I have to say that knowing Trump has to endure just sitting there quietly for hours and days and weeks, and seeing that it is clearly distressing him, has caused me the first real feeling of getting some consolation in all these years of seeing him **** on the system.
But the guy needs exercise. He's usually golfing. And so, you're going to put a man who's almost 80, sitting in a room like this on his butt for all that time? It's not healthy. You know how big of a health nut I am. He needs sunlight and he needs activity. He needs to be walking around, he needs action. It's really cruel and unusual punishment to make a man do that. And any time he moves, they threaten to throw in prison.
This morning, President Joe Biden signed into law the $95 billion national security supplemental bill providing military aid to Ukraine, Israel, and the Indo-Pacific, as well as humanitarian aid to Gaza and other peoples suffering humanitarian crises. The Pentagon immediately sent about a billion dollars worth of ammunition, air defense munitions, and artillery rounds, as well as weapons and armored vehicles to Ukraine. The U.S. Department of Defense had moved supplies into Poland and Germany in hopes that the measure would pass; they should move into Ukraine soon.
The Pentagon also said today that in mid-March it provided Ukraine Army Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS, with a range of 185 miles (300 kilometers), twice that of previous weapons sent by the U.S.
For many months, Ukraine has been desperately short of supplies, especially ammunition, and its war effort has suffered as it waited for the reinforcements that are finally on their way.
In a speech after signing the law, Biden explained that the U.S. would send equipment to Ukraine from its own stockpiles and then “replenish those stockpiles with new products made by American companies here in America: Patriot missiles made in Arizona, Javelins made in Alabama, artillery shells made in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas. In other words, we’re helping Ukraine while at the same time investing in our own industrial base, strengthening our own national security, and supporting jobs in nearly 40 states all across America.”
Biden emphasized that the law is “going to make America safer. It’s going to make the world safer. And it continues America’s leadership in the world, and everyone knows it.” But he called out that border security was missing from the bill, and he promised to bring that measure back.
Biden made it a point “to thank everyone in Congress who made it possible, especially the bipartisan leadership: Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson; Leader Jeffries; Leaders Schumer and McConnell. They don’t always agree, but when it matters most, they stepped up and did the right thing. And I mean this sincerely, history will remember this time.”
“We don’t walk away from our allies; we stand with them. We don’t let tyrants win; we oppose them. We don’t merely watch global events unfold; we shape them. That’s what it means to be the…indispensable nation. That’s what it means to be the world’s superpower and the world’s leading democracy. Some of our MAGA Republican friends reject that vision,” he said, “but this vote makes it clear: There is a bipartisan consensus for that kind of American leadership. That’s exactly what we’ll continue to deliver.”
This morning, Arlette Saenz of CNN reported on the six months of behind-the-scenes negotiating Biden and his team engaged in to get House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) behind Ukraine aid. Meetings, phone calls, defense briefings, and so on, laid out for Johnson just what abandoning Ukraine would mean for U.S. and global security.
Biden urged his team to stay in close contact with Johnson, as well as House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), but to avoid attacking Johnson in order to allow room to move discussions forward.
Counselor to the president Steve Ricchetti, a key negotiator, told Saenz: “He just kept saying, ‘Keep talking. Keep working.’ You know, keep finding ways to resolve differences. And that was his direction.”
Biden’s focus on the slow, steady work of governance is a change from the actions of Republican leaders since 1981 whose goal was not to build up successful programs that helped Americans in general, but rather to slash the government. Killing programs requires only saying no to other people’s ideas and riling up voters to endorse that anti-government program by flame-throwing on right-wing media.
Over the years, it seems we have become accustomed to the idea that flame-throwing defines politics, but in fact, Biden’s reliance on slow, careful negotiation harks back to the eras when leaders sought to build coalitions and find common ground in order to pass legislation.
North America’s Building Trades Unions (NABTU) acknowledged the power of Biden’s approach today when it endorsed Biden for president in 2024. The union’s president, Sean McGarvey, noted that Trump had promised to protect pensions and to pass infrastructure laws that would help employment in the building trades, but did neither. In contrast, Biden worked to pass the American Rescue Plan, which protected pensions, and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Chips and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act, which McGarvey said “have brought life-changing, opportunity-creating, generational change focused on the working men and women of this great country who have for far too long been clamoring for a leader to finally keep their word.”
In an ad, McGarvey said: “Donald Trump is incapable of running anything, let alone the most powerful country in the history of the world.”
The NABTU has 3 million members across the country and has committed to investing heavily to organize workers to vote for Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, where about 250,000 of their members live.
Trump has other problems today, as well, after an Arizona grand jury yesterday indicted 11 of the fake electors in that state with conspiracy, fraudulent schemes and artifices, fraudulent schemes and practices, and forgery for their attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Those charged included state senators Jake Hoffman and Anthony Kern, former Arizona Republican Party chair Kelli Ward, and Tyler Bowyer of the right-wing advocacy organization Turning Points Action. The indictment lists seven other co-conspirators, who are not yet named but who appear from descriptions to include Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Christina Bobb, Boris Epshteyn, and Jenna Ellis; Trump campaign operative Mike Roman; and Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows. Bobb is now senior counsel for “election integrity” for the Republican National Committee.
Trump is listed as an unindicted co-conspirator.
Why we need to stop using ‘pro-Palestine’ and ‘pro-Israel’
The safety and security of Palestinians and Jews are interdependent, so we should use language carefully
In reporting on the encampments springing up on college campuses across the US, the media seem to have convened a terminology confab and agreed on two descriptions: “pro-Palestinian” and “anti-Israel”. These labels oversimplify Americans’ opinions on Israel’s onslaught against Gaza, which marked its 200th day on Tuesday with no end in sight. But the error is worse than semantic.
“Universities Struggle as Pro-Palestinian Demonstrations Grow,” says the New York Times. “Colleges Struggle to Contain Intensifying Pro-Palestinian Protests,” reports the Wall Street Journal. In Minneapolis, the Star Tribune has the local news that the “University of Minnesota police arrest 9 after pro-Palestinian encampment set up on campus”. Some publications less shy about displaying their political biases take the opposite tack. A headline in the right-leaning New York Post, for instance, exaggerated the literally incendiary nature of the demonstrators’ tactics: “Anti-Israel protesters carry flares to March on NYPD HQ after 130 arrested at NYU.” The accompanying video is cast in red. Ever evenhanded, CBS does both: “Pro-Palestinian, pro-Israel protesters gather outside Columbia University.”
Yes, for some, the phrase “from the river to the sea” signals a wish to exterminate the other side, whether that means Palestinians, Jews or the state of Israel. At demonstrations aflutter with Palestinian flags, chants may be heard calling for repeat performances of the atrocities of 7 October.
For most people, particularly Jews, in the movement to end the annihilation of Gaza, the feelings are complex, even when the moral stance is uncompromising and the demands straightforward: stop funding genocide, let Gaza live. There are ways to describe where people stand that more accurately represent these complexities.
First, support for Palestinian liberation is not synonymous with support for Hamas. “The contemporary left-wing slide into Hamas apologism is not only abhorrent, but not aligned with the goals of Palestinian liberation,” wrote Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a Gaza native and US citizen, in the Forward in March. “If contemporary activists truly grappled with the horror Hamas inflicted on October 7 and understood Hamas’s history of corruption and exploitation of the Gazan people, they would see that Hamas must be abandoned entirely for pro-Palestine activism to actually progress.”
While one term seems to refer to people and the other to the state, the terms pro-Palestinian and anti- (or pro-) Israel blur the distinction between governments and people. To be for Palestinian liberation is not necessarily to endorse Palestinian nationalism or a future Arab-supremacist nation. As the feminist legal scholar Aya Gruber noted on X: “During Vietnam there were ‘antiwar’ and ‘peace’ protesters, not ‘pro-Vietnam’ & ‘anti-US’ protesters.” She adds that the “irresponsible” media do not refer to elected officials who vote to fund the bombs that are killing tens of thousands of people and decimating homes, hospitals and schools as “anti-Palestinian”.
Nor does opposition to Israeli policy mean indifference to the Jewish residents of Israel. The journalist (and seriously observant Jew) Peter Beinart, formerly a prominent spokesperson for liberal Zionism, has since renounced his support for a Jewish ethno-state in the Middle East and now advocates for a single, secular, multinational state, with equal rights for all. While consistently foregrounding the cataclysm in Gaza, Beinart rarely fails to mention the hostages still being held by Hamas. Yet, as he recently told the Harvard Crimson, his condemnation of Israel does not “reflect a lack of concern for the welfare of Jews in Israel and Jews around the world, but are actually my best effort to take positions that I believe will lead to greater safety for us”. He frequently points to data showing that escalations of Israeli violence against Palestinians are correlated with increased antisemitic acts elsewhere the world.
The left is increasingly anti-Zionist. At the “emergency seder in the streets” in Brooklyn on the second night of Passover, the Canadian socialist and climate justice activist Naomi Klein called Zionism “a false idol that takes our most profound biblical stories of justice and emancipation from slavery – the story of Passover itself – and turns them into brutalist weapons of colonial land theft, roadmaps for ethnic cleansing and genocide”.
But if you see Zionism as a movement of refuge, not of genocide, you can be Zionist and oppose the violence perpetrated by Israeli authorities against Palestinian civilians. The Jewish anti-occupation and antiwar organization IfNotNow comprises “Zionists, anti-Zionists, non-Zionists, post-Zionists, and many people who don’t know what they’d call themselves”, wrote Alex Langer, a New York member of the group, in Haaretz, in 2018. “The Zionists within IfNotNow have shown that not everyone who believes in a Jewish nation-state in Israel seeks a system of endless bloodshed and oppression, that there are Zionists who are willing to put their voices and sometimes bodies on the line for freedom and dignity for all.”
Of course, the most noxious – and incorrect – characterization of a political stance toward Israel-Palestine is the conflation of “anti-Israel” with antisemitism. The useful cynicism of that maneuver is currently on view at the hearings run by Elise Stefanik, the New York Republican representative, whose goal is not to eradicate antisemitism but rather to undermine academic freedom and the credibility of intellectuals generally. “Two groups conflate Zionism and Judaism,” said Yaakov Shapiro, the anti-Zionist Orthodox rabbi. “Zionists, who want to legitimize Zionism by pretending it is Judaism; and anti-Semites, who want to de-legitimize Judaism by pretending it is Zionism.”
Most people in the movement to end Israeli apartheid have come to understand that whatever the solution – one state or two – the safety and security of Jews and Palestinians are interdependent. That makes the misrepresentation of the spectrum of beliefs more than an insult to language. The terms “pro-Palestinian” and “pro-Israel” – and their implicit mutual exclusion – reproduce and perpetuate the nationalist antagonisms that fuel the forever war between Jews and Palestinians.
If ceasing to use them will not magically produce a solution, it would help create the atmosphere necessary to imagine a peaceful future for Palestinians and Jews in the Middle East and the diaspora. In fact, the college encampments are rehearsals of that future. On MSNBC, Isra Hirsi, daughter of progressive Democratic US Representative Ilhan Omar, told an interviewer that far from being a threat to public safety, the Columbia University encampment was a “beautiful” embodiment “of solidarity”. Before the police broke up the camp and arrested students including Hirsi, participants of all faiths and none sang, prayed and celebrated Shabbat together. On the first night of Passover at Yale and the University of Michigan, students held seders amid the tents. The outdoor rituals demonstrated that a person can be openly, fearlessly Jewish on these campuses.
At the seder in the streets, a friend and I looked around at the many attendants in keffiyehs and noted that the black-and-white Palestinian scarf could be easily interchanged with a tallit, or Jewish prayer shawl. A few minutes later, a Palestinian-American speaker just returned from the West Bank called for liberation for everyone “between every river and every sea”.
I think the best thing that could happen for our country’s collective mental health and in the best interest of our survival as a democratic republic would be if Donald Trump could be publicly destroyed.
Just let me enjoy his being stuck having to sit in court with his big mouth shut.
I was watching cable news this afternoon at the gym. And I saw one of those examples of what has now become a Trump/Roberts Court-era set piece. Where principled and very smart lawyers and/or legal academics have to say, I guess I was a chump. Sure the Roberts court is partisan, I thought. But there’s a threshold level belief in the rule of law. I’m not trying to make hay out of others’ mistakes. My guiding heuristic has been that the Roberts Court, especially in its post-2017 iteration is thoroughly corrupt and will generally do whatever is in the interests of the GOP so long as it doesn’t put too big a dent in the Court’s own perceived legitimacy and elite social standing. Based on this standard I assumed the Court would settle for delaying Trump’s trial until the Fall. It seems now that they’re likely to kick it back to the trial Court for further fact-finding and thus the case itself well into 2025.
Fair enough.
Everything comes into conceptual alignment if we understand the Court’s corruption: corrupt in its construction, corrupt in its jurisprudence, venally corrupt as well, though that is the least of its problems.
On this show I still saw people saying things like, “I hope this isn’t the case.” “I hope I’m wrong.” Don’t hope you’re wrong. This just leaves us still in some hunt for the silver lining in the Court’s corruption. Or even worse, this undermines faith in the Court. No. We don’t want to shore up faith in a corrupt institution.
We are where we should know we are. The Roberts Court is a corrupt institution which operates in concert and on behalf of the Republican party and to an ambiguous degree right-wing anti-regulatory ideology. If we believe in a different set of policies or even democratic self-governance we will have to succeed at that with the Supreme Court acting as a consistent adversary.
That’s the challenge in front of us. It sucks. But things become more clear cut once we take the plunge and accept that fact. Swallow it whole
Kevin McCarthy Protege Under Investigation For Sexually Assaulting Daughter
Republican Kern County Supervisor Zack Scrivner is being investigated for sexual assault after his other child stabbed him in the chest twice
Zack Scrivner, the Kern County Supervisor, is under investigation for allegedly sexually assaulting his pre-teen daughter, as stated by Sheriff Donny Youngblood during a press conference on Thursday.
Scrivner, a Republican, is currently the Supervisor of Kern County and a long-time friend of former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy.
Sheriff Youngblood recounted the incident where Scrivner, apparently experiencing a psychotic episode, was armed with a gun at his Tehachapi home, following a call from Scrivner’s aunt, District Attorney Cynthia Zimmer.
Deputies dispatched to the scene discovered Scrivner had already been disarmed and had sustained two stab wounds in a physical altercation with his children, sparked by the assault allegations.
Thirty guns, electronic devices, and psychedelic mushrooms were seized from Scrivner's residence, leading to forensic examinations to determine potential influence.
A criminal protective order currently prohibits Scrivner from contacting his children while investigations are ongoing, with the case referred to the state Attorney General’s Office and possibly involving the Tulare County Sheriff’s Office.
Scrivner's attorney, H.A. Sala, refutes the sex assault allegation, attributing the altercation to Scrivner's mental health crisis and pending divorce.
Despite the turmoil, Sala asserts Scrivner's dedication as a father and his lengthy political career spanning 20 years — he has served on the Board of Supervisors for 14 years and previously held positions in local government.
“I am in shock that a lawyer stood in the U.S. Supreme Court and said that a president could assassinate his political opponent and it would be immune as ‘an official act,’” lawyer Marc Elias, whose firm defends democratic election laws, wrote today on social media. He added: “I am in despair that several Justices seemed to think this answer made perfect sense.”
Elias was referring to the argument of Trump’s lawyer before the Supreme Court today that it could indeed be an “official act” for which a president should be immune from criminal prosecution if “the president decides that his rival is a corrupt person and he orders the military or orders someone to assassinate him.”
The Supreme Court today heard close to three hours of oral argument over Trump v. United States, which concerns former president Trump’s claim of absolute immunity from criminal charges for “official acts”: in this case, his attempt to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 presidential election and to stay in office against the will of the voters.
That is, like the authoritarian leaders he admires, Trump tried to steal the 2020 presidential election and seize the presidency. Sometimes I worry that the enormity of that crime against our democracy is becoming normalized.
It was not normalized by grand jury members who reviewed the evidence of that effort; they indicted Trump in August 2023 on four counts. But Trump responded by claiming that a president cannot be prosecuted for official acts and that a former president cannot be prosecuted unless the House of Representatives has impeached him and the Senate convicted him.
Justice Clarence Thomas, whose wife, Ginni, participated in that effort, did not recuse himself from today’s hearing, and the court did not object to his presence.
Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post noted that the justices on the court seemed to be weighing “which poses the greater risk—putting a criminal president above the law or hamstringing noncriminal presidents with the risk of frivolous or vindictive prosecutions brought by their successors.”
The liberals on the court focused on the former—after all, the case is about whether Trump should answer to criminal indictments for trying to overturn our democracy. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson noted: “If someone with those kinds of powers, the most powerful person in the world with the greatest amount of authority, could go into office knowing that there would be no potential penalty for committing crimes, I’m trying to understand what the disincentive is from turning the Oval Office into, you know, the seat of criminal activity in this country.”
In contrast, the right-wing justices focused on the risk of vindictive prosecutions, which has been the heart of Trump’s argument for complete immunity. Trump insists that without immunity, a president will be afraid to make controversial decisions out of fear of later prosecution. Such a lack of immunity would destroy the presidency, he has argued, claiming that he is simply trying to protect the office.
And yet he is the first of 45 presidents to be charged with a crime, and no previous president made any claim of immunity.
Nonetheless, the right-wing justices made it clear they were more interested in the future than in the present. In their comments they stayed far away from Trump and focused instead on presidents in the past and the future. (Conservative judge Michael Luttig noted: “The Court and the parties discussed everything but the specific question presented.”)
Justice Neil Gorsuch said: “I’m not concerned about this case, but I am concerned about future uses of the criminal law to target political opponents based on accusations about their motives.” Justice Samuel Alito tried to turn the argument for accountability upside down by suggesting that complete immunity would be more likely to encourage presidents to leave office, because if a president knew they could be prosecuted for crimes, they would be less likely to leave peacefully.
Indeed, Marcus wrote: “The conservative justices’ professed concerns over the implications of their rulings for imaginary future presidents, in imaginary future proceedings, seemed more important to them than bringing Trump to justice.” Constitutional law professor Anthony Michael Kreis was more concrete in his reaction; he found it “unbelievable that Supreme Court justices who see forgiving student loans, mandating vaccines, and regulating climate change as a slippery slope toward tyranny were not clear-eyed on questions of whether a president could execute citizens or stage a coup without being prosecuted.”
The court’s decision will likely take weeks and thus will delay Trump’s trial for crimes committed in his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, likely until after the 2024 election. On Monday, April 22, former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), who served as vice chair of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, called out Trump’s attacks on the legal system and delays to avoid accountability. In a New York Times op-ed, Cheney reminded the justices that delay would mean that the American people would not get to hear the testimony and evidence Special Counsel Jack Smith has uncovered before the 2024 election.
“It cannot be that a president of the United States can attempt to steal an election and seize power but our justice system is incapable of bringing him to trial before the next election four years later,” she wrote.
And yet, here we are.
Voters’ right to know what a candidate for president did to overthrow the will of the people in a previous election is at stake in today’s arguments. But so is the rule of law on which our democracy stands. The rule of law means that laws are made according to established procedures rather than a leader’s dictates, and that they are reasonable. Laws are enforced equally. No one is above the law, and everyone has an obligation to obey the law.
As Justice Elena Kagan noted today: “The framers did not put an immunity clause into the Constitution. They knew how to; there were immunity clauses in some state constitutions. They didn’t provide immunity to the president. And, you know—not so surprising—they were reacting against a monarch who claimed to be above the law. Wasn’t the whole point that the president was not a monarch and the president was not supposed to be above the law?”
Indeed.
“[W]here, say some, is the King of America?” Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense, the 1776 pamphlet that convinced British colonists in North America to cut ties with their king and start a new nation. “In America the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.”
It was a profound exchange.
On Thursday, as justices of the U.S. Supreme Court heard extensive oral arguments over whether Donald Trump, as a former president, is totally immune from criminal prosecution for actions taken while he was in office, it began with a series of questions to special counsel attorney Michael Dreeben from Justice Samuel Alito.
Alito, more than an hour into proceedings, started to press Dreeben about whether the prosecution of a president would undermine the stability of a country’s governance. It would seem easily agreeable, the justice argued, that a “stable, democratic society” required a defeated candidate to leave office peacefully if he lost an election.
“Even a close one,” Alito said. “Even a hotly contested one.”
Dreeben easily agreed but when Alito asked what may change if that same outgoing incumbent realized he couldn’t head off into “peaceful retirement” after a defeat but “may be criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent,” would that not lead the country into a destructive cycle of destabilizing democracy, too?
For the special counsel’s attorney, the reasoning was “exactly the opposite.”
Mechanisms already exist to contest elections that are both legal and far more appropriate. Dreeben took the window to remind the court that Trump lost every lawsuit he raised to challenge the 2020 election, save for one and that outcome wasn’t “determinative,” he said.
Alito’s argument appeared to strike a solemn but dissonant chord in Justice Sonia Sotomayor after the back-and-forth with Dreeben.
Turning to Dreeben, the justice asked if the “stable democracy society” required the “good faith of its public officials” and that “good faith” would assume those officials would loyally follow the laws of the United States.
“Correct,” Dreeben said.
But putting that ideal situation aside for a moment and considering the real world, Sotomayor remarked that “there is no fail-safe system of government.”
“Meaning, we have a judicial system that has layers and layers and layers of protection for accused defendants in the hopes that the innocent will go free,” she said. “We fail routinely.”
The justice continued:
But we succeed, more often than not, in the vast majority of cases and the innocent do go free. Sometimes they don’t and we have some post-conviction remedies for that. But we still fail, and we’ve executed innocent people.
Having said that, Justice Alito went through step by step all of the mechanisms that could potentially fail.
In the end, if it fails completely, it’s because we’ve destroyed democracy on our own, isn’t it?
Dreeben argued that the framers of the Constitution designed the separation of powers to avoid — or, at minimum, limit — the abuses of a democratic system.
“The ultimate check is the goodwill and faith in democracy and the crimes that are alleged in this case are the antithesis of democracy,” he said.
Trump faces four felony charges in Washington, D.C., connected to his alleged effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
Separate of this exchange on Thursday, there are many other notable moments at arguments including Justice Neal Gorsuch dreading the idea of having to face the issue of whether a president can issue a self-pardon and Justice Amy Coney Barrett asking a Trump lawyer if he conceded that private acts are not protected.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor cut right to the heart of the issue, by asking attorney John Sauer point blank whether a president should be allowed to assassinate his political rivals, as both he and Trump have previously argued.
“If the president decides that his rival is a corrupt person, and he orders the military or orders someone to assassinate him, is that within his official acts for which he can get immunity?” she asked.
Sotomayor: If the president decides that his rival is a corrupt person and he orders the military to assassinate him, is that within his official acts for which he can give immunity? pic.twitter.com/mJCAeE4sXx
“It could, and why? Because he’s doing it for personal reasons,” she said. “He’s not doing it like President Obama is alleged to have done it, to protect the country from a terrorist. He’s doing it for personal gain. And isn’t that the nature of the allegations here? That he’s not doing these acts in furtherance of an official responsibility, he’s doing it for personal gain.”
“I agree with that characterization of the indictment, and that confirms immunity, because the characterization is there is a series of acts that were done for—” Sauer said, doubling down before he was interrupted by the liberal Justice.
“No, because immunity says, even if you did it for personal gain, we won’t hold you responsible. How could that be?” asked Justice Sotomayor, undermining the former president’s claims that his immunity should shield him from prosecution across his ongoing legal battles.
Yesterday, in a long story about “the petty feud between the [New York Times] and the White House,” Eli Stokols of Politico suggested that the paper’s negative coverage of President Joe Biden came from the frustration of its publisher, A. G. Sulzberger, at Biden’s refusal to do an exclusive interview with the paper. Two people told Stokols that Sulzberger’s reasoning is that only an interview with an established paper like the New York Times “can verify that the 81-year-old Biden is still fit to hold the presidency.”
For his part, Stokols reported, Biden’s frustration with the New York Times reflects “the resentment of a president with a working-class sense of himself and his team toward a news organization catering to an elite audience,” and their conviction that the newspaper is not taking seriously the need to protect democracy.
A spokesperson for the New York Times responded to the story by saying the idea that it has skewed its coverage out of pique over an interview is “outrageous and untrue,” and that the paper will continue to cover the president “fully and fairly.”
Today, Biden sat for a live interview of more than an hour with SiriusXM shock jock Howard Stern. Writer Kurt Andersen described it as a “*Total* softball interview, mostly about his personal life—but lovely, sweet, human, and Biden was terrific, consistently clear, detailed, charming, moving. Which was the point. SO much better than his opponent could do.”
Also today, the Treasury Department announced that the pilot program of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) that enabled taxpayers to file their tax returns directly with the IRS for free had more users than the program’s stated goal, got positive ratings, and saved users an estimated $5.6 million in fees for tax preparation. The government had hoped about 100,000 people would use the pilot program; 140,803 did.
Former deputy director of the National Economic Council Bharat Ramamurti wrote on social media, “Of all the things I was lucky enough to work on, this might be my favorite. You shouldn’t have to pay money to pay your taxes. As this program continues to grow, most people will get pre-populated forms and be able to file their taxes with a few clicks in a few minutes.” Such a system would look much like the system other countries already use.
Also today, the Federal Trade Commission announced that Williams-Sonoma will pay a record $3.17 million civil penalty for advertising a number of products as “Made in USA” when they were really made in China and other countries. This is the largest settlement ever for a case under the “Made in USA” rule. Williams-Sonoma will also be required to file annual compliance certifications.
FTC chair Lina Khan wrote on social media: “Made in USA fraud deceives customers and punishes honest businesses. FTC will continue holding to account businesses that misrepresent where their product[s] are manufactured.”
In another win for the United Auto Workers (UAW), the union negotiated a deal today with Daimler Trucks over contracts for 7,300 Daimler employees in four North Carolina factories. The new contracts provide raises of at least 25% over four years, cost of living increases, and profit sharing. This victory comes just a week after workers at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, voted overwhelmingly to join the UAW.
Today was the eighth day of Trump’s criminal trial for his efforts to interfere with the 2016 election by paying to hide negative information about himself from voters and then falsifying records to hide the payments. David Pecker, who ran the company that published the National Enquirer tabloid, finished his testimony.
In four days on the stand, Pecker testified that he joined Michael Cohen and others in killing stories to protect Trump in the election. Trump’s longtime executive assistant Rhona Graff took the stand after Pecker, and testified that both Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels were in Trump’s contacts. Next up was Gary Farro, a bank employee who verified banking information that showed how Michael Cohen had hidden payments to Daniels in 2016.
Once again, Trump appeared to be trying to explain away his lack of support at the trial, writing on his social media channel that the courthouse was heavily guarded. “Security is that of Fort Knox,” he wrote, “all so that MAGA will not be able to attend this trial….” But CNN’s Kaitlan Collins immediately responded: “Again, the courthouse is open [to] the public. The park outside, where a handful of his supporters have gathered on [trial] days, is easily accessible.”
Dispatch Politics noted today that when co-chairs Michael Whatley and Lara Trump and senior campaign adviser Chris LaCivita took over the Republican National Committee (RNC), they killed a plan to open 40 campaign offices in 10 crucial states and fired 60 members of the RNC staff. According to Dispatch Politics, Trump insisted to the former RNC chair that he did not need the RNC to work on turning out voters. He wanted the RNC to prioritize “election integrity” efforts.
The RNC under Trump has not yet developed much infrastructure or put staff into the states. It appears to have decided to focus only on those that are key to the presidential race, leaving down-ballot candidates on their own.
While Trump appears to be hoping to win the election through voter suppression or in the courts, following his blueprint from 2020, Biden’s campaign has opened 30 offices in Michigan alone and has established offices in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, New Hampshire, and Florida.
Finally today, news broke that in her forthcoming book, South Dakota governor Kristi Noem wrote about shooting her 14-month-old dog because it was “untrainable” and dangerous. “I hated that dog,” she wrote, and she recorded how after the dog ruined a hunting trip, she shot it in a gravel pit. Then she decided to kill a goat that she found to be “nasty and mean” as well as smelly and aggressive. She “dragged him to the gravel pit,” too, and “put him down.”
Noem has been seen as a leading contender for the Republican vice presidential nomination on a ticket with Trump, and it seems likely she was trying to demonstrate her ruthlessness—a trait Trump appears to value—as a political virtue. But across the political spectrum, people have expressed outrage and disgust. In The Guardian, Martin Pengelly said her statement, “I guess if I were a better politician I wouldn’t tell the story,” was “a contender for the greatest understatement of election year.”
There were so many things that happened yesterday in the Supreme Court’s hearing on presidential immunity that it’s hard to know where to start. But one part that captured it for me was Sam Alito’s line of argument that presidential immunity might be necessary to make it possible for presidents to leave office voluntarily, or that not having some broad grant of immunity would make refusal to leave office more likely. Here’s one of the quotes: “If an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly contested election knows that a real possibility after leaving office is not that the president is gonna be able to go off to a peaceful retirement, but that the president may be criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent, will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy? And we can look around the world and find countries where we have seen this process, where the loser gets thrown in jail.”
I think it’s safe to say that as a policy matter this is a very bad way to approach presidential accountability, the rule of law or the peaceful transfer of power. But that really isn’t the big point to me. It’s that the subtext of so much of yesterday’s discussion and — often the explicit statements from the justices during it — was that this is a new question that the Supreme Court is now tasked with crafting a policy to address. Neither is the case.
I am not naive enough to think that judicial interpretations and rulings don’t have policy implications. Of course they do. What’s more, the policy implications of judicial interpretations frequently are a reasonable part of the prudential analysis that goes into judges’ work: if we think the law and the Constitution say something, we need to have open eyes about what that something actually means in practice. What was so striking about yesterday’s performances, if not at all surprising, were that there was little effort to even keep up these pretenses. It was almost like these were de novo questions. Even down to the point where multiple justices waived off dealing with the actual case and facts before them, arguing that they’re being called upon to set up the big rules for posterity.
Listening to Sam Alito, but really Kavanaugh and Roberts too, you get the sense that if they decided that presidents need to be immune from possible prosecution forever for whatever policy reason they think makes sense … well, elections have consequences and it’s up to them to make that choice. But that’s not how any of this works. If you really want to get into history to make this ruling, it is the plainest thing in all the discussions around the authorship and ratification of the federal Constitution that presidents remain citizens. The core dynamic in the process of creating the Constitution was the belief that the country needed a more unified and powerful executive authority without making that person above the law, which is to say, a king. Presidents are not above the law. When they leave office they give up all their powers. The text itself gives not the slightest hint that presidents have immunity from the law.
You can play devil’s advocate and say: well how is it then that the Justice Department and pretty much the whole legal and political class has decided that a president can’t be prosecuted while in office? There’s an answer to that. There are numerous principles in the common law that say that you can’t be a judge in your own case. The president is the officer who enforces the laws. He can’t prosecute himself. It’s a contradiction in terms. Well, is there a defect in the Constitution? Did they leave something out? No. It turns out that the Constitution creates a process to resolve this contradiction. The document invests the political process with a means to deal with a law-breaking president: Impeachment. The Congress can remove the president. Now someone else is charged with enforcing the laws, and the contradiction is resolved. Some people disagree with this logic. But this is the proper process of looking at the document — resolving seeming contradictions or problems by looking at the whole document and trying to see what it prescribes, how it charges us to resolve seeming contradictions within it.
The display we saw yesterday was a vivid illustration of how the Court has gone thoroughly rogue, cutting itself off from even the appearances of the processes that give it legitimacy. That is the core of the current Court’s corruption. If we assume that there might be some limited ways that official acts can’t be reinterpreted as crimes, it seems to go without saying that refusing to honor the results of an election can’t be one of them. Trying to overthrow the government can’t be one of those official acts. If that’s the case — this hypothetical, narrow kind of immunity — then the Court’s proper path is clear. You say that there may be some cases where a very narrow kind of immunity applies. But what we have before us now certainly isn’t one of those cases. End of story.
But that’s not what we got.
It’s certainly the case that justices aren’t bound by things they say in the process of airing an issue. So perhaps this was all just the equivalent of the preposterous hypotheticals that a law professor raises in a class on constitutional interpretation. But lets be real. We know who these people are. They’re telling us.
It’s a rogue court, a thoroughly corrupt one, one that is so far gone in its corruption that it feels free even from the practical obligation to clothe its corruption for the sake of appearances.
This week, the Supreme Court managed to fail to meet the already extremely low expectations most sane people already had for it. First, during the Idaho EMTALA case on whether hospitals receiving federal funding can refuse to provide abortions to women who are actively dying as a result of a pregnancy, we heard debate over which, and how many, organs a woman had to lose before an abortion becomes legally acceptable. By all appearances, it looks as though the court is going to gut the already laughably weak “life of the mother” protections by a 5-4 vote.
It followed up this abysmal performance with hearing the Trump immunity case the next day, and the comportment of the same five male, conservative justices was even worse. When Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked Donald Trump’s lawyer, “If the president decides that his rival is a corrupt person, and he orders the military or orders someone to assassinate him, is that within his official acts for which he can get immunity?”, he replied, “It would depend on the hypothetical, but we can see that would well be an official act.”
Based on that one line of questioning, Trump’s argument should be going down in flames 9-0. A democracy cannot survive when its supreme leader can arbitrarily decide that it’s in the nation’s best interest to rub out his opponents, and then leave it to some future court to decide whether it was an official act, because he’ll get away with it as long as there aren’t 67 votes in the Senate to impeach. And given that it will have been established that the president can put out a contract on political foes, how many senators are going to vote to impeach?
But the justices did not laugh this argument out of court. Quite the contrary: At least five of the justices seemed to buy into the Trump team’s arguments that the power of the office of the president must be protected from malicious and politicized litigation. They were uninterested in the actual case at hand or its consequences. Elie Mystal, justice correspondent at The Nation, perhaps captured my response to the Supreme Court’s arguments best: “I am in shock that a lawyer stood in the U.S. Supreme Court and said that a president could assassinate his political opponent and it would be immune as ‘an official act.’ I am in despair that several Justices seemed to think this answer made perfect sense.”
At a minimum, it appears the court will send all of the federal cases back down to lower courts to reconsider whether Trump’s crimes were “official acts.” It’s also likely that their new definition of “official acts” is likely to be far broader than anyone should be comfortable with, or at least broad enough to give Trump a pass. This delay all but guarantees that Trump will not stand trial for anything besides the current hush-money case before the 2024 election.
This is catastrophic in so many ways. The first is that it increases the already high chances that the United States ends up with a dictator who will attempt to rapidly disassemble democracy in pursuit of becoming President for Life. It simultaneously increases the chances that yes, he will go ahead and violate the civil and human rights of political opponents and classes of people he calls Communists, Marxists, and fascists. People forget that the first German concentration camp (Dachau) was built in 1933 to hold members of the Communist and Social Democratic Parties, and Trump has made it clear that he’s building enough camps to process a minimum of 11 million people (migrants, at least for starters).
The conservatives on the Supreme Court have also exposed their hubris, willful ignorance, and foolishness to the entire world in stark terms, and it will cost them and the nation dearly in the long run. They somehow presume that if Trump is elected and goes full dictator, that the power of the court, and their reputation, will save them. The truth is, Trump’s relationships with everyone he meets are completely transactional. If the court ever stops being useful to him, he will terminate it with prejudice if he thinks he can get away with it, and this court is doing everything it can to make him think he can get away with it.
These justices’ foolishness lies in their lack of foresight as to what happens if Trump wins in 2024. In the justice’s efforts to ensure that they are the most powerful branch of government, they are about to make it the weakest. They are creating a win-win situation for Trump, and a lose-lose for themselves. When Trump is president again, he is likely to believe that he has the option of “removing” any member of the Supreme Court who defies him. As long as the court doesn’t rule against him, they’re fine. From the justices’ perspective, they either end up neutered lap dogs of a despot, who do whatever they’re told out of fear, or they defy him and end up somewhere … unpleasant (at best). Taking a dirt nap at worst. After all, if Trump can rub out a political opponent, can’t he do the same to an uncooperative jurist?
The Roberts Court surely believes that Trump would never stoop to this—that the sanctity of court and the laws and norms of our democracy will protect them. Anyone who has spent 10 minutes studying how democracies collapse knows this is idiotic, but it stems from the justices’ own hubristic belief that the court is so powerful and respected that it is immune to everything. They believe the respect for the institution will ensure their power endures.Except, what happens when neither Democrats nor Republicans have any respect for the courts? If Republicans see the court as neutered pets who can be put down the first time they bite, or ignored like a chihuahua straining against a leash, what real power does it posses? Much like Stalin asked, “How many divisions does the Pope have?”, Trump and Republicans will be fully cognizant that the court controls nothing once every federal agency has been packed with loyalists.
If Democrats nearly universally see the court as a corrupt rubber stamp for an autocrat, what happens if Republicans push too far on an issue? Like, say, an effective 50-state ban on abortion from the moment of conception with no real exceptions, which is almost certainly coming despite Republican claims to the contrary. Well, when the court upholds this, or implements it, it becomes highly likely that blue state governments tell the court, and the administration, to go f--- yourself.
In the end, the court appears to be doing everything to destroy itself, democracy, and the union, with its own arrogance and lack of foresight. It’s either castrated itself, and in the process doomed the country, or signed its own death warrant.
