Tuesday Reads: Odds and Ends

Good Afternoon!!

As a lapsed Catholic, I was surprised and heartened yesterday to read that Pope Francis has criticized right wing American Catholics–several of whom sit on the Supreme Court.

From the AP via Yahoo News: Pope says some ‘backward’ conservatives in US Catholic Church have replaced faith with ideology.

Pope Francis has blasted the “backwardness” of some conservatives in the U.S. Catholic Church, saying they have replaced faith with ideology and that a correct understanding of Catholic doctrine allows for change over time.

Francis’ comments were an acknowledgment of the divisions in the U.S. Catholic Church, which has been split between progressives and conservatives who long found support in the doctrinaire papacies of St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI, particularly on issues of abortion and same-sex marriage.

Many conservatives have blasted Francis’ emphasis instead on social justice issues such as the environment and the poor, while also branding as heretical his opening to letting divorced and civilly remarried Catholics receive the sacraments.

Francis made the comments in a private meeting with Portuguese members of his Jesuit religious order while visiting Lisbon on Aug. 5; the Jesuit journal La Civilta Cattolica, which is vetted by the Vatican secretariat of state, published a transcript of the encounter Monday.

More details:

During the meeting, a Portuguese Jesuit told Francis that he had suffered during a recent sabbatical year in the United States because he came across many Catholics, including some U.S. bishops, who criticized Francis’ 10-year papacy as well as today’s Jesuits.

The 86-year-old Argentine acknowledged his point, saying there was “a very strong, organized, reactionary attitude” in the U.S. church, which he called “backward.” He warned that such an attitude leads to a climate of closure, which was erroneous.

“Doing this, you lose the true tradition and you turn to ideologies to have support. In other words, ideologies replace faith,” he said.

“The vision of the doctrine of the church as a monolith is wrong,” he added. “When you go backward, you make something closed off, disconnected from the roots of the church,” which then has devastating effects on morality.

“I want to remind these people that backwardness is useless, and they must understand that there’s a correct evolution in the understanding of questions of faith and morals,” that allows for doctrine to progress and consolidate over time.

I’m surprised this pope has lasted this long. I hope he has supporters in the hierarchy.

The Daily News added more specifics:

He said it was an “error” to consider the Church’s stances on issues a “monolith,” citing how it had changed positions in the past on issues like slavery.

“In other words, doctrine also progresses, expands, and consolidates with time and becomes firmer but is always progressing,” he said.

In regards to LGBTQ issues, he said, “It is apparent that perception of this issue has changed in the course of history.”

Well, that’s a breath of fresh air. Unfortunately, I doubt if the reactionaries in the Supreme Court and the Federalist Society will be swayed by Francis’ arguments.

NBC News has some specifics on the shooting at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill yesterday.

NBC News: UNC-Chapel Hill graduate student charged with murder in fatal shooting of faculty member.

A graduate student at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill was charged with first-degree murder after the fatal shooting of a professor in his research department.

Tailei Qi, an applied physical sciences major, was apprehended Monday afternoon following the shooting at Caudill Labs, a science building on the UNC campus, which prompted an hourslong lockdown that forced students and faculty to barricade themselves in classrooms and dorms as authorities searched for a suspect.

Qi, 34, was booked Tuesday in the Orange County Detention Center in Hillsborough and also charged with possession of a gun on an educational property, a felony.

The incident, which occurred in the second week of the fall semester at UNC, began when students were alerted to an armed and dangerous person after 1 p.m. The university issued another alert at 2:24 p.m. that the suspect remained at large. A photo of an unnamed person was released, and the suspect was later apprehended in a residential neighborhood near campus.

It sounds like the victim–a faculty member–might have been targeted, but that’s just my speculation.

The victim was initially described as a university faculty member, and was not immediately identified pending notification of family. The arrest warrant names the shooting victim as Zijie Yan, an associate professor in the applied physical sciences department.

A university department web page that has since been removed had listed Qi as being a member of Yan’s lab group.

On his LinkedIn profile, Qi says he enrolled at UNC’s flagship campus in January 2022 as a graduate student and research assistant, and shared links to papers on his research. One paper published last month

in the journal Advanced Optical Materials was co-authored by Yan.

So the two were well known to each other. We’ll probably learn more in the coming days.

At The Daily Beast, attorney Shan Wu has a piece on Mark Meadows’ choice to testify under oath yesterday: Mark Meadows Just Took an Enormous Risk. Will It Pay Off?

Meadows wants out of the Fulton County court so badly that on Monday, he took the enormous risk of testifying in his own criminal trial and subjecting himself to cross-examination by the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office.

Meadows’ longing for federal court may seem puzzling because switching is but a change of courthouses. In federal court, Meadows will face the same charges, under the same state laws (including the Georgia RICO Act), brought by the same prosecutor.

However, Meadows may be counting on the fact that a federal trial would give him a broader geographic jury pool which might be more favorable to him. He also may think that a federal court would be more sympathetic to his argument that his position as a federal official should automatically make him immune from a state criminal prosecution.

Theoretically, Meadows’ removal argument under 28 U.S. code § 1442 doesn’t look that hard to make, since he only needs to show that he was a federal official at the time and that he can raise a “colorable legal defense.” Meadows was a federal official at the time as Trump’s White House chief of staff, so he can meet that part of the legal standard.

He also has a “federal defense” to raise based on so-called “Supremacy Clause Immunity,” meaning that as a federal officer he cannot be criminally prosecuted by a state for actions performed in his official federal capacity. The question though is whether that defense is a “colorable one” in these circumstances. In plain English, a “colorable defense” is just one that passes the smell test. That may prove challenging for Meadows.

The problem for Meadows is that he needs to convince federal judge Steve C. Jones–a former state judge appointed to the U.S. District Court by President Obama–that his actions in allegedly conspiring with Trump and 18 other co-defendants to overturn the election results in Georgia were part of his job description as White House chief of staff.

Holding aside the fact that the Hatch Act bars a federal official from using their office to engage in partisan political activity, Meadows must prove that his involvement in such acts as the phone call to Brad Raffensberger, in which Trump pressured the Georgia secretary of state to find votes for Trump, were just part of doing his job.

The federal government does not have the power to regulate presidential elections. A strict reading of Article II, Section 1, clause 4 of the Constitution would allow only regulation of the “time” of choosing presidential electors and certainly there is no known precedent for a White House chief of staff overseeing any aspect of a state election process.

Read more at the link.

Republicans are trying to find a way to shut down the prosecutions of Trump by any means necessary.

From NBC News: 

WASHINGTON — Four criminal indictments of Donald Trump have ignited his followers and spurred his House Republican allies to try to use the upcoming government funding deadline of Sept. 30 as leverage to undermine the prosecutions.

The bad news for them: A government shutdown wouldn’t halt the criminal proceedings against the former president.

Trump’s indictments in New York and Georgia would not be affected, while his federal indictments — for allegedly mishandling classified documents and for his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection — are criminal matters that have been exempted from shutdowns in the past. The Justice Department said in a 2021 memo that in a shutdown, “Criminal litigation will continue without interruption as an activity essential to the safety of human life and the protection of property.” The Justice Department’s plans assume that the judicial branch remains fully operational, which it has said in the past can carry on for weeks in the event of a funding lapse.

Special counsel Jack Smith’s office is funded by a “permanent, indefinite appropriation for independent counsels,” the department said in its statement of expenditures. Given its separate funding source, the special counsel would not be affected by a shutdown and could run off of allocations from previous years.

So how are these idiots planning to stop the prosecutions?

As a result, Republicans are looking at ways to insert provisions in government funding legislation that would hinder federal and state prosecutors who have secured indictments of Trump, based on unproven claims that he’s being politically targeted.

It won’t be easy to achieve. The demands, spearheaded by hard-right Republicans, have sparked internal party divisions over reining in law enforcement power and will struggle to pass the House. The Justice bill is one of two appropriations measures the House GOP hasn’t yet passed, out of 12 total, a Democratic aide noted, which could signify splits about how to proceed. And Democrats, who control the Senate and the White House, are pushing back on those calls to derail law enforcement as interference in Trump’s cases….

Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Ga., a Trump ally who sits on the Appropriations Committee, said Monday he will introduce two amendments to eliminate federal funding for all three of Trump’s prosecutors — Smith, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. His office said the measures would block their prosecutorial authority over “any major presidential candidate prior to” the 2024 election.

“Due to my serious concerns about these witch hunt indictments against President Trump, I intend to offer two amendments to prohibit any federal funds from being used in federal or state courts to prosecute major presidential candidates prior to the 2024 election,” Clyde said in a statement.

These so-called legislators have done nothing this session except “investigate” Hunter and Joe Biden and try to protect Trump.

A new book on the Biden administration by Franklin Foer is coming out on September 5. You can read an excerpt that focuses on the withdrawal from Afghanistan at The Atlantic.

This is from today’s Politico Playbook: A first look at the big new Biden book.

Atlantic staff writer FRANKLIN FOER originally set out to write an account of Biden’s first one hundred days in office, focusing on the Biden team’s response to the pandemic and the undoing of Trump’s major policies. But Foer kept reporting as the story of the American Rescue Plan, the Inflation Reduction Act, the Afghanistan withdrawal, Ukraine and ultimately the midterm elections unfolded.

Along the way he conducted nearly 300 interviews from November 2020 to February 2023. The result is his eagerly anticipated 407-page tome about Biden world: “The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future” ($30).

In recent days Biden aides have been scrambling to secure a password-protected PDF of the book that has been sent to select journalists and reviewers, some of whom were required to sign nondisclosure agreements and promise not to share the contents with newsroom colleagues.

A major media rollout of the book is set to kick off this week. (In fact, we’ll be recording a conversation with Foer this afternoon for next week’s episode of the Playbook Deep Dive podcast.)

In the publishing world, “The Last Politician” is seen as a test of the market for political books about figures other than DONALD TRUMP. In Washington, the book will be a test for how a generally leak-proof White House grapples with the first detailed excavation of its successes and failures from the Inaugural through the midterms.

Minutes ago, the first excerpt of the Foer book was posted at the Atlantic and will appear across 13 pages in the magazine’s October issue. The piece — “The Final Days” — is a gripping history of America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan during August 2021, a month that marks one of the low points for a team that was elected for its competence. Foer’s account is notable both for his deep reporting as well as his shrewd insights into how Biden thinks, including the president’s unsentimental views on his decision to end America’s longest war.

Read more Politico-style analysis at the link.

That’s all I have for you today. Here’s hoping that Hurricane headed for Florida won’t cause too much damage. Take care everyone.