Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

I haven’t misread a ******* thing. I’m saying that it appears as if The Supreme Court is actually considering granting Trump absolute immunity. Are you saying that’s not happening?

Justice Sonia Sotomayor cut right to the heart of the issue, by asking <Trump's> 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. <she's asking Trump's attorney if Trump's Attorney thinks Trump should have immunity to murder>

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? <Trump's attorney says yes, he should have immunity to murder>

“It could, and why? Because he’s doing it for personal reasons,” she said. <She's challenging his rationale, saying it is not for the office, but for personal gain> “He’s not doing it like President Obama is alleged to have done it, to protect the country from a terrorist. <she's drawing a comparison of personal gain and for office> 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.” <same again>

“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. <Trump's lawyer tries to argue agains the rationale>

“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 <the Justice calls Trump's lawyer a fool> undermining the former president’s claims that his immunity should shield him from prosecution across his ongoing legal battles.

It's so disappointing...and pretty much what I was afraid would happen. The documents case – probably the simplest – may not even get heard at all. It's possible that the Court will invalidate convictions of the January 6 rioters for "obstruction". The charges against Trump and his co-conspirators for their part in the insurrection may be declared baseless if Trump is determined to have some sort of "immunity". The Georgia case is clouded by the indiscretion of the prosecutors. There are some state cases that may still end up with convictions but the idea that Trump may never be punished for orchestrating the events of January 6, which we all saw, is deeply, deeply troubling.

Not to worry, Frank. The Supreme Court is going to sort it. Just ask Vikorr.

Not to worry, Frank. The Supreme Court is going to sort it. Just ask Vikorr.

I think the confidence you express that the Supreme Court is not politically motivated

I never expressed this. To me, it is meaningless to whether or not the words as expressed, are correct or not

On Friday, in an interview with CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins, Trump’s former attorney general William Barr brushed off the recent news that Trump, furious that the story he had taken refuge in a bunker during the Black Lives Matter protests in summer 2020 had leaked, called for the White House leaker to be executed.

“I remember him being very mad about that. I actually don’t remember him saying ‘executing,’ but I wouldn‘t dispute it, you know,” Barr said to Collins when she asked him about it. “The president would lose his temper and say things like that. I doubt he would’ve actually carried it out.”

Collins followed up, asking if Trump would call for executions on other occasions. “He would say things similar to that on occasions to blow off steam. But I wouldn’t take them literally every time he did it,” Barr answered.

Why not? Collins asked.

“Because at the end of the day, it wouldn’t be carried out and you could talk sense into him,” Barr said. “I don’t think he would actually go and kill political rivals and things like that.” Barr said he intends to vote for Trump.

“Just to be clear,” Collins said, “you’re voting for someone who you believe tried to subvert the peaceful transfer of power, that can’t even achieve his own policies, that lied about the election even after his attorney general told him that the election wasn’t stolen.… You’re going to vote for someone who is facing 88 criminal counts?”

“The answer to the question is yes,” Barr said. “I think the real threat to democracy is the progressive movement and the Biden administration.”

The contention of the former attorney general—who had been responsible for enforcing the rule of law in the United States of America—that a man who has demanded the execution of people he dislikes is a better candidate for the presidency than a man who is using the power of the federal government to create jobs for ordinary people, combat climate change, protect the environment, and promote health and education, illustrates that Republican leaders have abandoned democracy.

In November 2019, in a speech to the right-wing Federalist Society, Barr ignored the Declaration of Independence, which is a list of complaints against King George III, to argue that Americans had rebelled in 1776 not against the king, but rather against Parliament. In the modern world, Barr argued, Congress has grown far too strong. The president should be able to act on his own initiative and not be checked by either congressional or judicial oversight.

That theory is known as the theory of the “unitary executive,” and it says that because the president is the head of one of the three unique branches of government, any oversight of that office by Congress or the courts is unconstitutional, although in fact presidents since George Washington have accepted congressional oversight.

The theory took root in 1986, when Samuel Alito, then a 35-year-old lawyer for the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice, proposed the use of “signing statements” to take from Congress the sole power to make laws by giving the president the power to “interpret” them. In 1987, president Ronald Reagan issued a signing statement to a debt bill, declaring his right to interpret it as he wished and saying the president could not be forced “to follow the orders of a subordinate.”

In 2004, when Congress outlawed the newly-revealed U.S. torture program at remote sites around the world, President George W. Bush issued a signing statement rejecting any limitation on “the unitary executive branch.” In April 2020, to justify his demands for states to reopen in the face of the deadly pandemic, Trump told reporters, “When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total….” Now, in 2024, Trump’s lawyers are in court arguing that the president has criminal immunity for his behavior in the White House, possibly including his right to order the executions of those he sees as enemies.

As Republicans have embraced unlimited power for the president, they have also turned against the right of American citizens to have a say in their government. Beginning with so-called ballot integrity measures in 1986, they embraced methods to knock voters off the voting rolls. That policy intensified after Democrats passed the so-called Motor-Voter Law in 1993, making it easier to register to vote.

After voters nonetheless elected Democrat Barack Obama in 2008, the Supreme Court handed down the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision, permitting unlimited donations to political campaigns, and corporate money flowed into them. In that same year, Republican operatives launched Operation REDMAP to elect Republicans to state legislatures ahead of the redistricting required after the 2010 census. Operation REDMAP resulted in extreme partisan gerrymandering that would make it virtually impossible for Democrats to win elections even if they won a majority of the vote.

Then, in 2013, the Supreme Court decided Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That law had required states with a history of racial discrimination to get clearance from the Department of Justice before they changed their voting laws. The court said that preclearance was no longer necessary. Within hours of the decision, Republican-dominated states proposed new laws that discriminate against voters of color.

In 2019, Barr explained to an audience at the University of Notre Dame the ideology behind the strong executive and weakened representation. Rejecting the clear words of the Constitution’s framers, Barr said that the U.S. was never meant to be a secular democracy. When the nation’s founders had spoken so extensively about self-government, he said, they had not meant the right to elect representatives of their own choosing. Instead, he said, the founders meant the ability of individuals to “restrain and govern themselves.” And, because people are willful, the only way to achieve self-government is through religion.

Those who believe the United States is a secular country, he said, are destroying the nation. It was imperative, he said, to reject those values and embrace religion as the basis for American government.

The idea that the United States must become a Christian nation has apparently led Barr to accept the idea that a man who has called for the execution of those he sees as enemies should be president, apparently because he is expected to usher in an authoritarian Christian state, in preference to a man who is using the power of the government to help ordinary Americans.

Saturday night, journalists, politicians, and celebrities gathered for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, an annual fundraiser for the White House Correspondents’ Association, which protects press passes for journalists who regularly cover the White House, assigns seats in the briefing room, funds scholarships for aspiring journalists, and gives awards for outstanding journalism. It is traditionally an evening of comedy, but last night, after a humorous speech, President Joe Biden implored the press to take the threat of dictatorship seriously.

“I’m sincerely not asking of you to take sides but asking you to rise up to the seriousness of the moment; move past the horse race numbers and the gotcha moments and the distractions, the sideshows that have come to dominate and sensationalize our politics; and focus on what’s actually at stake,” he said. “Every single one of us has…a serious role to play in making sure democracy endures…. I have my role, but, with all due respect, so do you.”

George Stephanopoulos of ABC’s This Week apparently took this reminder to heart. “Until now,” he said in the show’s opener on Sunday, “[n]o American president had ever faced a criminal trial. No American president had ever faced a federal indictment for retaining and concealing classified documents. No American president had ever faced a federal indictment or a state indictment for trying to overturn an election, or been named an unindicted co-conspirator in two other states for the same crime. No American president ever faced hundreds of millions of dollars in judgments for business fraud, defamation, and sexual abuse….

“The scale of the abnormality is so staggering, that it can actually become numbing. It’s all too easy to fall into reflexive habits, to treat this as a normal campaign, where both sides embrace the rule of law, where both sides are dedicated to a debate based on facts and the peaceful transfer of power. But, that is not what’s happening this election year. Those bedrock tenets of our democracy are being tested in a way we haven’t seen since the Civil War. It’s a test for the candidates, for those of us in the media, and for all of us as citizens.”

The Supreme Court heard arguments Thursday in Trump v. United States, a challenge to special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of Donald Trump for election subversion related to Jan. 6. The former president argues that he has absolute “presidential immunity” for the “official acts” he undertook while attempting to overturn the election, rendering the prosecution against him largely unconstitutional. Despite the total lack of any known constitutional basis for this theory, the Supreme Court’s conservatives received it favorably, suggesting that they will further delay and undermine Trump’s eventual federal trial.

On this week’s episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick spoke about the arguments with Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern and Stanford Law professor Pam Karlan, who previously served as deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. Below is an excerpt of their conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity. To listen to the full episode , join Slate Plus.

Dahlia Lithwick: Justice Alito trotted out this theme that was kind of bone-chilling: He said “we all want” a “stable democratic society,” and nothing could be worse for democracy than holding a president to account, because that will “lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy.” As if democracy requires giving immunity to criminal presidents because otherwise they won’t leave office. This was when I went through the looking glass—it literally felt like “don’t make me hit you again” democracy.

Pam Karlan: That was the moment where I felt like saying, “That’s what just happened!” This is not something that might happen in the future. It’s what already happened! And if you let people get away with it, what you’ve said to Donald Trump is, “If you win the 2024 election, don’t bother leaving office in 2029—just stay there.” I mean, that’s really what the Supreme Court would be saying: There’s not going to be any crime if you try to stay there. It wasn’t just through the looking glass. I thought, Did you hear what just came out of your mouth?

Mark Joseph Stern: This was a great example of Alito being fully brain-poisoned by Fox News. This is been happening for years; he used to ask famously great questions, but these days it’s just culture war grievances and stuff that falls apart upon even a little bit of scrutiny. He’s losing his edge. And that was clear in this bizarro question saying that actually, a functioning constitutional democracy requires us to let presidents off the hook when they engage in a criminal conspiracy to steal elections.

But it was also clear during his next round of questions with Michael Dreeben, who represented Jack Smith. Alito had Dreeben walk through the layers that protect a president from a frivolous or vindictive prosecution. Then he dismissed each one out of hand. So Dreeben said: First, you need a prosecutor who’s willing to bring charges; then you need a grand jury to indict; then there’s a criminal proceeding in open court where a jury of his peers decides whether he’s been proved guilty. And Alito just laughs it off as though it’s a big joke. Because we all know Justice Department attorneys are hacks who’ll do whatever they want, right? And a grand jury will indict a ham sandwich—nobody believes a grand jury will do anything worthwhile. And then, oh, sure a jury of his peers, like that’s going to do anything.

This is the justice who is, by far, the most friendly to prosecutors and hostile to criminal defendants in case after case. Who could not for the life of him find a violation of the right to trial by jury or due process. But when the defendant is Trump, he suddenly thinks this entire system of criminal prosecution is such a bad joke that the Supreme Court has to step in and essentially quash this prosecution, because we can’t trust the system to work. The system that is incarcerating so many other people whose convictions Sam Alito just rubber-stamps.

I felt like that was the turn for me—it was Alito winking to Dreeben, saying, in short, “We both worked in the Justice Department; we know what a racket that crap is.” This was another one of those moments when I thought, sorry: Did one of the justices of the United States Supreme Court just imply that everything that happens at the Justice Department is hackery and rigged prosecutions?

Karlan: There was shock to it, but notice what’s underneath all of that. Which is Alito saying we’re worried about vindictive prosecutions and we haven’t seen any of this up until now, that no president has prosecuted the president who came after. For all of what Alito was saying to be true, he has to believe that this prosecution itself is vindictive. Which means he has to have bought Trump’s narrative of the case. And when he does this with Dreeben, he’s attacking the deep state, which is career-line prosecutors. Remember, Dreeben’s entire career has been as a nonpartisan civil servant who’s gotten up there and argued cases on behalf of the Bush administration, on behalf of the Trump administration, on behalf of the Obama administration.

I mean, what Alito did is essentially say: “I’m living in MAGA world.” Which views this case as a totally bogus prosecution ginned up by totally bogus people as part of a vindictive prosecution by Joe Biden. And Alito is also implicitly saying that if Donald Trump gets reelected, you just know he’s going to prosecute people vindictively too. He really has lost faith in the entire system. Or at least he’s prepared to lose faith in the system enough to decide this case in Trump’s favor.

Beyond Alito, this was certainly not the Roberts court that I expected to show up at this argument. As a blinkered institutionalist, I’m getting blowback along the lines of: “I told you so. They’re a bunch of partisan hacks.” I truly believed that at least seven members of the court would take the potential failure of democracy as a proposition seriously enough that the partisan valence of this case went away. That didn’t happen.

Karlan: Part of what’s shocking about this is juxtaposing the case with Trump v. Anderson, from earlier this term. Anderson involved whether Colorado could keep Trump off the primary ballot for having engaged in insurrection, which under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment disqualifies you from holding an additional office. Coming out of that argument, the court fairly swiftly reached a unanimous bottom line that they were going to keep him on the ballot, because that’s what democracy requires—to let the people decide. At the time I kind of thought, well, maybe they have some grand bargain here, which is to keep Trump on the ballot but say he’s not immune from prosecution for engaging in crimes that undermine the very democracy that you just said you’re so committed to protecting.

Instead we got nothing about protecting democracy. Certainly nothing about letting the people decide, which is the way you prove crimes. You take them to a jury, and the jury decides whether somebody’s guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. “Democracy for me but not for thee” is kind of where the Supreme Court seems to be ending up. Maybe they’ll surprise us, and they were just letting off some steam. But where the argument seemed to go was that all of the things they said in Trump v. Anderson played no role and had no weight on how they’re going to decide Trump v. United States.

Right. Anderson was “screw originalism; democracy demands more.” And this was just “screw democracy.”

And I don't think we can ignore the centrality of a certain version of Catholic theology in all of these characters' worldviews.

Former attorney general William P. Barr’s consideration of Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy is not terribly complicated.

It seemed for a bit as though it might be. After serving as one of Trump’s most aggressively loyal officials, Barr broke with Trump in December 2020 by refusing to elevate false claims about voter fraud. He later told the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot that Trump never offered “an indication of interest in what the actual facts were” about the election results, preferring to live in his fantasy world. In July, Barr compared having to pick between Trump and President Biden in the 2024 election to jumping off a bridge.

And now he has jumped and landed precisely where every other aspect of his service under Trump would have indicated: on Trump’s side.

Barr walked through his reasoning in an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Friday. He specifically addressed the issue on which he’d most obviously broken with Trump: the former president’s effort to retain power despite losing in 2020. His argument? Biden was the more worrisome actor.

“I think Trump would do less damage than Biden,” Barr told Collins. “I think all this stuff about a threat to democracy, I think the real threat to democracy is the progressive movement and the Biden administration.”

He explained his thinking by claiming that “the threat to freedom and democracy has always been on the left. It’s the collectivist socialist agenda.” He outlined how he saw these threats manifesting at the moment: “Parents are losing the freedom to control their children’s education. And people can’t speak their mind without losing their jobs, and things like that. This is worse than the McCarthy era.”

“We’re not enforcing our borders, we have open borders,” he continued a bit later. “We have lawlessness in our cities. We have regulations coming fast and furious. So, telling people what kind of stoves they can use, and what kinds of cars they have to drive, and eliminating cars and so forth. Yes, those are the threats to democracy.”

This is patter straight out of the right-wing media bubble. The stove thing, the crime thing, the border thing. Then there’s the McCarthyism charge, “cancel culture” anecdotalism. Collins challenged Barr by noting the right’s push to ban books; Barr shrugged and countered by asking, “Don’t you think there should be some limits on what people are able to read at very young ages?”

That’s it, right there. Barr likes and agrees with Trump’s efforts to undermine democracy — and, in fact, was standing alongside him for most of those efforts. He dislikes what Biden is doing in part because he has gobbled up nonsensical claims about what Biden is doing and in part because he just thinks it’s what the left does. The left “has always” been the threat to democracy, he said; ergo, it is currently the threat to democracy.

Before Barr was the guy noting correctly that Trump’s claims about the 2020 election were false, he was the guy defending and extending Trump’s line-crossing approach to the presidency. (Even as Barr claimed that the prosecutions Trump faces were perhaps political, in his familiar just-asking-questions way, he also pointed out to Collins that Trump “basically has the kind of personality that he’s always testing the limit,” which is “what gets him in trouble.”)

Barr got the gig in part by sending an unsolicited letter to the Justice Department in 2018 arguing that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III couldn’t feasibly charge a president with obstructing justice. After Barr took over as attorney general less than a year later, the Mueller investigation into Russia’s effort to influence the 2016 election quickly concluded. Barr’s framing of the report’s findings was incredibly useful to Trump in batting away concerns about his actions.

And then Barr went further, appointing a U.S. attorney to investigate the origins of the Russia probe. Barr had an active hand in this effort to raise questions about the work of federal law enforcement, an effort that ultimately tried to implicate Hillary Clinton directly in triggering questions about ties between Trump and Russia. (It did not work.)

Before Barr was the guy admitting that Trump didn’t have the goods on election fraud, he was the attorney general giving Trump oxygen by allowing the Justice Department to break tradition by digging into alleged claims of fraud. Before that, he was the guy who came out to ask law enforcement dealing with protesters in Lafayette Square whether the protesters would still be there when the president came out of the White House, with the violent clearing of the square following a few minutes later — and Trump’s photo op at a church a few minutes after that.

Before that, he was the guy who set up a system under which Rudy Giuliani’s flood of allegations about Biden from sources in Ukraine (including some linked to Russian intelligence) worked their way into proper law enforcement channels — a system that ultimately generated the discredited bribery claim against the current president.

All of these actions were taken in service of a president who viewed his power as expansive and allowed for targeting opponents in direct and indirect ways. As he made clear in that initial letter to the Justice Department, Barr shares this view of presidential power, at least when deployed by a Republican president.

When an official within a Democratic administration floats the idea of phasing out gas stoves before quickly backing off the idea, though, that’s a sign of how Biden is implementing a “collectivist socialist agenda.”

Barr has framed his worldview in starkly religious terms, as he did in an infamous 2019 speech at the University of Notre Dame.

“Today militant secularists do not have a live-and-let-live spirit,” he said in that speech, identifying these secularists in the way an adherent of the extremist QAnon ideology might, as elements of the media and entertainment industries and as college professors. “They are not content to leave religious people alone to practice their faith. Instead, they seem to take delight in compelling people to violate their conscience.”

At another point in that speech, Barr said, “I do not mean to suggest that there is no hope for moral renewal in our country, but we cannot sit back and just hope that the pendulum is going to swing back towards sanity.”

Barr broached the issue of morality to Collins, too.

“Biden is not a great moral exemplar, okay?” he said. “And is he following the laws? Here he is, giving away another round of forgiving student loans, after he lost it in the Supreme Court.” On Barr’s scales of morality, Trump’s actions sit evenly with Biden’s forgiving student loans.

In part because he’s so willing to excuse what Trump did. Collins asked Barr about a claim that Trump had called for the execution of someone who had leaked an unflattering story about him.

“I remember him being very mad about that. I actually don’t remember him saying, executing. But I wouldn’t dispute it, you know?” Barr responded. “I mean, it doesn’t sound — I mean, the president would lose his temper and say things like that. I doubt he would have actually carried it out.”

Pressed by Collins, he claimed he was confident that Trump could be talked out of such an action. “The thing that I worry about President Trump is not that he’s going to become an autocrat and do those kinds of things,” Barr insisted. This came a minute or two before his claim about how the Biden administration’s effort to address emissions from internal combustion engines was a mark of democratic collapse.

Barr also doesn’t seem to acknowledge that his break with Trump was rooted specifically in his inability to talk Trump off the ledge. He tried to get Trump to step away from the election-fraud stuff, without luck. But he seemingly wants those watching to assume that Trump won’t have someone killed.

Collins challenged Barr on this.

“Name one thing that Biden has done that’s worse” than trying to subvert the election, she said.

“I think his whole administration is a disaster for the country,” Barr replied.

Collins asked whether it was “worse than subverting the peaceful transfer of power.”

“Did he succeed?” Barr replied.

The answer is “yes,” of course: Power was transferred, but the process was not peaceful. But, hey, at least no one suggested that cutting back on natural gas stoves would have potential health and environmental benefits.

Barr certainly is a right-wing Catholic ideologue, follows extremist Catholic ideas.