In Our Time

In memory of those who fought here, died here, literally saved the world here, let us be worthy of their sacrifice. Let us be the generation that when history is written about our time — in 10, 20, 30, 50, 80 years from now — it will be said: When the moment came, we met the moment. We stood strong. Our alliances were made stronger. And we saved democracy in our time as well. 

– President Joe Biden
at the Normandy American Cemetery
June 6, 2024

This week’s featured post is “To stop fascism, unite around the old guy“.

This week everybody was talking about Israel’s hostage rescue

The good news: Four of the approximately 250 Israelis taken hostage in Hamas’ October 7 attack were freed Saturday.

The bad news: It appears that the raid killed 274 Palestinians. Palestinian authorities don’t try to identify who was or wasn’t a Hamas fighter, so we don’t know how many civilians were killed. We do know that dozens of children were included in the 274 total.

But only three other hostages have been freed by military force since the start of the war. Another three were mistakenly killed by Israeli forces after they escaped on their own, and Hamas says others have been killed in Israeli airstrikes. … Over 100 hostages were released during a weeklong cease-fire last year, in exchange for Palestinians imprisoned by Israel, and reaching a similar agreement is still widely seen as the only way of getting the rest of the hostages back.

Sunday, Netanyahu rival Benny Gantz followed through on his threat to withdraw from Israel’s war cabinet. He had given Netanyahu a three-week ultimatum to produce a plan to end the war, and that deadline ran out Saturday.

President Biden has put forward a peace plan that pairs a full hostage release with a complete ceasefire. But Prime Minister Netanyahu stands by his condition that Hamas be “completely defeated” before hostilities can end. Gantz’ protest is related to the idea that no one can define what “completely defeated” means, so Netanyahu’s plan seems to be to continue fighting indefinitely.

and more reaction to Trump’s felony conviction

Rick Perlstein hangs around in far-right social-media communities — and he claims that’s not why he’s depressed — reporting on “The Republican Id“. His article got me thinking about the weird dichotomy we’re seeing.

On the one hand, Trump (along with virtually all elected Republicans) are pouring out violence-promoting rhetoric. They’re not exactly saying “Go out and kill liberals”, but they’re definitely hinting in that direction. Trump predicts that seeing him sentenced to jail “would be tough for the public to take. You know, at a certain point, there’s a breaking point.”

What are MAGA folks supposed to do when they “break”? He doesn’t say.

But he has similarly predicted violence if the Republican convention didn’t nominate him in 2016, if Pennsylvania counted all the mail-in ballots in 2020, after the search of Mar-a-Lago, if he was indicted, or went to trial, or was convicted. Other than the convention snub, those events came and went without so much as a major protest. During his Manhattan trial, Trump was so embarrassed by the lack of MAGA demonstrators that he made up an outrageous lie to cover it:

After The New York Times published a story that said Trump was unhappy with the meager crowd he saw when he arrived at the courthouse for opening statements on Monday, Trump posted on social media on Tuesday to deny the story, denigrate a Times reporter and make this claim: “Thousands of people were turned away from the Courthouse in Lower Manhattan by steel stanchions and police, literally blocks from the tiny side door from where I enter and leave. It is an armed camp to keep people away.”

Trump also wrote on social media on Monday that “Lower Manhattan surrounding the Courthouse, where I am heading now, is completely CLOSED DOWN.” And he told reporters inside the courthouse on Tuesday: “For blocks you can’t get near this courthouse.”

He succeeded in inciting a riot once: on January 6. Other than that day, and in spite of all the violent rhetoric on social media and all the death threats against anyone who speaks out against him, his supporters seem to have little appetite for mass action on his behalf.

and the border

President Biden announced a new border policy this week. It’s complicated, but the basic idea is to stop letting people apply for asylum when the number of daily border crossings gets too high. Vox elaborates.

The underlying problem at the border can’t be solved without congressional action, which Trump and his allies have blocked: The US is obligated by law and treaty to give asylum to refugees who meet certain standards of persecution, but the system that processes asylum claims was not designed to handle the current quantity and is hopelessly jammed. People wait years for a hearing, and what should we do with them in the meantime? As the new executive order puts it:

For the vast majority of people in immigration proceedings, the current laws make it impossible to quickly grant protection to those who require it and to quickly remove those who do not establish a legal basis to remain in the United States. This reality is compounded by the fact that the Congress has chronically underfunded our border security and immigration system and has failed to provide the resources or reforms it needs to be able to deliver timely consequences to most individuals who cross unlawfully and cannot establish a legal basis to remain in the United States.

Executive orders can’t create new courts, hire new judges, or ameliorate the conditions that cause people to leave their home countries. They can only change how the backlog is handled. And even then, the Supreme Court may decide that Biden has exceeded his authority. (In recent years, the Court has interpreted Biden’s authority far less generously than it did Trump’s.)

and the Supreme Court

Still no word on the immunity case that the Court is using to delay Trump’s D.C. trial until after the election. The court’s term is expected to end later this month.

Meanwhile, there were two new reasons to doubt the conservative majority’s honesty and impartiality: First, the neighbor at the heart of Justice Alito’s flag controversy has disputed his story, and seems to have a police report to back up her version of the timeline. Watch her CNN interview. (Almost as disturbing as the Alito lie is the neighbor’s account of how the Alito’s tried to intimidate her.)

And second, Fix the Court has published a tally of all the gifts accepted by the justices who served during the last 20 years. The $4.7 million total is stunning in itself, but the jaw-dropping fact is that more than $4 million went to Clarence Thomas, nearly matching his already-generous salary. Fix the Court says the total is “probably an undercount”.

and Hunter’s trial

It’s been observed many times that Trump and his followers practice projection: Whatever Trump is doing — trying to steal an election, corrupting the Justice Department, … — they claim that his opponents are doing it. Every accusation they make is actually a confession.

Because it has fallen so close to the trial that found Trump guilty of multiple felonies, the Hunter Biden trial is providing a grand opportunity for projection. Here, Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro discusses the “mob mentality” of the Biden family and their attempt to intimidate jurors. (To see how a family with a real mob-mentality operates, look at Pro Publica’s recent report: “Nine witnesses in the criminal cases against former President Donald Trump have received significant financial benefits, including large raises from his campaign, severance packages, new jobs, and a grant of shares and cash from Trump’s media company.” Take care of the Boss, and the Boss will take care of you.)

How are the Bidens carrying out this “intimidation”? First Lady Jill Biden, who has been Hunter’s step-mother since he was seven years old, has been showing up at his trial! Her presence, Pirro claims, tells jurors that “We know who you are. We’re in the courtroom and we’re watching you.” (Very scary lady, that Jill Biden.)

And then there’s Joe, who spent the entire previous weekend with his son! Another Fox host quotes a New York Post writer suggesting this is a “cynical power play” aimed at sending a “Mafia-like” message to potential jurors: “Screw with my son and you screw with me.”

Consider the parallels and contrasts with the Trump trial: Nobody from Trump’s family supported him in court until the media started to notice, and neither Melania nor Ivanka ever made an appearance. (“His family is nowhere to be seen. His wife, at least presently, is not to be seen at his side; his children have vanished; his loved ones have melted away.”) You know who did show up? Power players: the Speaker of the House, numerous senators and congressmen. (Matt Gaetz ominously tweeted that he was “standing back and standing by, Mr. President”. Standing by to do what to who?)

Can you picture Hakeem Jeffries or Chuck Schumer going to Delaware to attend Hunter’s trial? What would they do there? Is AOC standing back and standing by?

Trump jurors can only hope they stay anonymous, because Trump’s supporters post threats against them (and the judge and his daughter) daily. But if you’re a Biden supporter, you probably can’t name the judge in Hunter’s trial, or any of the judge’s family members. I know I can’t. I have no interest in finding out who Hunter’s jurors are, and I don’t know anybody who does. Those people are all safe from us, no matter how the trial comes out.

But yes, Fox News, tell me more about the Biden family’s “mob-like” approach to Hunter’s trial.

The Bidens have gone to great lengths to communicate to Hunter that no matter what mistakes he has made in life, he is still their son and they love him. How sinister of them! How unlike the Trump family.

Meanwhile, the House committee that failed to find any evidence linking Joe Biden to whatever sketchy business deals brother James and son Hunter might have had going has taken its next step: The committee refers James and Hunter to the DoJ, claiming that they lied to the committee about Joe not having anything to do with their business deals.

See the logic? The complete lack of evidence is the clearest sign that the conspiracy is working.

and you also might be interested in …

Three Trump allies have been charged with forgery for their role in the Wisconsin fake elector plot.

Steve Bannon is finally going to jail. He will start a four-month sentence for contempt of Congress on July 1. During that time he will probably go to trial for his role in conning contributors to his We Build the Wall fund.

Trump has pardoned Bannon for his role in stealing from Trump supporters, but New York state has decided to pursue charges. His accomplices are already in jail.

AP examines videos that are deceptively edited to make Biden look mentally incompetent. If he’s so lost to dementia, why can’t his critics just use real videos?

In a strong hint that the Sandy Hook parents he slandered may finally see some money, Alex Jones has changed his bankruptcy filing. Originally he filed for a Chapter 11 reorganization, but he has changed that to a Chapter 7 liquidation.

I mentioned Trumpists’ projections above. Here’s more: The Federalist’s Erika Andersen thinks Dolly Parton isn’t really Christian and Newmax’ Greg Kelly worries that Taylor Swift fans are practicing “idolatry”, which “is a sin”.

Just before the guilty verdict in Trump’s Manhattan trial was announced, Maryland Republican senate candidate Larry Hogan made a statement that would be uncontroversial in any other era of American life. He asked people to “respect the verdict and the legal process”.

That pro-civic stance has just about gotten him run out of the Republican Party, which appears to be ready to sacrifice the Maryland senate seat in order to enforce MAGA discipline.

Tuesday, Hogan’s campaign confirmed that he will not attend the Republican Convention in Milwaukee next month. That should avoid some nasty confrontations.

On a similar note, former Republican congressman Ken Buck told Jon Stewart:

I left because I couldn’t tell the lie. The 2020 election wasn’t stolen. The Jan. 6 defendants aren’t political prisoners…There’s a lot of life out there besides arguing about nothing and telling lies. I made a choice to go enjoy what I’ve got left.

A book you might want to read: They Came for the Schools by Mike Hixenbaugh. It’s the story of how the model suburb of Southlake, Texas began to recognize it had a racism problem and tried to deal with it, until a backlash led to a right-wing takeover of the school board.

You may have seen news stories about Southlake in the last few years. It was the testing ground for the conservative campaign against “critical race theory” and for the idea that teachers and librarians were trying to “groom” children to become gay or trans. I had been loosely following that story, but seeing everything laid out in one narrative is pretty amazing.

The big thing I glean from this story is that the conservative cultural project doesn’t work without lying. Parents need to be convinced that schools are teaching things nobody is actually teaching, and they need to believe that members of their community not just wrongheaded, but are engaged in unimaginable evil.

As I’ve said before, I don’t see how this happens without the flaws in Christianity. You have to believe in a Devil to make these kinds of conspiracy theories plausible.

Justin Rosario tells the story of his wife’s two miscarriages in 2006. Her situation (both times) was very similar to that of women in red states who very nearly bleed to death, and sometimes suffer permanent consequences, because of abortion bans. But Justin’s wife got the medical care she needed and survived to have two children. (If you have the time, read the comments on this post. Many are by women telling their own miscarriage stories.)

Recently, friends told me a similar story about a miscarriage suffered by their daughter, a girl I watched grow up. Similarly, she was in a blue state and is fine now, probably planning her next attempt at motherhood. But what, they wondered, might have happened to her Texas or Missouri?

Rosario:

What if the next time, [my wife’s] miscarriage had stalled and become septic like [a woman in Texas]’s? Numerous women have had this happen to them throughout Republican-controlled states already. They’ve lost the ability to have children. Some of them have possibly died.

If you’re wondering why these stories have not been massive front-page headlines for weeks on end, you should know the answer by now. Doing so would require discussing why these women are suffering and dying and that would require pointing the finger, unerringly, at Republicans.

But we don’t do that in America’s press. We will run hundreds of above-the-fold articles about a “crisis” at the border to terrorize racist white people but talk about how Republicans are literally maiming and killing women? No, thank you. That would be biased.

This strikes me as a revealing clip from Fox News: Interviewers ask Trump a question submitted by a viewer: “What’s your relationship with God like and how do you pray?” He never answers. Instead he talks about how well he does with Evangelical voters and how many people are praying for him. Eventually he goes off on a tangent about how people who don’t believe in God have no reason to be good.

I can’t decide: Is he dodging? Or does the question make no sense to him because he has no inner life to report on?

and let’s close with something natural

racooned.com collects photos of animal striking humanlike poses. Here, raccoons seem to be gossiping.

June 10, 2024 – 11:36 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (6)

To stop fascism, unite around the old guy

Democracies fall to fascism when the opposition fails to unite until it’s too late.
It’s getting late.

Nothing sums up the psychological difference between the two major parties quite like this fact: In the week-and-a-half after Donald Trump was convicted of 34 felonies, it was the Democrats who fretted about whether they were nominating the right candidate.

Democracies fall to fascism when the opposition fails to unite until it’s too late. It’s getting late.

Big-name Republicans were quick to circle the wagons around their felonious leader: If a jury found him guilty, then the jury system must be to blame. Anybody and everybody — judges, prosecutors, witnesses, the Biden administration, the FBI, the jurors — must be corrupt, because Trump can’t possibly be corrupt. Only he can be trusted, and just wait until he’s back in power and can turn the power of government against Democrats!

Meanwhile, the latest collective Democratic shiver started, oddly enough, with an article in Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal: “Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping“. These “signs” of fading mental acuity had been noticed by such unbiased and reliable sources as Kevin McCarthy and Mike Johnson, causing CNN to comment:

Republicans accusing their political foe of lacking the mental fitness to hold office is nothing surprising. Such accusations are made every night on Fox News. And Donald Trump, who at 77 years old has also shown plenty of signs of waning mental faculties, including repeatedly falling asleep at his own high-stakes hush money trial, has made the accusation a centerpiece of his campaign. In other words, these accusations from the right aren’t exactly news.

The WSJ article was followed by Mark Leibovich in The Atlantic making a headline out of an insult from cheap-shot artist Bill Maher: “Ruth Bader Biden“, “the person who doesn’t know when to quit and so does great damage to their party and their country.”

If my social media is typical, we then saw yet another round of young progressives suggesting Biden should withdraw and let the Democratic Convention choose someone else, or perhaps that left-of-center folks should all vote for Cornell West or Jill Stein in November.

It’s hard to know where to start. There are so many wrongheaded notions floating around that by addressing one in detail I can seem to covertly accept the others. So let’s keep this short and simple:

  • Biden is fine. Yes, Joe Biden is 81, arthritis causes him to walk stiffly, and he’s never going to be an Obama-class orator. But whenever there’s a big test and he needs to be at the top of his game, he is. Watch either of the last two state of the union addresses, where he didn’t just deliver a good speech, he bantered with Republicans in the audience and ate their lunch. (If that seems like ancient history to you, watch his D-Day speech from this week.) He got the better of both McCarthy and Johnson in budget negotiations. He has brilliantly used the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to stabilize the oil market. A debate with Trump is coming up two weeks from Thursday (if Trump doesn’t come up with some excuse to drop out). Watch it. If you’re expecting Biden to be a doddering old man, I think you’ll be surprised. (Also, if it’s so obvious that he’s fading into senility, why do his critics need to post doctored videos to make that point?)
  • Whatever issue you have with Biden, Trump will be worse. What do you think will happen to inflation after Trump raises tariffs and deports millions of low-wage workers? And yes, Biden has not done nearly enough to rein in Netanyahu’s genocide in Gaza. But Trump actively cheers Netanyahu on, and criticizes Biden for putting up any resistance at all.
  • This would have been a worthwhile discussion to have a year ago, or maybe even six months ago. But not now. The Democratic Party held its ordinary primary process this year. If support had coalesced around some other candidate, that candidate could be the nominee. But none of the white knights people hope to nominate instead of Biden made that challenge then, and they’re still not making it. Maybe you should respect their judgment.
  • A chaotic Democratic Convention is not going to help defeat Trump. Competitive conventions tend to get nasty, and people come out of them with hard feelings. (For example, I can easily picture Black voters getting miffed if the Convention passes over Kamala Harris to nominate a White candidate like Gavin Newsom or Gretchen Whitmer.) That wonderful Biden-replacement nominee you’re imagining will have to spend most of the fall reuniting the base rather than reaching out to persuadable swing voters.
  • Any Democratic nominee will have to run on the Biden record. Pushing Biden aside more-or-less ratifies Trump’s assertion that Biden has been a terrible president. Certainly most of the public will interpret it that way. I don’t see how we then turn around and convince them to vote for another Democrat.
  • Whoever you imagine nominating to beat Trump, that candidate can be smeared too. Whenever the right-wing noise machine turns its power against someone, that candidate develops “baggage”. Before Biden’s supposed mental decline, it was Hillary’s emails and Obama’s birth certificate and Kerry’s swiftboat. There’s always some reason why this was the wrong person to nominate. We often picture our favorite alternative candidate remaining unsullied through November. But by election day, he or she would have baggage too. No one is so perfect that they can’t be lied about.
  • Biden has been a good president and has a good story to tell. We need to stop wasting time and start telling that story. Biden didn’t inherit the rosy pre-Covid America Trumpists get nostalgic about. He inherited a mess — high unemployment, a stagnant economy, huge budget and trade deficits, a high murder rate, and thousands dying of Covid every day. He has done a remarkable job cleaning that up. Job-creation is off the charts. We’ve finally started the transition to a sustainable economy, even if there’s still a long way to go. Crime has fallen significantly. Looking ahead, Biden will protect your personal autonomy, your voting rights, and American democracy — all of which are threatened if Trump returns to power. The longer we compare Biden unfavorably to some ideal alternative, the less time we’ll have to make that case.

I know it’s frustrating that the polls remain close, and that so many Americans fail to see what Trump is or what Biden has accomplished. But believe me, bickering among ourselves is not going to solve that problem. In every democracy that falls to fascism, the story is always the same: The opposition fails to unite until it’s too late. Let’s not make that mistake here.

June 10, 2024 – 9:08 am Categories: Articles | Comments (24)

Tagged |

The Monday Morning Teaser

After one presumptive nominee for president gets convicted of felonies, you might expect to hear talk about one of the summer’s political conventions choosing someone else. What you wouldn’t expect, though, is that it’s the other party having that discussion.

So far it doesn’t seem to be a serious discussion: The Democratic Convention is going to renominate President Biden without significant opposition. Nonetheless, this week we went through yet another round of Democrats and left-leaning pundits fretting about Biden’s age and poll numbers, and speculating about alternatives.

Republicans never seem to suffer from this kind of self-doubt. During the primaries, nobody cared that polls consistently showed Nikki Haley running much better against Biden than Trump did. Now, Trump is a convicted felon in New York, and only his political clout has delayed his three other trials long enough to avoid pre-election convictions for even-more-serious federal and Georgia felonies. But prominent Republicans have wasted no time lining up behind their criminal leader, and even Larry Hogan’s tepid plea to “respect the verdict and the legal process” has all but gotten him run out of the party.

In this week’s featured post, I’ll explain why it’s time for all these anxiety-driven can’t-we-dump-Biden conversations to stop. Hoping for another candidate was a totally appropriate fantasy a year ago, but at this point there’s only one scenario that avoids a second Trump term and the threat of fascism it poses: re-elect Biden. We need to get focused on that project, which means boosting Biden rather than tearing him down.

Democracies fall to fascism when the non-fascist opposition fails to unite until it’s too late. Let’s not do that.

That post, “To stop fascism, unite around the old guy”, is just about done and should be out soon.

The weekly summary has a bunch of other stuff to cover: Israel’s costly raid to recover hostages, the ceasefire proposal, Alito’s flag story falls apart, Biden’s new border policy, Hunter’s trial, and a few other things, plus a book about the anti-CRT campaign in one Texas suburb. That should be out around noon EDT.

June 10, 2024 – 8:32 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (1)

Dividends of Democracy

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.

– Ruth Ben-Ghiat

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.

June 3, 2024 – 10:41 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (10)

Trump is Guilty

Twelve ordinary Americans reviewed documents, listened to witnesses, and concluded beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump is guilty of 34 felonies. His defenders almost entirely avoid disputing the facts of the case, but argue instead that he should get away with those crimes.

Among the four indictments of Donald Trump, the Manhattan case brought by District Attorney Alan Bragg was supposed to be the weakest. [1] Up to this point, though, the three “stronger” indictments have all been sidelined by the partisan Republican majority on the Supreme Court, accusations against the prosecutor in Georgia, and the tactics of a trial judge Trump appointed himself, despite her lack of qualifications. None of the hold-ups in these trials points to any weakness in the evidence against him.

An innocent man running for office should want to clear his name before the election, but Trump has used every device at hand to delay his trials until after the election (when, if he wins, he will gain new powers to obstruct justice). But Trump lacked any leverage for delaying the Manhattan trial: Because it’s a state trial, the Supreme Court had no grounds to stop it; because New York is a blue state, no state officials got in the way; and the judge overseeing the case was not indebted to Trump.

So the trial was held. It was a fair trial. Trump had been indicted not by President Biden or the Department of Justice, but by a grand jury of New York citizens. He exercised a defendant’s usual right to participate in selecting the trial jury. His lawyers were allowed to cross-examine the witnesses against him, to introduce relevant evidence in his defense, to file motions, to object to prosecution questions and witness statements, to call witnesses of their own, and to give a summation to the jury. The judge ruled on those motions and objections, sometimes favoring the prosecution and sometimes favoring the defense. Trump himself had the right to testify, but chose not to. The jury was instructed that they should acquit if they found any reasonable doubt about his guilt.

In short, Trump received every consideration the American justice system grants to defendants. In certain ways, he was treated much better than most other criminal defendants: Just about anyone else would have been jailed after 11 violations of the judge’s orders, but Trump was not.

Outside the courtroom, the world frequently bent under the gravity of his political power. The chairs of three House committee tried to intimidate his prosecutor (despite Congress having no oversight role in regard to state prosecutors), and at least one is still trying. Members of Congress, all the way up to the Speaker himself, have come to New York to repeat Trump’s accusations, as a way of circumventing the judge’s gag order.

The jury found Trump guilty. This means that (after considering all the evidence) they were convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that the following facts are true: Trump had sex with a porn star, had his fixer buy her silence to keep voters in the 2016 election from finding out, reimbursed his fixer, and cooked the books of the Trump Organization to hide those payments from election regulators.

Those are no longer mere accusations or “alleged” facts. They have been established in a court of law.

If nothing else results from this conviction (see the discussion of jail time below), it should call attention to the seriousness of the shenanigans delaying the other trials. [2] The charges Trump faces are quite real, and the evidence against him is convincing. In each case, the public interest demands a trial.

The response. Rational people might begin to have second thoughts about supporting a candidate convicted of felonies, but that is not how the Republican Party works these days. With very rare exceptions, Republicans doubled down on their Trump support, choosing instead to attack the American justice system.

[T]he entire American political and legal system is controlled by Biden and Democrats: a banana republic, not a democracy worthy of its name. A range of leading Republicans — from House Majority Steve Scalise to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to rising Senate stars Josh Hawley and J.D. Vance — have all said basically the same thing.

At this point, you might be wondering: Is any of this surprising? Trump always claims he’s the victim of a conspiracy, and Republicans always end up backing whatever Trump says.

But that’s precisely the problem. The current Republican party is so hostile to the foundations of the American political system that they can be counted on to attack the possibility of a fair Trump trial. Either Trump should be able to do whatever he wants with no accountability, or it’s proof that the entire edifice of American law and politics is rotten.

Looking forward, Speaker Johnson called on the Supreme Court to intervene, opining that justices that he “knows personally” were upset by the trial’s outcome, and would want to “set this straight”.

What exactly needs to be “set straight” is almost never spelled out. I have heard and read a lot of outrage from the MAGA cult, but few of them care to argue the facts of the case. They just think Trump should get away with it. They attack the judge, the jury, the prosecutor, and the Biden administration (which played no apparent role in this trial). They argue that Trump should never have been prosecuted (which is a strange thing to argue after the jury returns a guilty verdict [3]), or that an appeals court should overturn the verdict on some technical grounds.

But they don’t argue that Trump didn’t do exactly what the indictment says he did.

The most troubling response to the verdict are the threats of violence. So far, the jurors have remained anonymous, but Trump supporters online are doing their best to deduce who the jurors might have been. Both Judge Merchan and District Attorney Alan Bragg will have to watch their backs for years to come.

Of course, Trump could make a magnanimous public statement urging his followers not to harm the jurors and other people involved in the case. But don’t be silly. MAGA is a violent movement, and Trump likes it that way.

Will he go to jail? No time soon, and almost certainly not before the election (unless Judge Merchan gives him a few days of jail time for contempt of court).

Trump will be sentenced on July 11, and all options are open. Felony falsification of business records is a Class E felony in New York, the lowest category. The maximum sentence is four years. Theoretically, he could get four years for each of the 34 convictions, but since the offenses are so similar it seems likely he would serve the sentences concurrently.

Experts disagree about whether jail is a likely sentence at all. The majority of first-time Class E felons aren’t sentenced to jail, but some are. In his favor is that this is his first conviction and he is 77 years old. Working against him is the seriousness of the conspiracy (it may have decided the 2016 election), his complete lack of remorse, his repeated violations of the judge’s orders, his threats of revenge, and his history of civil fraud judgments. It’s not clear to me whether the judge can take into account his other felony indictments.

I can only laugh when Trump defenders say that he is unlikely to re-offend. Trump will almost certainly re-offend if he is not in jail. And Jay Kuo makes a good point:

If you think famous, wealthy people who are first-time offenders cannot be sentenced to prison for covering up a crime, Martha Stewart would like a word.

I’m betting that some form of incarceration will be part of the sentence, maybe tailored for his convenience, like weekends in jail or house arrest. Almost as humiliating would be community service, which in New York typically means wearing an orange jumpsuit and picking up litter in a park or near a highway.

Whatever Trump’s sentence, it will almost certainly be suspended pending his appeal, which probably won’t be decided until after the election. If he wins the election, he probably can’t be imprisoned until he leaves office, which is yet another motive for him never to leave office (which I already don’t expect him to do voluntarily).

If he loses the election, on the other hand, his other trials will eventually start, and I predict he will be convicted of some other felony before this felony can be wiped off his record. After all, those are the “stronger” cases.

People too young to remember President Nixon’s Watergate scandal might not recognize the cartoon at the top of this post, but it was iconic in its day. It came from Gary Trudeau’s Doonesbury comic, which ran daily in most newspapers. The full strip is here, along with some commentary. In 2017, Trudeau updated the comic in response to the Trump/Russia scandal (which remains unresolved).

Trudeau’s latest comment on Trump is here.

[1] However, I did tell you back in April that “The Manhattan case against Trump is stronger than I expected“.

From a evidentiary point of view, the Mar-a-Lago documents indictment is probably the strongest. After his term ended, Trump had no right to possess classified documents. When the government asked for him to return the documents he had taken, he said he didn’t have them. Then the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago and found them. There’s no innocent explanation for that set of facts.

That case also involves various things Trump did to try to obstruct the investigation, but the core of the charge is the simple description in the previous paragraph. A jury will have no trouble understanding it, if the Trump-appointed judge ever allows a trial to happen.

[2] It should particularly call attention to the delaying tactics of this corrupt Supreme Court. Both Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito are compromised, and according to the rules governing any other federal court, should recuse themselves from any January 6 related cases. But they have not.

The public especially deserves to know what role these compromised judges have played in the Court’s decision to hear Trump’s absurd immunity claim, which has been convincingly rejected at all lower levels. If their votes were decisive in the Court’s decision to take the case (thereby delaying Trump’s federal trials by many months, probably past the election) that’s a grave and highly consequential injustice.

[3] Usually, the sign that a case shouldn’t have been brought to trial is that the jury doesn’t find the prosecution’s case convincing.

For example, when Bill Barr was Trump’s attorney general, he appointed John Durham as special prosecutor, and charged him with proving Trump’s conspiracy theory about the nefarious origins of the Mueller investigation. Trump claimed Durham would uncover “the crime of the century” and “treason at the highest level”.

Two jury trials came out of this effort, both fairly minor indictments of fairly minor figures: Michael Sussman and Igor Danchenko were charged with lying to the FBI. Both were unanimously acquitted by juries that only needed a day or two to reach agreement. The supposed authors of the conspiracy — Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, or somebody (I could never figure it out exactly) — were never charged with anything.

That’s what it looks like when a case is undertaken for purely political purposes by a weaponized Justice Department and charges should never have been brought.

June 3, 2024 – 8:53 am Categories: Articles | Comments (11)

Tagged |

The Monday Morning Teaser

The main story this week is obvious: “Trump is Guilty”. That post will be out shortly. The gist: In all the yelling about Trump’s conviction, nobody is really disputing the essence of the case: He banged a porn star, had his fixer pay her off before the voters could find out, and then cooked the books to hide the payment from election monitors. Those aren’t just “alleged” any more; they’re established facts. They’ll continue to be established facts even if some legal technicality keeps him out of prison.

The weekly summary will cover Justice Alito’s predictable refusal to recuse himself from Trump cases, where he is anything but impartial. Mexico elected its first female and first Jewish president. A New Hampshire law similar to Florida’s Don’t-Say-Gay has been blocked as unconstitutionally vague. Rick Perlstein and Cory Doctorow wrote articles you should read. And the Negro Leagues are finally recognized in the official baseball statistics.

That should be out around noon.

June 3, 2024 – 8:20 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (3)

Venues

Trump’s refusal to take the stand encapsulates the MAGA approach to politics. Since the 2020 presidential election, he and his surrogates have made repeated accusations and statements about how the system is rigged against them and alleged there is evidence that proves them right. Crucially, they make those arguments only in front of television cameras or on podcasts and radio. They refuse to make them under oath in a court of law, where there are penalties for lying. 

– Heather Cox Richardson

This week’s featured post is “Alito’s Flags Aren’t the Worst of It“, concerning the Supreme Court’s ruling (with Alito writing the majority opinion) in a racial gerrymanding case.

This week everybody was talking about Alito’s flags

It all started last week, when the NYT revealed that an upside-down American flag flew over Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s home in Virginia for several days between the January 6 insurrection and Biden’s inauguration. An upside-down flag is a traditional distress symbol, and was used by the “stop the steal” movement that believed Biden’s 2020 win was illegitimate. Alito blamed the flag on his wife, whom he said was responding to some kind of dispute with the neighbors. (He provided no further details, and also said that the dog ate his homework.)

Then Wednesday the NYT reported that a second insurrectionist flag, the Appeal To Heaven flag sometimes associated with Christian nationalism, flew over the Alitos’ vacation home on the Jersey shore in July, August, and September of 2023. (It’s not clear whether it flew continuously or sporadically.) This flag was also carried by January 6 insurrectionists.

Since its creation during the American Revolution, the flag has carried a message of defiance: The phrase “appeal to heaven” comes from the 17th-century philosopher John Locke, who wrote of a responsibility to rebel, even use violence, to overthrow unjust rule. “It’s a paraphrase for trial by arms,” Anthony Grafton, a historian at Princeton University, said in an interview. “The main point is that there’s no appeal, there’s no one else you can ask for help or a judgment.”

According to the Supreme Court’s own Code of Conduct, which it released last November to demonstrate it was not completely lawless following revelations of Clarence Thomas’ corruption,

A Justice should disqualify himself or herself in a proceeding in which the Justice’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned, that is, where an unbiased and reasonable person who is aware of all relevant circumstances would doubt that the Justice could fairly discharge his or her duties.

The Court is currently hearing a number of cases related to January 6, and has already ruled that states cannot remove Trump from their ballots on 14th-Amendment participating-in-an-insurrection grounds. Alito’s impartiality “might reasonably be questioned” by “an unbiased and reasonable person” in all these cases. But of course he will not recuse himself and Chief Justice Roberts will not demand that he do so, because in practice the Court has no code of conduct and does not recognize any judicial ethics.

Likewise Congress will not solve the problem. The filibuster will prevent the Senate from passing any binding code for the Court, and Republicans would never participate in an impeachment. I agree with Joyce Vance, that the only conceivably effective response needs to come from the voters:

This one, as I’ve written, is up to us, and to investing in the political cycle. Don’t despair, vote! … If you want a Congress that will pass ethics reform for the Supreme Court, as difficult of an endeavor as it may be to craft rules that will pass constitutional muster, then vote for people who will go on record as supporting it.

It’s unlikely we’ll get a majority large enough to impeach Alito or Thomas. But if it becomes clear that their in-your-face defiance of all constraints is a drag on the Republican Party, partisan interests may start to rein them in.

and international courts v Israel

This week, international courts made two moves against Israel. Last Monday International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Kahn sought arrest warrants for leaders of both Hamas and Israel.

Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and two others are accused of various crimes associated with October 7, including the killings of several hundred Israeli civilians, taking hostages, rape, and so on.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant are accused of starvation of civilians as a method of warfare, intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population, and other related offenses.

Judges of the ICC have not yet approved the warrants. If they are approved, they may not have much effect beyond their influence on international opinion. Neither set of leaders is likely to surrender itself, and the ICC commands no military force able to bring them in.

President Biden denounced the prosecutor’s move:

The ICC prosecutor’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders is outrageous. And let me be clear: whatever this prosecutor might imply, there is no equivalence — none — between Israel and Hamas. We will always stand with Israel against threats to its security.

Friday, the International Court of Justice

ordered Israel to “[i]mmediately halt its military offensive, and any other action in the Rafah Governorate, which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

The Court also ordered Israel to open the Rafah crossing, to allow United Nations fact-finders to enter Gaza, and to report to the Court within one month regarding its compliance with the Court’s orders. The Court also reaffirmed its prior orders and reiterated its call for the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages held by Hamas and other armed groups.

Again, the international court has little ability to enforce this order, but it may have some effect on popular opinion around the world.

If you’re like me, you may not have previously realized the the ICC and the ICJ are separate entities. Both are located in The Hague. The difference seems to be that the ICC prosecutes individuals, while the ICJ adjudicates disputes among nations.

Another diplomatic blow to Israel: Spain, Ireland, and Norway will formally recognize a Palestinian state tomorrow.

and the Trump trials

Both sides have now rested their cases. The judge declared a break so that summations and jury instructions could occur without interruption by the holiday weekend. Summations begin tomorrow, and the jury should be ready to deliberate later this week.

What they will do is anyone’s guess. An outright acquittal seems unlikely, given the strength of the prosecution’s case. But to prevent a conviction the defense only needs to convince one juror. That juror doesn’t even have to believe Trump is innocent, just that the case against him hasn’t been proved beyond reasonable doubt.

To no one’s surprise, Trump himself did not testify, despite saying many times that he would.

He would have been better off not offering a defense at all. It would have looked like a power move: The government hasn’t proved its case, so we have nothing to answer.

Instead, the defense called one technical witness and then Robert Costello, who was a disaster. Not only was Costello disrespectful of Judge Merchan, leading the judge to clear the courtroom to tell Costello how close he was to a contempt of court ruling, but his presence allowed the prosecution to introduce emails Costello wrote that captured just how mob-like TrumpWorld is.

Emails between Costello and Cohen were read aloud to leave the indelible memory in the minds of the jurors that Trump and Giuliani were conspiring with Costello to make sure Cohen didn’t cooperate with the government. There is even an email from Costello to Cohen saying, “Rudy said this communication channel must be maintained…sleep well tonight, you have friends in high places,” and one from Costello to his law partner saying, “Our issue is to get Cohen on the right page without giving the appearance that we are following instructions from Giuliani or the President,” (which they clearly were.) When Cohen didn’t sign on with him right away he told his law partner Cohen was “slow-playing us and the President…What should I say to this asshole? He’s playing with the most powerful man on the planet.” Didn’t he know who he was messing with?

Costello was supposed to undermine Michael Cohen’s credibility, but I suspect he enhanced it. The defense was trying to make Cohen look like a thug, but they overshot and made everyone connected with Trump look like a thug.

and Trump’s assassination claim

At some point years ago, “Trump lies” stopped being a headline; it happens every day, so it’s not news. But this week included a lie so brazen and so outrageous that it deserves attention.

In a fundraising email responding to right-wing media reports that offered a distorted reading of a newly-unsealed court filing in Trump’s classified documents case, Trump falsely claimed Biden was “locked & loaded ready to take me out” when the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago in August of 2022.

In a separate post on his Truth Social platform Tuesday evening, Trump further said he was “shown Reports” that Biden’s DOJ “AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE” in their search of the property for classified documents.

So what’s real? FBI search warrants have boilerplate language that is actually about limiting lethal force:

law enforcement officers of the Department of Justice may use deadly force only when necessary, that is, when the officer has a reasonable belief that the subject of such force poses an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to the officer or to another person.

In a court filing in the Mar-a-Lago case, Trump’s lawyers left out the “only”, leaving “may use deadly force when necessary”. That document recently got unsealed, and Trump conspiracy theorists jumped on it online, eventually leading Marjorie Taylor Greene and Fox News hosts like Jesse Watters and Jeanine Pirro to start discussing the “assassination plot” like it was a real thing, including imagining shoot-outs with the Secret Service. From there the wild story got back around the Trump, who pushed it for all it was worth. It’s not clear whether he realized that he started the misperception himself.

In reality, it has been known since the day it happened that the FBI had coordinated with the Secret Service and timed the raid so that Trump would be out of town. Trump knows this. MTG knows this. Jesse Watters and Jeanine Pirro know it.

Jack Smith has responded to this incident by noting the possible danger the rumor poses to FBI agents involved in the raid, who could be witnesses in Trump’s Mar-a-Lago trial, if Judge Cannon ever allows it to happen. He has asked Cannon to modify Trump’s terms of release “to make clear that he may not make statements that pose a significant, imminent, and foreseeable danger to law enforcement agents participating in the investigation and prosecution of this case.”

I can’t imagine the boot-licking Judge Cannon acknowledging that Trump lied or that his violent supporters predictably threaten the people his rhetoric targets. But she’ll have to respond somehow.

and you also might be interested in …

I can’t say I’m surprised that Nikki Haley has finally said that she’s voting for Trump. Did she previously say a lot of bad things about the Great Man? Join the club. Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, Ron DeSantis — they all said bad things about him before abasing themselves to kiss the ring.

But the people who think Haley is now in the running to be Trump’s VP are crazy. Trump’s VP has to satisfy these conditions:

  • You can’t outshine the boss. (That eliminates not just Haley, but MTG and Vivek as well.)
  • You can’t have your own following independent of the boss. (So: not DeSantis or Haley.)
  • You have to be willing to commit treason for Trump. (He’s not making the Mike Pence mistake again.)
  • You must be willing to repeat whatever claim the boss makes, no matter how absurd or counterfactual. (That’s why so many VP wannabees showed up at Trump’s courtroom wearing matching suits and red ties.)

Just to remind us that there’s no situation so good that a person can’t screw it up, former NFL star Antonio Brown, who earned $80 million during his 12-year career, has filed for bankruptcy.

If you were worried at all about Amy Klobuchar’s ability to hang onto her Senate seat in Minnesota, you can stop. Republicans looks set to nominate an absolute loon.

Cory Doctorow says that “AIs and self-driving cars are the new jetpacks”. It turns out that there was never any reason to think Jetson-style jetpacks were feasible.

In a terrific new 99 Percent Invisible episode, Chris Berube tracks the history of all those jetpacks we saw on TV for decades, and reveals that they were all the same jetpack, flown by just one guy, who risked his life every time he went up in it. The jetpack in question — technically a “rocket belt” — was built in the 1960s by Wendell Moore at the Bell Aircraft Corporation, with funding from the DoD. The Bell rocket belt used concentrated hydrogen peroxide as fuel, which burned at temperatures in excess of 1,000′. The rocket belt had a maximum flight time of just 21 seconds.

But Moore was a great showman, and got it into our heads that jetpacks were an inevitable part of the future — to the point that many people my age lament “Where are our jetpacks? We were promised jetpacks.”

Doctorow explains how the same kind of hucksterism is happening today with self-driving cars and AI in general. Big things are always just a year or two away, and if the impressive demo videos are mostly fake, they’re not lies, they’re “premature truths”.

and let’s close with something thought-provoking

If you’re looking for blogs to read, let me suggest Jess Piper’s “The View from Rural Missouri“. She has that rare touch for telling personal stories that capture something larger. Two posts to get you started: “Losing My Religion“, about how she drifted away from her Evangelical upbringing, and “Daddy Died a MAGA” about how the right-wing echo chamber turned her father into someone she couldn’t recognize.

May 27, 2024 – 12:23 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (32)

Alito’s Flags Aren’t the Worst of It

While we were watching the flags, Alito wrote a decision that greenlights racial gerrymanders and opens a door for Jim Crow to come back.

Samuel Alito has long been my least favorite Supreme Court justice, even before his anti-American-democracy flags (which I’ll cover in the weekly summary post that will follow this one), and even before he wrote the Dobbs decision. You might think I just dislike him because his judicial philosophy is different from mine, but I don’t think that’s it. You see, I’m not convinced he has a judicial philosophy.

What makes Alito a frustrating judge for me is that his rulings seem to have nothing to do with the law. In just about any case, you can predict Alito’s opinion by asking three simple questions:

  • Does one outcome favor the Republican Party?
  • Does one outcome favor the Catholic Church?
  • Does one outcome favor the Haves over the Have-Nots?

If the answer to any of those questions is “yes”, that’s where Alito will come down. You can safely make that prediction without knowing anything about the facts of the case or the relevant laws. All the stuff people argue about in law school is irrelevant.

Other justices will sometimes surprise. Even bought-and-paid-for Clarence Thomas has a few legal hobby horses that occasionally cause him to take a position I wouldn’t have expected. But as best I can tell, Alito has none. He has partisan commitments and he votes to support them; end of story.

Whenever I read an Alito opinion, I’m reminded of a distinction that occurs in religion, between theology and apologetics. Theology attempts to ascertain truths about God, but apologetics develops convincing arguments to defend prior religious beliefs. The two often resemble each other: When Thomas Aquinas claims to prove the existence of God through reason, is he nailing down something previously in doubt (theology), or is he evangelizing to rational people who otherwise might not believe in God (apologetics)? It can be hard to tell.

Similarly, Alito’s written opinions often resemble legal reasoning. He cites precedents, makes deductions, and in general constructs arguments that lead to conclusions. But the arguments appear to have nothing to do with how he reached those conclusions. Instead, they give a gloss of legality to Alito’s prior convictions.

The Dobbs decision is an obvious example: Ostensibly, Alito argues that

Our nation’s historical understanding of ordered liberty does not prevent the people’s elected representatives from deciding how abortion should be regulated.

The Dobbs opinion is one long history lesson justifying that claim. But its history is carefully edited, and Alito does not address the points made in an amicus brief by actual historians. [1] He appears to have no interest in history beyond how it might justify fulfilling the Catholic goal of overturning Roe v Wade.

This week gave us another example, whose importance is in danger of being lost in the controversy over Alito’s flags: He wrote the majority opinion in Alexander v South Carolina NAACP, a decision that Vox’ Ian Milhiser calls “a love letter to gerrymandering“. This decision gives states a green light to engage in all manner of racial gerrymandering; the practice is still technically unconstitutional, but under the standards of Alexander, it becomes nearly impossible to establish in court.

Gerrymandering. Let’s review a little: Gerrymandering means drawing the lines of electoral districts so that your side can win a decisive majority in some legislative body with only a minority of actual votes. There are numerous examples of this happening in state legislatures and even in the U.S. Congress. In extreme examples, a near-50/50 state can wind up with a legislative supermajority for one party. (Basically, you pack all of the other party’s voters into a few districts, which they win with 90% majorities. Then you distribute your voters so that you have reliable 55-45 wins in the other districts.)

On paper, gerrymandering is a cross-partisan problem, and there are states where Democrats gerrymander. But Democrats have tried to ban the practice, and on the whole it favors Republicans, whose rural voters are already more distributed geographically, and who have less shame generally about subverting democracy.

Not that many years ago, optimists thought partisan gerrymandering might get banned by the courts as a violation of basic democratic principles. That hope went out the window in the 2019 Rucho decision, where Chief Justice Roberts declared partisan gerrymanding “nonjusticiable”, meaning that whatever damage the practice might do to democracy, courts have no power to stop it.

But racial gerrymandering, where you draw lines to diminish the voting power of some racial minority, is still considered a violation of the 14th Amendment. The problem is how to tell the difference when a racial minority has predictable voting patterns. If South Carolina moves voters from one congressional district to another, how do we know whether they’re being moved because they’re Black (unconstitutional) or because they’re Democrats (nonjusticiable)?

The Alexander case. Here’s how Alito makes that determination in the current case:

The Constitution entrusts state legislatures with the primary responsibility for drawing congressional districts, and redistricting is an inescapably political enterprise. Legislators are almost always aware of the political ramifications of the maps they adopt, and claims that a map is unconstitutional because it was drawn to achieve a partisan end are not justiciable in federal court. Thus, as far as the Federal Constitution is concerned, a legislature may pursue partisan ends when it engages in redistricting. By contrast, if a legislature gives race a predominant role in redistricting decisions, the resulting map is subjected to strict scrutiny and may be held unconstitutional.

These doctrinal lines collide when race and partisan preference are highly correlated. We have navigated this tension by endorsing two related propositions. First, a party challenging a map’s constitutionality must disentangle race and politics if it wishes to prove that the legislature was motivated by race as opposed to partisanship. Second, in assessing a legislature’s work, we start with a presumption that the legislature acted in good faith.

In Alexander, Alito’s assumption of the legislature’s good faith bulldozes all evidence to the contrary. In particular, it bulldozes the deference higher courts are supposed to give to the factual findings of lower courts. In Alexander, a three-judge panel held a trial where they listened to witnesses and compiled a record that runs thousands of pages. That panel concluded unanimously that South Carolina’s gerrymander was motivated by race.

On appeal, higher courts are supposed to accept such judgments unless there is a clear error in the record. (The reason for this is simple: The appellate judges can read the record, but they didn’t hear the testimony. They have no basis for rejecting the lower-court judges’ conclusions about who was or wasn’t telling the truth.) But Alito rejects the lower-court findings because the three-judge panel made the “clear error” of not giving him the finding he wanted. They should have accepted South Carolina’s claims that race was not the motive if there was any possibility that it might be true.

Justice Kagan’s dissent shreds this argument, and concludes:

What a message to send to state legislators and mapmakers about racial gerrymandering. For reasons I’ve addressed, those actors will often have an incentive to use race as a proxy to achieve partisan ends.
And occasionally they might want to straight-up suppress the electoral influence of minority voters. Go right ahead, this Court says to States today. Go ahead, though you have no recognized justification for using race, such as to comply with statutes ensuring equal voting rights. Go ahead, though you are (at best) using race as a short-cut to bring about partisan gains—to elect more Republicans in one case, more Democrats in another. It will be easy enough to cover your tracks in the end: Just raise a “possibility” of non-race-based decision-making, and it will be “dispositive.” And so this “odious” practice of sorting citizens, built on racial generalizations and exploiting racial divisions, will continue.

Disrespect for precedent. Kagan also points out that the Court heard a nearly identical case in 2017: Cooper v Harris. In that case, Alito made a nearly identical argument, but he lost 5-3, and the lower court’s rejection of North Carolina’s map was upheld.

Cases like that are supposed to be binding precedents, but this Court no longer respects precedent, so it reached the opposite conclusion in this case.

What changed since 2017? Were new laws or constitutional amendments passed? Did we learn something new about gerrymandering that called previous conclusions into question?

Not at all. As with Dobbs, the only thing that has changed is the composition of the Court. With the addition of the Trump justices, the three dissenters in Cooper have become the majority. Kagan writes:

Today, for all practical purposes, the Cooper dissent becomes the law.

Going forward. As with Dobbs, the arguments in the decision have much broader implications. When you read Alito’s opinion, it’s easy to forget that the Court’s precedents against racist laws come out of an ugly history. Ignoring this history, Alito expresses great sympathy for state officials who might find themselves accused of racism

[W]hen a federal court finds that race drove a legislature’s districting decisions, it is declaring that the legislature engaged in “offensive and demeaning” conduct that “bears an uncomfortable resemblance to political apartheid.” We should not be quick to hurl such accusations at the political branches.

But you will search Alito’s opinion in vain to find any expression of sympathy for the victims of racism. It’s as if racism exists only as an “accusation”, something disreputably used to stain the reputations of White people, who deserve our “presumption of good faith”.

Kagan calls out Alito’s message to legislatures that want to gerrymander away the electoral power of non-White voters: “Go ahead.” But the Alexander decision is even bigger than that. It says “Go ahead” to any legislative attempt to reestablish Jim Crow. If legislatures just avoid announcing their racist intentions openly, if they create plausible cover stories for laws that disadvantage racial minorities, the Supreme Court will “start with a presumption that the legislature acted in good faith” and be quick to dismiss any evidence to the contrary.

[1] The historians’ brief begins:

When the United States was founded and for many subsequent decades, Americans relied on the English common law. The common law did not regulate abortion in early pregnancy. Indeed, the common law did not even recognize abortion as occurring at that stage. That is because the common law did not legally acknowledge a fetus as existing separately from a pregnant woman until the woman felt fetal movement, called “quickening,” which could occur as late as the 25th week of pregnancy.

May 27, 2024 – 9:40 am Categories: Articles | Comments (7)

Tagged , |

The Monday Morning Teaser

Like most people who follow the news, I spent much of the week thinking about Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who (for reasons I’ll explain in the featured post) has long been my least favorite justice. (I suppose one sign that you might be a news nerd is that you have a least favorite Supreme Court justice.)

Alito made headlines this week because we found out that an insurrectionist flag flew over a second Alito home. This led to a lot of calls for him to recuse himself from any cases concerning January 6, which he obviously will not do, in keeping with the well-established grade-school principle of “Make me.” I’ll cover all that in the weekly summary.

But what struck me is a decision the Supreme Court released this week in which Alito wrote the majority opinion: Alexander v South Carolina NAACP. In this decision, the Court gives its approval to a congressional map that a lower court said was an illegal racial gerrymander. But (as with Alito’s abortion opinion in Dobbs), the implications go much further: Under the logic laid out in Alexander, just about any racial gerrymander is OK, as long as you don’t say it out loud. Going forward, any racist legislator who wants to pass a new round of Jim Crow laws should know that he’ll get a sympathetic hearing at the Supreme Court.

This week’s featured post centers on Alexander and its larger implications. It’s called “Alito’s Flags Aren’t the Worst of It”, and it should appear shortly.

That leaves the weekly summary a lot to cover: the flags, the International Criminal Court targeting Israel, the Manhattan Trump trial, Trump’s crazy charge that the FBI tried to kill him (and Jack Smith’s response), Nikki Haley endorsing Trump, Memorial Day, and a few other things.

In addition to the newsy stuff, I found some more general articles worth your attention, like Cory Doctorow’s comparison of AI to jetpacks, and a thoughtful woman’s blog from rural Missouri. I’ll try to get that out by noon, but it’s a holiday, so the schedule might slip.

May 27, 2024 – 8:54 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (5)

Not the End

The cabinet, the prime minister, they signal to the Shin Bet that if a Jew is killed, that’s terrible. If an Arab is killed, that’s not good, but it’s not the end of the world.

– former Shin Bet head Ami Ayalon
quoted in “The Unpunished: How Extremists Took Over Israel“

This week’s featured posts are “Wide Right: that kicker’s commencement speech” and “Two Significant Articles about Israel“.

This week everybody was talking about Israel and the Palestinians

That’s the subject of one featured post.

and the Trump trial moving towards its conclusion

I’m resisting the urge to write about the trial at length, because there’s one big thing we all want to know right now, and we can’t know it yet: What is the jury making of Michael Cohen’s testimony? I could speculate, I could link to other people’s speculations, or I could cast a hexagram from the I Ching, but in the end there’s nothing worth saying. We won’t know what the jury thinks until it produces a verdict.

Cohen is not quite done testifying yet. Today marks the third day of the defense’s cross-examination and Cohen’s fifth day on the stand altogether. Given how long it’s been since Cohen’s original testimony, the prosecution will probably want to question him in a redirect.

Cohen is the prosecution’s last witness, and the defense has been cagey about who it might call. Maybe Trump? Maybe no one? The burden of proof-beyond-reasonable-doubt is on the prosecution, so the defense could simply rest its case and claim that the burden has not been met. There’s no guessing how long the summation presentations to the jury will take, but we’re probably looking at the trial finishing either this week or next.

One major task for the prosecution’s summation will be to emphasize just how few points of its case rely on Cohen, and how unlikely all the alternative explanations are.

For example, without Cohen we already know that the payoff to Stormy Daniels happened and that Trump CFO Allen Weisselberg agreed to a plan for covertly reimbursing Cohen for fronting this payment. (We know the reimbursement was covert because Cohen was repaid double the amount he had paid Daniels in order to account for taxes. But taxes are unnecessary for a reimbursement. Only that fact that the reimbursement was hidden as “legal fees” accounts for the doubling.) Multiple witnesses have established that Trump was worried about Daniels’ story getting out, and that his worry centered on the election rather than on personal considerations (like Melania’s reaction). Multiple witnesses attest that nothing happened in the Trump empire without Trump’s personal approval.

Only Cohen’s testimony puts Trump in the room when the decisions were made. But if you disbelieve him on this point, what’s the alternative story? That Cohen paid Daniels $130K of his own money without Trump’s knowledge, that Weisselberg and Cohen fooled Trump with the reimbursement scheme, and that Trump signed $35K monthly checks to Cohen for a year without knowing what he was paying Cohen for. Really?

Various Republicans hoping for Trump’s favor have shown up at the courthouse looking like the Dear Leader’s mini-mes. And they wonder why we call it a cult.

Trump continues to be embarrassed that he hasn’t been able to get protesters to show up outside the courthouse, so he falsely claims that police are keeping them away.

and Alito’s insurrection flag

I’m not sure why it took more than three years for this to come out, but an upside-down American flag — the symbol of the pro-Trump Stop the Steal movement — flew over Justice Alito’s home for several days in the weeks following the January 6 insurrection.

Alito’s response to the revelation was ridiculous: His wife did it, in connection with some kind of dispute with the neighbors.

Alito’s statement is notable because, as the Times reporter Michael Barbaro pointed out, it does not deny that the flag was flown in solidarity with the insurrectionists. It also does not disavow the insurrectionist claim that the 2020 election was stolen, and it does not condemn the Trump-directed attempt to overthrow the constitutional order that Alito has sworn an oath to uphold.

Alito is the second justice whose behavior — sorry, sorry, his wife’s behavior — casts doubt on his ability to be impartial to cases involving January 6. (Clarence Thomas’ wife was actively pushing the false story of a stolen election in the lead-up to January 6.)

That raises the most important issue here, which is that Alito and Thomas sit on the nation’s highest court and are poised to rule on matters related to Trump’s attempts to unlawfully hold on to power. In one case, they already have—deciding that the Constitution’s ban on insurrectionists holding office does not disqualify Trump from running for president. The Court is set to rule on a challenge to a federal law used to prosecute the January 6 rioters, and in another case about Trump’s claim that former presidents have “absolute immunity” to prosecution for crimes committed as “official acts” in office. The 6–3 right-wing majority has made its partisan lean unmistakable. But there is still a difference between an ideologically conservative, or even partisan, Court and one with sitting justices whose worldview is so deranged by fanaticism that they would prefer the end of constitutional government to a president from the rival party.

An ethical judge would recuse himself from these cases. But when we’re talking about Alito and Thomas, the good ship Judicial Ethics sailed a long time ago.

and presidential debates

After a back-and-forth of taunts, it looks like there will be two presidential debates. The first is June 15 on CNN, moderated by Jake Tapper and Dana Bash. The second is September 10 on ABC, with moderators not named yet. Both debates will be open to candidates polling at least 15% among likely voters in four national polls. Whether RFK Jr. and his brain-worm will meet that standard remains to be seen.

I continue to be mystified by the negative coverage Biden’s presidential campaign is getting. Trump is currently ahead by less than 1% in the RealClearPolitics polling average, which looks pretty close to even to me. Several polls either have Biden ahead or see the race as tied. And yet Ezra Klein is examining “Why Biden is Losing“. If you just read headlines and don’t bother with the article “Biden is losing” is the only message you’ll get.

Josh Marshall discusses a related issue in “Is Biden in ‘Denial’ about the polls?” Biden, Marshall says, believes the polls don’t show his true strength for a number of reasons. But is that “denial” really?

The factual questions here aren’t terribly complicated and they’re not really the reason I note this article or write this post. Most polls currently show Biden just behind Trump in a tight race. Others show him either tied or just ahead. And there is a theory of the election that those polls, with a greater emphasis on high propensity voters and the concentrating effect of the final months of the campaign, will put Biden on top in November. I’ve tried to air these different arguments here in the Editors’ Blog. You can believe one or the other.

He attributes this pervasive pessimism to a psychological difference between Republicans and Democrats:

If a race is at all close, Republicans think they’re winning, or at least say they think they’re winning. Democrats are the reverse. And if they’re demonstrably winning, they worry that they’re not winning by enough or should be winning by more.

I have my own reasons to believe the polls will swing towards Biden as the election gets closer: Various voting blocs that have been Democratic in recent elections are down on Biden for one reason or another, like Gaza, and are not really thinking about Trump at all. But will young voters really let Big Oil elect a pro-fossil-fuel president? Do pro-Palestinian voters think Trump will be better for them? Do Hispanics really want to see their cousins rounded up in detention camps? I think a lot of those disaffected Democrats will eventually come home.

It doesn’t have to be all of them. I mean, we’re talking about covering a 1% gap.

Trump teased a third-term possibility in a speech to the NRA. In the same speech, a teleprompter malfunction had him completely stymied.

and that kicker’s commencement speech

See one of the featured posts.

and you also might be interested in …

The president of Iran has died in a helicopter crash. Maybe it was bad weather. Maybe it was that Iran’s helicopter fleet has a hard time getting parts, given American sanctions. Maybe it was foul play by either foreign interests or domestic rivals. Too soon to tell.

Governor Abbott pardoned a guy in prison for murdering a Black Lives Matter protester. One of the featured posts discusses how crimes by Israeli settlers against Palestinians have been routinely ignored by the authorities. Well, we have the same pattern here: If you agree with Abbott and kill somebody who disagrees with Abbott, that’s not really murder in Texas.

There’s a strong Nazi parallel here. In the early days of Hitler’s rule, the police were not nearly as scary as they eventually became. But the Brownshirts — non-government Nazi thugs — could do whatever they wanted and the police would look the other way.

A fascinating article in yesterday’s NYT about conservative Christian parents trying to create space in their lives for their transgender children.

The problem with basing a political movement on fiction is that once people get elected they get confronted with reality. Courtney Gore won a school board seat in Texas, pledging to stop the national campaign to indoctrinate children with progressive messages on sex, gender, and race. Once in office, she looked hard for such indoctrination, and didn’t find it. So she changed her mind.

The UAW’s effort to unionize Southern auto plants hit a pothole: The Mercedes plant in Alabama said no. This follows a UAW victory at a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee.

and let’s close with something peaceful

It turns out there’s a whole genre of videos showing natural beauty accompanied by relaxing music. This one focuses on Norway. I haven’t watched the whole thing — who has the time to get THAT relaxed? — but it looks fabulous.

May 20, 2024 – 11:24 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (8)