This trial could never have happened in the countries Trump admires. No
one can hold Xi, Putin, Orban, Erdogan, Lukashenko, or any other of
these vile strongmen accountable. This is why we invest in democracy and
work to uphold it when it is being attacked.
This week’s featured posts is “Trump is Guilty“.
This week everybody was talking about the Trump verdict
I cover that in the featured post. There are a few common questions I didn’t get to.
Can Trump continue running for president now that he’s a felon? Yes. There’s precedent: In 1920, Socialist candidate Eugene Debs got a million votes for president while he was in prison. He was serving a 10-year sentence for an anti-World-War-I speech he gave in 1917, which the government claimed violated the Espionage Act.
Could he take office? I don’t see why not. The Constitution‘s list of qualifications for the presidency is pretty short and says nothing about being a criminal. (The Founders certainly imagined the possibility of a criminal getting elected president — hence the provision of impeachment — but I doubt they pictured someone whose criminality was already known getting elected.)
No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.
Could this actually help him? These days, MAGA folks tend towards confident bluster and Democrats tend towards doom-saying, so people from both sides are likely to predict that conviction will give Trump a boost. But I doubt it. If Trump getting convicted makes you like him more, you were probably already voting for him.
About half the country didn’t expect him to get convicted, and those are the people to watch. Particularly important are the folks who hadn’t been paying a lot of attention to the Trump trials. To a lot of them, I imagine this had been sounding like the usual political attacks: something opponents say that never comes to anything, like the Biden impeachment effort in the House. This actually arrived at a conviction, which makes it a bit different. It also should make people re-evaluate the other charges against Trump: Maybe they’re true too.
In particular, the idea that Blacks will be more attracted to Trump now that he’s a felon seems based on a stereotypic and demeaning view of Black people.
Yesterday on Meet the Press, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries was asked a simple question and (in contrast to Republicans asked about the Trump verdict) gave a simple answer.
PETER ALEXANDER: Congressman Jeffries, Donald Trump’s attorney, as you’ve certainly heard, said that they will appeal the verdict. If it is overturned on appeal, will you accept that result?
REP. HAKEEM JEFFRIES: Yes.
and Justice Alito
To no one’s surprise, Justice Alito announced in a letter to Senators Durbin and Whitehouse that he will not recuse himself from January 6 related cases. He responded to both of the recently-revealed flag incidents by putting the responsibility on his wife (“My wife is fond of flying flags. I am not.”) and claiming that
A reasonable person who is not motivated by political or ideological considerations or a desire to affect the outcome of Supreme Court cases would conclude that this event does not meet the applicable standard for recusal.
Josh Marshall comments:
This is not how federal ethics guidelines work. They make very clear that the appearance of a conflict of interest or impropriety, for these purposes, counts as much as actual ones. They also make clear that the actions of a spouse count toward creating such appearances even though, certainly in the early 21st century, a judge can’t dictate a spouse’s actions. The ethics guidelines specifically deal with the spouse issue. And they say “it’s my spouse, not me” isn’t a defense. … Alito is a smart guy. He knows this.
So while Alito’s wife has every right to express her political views, even treasonous ones, her actions have consequences for her husband. Alito is refusing to accept those consequences. (Imagine the outcry if Justice Jackson drove to court displaying a Black Lives Matter bumper sticker, and then said, “It’s my husband’s car.”)
In addition, Marshall notes, Alito has now told multiple versions of the flag story, at least some of which must be lies. In responding to the controversy, he sought out a friendly reporter at a partisan venue (Fox News) — something a politician might do, but a justice shouldn’t.
Alito’s reaction to this controversy has been sullen, defensive, mendacious and overtly partisan. Those are all total nonstarters for how a justice is supposed to conduct himself or herself. He does it because he’s corrupt and he’s confident in his impunity.
In an idealistic vision of the judiciary, recusal is not that big a deal: Your responsibility to rule impartially passes to the other justices, who presumably are also impartial. But this clearly is not Alito’s vision: He is a member of a political faction, and it is important that he be there to deliver his vote.
and other legal news
A federal judge just struck down a New Hampshire law that comes out of the same conservative flurry that gave us Florida’s Don’t-Say-Gay and Stop-WOKE laws.
New Hampshire prohibited public employees, including public school teachers, from promoting “divisive concepts” related to race or gender. A parent who felt the law had been violated could sue, and offending teachers could lose their licenses to teach in the state.
In April 2022, a New Hampshire parent complained that Alison O’Brien, a high school social studies teacher, violated the divisive concepts law by showing two videos — “Formation” by Beyoncé and “This is America” by Childish Gambino — as part of a unit on the Harlem Renaissance. … The parent who complained claimed the music videos were “offensive,” too focused “on the oppression of just one group,” and “not a balanced view of history.”
Fortunately, a federal judge has objected.
[District Judge Paul J.] Barbadoro, citing the experience of O’Brien and other teachers, ruled that the law was unconstitutionally vague. The law represents “viewpoint-based restrictions on speech” but does not “provide either fair warning to educators of what they prohibit or sufficient standards for law enforcement to prevent arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement.” As such, it violates the due process protections of the 14th Amendment.
Since May 21, Trump has been claiming that when the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago in August, 2022, they were really there to assassinate him, a claim Politifact has rated as a pants-on-fire lie.
Special Counsel Jack Smith is concerned about the danger this and similar lies pose to the FBI agents involved in the search, some of whom would be witnesses in the Mar-a-Lago documents trial, assuming Judge Cannon ever allows that trial to take place. (The process Smith worries about is called stochastic terrorism, which Wikipedia defines as “when a political or media figure publicly demonizes a person or group in a way that inspires supporters of the figure to commit a violent act against the target of the communication”.)
Last week, Smith filed a motion asking Cannon to amend Trump’s terms of release, to prevent him from making this claim. Cannon denied that motion on procedural grounds. Smith has now refiled it in a way that satisfies Cannon’s objections.
Predictably, Cannon is slow-walking the motion.
Another Trump-appointed judge is slow-walking Steven Bannon’s prison sentence. Bannon has been convicted of contempt of Congress and sentenced to four months in prison. He was released pending his appeal, which has now been rejected. But the judge still hasn’t ordered him to report to prison.
and two thought-provoking articles
Rick Perlstein is the leading historian of the modern conservative movement, from Barry Goldwater to (so far) Ronald Reagan. He has an article in The American Prospect that is interesting both for its ideas and for what it says about the current political mood.
The interesting idea concerns the question: Why does conservatism keep getting worse? There could be a long discussion about what “worse” means in this context, but intuitively you already know: Barry Goldwater lost graciously. Dick Nixon’s administration was a mixture of good and bad. (For example, he signed the Clean Air Act.) Ronald Reagan generally maintained a high level of decorum. George W. Bush tried to avoid a post-9-11 pogrom against American Muslims. And so on. I’ve had many moments when I looked at something Trump was doing and wished I had one of those past conservative leaders back.
Perlstein thinks the reason is something he calls “the authoritarian rachet”.
Its axioms are that the basic thing conservatism promises to its adherents, a return of society to a prelapsarian state, is impossible; but that this impossible thing, in the logic of conservatism, is also imperative to achieve, lest civilization collapse, and good people suffer a kind of living death.
So each time conservatives win, they nonetheless fail, because the impossible things don’t happen. (Donald Trump did not bring back the “great again” era of the 1950s or the 1920s or whenever you thought America was greatest.) So the next time conservatism gains power, it will have to try even harder.
This is why I now describe the history of conservatism as a ratchet. It must always move in an invariably more authoritarian direction, with no possible end point but an apocalyptic one.
Just listen to any recent Donald Trump speech: The redemptive promises he makes are more insanely fantastical with each passing day. Imagine the disappointment their serial failures will bring in their wake, which can never redound on him. (Conservatism never fails …) They must instead be blamed on the Enemy.
Which is us.
That is why another Trump term—or the potential insurgency after a Trump defeat—may be traumatic beyond our poor powers to imagine it.
But Perlstein’s article is also about his personal depression, which he claims is brought on by the Left, not the Right: Perlstein is frustrated by his inability to convince progressives to put aside their very real differences with Biden in order to avoid the catastrophe of a second (and necessarily worse) Trump administration.
What it comes down to, I guess, is this. If I of all people can’t convince people on the left to fight right-wing authoritarians who consider them veritable Untermenschen, then what the hell have I been wasting half my life on this work for?
The other article I want to call your attention to is Cory Doctorow’s “A Major Defeat for Technofeudalism” from last fall. (It sometimes takes a while for me to notice things.)
Ostensibly, he’s writing about patent trolls, the people who claim ownership of basic technological ideas that nobody else had thought to patent, and then harass anybody who uses those ideas, looking for royalty payments. But the article is more interesting for its theoretical framing: Doctorow calls attention to a piece of the class struggle we ordinarily don’t think about: not the battle between capital and labor, but the battle between two factions in the ruling class: capitalists and rentiers.
Basically, capitalists make money by producing things to sell at a profit, while rentiers make money by owning things they can charge rent on. What defines feudalism, for Doctorow, is the domination of society by rentiers.
Perversely, even as capitalism replaces feudalism, capitalists aspire to become rentiers. They want to achieve a monopoly or near-monopoly position in some market that allows them to charge what is essentially rent.
In his new book Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, the economist Yanis Varoufakis argues that a new form of capital, “cloud capital,” has taken over the real economy, allowing a small number of feudal companies to insert themselves between capitalists and their customers. Amazon takes 45–51 percent out of every dollar its sellers generate, Google and Apple take 30 cents out of every dollar an app maker generates.
and you also might be interested in …
If you’ve been worrying about the “weaponization” of the Justice Department by Democrats against Republicans, Hunter Biden’s trial began today. Like Trump, he also will have his future decided by a jury.
The bribery trial of Democratic Senator Bob Menendez is ongoing.
DoJ seems to be focused on people who break the law, not on Republicans or Democrats.
Seven Negro leagues operated between 1920 and 1948. As became apparent after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in major league baseball in 1947, the players in those leagues were quite good. This week major league baseball recognized this fact by including players from these Negro leagues in the official statistics.
The biggest impact will be on the all-time-best lists. For example, Josh Gibson (.372) now replaces Ty Cobb (.367) at the top of the all-time career batting average list.
For most of us, this rectifies a longstanding injustice. But if you’re a white supremacist, it’s one more example of America being taken away from you. You can be offended on behalf of Ty Cobb, and resent that what you learned as a kid is now obsolete.
Basketball great Bill Walton died. The most interesting tribute came from his friend and rival Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Walton’s place on the list of great players is hard to pin down, because he played at a very high level for a very short time before injuries brought him down. You could put him in the top 10 or leave him out of the top 50.
and let’s close with something deep
A surprising number of impressive sculptures are under water. Some sank there, like those from the lost Egyptian city of Heracleion. Others, though, like this statue of Poseidon’s wife Amphitrite, were intentionally placed where only divers can see them.
The Weekly Sift 