Posted: September 4, 2024 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: 2024 presidential Campaign, Donald Trump | Tags: Afghanistan, Alvin Bragg, Arlington National Cemetery, Ginni Thomas, Jack Smith, January 6 case, Kamala Harris, misogyny, Section 60, Steven Cheung |
Good Day!!
This is getting ridiculous. On August 27, Trump staged a campaign event at Arlington National Cemetery, supposedly to commemorate the deaths of 13 soldiers in a suicide bombing that took place during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. This was not an official event, even though Trump tried to pretend it was. He was apparently invited to the private ceremony by 2 of the deceased soldiers’ families.
As we all know by now, a woman representative of the cemetery tried to stop Trump’s people from filming and photographing in Arlington’s Section 60, because federal law forbids it. Two Trump staff members verbally abused the woman and roughly pushed her aside. Later they claimed that she was mentally ill.
A report was filed with police, but the woman declined to prosecute because she feared reprisals from Trump’s goons and thugs. There are still many questions about this incident, chief among them: why has no reporter or other witness revealed the names of the staffers who attacked the woman? And why has the army refused to provide any further information?
Arlington National Cemetery
Now, a week later, Trump himself is claiming the incident never happened. David Kurtz from TPM’s Morning Memo: Trump: ‘It Was A Made Up Story.’
Since we last touched base on Trump’s Arlington National Cemetery fiasco, none of the big six outstanding questions have been answered – but Trump may have given himself a new self-inflicted wound.
With the Army declaring the case “closed” after the cemetery staffer in fear of MAGA reprisals declined to press criminal charges over the alleged incident and with a holiday weekend allowing attention to drift away from the story, Trump took the curious step of reigniting the firestorm by publicly issuing a complete denial Tuesday that any kind of altercation took place.
Not only did it not happen but the story was “made up,” Trump claimed, by “Comrade Kamala and her misinformation squad.” It was, in Trump’s telling, just a “BEAUTIFUL DAY OF HONOR” with “no fights or problems.”
Here’s what Trump posted, according to NPR:
Former President Donald Trump denied Tuesday there was a conflict or “fighting,” during his visit to Arlington National Cemetery last week, calling it a “made up story,” though Army officials said one of their employees “was abruptly pushed aside” by Trump campaign officials.
“It was a made up story by Comrade Kamala and her misinformation squad,” Trump posted on his Truth Social website using the sobriquet he has coined for Vice President Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee. “She made it all up to make up for the fact that she and Sleepy Joe have BLOOD ON THEIR HANDS for the INCOMPETENT AFGHANISTAN Withdrawal – THE MOST EMBARRASSING DAY IN U.S. HISTORY!!!”
Back to David Kurtz at TPM:
So now we have a situation where the Trump campaign disparaged the cemetery staffer has having a “mental health episode,” said she shouldn’t be in her job, suggested she suffered from Trump Derangement Syndrome – and now Trump himself is claiming nothing even happened.
At the same time, the Army seems desperate to make this all go away.
The Army is currently sitting on the police report filed by the cemetery staffer recounting her version of the incident where she was reportedly verbally abused and shoved aside by two Trump campaign staffers when she tried to enforce cemetery rules against political activities.
As of late last week, Democratic staffers on the Senate Armed Services Committee “have been directly communicating with Army officials about the incident, and are in the process of seeking and receiving the information in the report and about what happened,” according to Greg Sargent.
At the at same time, House Democratic staffers attempting to looking into the matter are “frustrated” about resistance from the Army they’re running into, Sargent reports:
“Meanwhile, senior House Democrats are privately pushing Army officials to say more clearly what laws or regulations they think may have been broken and to reveal more details about what happened, another aide says, noting that Democratic staffers are encountering resistance, leaving them frustrated.”
With Trump issuing a blanket denial of any incident even occurring, is the Army going to release the police report and provide more details about the incident or leave the cemetery staffer twisting in the wind?
Apparently, even the U.S. Army is intimidated by Trump.
Will Bunch at The Philadelphia Inquirer: The ugly truth we’re missing on Trump, Arlington. [Hint: misogyny]
….[D]espite a week of headlines, there’s one critical aspect to this story I feel is being ignored, even though it is central to the very essence of Trump’s warped campaign.
The people closest to Trump allegedly shoved and verbally abused a woman — because that’s what they do.
And when the woman complained in a formal statement to the U.S. Army, Team Trump gaslit her by accusing her of being a psycho — seemingly part of an intimidation campaign which was meant to scare the accuser from pressing criminal charges.
Steven Cheung
This blatantly sexist bullying of the Arlington employee has worked — just as it’s worked so many times for Trump himself during his decades-long trail of sexual abuse and harassment allegations, and just as violence and gross mistreatment of women hasn’t thwarted the careers of Trump’s male-dominated inner circle.
We shouldn’t let the other unseemly aspects of Trump’s behavior at one of America’s most sacred places obscure the fact that rank misogyny is the lifeblood of this authoritarian crusade to retake the White House, and that contempt for women saturates everything they do. It runs the gamut from taking away reproductive rights and ridiculing any female who doesn’t become a “tradwife,” to the inner circle’s 100% tolerance policies toward sexual harassment, to the ultimate goal of creating doubts that any woman — first Hillary Clinton, now Kamala Harris — is fit to lead the United States.
In the Arlington affair, the circumstances and setting are different, but the Team Trump response carries powerful echoes of practically every time Trump or his subordinates have been accused of misconduct involving women. Consider the best-known case: that of Manhattan writer E. Jean Carroll, who accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in a department-store dressing room in 1996 and has won civil court judgments over both the assault — which the judge characterized as a rape — and the campaign of defamation surrounding it.
In both the Carroll case and the physical attack at Arlington, Trump insisted the woman was making it all up. And you can hear the echoes of what Trump and his lawyers falsely said about Carroll — that she was a lying political operative — in spokesman Steven Cheung’s outrageous claim about the cemetery employee that she was “clearly suffering from a mental health episode” and in campaign chair Chris LaCivita branding her as “despicable.”
These aggressive deny-and-defame tactics have enabled a billionaire-turned-president to brush off more than two dozen credible allegations of sexual harassment or assault over his career, and — in a demoralizing moment of clarity about the brute force of misogyny in America — defeat the first major-party woman nominee in 2016, even after he was caught on tape bragging about his propensity for grabbing female private parts.
Of course J.D. Vance fits in with this gang of woman-haters, as Bunch goes on to discuss.
Gee, I wonder why Trump is doing poorly among women voters? Alexander Bolton at The Hill: Republicans fret over Trump’s free fall among women.
Republican pollster Whit Ayres says “it’s going to be a challenge” for Trump to chip away at Vice President Harris’s big lead among women.
“The real challenge right now for Republicans is whether they can perform sufficiently well among men to overcome the deficit among women. Given the prominence of abortion in this year’s race and Trump’s past statements about women, the traditional gender gap could become a gender chasm,” he warned.
An ABC News/Ipsos poll published Sunday showed Harris with a huge lead over Trump among women, 54 percent to 41 percent, while Trump enjoyed a more modest 51 percent to 46 percent lead over Harris among men.
Especially concerning for Republicans, the ABC/Ipsos poll showed Harris’s standing among women had jumped significantly compared to before the Democratic convention in Chicago, when she led Trump by only 6 points among women.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll published Thursday also showed Harris with a 13-point lead among women, 49 percent to 36 percent, and Trump with a smaller lead among men voters.
Both polls showed Harris with a 4-percentage point overall lead nationwide.
Trump has tried to win over college-educated and suburban women by moderating his position on abortion and backing free in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments.
But those proposals are meeting a backlash from anti-abortion conservatives, and GOP strategists are skeptical about how much they will influence women who have already moved away from Trump….
Glenn Kessler at The Washington Post Fact Checker also addressed the Arlington incident: Trump appears to have misled Gold Star families on troop deaths in Afghanistan.
“We didn’t lose one person in 18 months. And then they took over that disaster.”
— Former president Donald Trump, in a video of him at Arlington National Cemetery speaking to the families of U.S. troops killed at Abbey Gate in Afghanistan, posted on TikTok, Aug. 28
This TikTok of Trump’s controversial visit to Arlington, where he marked the third anniversary of a suicide bombing that killed 13 U.S. troops during the chaotic evacuation of Afghanistan overseen by President Joe Biden,has been viewed more than 11 million times. Federal law prohibits election-related activities at military cemeteries, but Trump’s entourage pushed past a cemetery employee who tried to prevent Trump’s aides from bringing cameras, according to the Army.
Trump senior adviser Chris LaCivita
Those cameras appear to have recorded Trump saying these words to the Gold Star families. (The TikTok shows him talking to families as the words are spoken as a voice-over.) In his phrasing, it sounds as if no troops were killed in Afghanistan during the last 18 months of his presidency. That’s false, though as we will show, there was an 18-month gap with no fatalities across Trump’s and Biden’s combined presidencies.
A Trump campaign spokesman did not respond to queries about why Trump says there were no fatalities over 18 months. Using the Defense Casualty Analysis System, we first reviewed every 18-month period in Trump’s four years as president, looking only at deaths in hostile action in Afghanistan during Operation Freedom’s Sentinel, not accidental deaths such as in a vehicle or helicopter crash. There was no such period.
Then we focused on the last 18 months of his presidency — July 20, 2019, to Jan. 20, 2021. That makes the most sense since Trump referenced Biden’s taking over. The Defense Department database showed 12 deaths from hostile action in that period. We double-checked with the news releases issued by the Pentagon in that period and confirmed the 12 names.
The last two deaths occurred on Feb. 8, 2020. Javier Jaguar Gutierrez of San Antonio and Antonio Rey Rodriguez of Las Cruces, New Mexico, both 28, werefatally ambushed by a rogue Afghan policeman. Trump, along with Vice President Mike Pence, flew to Dover Air Force Base when the bodies arrived in the United States.
Kessler also notes that Trump initially agreed with Biden’s withdrawal policy, and he (Trump) also bragged that he was the one who set up the process of withdrawal.
In March 2020, Trump approved an agreement with the Taliban (not the Afghan government at the time) for all U.S. forces to leave the country by May 1, 2021. He sealed the deal with a phone conversation with Abdul Ghani Baradar, a co-founder of the Taliban and head of its political office in Qatar. “We had a good long conversation today and, you know, they want to cease the violence,” Trump told reporters at the time. “They’d like to cease violence also.”
Despite abandoning many of Trump’s policies, Biden honored this one, just stretching out the departure by a few months in 2021.
Trump even celebrated Biden’s decision to stick with the withdrawal. “Getting out of Afghanistan is a wonderful and positive thing to do. I planned to withdraw on May 1st, and we should keep as close to that schedule as possible,” he said in a written statement after Biden announced he would continue the departure set in motion by Trump.
At a political rally on June 26 that year, weeks before the collapse of the Afghan government, Trump bragged that he had made it difficult for Biden to change course. “I started the process. All the troops are coming back home. They couldn’t stop the process,” he said. “Twenty-one years is enough, don’t we think? Twenty-one years. They [the Biden administration] couldn’t stop the process. They wanted to, but it was very tough to stop the process.”
Read the rest at the WaPo.
You might also be interested in this piece by Parker Malloy: How the Media Let Trump Off the Hook for His Arlington National Cemetery Stunt.
A couple of updates on Trump’s legal woes:
AP: Federal judge rejects Donald Trump’s request to intervene in wake of hush money conviction.
A federal judge on Tuesday swiftly rejected Donald Trump’s request to intervene in his New York hush money criminal case, spurning the former president’s attempt at an end-run around the state court where he was convicted and is set to be sentenced in two weeks.
U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein’s ruling — just hours after Trump’s lawyers asked him to weigh the move — upends the Republican presidential nominee’s plan to move the case to federal court so that he could seek to have his conviction overturned in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling.
Trump’s lawyers challenged the decision, filing a notice of appeal late Tuesday in the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Trump and his lawyers “will continue to fight to move this Hoax into federal court where it should be put out of its misery once and for all,” his campaign spokesperson, Steven Cheung, said in a statement.Hellerstein, echoing his denial of Trump’s pretrial bid to move the case, said the defense failed to meet the high burden of proof for changing jurisdiction and that Trump’s conviction for falsifying business records involved his personal life, not official actions that the Supreme Court ruled are immune from prosecution.
Shirin Ali at Slate: Trump’s Last-Ditch Effort to Delay His Sentencing.
Trump has been doing everything he can to avoid his upcoming sentencing in New York, with his attorneys filing a last-ditch motion last week to get the hush money case transferred to federal court. Meanwhile, special counsel Jack Smith filed a new superseding indictment that adjusts for the Supreme Court’s landmark presidential-immunity decision.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg
A few days later, Trump’s attorneys responded by proposing a timeline for resolving the Jan. 6 federal case that extends well beyond the November election.Last week, the former president’s attorneys filed a removal notice that requested that his hush money case be transferred to federal court and out of New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan’s hands, about two weeks before his scheduled sentencing on Sept. 18.
This is the second time Trump’s defense team has asked to transfer this case; a district-court judge denied its first attempt earlier this year. However, this time around, Trump’s team has the Supreme Court’s presidential-immunity decision to point to. In a 65-page notice, the lawyers argue that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case was “flawed” and that he used evidence that should not have been admissible because it’s related to “official acts” covered by presumptive immunity.
“Post-trial removal is necessary under these circumstances to afford President Trump an unbiased forum, free from local hostilities, where he can seek redress for these Constitutional violations,” write Trump’s attorneys.Just three weeks ago, his attorneys also requested that Merchan delay Trump’s Sept. 18 sentencing. Trump has repeatedly tried and failed to get the judge to recuse himself from the hush money trial as well. On Tuesday, Bragg’s office responded to Trump’s removal request, noting that proceedings in state court can continue even as the federal courts consider the request.
That case appears to be decided, but apparently Trump is trying to appeal once again. Back to the Slate article:
The Special Counsel Files a New Indictment
The Supreme Court’s presidential-immunity decision was considered a big win for Trump, but Jack Smith isn’t giving up yet. Last week, the special counsel filed a new superseding indictment in his federal election-interference case against the former president.
The indictment raises the same four counts against Trump as the original did, including for obstruction of an official proceeding, a charge that could be affected by the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Fischer v. United States. That decision narrowed the scope of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act—it included a section that seemed to broadly outlaw any obstruction of an official proceeding, and the justices ruled that it should apply only to interference with official documents. Smith’s determination to keep the obstruction charges indicates he’s willing to risk litigating the issue further in court.
The superseding indictment also eliminated any mention of former Trump Department of Justice official Jeffrey Clark and cut back significantly on how much it discusses former Vice President Mike Pence’s role. (Trump’s conversations with former DOJ officials and advisers are now considered “official” acts that are covered by absolute immunity and thus cannot be used as evidence, while his conversations with Pence appear to be covered by presumptive immunity.) [….]
Judge Tanya Chutkan has scheduled a hearing Thursday to determine the next steps in this case. Her biggest priority will be to conclude what portions of Smith’s indictment fall under core official presidential acts and what do not. In order to make those decisions, she could find that evidentiary hearings are necessary and require that witnesses testify, though Smith has reportedly been hoping to avoid this kind of minitrial….
The special counsel and Trump’s attorneys filed a joint proposal late last week that laid out two very different timelines for Smith’s federal election-interference case. The former president also indicated that he plans to file a series of motions challenging Smith’s superseding indictment and his appointment to special counsel.
Trump’s attorneys suggested a timeline in which Chutkan considers a series of motions through the end of this year—stretching well past November’s presidential election. Their timeline would have Chutkan considering a motion to dismiss based on presidential immunity in mid-December and pretrial litigation continuing through spring and fall 2025. The defense also acknowledges Smith’s new superseding indictment, arguing that it “correspondingly requires time to review the new charging instrument as [Trump] determines what steps and procedures to undertake regarding, among other motions, his Presidential immunity defense.”
We are going to have to get Kamala Harris elected if we want any chance of Trump finally facing legal accountability.
Ginni Thomas
I’ll end with one more interesting story from ProPublica: Ginni Thomas Privately Praised Group Working Against Supreme Court Reform: “Thank You So, So, So Much.”
Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, privately heaped praise on a major religious-rights group for fighting efforts to reform the nation’s highest court — efforts sparked, in large part, by her husband’s ethical lapses.
Thomas expressed her appreciation in an email sent to Kelly Shackelford, an influential litigator whose clients have won cases at the Supreme Court. Shackelford runs the First Liberty Institute, a $25 million-a-year organization that describes itself as “the largest legal organization in the nation dedicated exclusively to defending religious liberty for all Americans.”
Shackelford read Thomas’ email aloud on a July 31 private call with his group’s top donors.
Thomas wrote that First Liberty’s opposition to court-reform proposals gave a boost to certain judges. According to Shackelford, Thomas wrote in all caps: “YOU GUYS HAVE FILLED THE SAILS OF MANY JUDGES. CAN I JUST TELL YOU, THANK YOU SO, SO, SO MUCH.”
Shackelford said he saw Thomas’ support as evidence that judges, who “can’t go out into the political sphere and fight,” were thankful for First Liberty’s work to block Supreme Court reform. “It’s neat that, you know, those of you on the call are a part of protecting the future of our court, and they really appreciate it,” he said.
On the same call, Shackelford attacked Justice Elena Kagan as “treasonous” and “disloyal” after she endorsed an enforcement mechanism for the court’s newly adopted ethics code in a recent public appearance. He said that such an ethics code would “destroy the independence of the judiciary.” (This past weekend, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said she too was open to an enforceable ethics code for the Supreme Court.)
After the call, First Liberty sent a recording of the 45-minute conversation to some of its supporters. ProPublica and Documented obtained that recording.
Have a nice Wednesday, everyone!!
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Posted: August 10, 2024 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: "presidential immunity", 2024 presidential Campaign, cat art, caturday, Donald Trump, Kamala Harris 2024 | Tags: childless cat ladies, Culinary union Nevada, Jack Smith, Judge Tanya Chutkan, McDonalds, Nate Holden, Project 2025 training videos, swing state polls, Tim Walz, Trump lies, Trump press conference, UAW, Willie Brown |
Happy Caturday!!
Last night, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz held their biggest rally yet in Glendale, Arizona, a Phoenix suburb. The crowd numbered around 15,000 people. Once again, the atmosphere was joyful and enthusiastic, with the crowd cheering lustily. Later last night, Trump spoke to a much smaller crowd, in a large venue with hundreds of empty seats. There was no joy at his sad rally.
The Guardian: Harris and Walz whip up crowd at packed Phoenix rally – but ‘we are the underdog.’
Kamala Harris and Tim Walz rallied a packed arena outside Phoenix, Arizona, on Friday – drawing perhaps the largest Democratic crowd of the election cycle this year.
The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, her running mate and the local leaders who joined them on stage whipped up the crowd, discussing immigration, abortion rights and Indigenous sovereignty.
Noting the Indigenous leaders in the room, Harris also said: “I will always honor tribal sovereignty and respect tribal self-determination.” Indigenous voters are credited with helping deliver Arizona to Joe Biden in 2020; the state is home to 22 federally recognized tribes.
At one point during her speech, Harris was interrupted by protesters chanting “free, free Palestine” and other messages in support of Gaza. She stopped her speech to address the protesters.
“We’re here to fight for our democracy, which includes respecting the voices that I think we are hearing from. Let me just speak to that for a moment and then I’ll get back to the business at hand,” she said. “I have been clear: now is the time to get a ceasefire deal and get the hostage deal done. Now is the time. And the president and I are working around the clock every day to get that ceasefire deal done and bring the hostages home.” Her statement represented a noticeable change in tone from her approach to Gaza protesters in Detroit on Thursday.
Harris and Walz took the stage at the Desert Diamond Arena, a venue that can hold 20,000 people. Although official estimates are not yet available, the Harris campaign confirmed that more than 15,000 people attended the Phoenix rally. On stage, in front of attendees waving signs that read “Coach!”, Walz said the rally “might be the largest political gathering in the history of Arizona”.
“It’s not as if anybody cares about crowd sizes or anything,” he added.
Other Harris campaign events this week that have drawn crowds of up to 15,000, invoking the ire of Donald Trump, who claims to have “spoken to the biggest crowds”.
The Harris-Walz rally represents a renewed push to put the Sun belt back on the map for Harris’s still young campaign. Before Friday night, the state appeared to be leaning red, with Trump leading Harris by single digits in recent polls. But by the evening of the rally, Harris and Trump appeared neck and neck in the state, with polling from FiveThirtyEight showing Harris’ 44.4% closely following Trump’s 44.8%.
Polls on Friday morning showed Harris narrowly leading Trump nationwide.
Harris also addressed immigration in her Arizona speech. AP: Kamala Harris makes an immigration pitch in Arizona as she fights to gain ground in the Sun Belt.
Vice President Kamala Harris drew on her prosecutorial background to make her first expansive pitch on immigration to border-state voters as she and her new running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, attracted thousands to a campaign rally in Arizona during their tour of battleground states.
Harris, the former attorney general of California, reminded the crowd that she, as a law enforcement official, targeted transnational gangs, drug cartels and smugglers.
Trump won’t be happy with the latest polls of swing states. Also from The Guardian: New poll shows Harris four points ahead of Trump in three key swing states.
“I prosecuted them in case after case, and I won,” Harris said in front of a crowd of more than 15,000 in Glendale, a suburb of Phoenix. “So I know what I’m talking about.”
Harris promoted a border security bill that a bipartisan group of senators negotiated earlier this year, which Republican lawmakers ultimately opposed en masse at Republican nominee Donald Trump’s behest.
“Donald Trump does not want to fix this problem,” Harris said. “Be clear about that: He has no interest or desire to actually fix the problem. He talks a big game about border security, but he does not walk the walk.”
Trump won’t be happy with the latest swing state polls.
The Guardian: New poll shows Harris four points ahead of Trump in three key swing states.
A major new poll puts Kamala Harris ahead of Donald Trump in three key swing states, signaling a dramatic reversal in momentum for the Democratic party with three months to go until the election.
The vice-president leads the ex-president by four percentage points in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, 50% to 46%, among almost 2,000 likely voters in each state, according to new surveys by the New York Times and Siena College.
The polls were conducted between 5 and 9 August, in the week that Harris named midwesterner Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota and a former high school teacher, as her running mate for November’s Democratic ticket.
It provides the clearest indication from crucial battleground states since Joe Biden pulled out of the race and endorsed Harris amid mounting concerns about the 82-year-old’s cognitive wellbeing and fitness to govern for a second term. The results come after months of polling that showed Biden either tied with or slightly behind Trump.
Harris is viewed as more intelligent, more honest and more temperamentally fit to run the country than Trump, according to the registered voters polled.
The findings, published on Saturday by the Times, will boost the Democrats, as Harris and Walz continue crisscrossing the country on their first week on the campaign trail together, holding a slew of events in swing states that are likely to decide the outcome of the election….
While only a snapshot, Democrats will probably be heartened to see that 60% of the surveyed independent voters, who always play a major role in deciding the outcome of the race, said they are satisfied with the choice of presidential candidates, compared with 45% in May.
The swing appears to be largely driven by evolving voter perceptions of Harris, who has been praised for her positivity and future-focused stump speeches on the campaign trail. In Pennsylvania, where Biden beat Trump by just more than 80,000 votes four years ago, her favorability rating has surged by 10 points since last month among registered voters, according to Times/Siena polling.
Harris will need to win Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan – crucial battleground states that Biden clinched in 2020 – if the Democrats are to regain the White House.
There’s also good news out of Nevada. The Nevada Independent: New Nevada poll sees Harris with biggest lead over Trump yet.
A new poll of likely Nevada voters found Vice President Kamala Harris with a nearly 6 percentage point lead over former President Donald Trump — the largest lead for a Democrat in any presidential poll of Nevadans this cycle.
While Nevada polls have been relatively scarce since Harris replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee, the vice president appears to have closed the gap that existed between Trump and Biden, who had not led Trump in a single public poll taken in the state since October 2023.
A Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll of Nevada in late July found Harris with a 2 percentage point lead in the head-to-head matchup — Democrats’ first leading poll of the cycle — and the Cook Political Report moved Nevada back into the “toss-up” category Thursday after previously categorizing it as “lean Republican.”
This latest poll, conducted by Decipher Ai’s David Wolfson, a pollster and Columbia University lecturer, sampled 991 likely voters across Nevada from Aug. 3-5 in a SMS/text-to-web poll on the presidential and House races. The statewide margin of error is 3 percentage points and between 6 percentage points and 7 percentage points for House races….
On the presidential ballot, Harris garnered 49.2 percent support while Trump received 43.6 percent. Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. received only 3.9 percent of the vote. Kennedy’s vote share is lower than the 8 percentage points to 10 percentage points he had been receiving, on average, when Biden was on the ballot. In an interview, Johnston said Kennedy’s polling fade reflects what typically happens to third-party candidates as the election nears.
Harris’ lead in this poll may be an outlier, but it mimics Biden’s position at this point in the cycle in 2020 when FiveThirtyEight polling averages showed he led in Nevada by about 6 percentage points. Biden ultimately won the state by about 2.4 percentage points.
Harris has received some major endorsements. From CNN:
Harris gains major endorsements: The nation’s oldest and largest Latino civil rights organization, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), has endorsed the Harris-Walz ticket. It is the first time LULAC has endorsed a presidential. candidate in its almost 100-year history. Culinary and bartenders unions in Las Vegas also endorsed the Harris-Walz ticket Friday.
The United Auto Workers (UAW) also endorsed Harris this week.
In her speech last night, Harris told the crowd that she worked at McDonalds one summer. The Independent: Kamala Harris could make history as the first president to work at McDonald’s.
More than 13 percent of Americans, or roughly 41 million people, have worked at a McDonald’s restaurant at some point in their lives. That includes Kamala Harris, who worked at a restaurant for a summer while she was in college.
Harris mentioned her brief stint on the fryer when she joined the picket line with fast food workers in Las Vegas in 2019 and during an appearance on The Drew Barrymore Show in April. (Her order? “Quarter pounder with cheese and fries,” and barbecue sauce for dipping if she gets McNuggets).
Now, the Democratic presidential candidate’s campaign is nodding to her summer job to highlight her upbringing and a platform to boost American workers that stands in stark contrast to her Republican rival Donald Trump, who “has no plan to help the middle class — just more tax cuts for billionaires,” according to a recent ad.
McDonald’s is all over influential Americans’ resumes (former House Speaker Paul Ryan and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos have also worked in McDonald’s restaurants), but service worker labor unions and fast food employees have been leading nationwide efforts to improve working conditions for lower-wage workers, including calls to boost the federal hourly minimum wage to at least $15.
They could soon have a powerful advocate in one of their former coworkers.
Harris — who has earned endorsements from several influential unions, including Service Employees International Union, which supported the nationwide Fight for $15 campaign — stood with striking McDonald’s workers and protesters as she was launching her first presidential campaign.
“If we want to talk about these golden arches being a symbol of the best of America, well, the arches are falling short,” she said from Las Vegas in June 2019. “We have got to recognize that working people deserve livable wages.”
“I did the french fries and I did the ice cream,” she told workers.
“There was not a family relying on me to pay the rent, put food on the table and keep the bills paid by the end of the month,” she added. “But the reality of McDonald’s is that a majority of the folk who are working there today are relying on that income to sustain a household and a family.”
Harris also made a point of stopping “lock him up” chants from the crowd. Ryan J. Reilly at NBC News: Harris shutting down ‘lock him up’ chants shields Trump’s federal Jan. 6 case from even more delays.
Vice President Kamala Harris’ efforts to shut down “lock him up” chants targeting Donald Trump at Harris-Walz rallies this week may be an effort to avoid engaging in the type of rhetoric seen at Trump rallies in 2016.
But there’s also a very practical reason for Harris to avoid showing any support for that type of language: Any comments or signs of approval she makes could further delay or complicate the pending federal criminal charges Trump is facing. That includes the Jan. 6 and 2020 election interference case brought by special counsel Jack Smith.
If Harris wins the election in November, Trump’s Jan. 6 case — though weakened by the Supreme Court — will continue to move toward trial. As sitting vice president in the administration that appointed the attorney general with oversight of the case, any comments Harris makes related to the trial could be fodder for the former president’s lawyers to argue in court that her comments interfered with Trump’s due process rights. That includes any suggestion that locking up Trump would be an explicit goal (as Trump repeatedly said about Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign).
When a “lock him up” chant broke out at a Harris rally in Wisconsin this week, she said to supporters, “We’re gonna let the courts handle that,” and used a similar line when the same chant broke out at another rally. “Our job is to beat him in November,” she said.
Harris, a former prosecutor herself, has been cautious in her references to the array of civil and criminal cases that Trump has faced in recent years. Harris is aware of the impact she could have on Trump’s pending federal cases and has surrounded herself with Justice Department veterans — including her brother-in-law, Tony West, a former top DOJ official, and former Attorney General Eric Holder, who vetted her vice presidential candidates.
This is important, because Trump’s DC case on January 6 and election subversion is active again and back in the capable hands of Judge Tanya Chutkan.
Joyce Vance wrote yesterday at Civil Discourse: Jack Smith Asks for More Time.
Late today, lawyers in the Special Counsel’s office and lawyers for Donald Trump filed the joint status report that wasn’t due until tomorrow in the Trump election interference case in the District of Columbia. The Special Counsel advised the court that it “continues to assess the new precedent” laid down by the Supreme Court creating the doctrine of presidential immunity and went on to ask the court for an additional three weeks to file “an informed proposal regarding the schedule for pretrial proceedings moving forward.” Trump’s lawyers didn’t oppose Jack Smith’s request. Now the timeline is up to Judge Chutkan.
What does that mean, and why is the government asking for more delay in the case? Those are legitimate questions, but I would not be quick to criticize the Justice Department here.
Part of the answer comes in the pleading itself, where Smith relates that under the relevant portion of the special counsel regulations, he is required to consult with other components in DOJ before moving forward: “A Special Counsel shall comply with the rules, regulations, procedures, practices and policies of the Department of Justice. He or she shall consult with appropriate offices within the Department for guidance with respect to established practices, policies and procedures of the Department, including ethics and security regulations and procedures. Should the Special Counsel conclude that the extraordinary circumstances of any particular decision would render compliance with required review and approval procedures by the designated Departmental component inappropriate, he or she may consult directly with the Attorney General.”
Here, the parties’ task is to provide the court with a schedule for moving forward, but it’s deciding what events belong on that schedule that is problematic. Smith has an indictment that consists of four counts, 45 pages of allegations, and a mountain of evidence.
Click the link to read the rest.
In Trump news, people are still talking about the former “president’s” so called “press conference.”
Tom Nichols at The Atlantic: The Truth About Trump’s Press Conference. His obvious emotional instability is frightening, not funny.
Donald Trump’s public events are a challenge for anyone who writes about him. His rallies and press conferences are rich sources of material, fountains of molten weirdness that blurp up stuff that would sink the career of any other politician. By the time they’re over, all of the attendees are covered in gloppy nonsense.
And then, once everyone cleans up and shakes the debris off their phones and laptops, so much of what Trump said seems too bonkers to have come from a former president and the nominee of a major party that journalists are left trying to piece together a story as if Trump were a normal person. This is what The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, has described as the “bias toward coherence,” and it leads to careful circumlocutions instead of stunned headlines.
Consider Trump’s press conference yesterday in Florida. Trump has been lying low since President Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race, at least in terms of public appearances. But Vice President Kamala Harris, the new Democratic nominee, and her running mate, Governor Tim Walz, are gaining a lot of great press, and so Trump decided it was time to emerge from his sanctuary.
Trump, predictably, did an afternoon concert of his greatest hits, including “Doctors and Mothers Are Murdering Babies After They’re Born,” “Putin and Xi Love Me and I Love Them,” and “Gas Used to Be a Buck-Eighty-Something a Gallon.” But the new material was pretty shocking.
Trump not only declared that mothers are killing babies in the delivery room—he’s been saying that for years—but added the incomprehensible claim that liberals, conservatives, and independents alike are very happy that abortion has been returned to the states. (When asked how he would vote in Florida’s abortion referendum, he dodged the question, which suggests that maybe not everyone is happy.)
He said (again) that the convicted January 6 insurrectionists have been treated horribly, but this time he added that no one died during the assault on the Capitol. (In fact, four people died that day.) He made his usual assertion that Russia would never have invaded Ukraine if he’d been in office, but this time he added how much he looked forward to getting along with the Iranians, despite also bragging about how he tanked the nuclear deal with them.
He claimed that Harris was sliding in the polls, a standard Trump trope in talking about his opponents, but he added that he was getting crowd sizes up to 30 times hers at his rallies. Harris recently spoke to approximately 15,000 people in Detroit; 30 times that would be nearly half a million people, so Trump is now saying that he’s having rallies that are five times bigger than the average crowd at a Super Bowl—bigger, even, than Woodstock—and somehow fitting them all into arenas with seats to spare….
“Nobody has spoken to crowds bigger than me,” Trump said. And then, referring to the crowd that gathered at his behest on January 6, he compared it to the 1963 March on Washington: “If you look at Martin Luther King, when he did his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours: same real estate, same everything, same number of people.”
The March on Washington drew a quarter million people, almost six times the number that showed up during the attack on the Capitol. Trump agreed that official estimates said his crowd was smaller than King’s. He pressed on anyway: “But when you look at the exact same picture and everything is the same—because it was the fountains, the whole thing all the way back to go from Lincoln to Washington—and you look at it, and you look at the picture of my crowd … we actually had more people.”
Nichols goes on to recount Trump’s story about going down in a helicopter with San Francisco’s Willie Brown (Brown says this never happened.) and also the media’s attempts to make sense of Trump’s rambling rants. He concludes:
The Republican nominee, the man who could return to office and regain the sole authority to use American nuclear weapons, is a serial liar and can’t tell the difference between reality and fantasy.
Donald Trump is not well. He is not stable. There’s something deeply wrong with him.
Any of those would have been important—and accurate—headlines.
Politico has finally located the man who actually was in that helicopter with Trump years ago: The other Black politician who says he was with Trump in that near-fatal chopper crash.
The man who almost crashed in a helicopter with Donald Trump told POLITICO Trump confused him with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown — despite the former president’s repeated insistence it was Brown.
It was Nate Holden, a former city councilmember and state senator from Los Angeles, who said in an exclusive interview late Friday that he remembers the near-death experience well. He and others believe it happened sometime in 1990.
“Willie is the short Black guy living in San Francisco,” Holden said. “I’m a tall Black guy living in Los Angeles.”
“I guess we all look alike,” Holden told POLITICO, letting out a loud laugh.
Holden, who is 95 years old, was in touch with Trump and his team during the 1990s when the flamboyant Manhattan developer was trying to build on the site of the historic Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Holden represented the district at the time and supported the project.\
In the interview, Holden said he was watching Trump’s press conference on Thursday when the former president claimed that Brown was aboard during the white-knuckle helicopter ride.
In fact, Holden says he met Trump at Trump Tower, en route to Atlantic City, New Jersey, where they were going to tour the developer’s brand new Taj Mahal casino. In the lobby at Trump Tower, Holden says he was greeted by several people as “senator,” salutations that miffed the host.
“He said, ‘You know I own this building but nobody seems to know who I am,’” Holden remembered the mogul saying.
Finally, I want to highlight this piece in Propublica by Andy Kroll and Nick Surgey: Inside Project 2025’s Secret Training Videos.
Project 2025, the controversial playbook and policy agenda for a right-wing presidential administration, has lost its director and faced scathing criticism from both Democratic groups and former President Donald Trump. But Project 2025’s plan to train an army of political appointees who could battle against the so-called deep state government bureaucracy on behalf of a future Trump administration remains on track.
One centerpiece of that program is dozens of never-before-published videos created for Project 2025’s Presidential Administration Academy. The vast majority of these videos — 23 in all, totaling more than 14 hours of content — were provided to ProPublica and Documented by a person who had access to them.
The Project 2025 videos coach future appointees on everything from the nuts and bolts of governing to how to outwit bureaucrats. There are strategies for avoiding embarrassing Freedom of Information Act disclosures and ensuring that conservative policies aren’t struck down by “left-wing judges.” Some of the content is routine advice that any incoming political appointee might be told. Other segments of the training offer guidance on radically changing how the federal government works and what it does.
In one video, Bethany Kozma, a conservative activist and former deputy chief of staff at the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Trump administration, downplays the seriousness of climate change and says the movement to combat it is really part of a ploy to “control people.”
“If the American people elect a conservative president, his administration will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere,” Kozma says.
In the same video, Kozma calls the idea of gender fluidity “evil.” Another speaker, Katie Sullivan, who was an acting assistant attorney general at the Department of Justice under Trump, takes aim at executive actions by the administration of President Joe Biden that created gender adviser positions throughout the federal government. The goal, Biden wrote in one order, was to “advance equal rights and opportunities, regardless of gender or gender identity.”
Sullivan says, “That position has to be eradicated, as well as all the task forces, the removal of all the equity plans from all the websites, and a complete rework of the language in internal and external policy documents and grant applications.”
Head over to ProPublica to read the whole thing.
That’s it for me. What’s on your mind today?
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Posted: January 17, 2024 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: Corrupt and Political SCOTUS, court rulings, Donald Trump, just because, SCOTUS | Tags: DC Circuit Court, defamation case, E Jean Carroll, Federal agencies, Jack Smith, Joseph W. Fischer v. United States, Judge Aileen Cannon, Loper Bright case, Neil Gorsuch, Supreme Court, Trump's Twitter feed |
Good Day Sky Dancers!!
Winter Moonlit Scene by Hendricks Hallett ( American, 1847-1921)
We finally got some snow here in the Boston area. It snowed overnight on Monday and for most of the day yesterday. It’s also quite cold, but our weather can’t compare to the deep freeze that has hit the South. Dakinikat’s house was only 54 degrees indoors this morning!
There’s another storm moving across the Midwest and it will dump more snow in the East over the weekend. I talked to my sister in Portland, OR last night, and they are also getting below normal temperatures. She said there was an ice storm happening when I called her.
In the news, there’s quite a bit about Trump’s legal messes. This post will focus on those as well as some SCOTUS news.
Yesterday was the first day of the second E. Jean Carroll defamation trial. Trump chose to show up, even though he doesn’t need to be there. He’s in court again today; I have to assume he is there trying to intimidate Carroll. Here’s the latest:
CNN: Takeaways from first day of Trump’s defamation trial.
Donald Trump attended the first day of his civil defamation trial, watching as a jury was selected to determine how much, if any, damages the former president must pay to E. Jean Carroll for his 2019 defamatory statements about Carroll’s sexual assault allegations….
Trump watched as prospective jurors were asked about their political donations to him and his political opponents, whether they believed the 2020 election was stolen and how they got their news. He left court before opening statements to travel to New Hampshire for a campaign event Tuesday evening with the primary one week away.
Trump may return to New York later this week for the rest of the trial, and his lawyers have suggested he could testify in the case, though the judge has ruled that Trump cannot try to contest a previous jury’s verdict that he sexually abused and defamed Carroll….
Trump left court Tuesday before opening statements began, where Carroll’s lawyer Shawn Crowley told the jury that it had already been proven that Trump sexually assaulted Carroll in a high-end department store in the 1990s.
That jury’s finding stemmed from statements Trump made in 2022, while the current case is dealing with statements Trump made while he was president in 2019.
“Donald Trump sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll. He managed to get her alone in an empty department store one evening and sexually assaulted her. That’s a fact,” Crowley said. “That fact has been proven and a jury sitting in the exact seats where you’re sitting now found that it happened.”
Crowley said that Trump’s attacks on her while he was president “unleashed his followers” and caused her to receive threats. “Trump was president when he made those statements, and he used the world’s biggest microphone to attack Ms. Carroll to humiliate her and to destroy her reputation,” Crowley said.
The damages awarded to Carroll “should be significant, very significant,” her lawyer argued.
“You will also be asked to decide how much money Donald Trump should have to pay as punishment for what he’s done and to deter him and others from doing it again,” Crowley said, noting Trump continued to post about her on social media, even as the trial got underway on Tuesday.
Read more at CNN.
David Kurtz in the TPM Morning Memo: Trump Is Playing With Absolute Fire In The Carroll Case. Is Trump About To Get Rudy’d?
Carroll II, the second trial of Donald Trump for defaming E. Jean Carroll by lying about his sexual assault of her, got underway in Manhattan yesterday, and it’s shaping up to be a colossal financial threat to the former president.
Having lost in Carroll I, where a jury concluded he had raped Carroll, Trump is barred from contesting the fact of the rape in Carroll II. The only question is how big are her damages for his defamation.
Spiders from Mars, Phyllis Shafer (American, b.1958)
While jury verdicts are notoriously difficult to predict, this case has the potential to do to Trump what a DC federal jury did to Rudy Giuliani in the defamation case brought against him by Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. The Giuliani jury reached a verdict against him of $148 million, including punitive damages.
Like Giuliani, Trump has been defiant throughout the two Carroll trials, constantly repeating the defamatory statements with impunity, and persisting in attacking the plaintiff even while trial was underway.
Trump was in court Tuesday as jury selection got underway, but his social media operation launched what was clearly a pre-planned full-scale attack on Carroll, including repeating the defamation. (It was perhaps not a coincidence that a key Trump lawyer resigned the night before.)
Trump is risking a substantial punitive damages award by continuing to attack his accuser. It does appear to be a calculated risk, not merely shooting from the hip inadvisably. And that should only fuel the arguments Carroll can make to the jury about how severely it should punish Trump for his misconduct.
In opening statements, Carroll’s lawyers seized on the morning’s developments to urge the jury to make Trump pay until it hurt enough to get him to stop defaming Carroll:
CNBC on today’s fireworks: Judge snaps at Trump lawyer during E. Jean Carroll defamation trial: ‘I said sit down!’
A New York federal judge snapped at a lawyer for Donald Trump on Wednesday after she again asked for a delay in his sex assault defamation trial so that the former president could attend his mother-in-law’s funeral.
“I said sit down!” Judge Lewis Kaplan told Trump’s lawyer Alina Habba.
Habba replied, “I don’t like to be spoken [to] like that … I will not speak to you like that.”
Kaplan shot back, “It is denied. Sit down.”
The judge several times has rejected Habba’s request for a delay in the civil trial in U.S. District Court in Manhattan so that Trump can attend the funeral of Melania Trump’s mother, Amalija Knavs, in Florida on Thursday without missing attending the trial that day.
The tense exchange, which Trump was in court to see, came shortly before the writer E. Jean Carroll was called to the witness stand to testify on the trial’s second day.
Sunset Lake Koocanusa, Patrick Markle, contemporary Canadian artist
From Twitter, NBC’s Kyle Griffin provided quotes from Carroll’s testimony:
“I’m here because I was assaulted by Donald Trump and when I wrote about it, he said it never happened. He lied. And he shattered my reputation.” [….]
E. Jean Carroll on the stand: “I’m 80 years old, so I spent 50 years building a reputation as a magazine and magazine journalist, both in articles and an advice column … People appreciated my articles because I stuck to the truth and used the facts.”
“Previously I was known simply as a journalist, and now I’m known as a liar, a fraud, and a whack job.”
“He has continued to lie. He lied last month. He lied on Sunday. He lied yesterday.” [….]
“To have the president of the United States, one of the most powerful persons on earth, call me a liar for three days and say it 26 times — I counted them. It ended the world I had been living in and I lived in a new world.” [….]
E. Jean Carroll says ever since she came forward with her claim of Trump sexually assaulting her, messages from people haven’t stopped — sometimes receiving hundreds per day. Carroll says the common themes are: accusing her of being a liar, hurting actual victims, and saying she’s ugly.
Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney at Politico on another Trump court case: Appeals court won’t revisit Twitter’s fight against Trump probe warrant. But conservative D.C. Circuit judges joined an opinion exalting executive privilege.
A federal appeals court won’t reconsider a ruling that allowed special counsel Jack Smith to access private communications from Donald Trump’s Twitter account.
But even as the court declined to revisit the issue on Tuesday, the court’s conservative judges united to scold their liberal colleagues and the lower-court judge who initially decided the case. Those prior rulings, the conservatives said, amounted to a significant, unjustified erosion of executive privilege.
“Judicial disregard of executive privilege undermines the Presidency, not just the former President being investigated in this case,” the judges wrote in an opinion authored by Trump appointee Neomi Rao.
All four Republican-appointed judges on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals extolled the virtues and importance of the president’s right to confidential communications and advice, even though they concluded that the underlying dispute over Smith’s access to Trump’s private Twitter messages was moot.
Ucluelet Sundown, Nicholas Bott (Dutch-Canadian, 1941-2021
Last February, as part of Smith’s investigation of Trump’s bid to subvert the 2020 election, prosecutors obtained a voluminous trove of Trump’s Twitter data after secret court proceedings. A district judge ordered the company, now known as X, to turn over the data without informing Trump, and a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit later upheld that decision.
That precedent, the D.C. Circuit’s Republican-appointed judges worried Tuesday, could lead federal and state prosecutors to invade a sitting president’s privileged materials — without advance notification — by simply accessing the materials via a third party like a social media or phone company.
The four conservatives ultimately agreed with seven Democratic-appointed judges on the court that the earlier decision of the three-judge panel — which upheld a $350,000 contempt fine against Twitter — should not be revisited by the full bench of the appeals court. Indeed, despite the lengthy exposition on the merits of executive privilege, no D.C. Circuit judge even called for a vote on rehearing the case by the full bench.
We can’t forget Aileen Cannon and her consistent efforts to help Trump in the stolen documents case.
This is from Dennis Aftergut and Lawrence Tribe at Slate: Judge Aileen Cannon Is Quietly Sabotaging the Trump Classified Documents Case.
On Friday, District Judge Aileen Cannon issued a new order in the Donald Trump classified documents case adding to the mountain of evidence that she is firmly in the former president’s pocket. Trump appointed Cannon in 2020 and the Senate confirmed her appointment in the days after he lost the 2020 election. It’s deeply offensive to the rule of law for judges to bend the law to benefit those who put them on the bench. Sadly, Cannon does just that.
Cannon’s new ruling rejected special counsel Jack Smith’s entirely standard request that she order Trump to state whether he intends to rely on an “advice of counsel” defense ahead of the trial, currently scheduled for May 20. Advance notice of the defense helps expedite a trial because defendants asserting it need to provide additional discovery to prosecutors—raising the defense means that defendants must disclose all communications with their attorneys, as the defense waives the attorney–client privilege.
Judge Cannon’s brief order asserted that Smith’s motion was “not amenable to proper consideration at this juncture, prior to at least partial resolution of pretrial motions” and further discovery.
Sound innocuous? It’s anything but. Instead, it’s part of a pattern we’ve already seen of Cannon laying the groundwork for delaying Trump’s trial—until it’s too late for a jury to be empaneled and the case tried to verdict before the election.
That is, of course, just what Trump has been angling for.
Back in November, Cannon issued an order slow-walking all pretrial motions in the case. As Politico reported, she “has postponed key pretrial deadlines, and she has added further slack into the schedule simply by taking her time to resolve some fairly straightforward matters.”
René Magritte, The Echo, 1944
As Brian Greer, a former Central Intelligence Agency attorney, told Politico, Cannon’s decision not to expedite pretrial motions “could be seen as a stealth attempt to delay the ultimate trial date without actually announcing that yet.”
New York University law professor Andrew Weissmann, the mild-mannered and knowledgeable former deputy to special counsel Robert S. Mueller, put it with uncharacteristic bluntness: “Judge Cannon’s bias is showing over and over again.” On Twitter he declared her to be “in the bag for Trump.”
By continuing to maintain the trial date while rendering the date virtually impossible to keep, Cannon evidently hopes to maintain plausible deniability from charges like Greer’s or Weissmann’s. At the same time, her pretense that the trial will commence on schedule prevents any attempt by Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis to seek to advance into May the scheduling of her prosecution of Trump for attempting to interfere with Georgia’s 2020 election.
And this is from Igor Derysh at Salon: “Completely out of bounds” Trump filing would delay docs case. Expert says expect a “harsh” response.
Former President Donald Trump’s legal team in a series of new filings on Tuesday signaled that they plan to argue that the intelligence community and the investigation into classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago was “politically motivated and biased.”
The lawyers in a filing to Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon accused special counsel Jack Smith of withholding records from Trump and flouting “basic discovery obligations,” according to The Messenger.
Trump attorneys Chris Kise and Todd Blanche alleged that Smith’s team is “seeking to avert its eyes from exculpatory, discoverable evidence in the hands of the senior officials at the White House, DOJ, and FBI who provided guidance and assistance as this lawless mission proceeded, and the agencies that supported the flawed investigation from its inception such as NARA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (‘ODNI’), and other politically-charged components of the Intelligence Community.”
The filing requested reams of additional materials from Smith’s team, arguing that the “prosecution team” is larger than the FBI and DOJ.
“The prosecution team includes the Intelligence Community agencies and components that participated in the investigation, such as during classification reviews and damage assessments,” Trump’s lawyers wrote. “This includes the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the agencies identified in…the Indictment as ‘equity’ holders of some of the documents at issue: the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Department, the National Security Agency, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, the Department of Energy, and the Statement [sic] Department.”
Former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance told MSNBC that the filing furthers the “fantastical narrative that Trump is the victim” of a politicized federal branch.
Vance said that while it may be “warranted” for Smith’s team to go back and talk to all of the FBI and DOJ personnel involved in the case, the other parts are “just completely out of bounds.”
“They want the special counsel to go and work with the entire intelligence community to turn over everything in the intelligence community’s possession that touches on anything to do with this,” said Vance. “So I think the safe thing to say is that we should wait for Jack Smith’s response, which will undoubtedly be pretty harsh, given what the defense is requesting here.”
Vance added that the filing also gives Judge Cannon, who has repeatedly delayed proceedings in the case, the “opportunity to delay things even further.”
At what point will it be time for DOJ to appeal to the 11th Circuit?
What’s happening in the Supreme Court? I’ll be brief:
The Supreme Court is about the hear a very scary case. Joyce Vance from Civil Discourse last night: Tomorrow at the Supreme Court.
Tomorrow, Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear argument in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, a pair of cases we’ve discussed in the past that could let conservatives achieve a long-term goal: Disassembling what they call the nanny state and what I think of as executive branch agencies that conduct the nation’s business day in and day out. The goal is to undo 40 years of administrative jurisprudence (so much for precedent!) and end the federal government’s ability to establish and administer rules that balance differing interests and make life better for all of us. Administrative agencies use their expertise to balance different interests and implement procedures on matters like health and safety concerns or consumer financial protection. Because that involves costs and limitations on businesses that can prevent them from being as profitable as they would like to be, some folks oppose leaving these decisions in the hands of career public servants. You will be able to listen to the oral argument here.
Sunset on Mugnone river, 1884, Ulvi Liège (Italian, 1859 – 1938)
Loper Bright is an effort to end or at least severely limit the reach of Chevron deference, a longstanding doctrine that determines when the courts are supposed to defer to an executive branch agency’s interpretation of a law. In 1984, the Supreme Court ruled that courts should defer to administrative agencies’ interpretation of laws when the statutory text is silent or ambiguous. That permits experts and career professionals to decide how to implement vague laws. This case is about whether the courts should substitute their judgment for those of experts on issues involving science, medicine, environmental protection, and so forth.
Conservatives have long sought to prevent federal agencies, like the EPA but also others, from regulating businesses. This case involves a sympathetic-looking small business, overwhelmed by an agency regulatory decision, to make the case that courts should be making the call, not “bureaucrats”. The cornerstone of these cases is the implication that the nanny state is making life impossible for the little guy.
The conservative group Alliance Defending Freedom described Loper Bright like this: “A National Marine Fisheries Service regulation requires that herring fishing boats allow an additional person on board their small boats to serve as a monitor, tracking compliance with federal regulations. The fishermen must also pay the monitor’s salary of around $700 per day. Overall, the regulation reduces fishing profits by about 20%. Loper Bright Enterprises, a fishing company in New England, and other fisheries sued to challenge this federal government rule, arguing that NMFS lacked statutory authority to force them to pay for these monitors.” Of course, this narrative ignores the importance of monitoring. And the point of the litigation isn’t really to provide relief for small businesses. It’s all about shifting decision-making about the regulation of big business out of the hands of agencies and into the courts, where conservatives believe they get a better reception. This has been the work of decades—ever since the Chevron case was decided.
Read more at Civil Discourse.
Neil Gorsuch is in the spotlight for this case. Three pieces to check out:
CNN: Neil Gorsuch has a grudge against federal agencies. He holds their fate in his hands.
The Guardian: Gorsuch urged to recuse himself from supreme court case over ties to oil baron.
The New Republic: Billionaire Poised to See Return on Investment in Neil Gorsuch.
Another Scotus case could affect Jack Smith’s prosecution of Trump.
Raw Story: Jack Smith’s Jan. 6 Trump case could be torn apart by imminent SCOTUS decision: report.
As the Supreme Court gears up to decide if Donald Trump’s claims of immunity from prosecution are legitimate, another case in front of the court threatens to upend special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of him, Politico reported.
Incredible Winter Evening, by Paul Evans, 2023
The case, Joseph W. Fischer v. United States, has raised the issue of whether the Department of Justice has been improperly using a law originally aimed at curbing financial crimes to prosecute Jan. 6 defendant Joseph Fischer. As Politico points out, if the Court rules in Fischer’s favor, it would undermine Smith’s use of the law against Trump, as well as other Jan. 6 defendants.
Two of the four counts in Smith’s indictment are for obstruction of an official proceeding and for conspiracy to do so. According to Politico, those crimes “are part of a relatively recent criminal statute governing financial disclosures known as the Sarbanes-Oxley (or “SOX”) Act, which was enacted following the Enron corporate accounting scandal, and which makes it a crime to obstruct an official proceeding of the U.S. government.”
So far, the Justice Department has used the law to charge over 300 Jan. 6 defendants, and more than 150 have been convicted.
Fischer, as well as other defendants, argues that the “obstruction of an official proceeding” part of the law was only meant to apply narrowly to financial crimes — not the broad definition as relied on by the government.
“The impact of Fischer on the Jan. 6 trial against Trump might not be known until after the Supreme Court wraps up its term in June, at which point it could knock out half of Smith’s counts against Trump. And it could also disrupt the convictions of many Jan. 6 defendants already serving time for their role in the insurrection,” Politico’s report stated.
Read the full report over at Politico.
That’s it for me today. What stories have you been following?
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Posted: December 30, 2023 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: 2024 Elections, 2024 presidential Campaign, cat art, caturday, Corrupt and Political SCOTUS, Donald Trump, just because, SCOTUS | Tags: 14th amendment, Civil War, Elon Musk, fake electors, Jack Smith, Kenneth Chesebro, lost cause theory, Niki Haley, Ron DeSantis, slavery, Supreme Court |
Happy Caturday!!
Benson B. Moore, born Washington, DC 1882-died Stuart, FL 1974
We’ve nearly reached the end of 2023. We’re also at the end of the typically slow news time known as “the holidays.” Therefore, there isn’t a lot of breaking news for me to post about. But here are a few interesting stories that are worth reading, along with some cat art from the Smithsonian “artful cats” collection.
Alex Shephard at The New Republic: Elon Musk Is The New Republic’s 2023 Scoundrel of the Year.
In one sense, Elon Musk has gotten exactly what he wanted. For all his talk about free speech, his primary motivation for sinking $44 billion into buying Twitter last year was clearly an unquenchable desire to be the center of attention. After Donald Trump’s defenestration in the wake of the January 6 insurrection, there was a main-character-size hole on the social network: Enter Musk and his infantile need for validation.
That Twitter—now renamed X, for reasons only Musk really understands—is now teetering on the brink of collapse and worth less than half what the world’s second-richest man paid for it is funny. It elicits deserved schadenfreude. Musk entered Twitter’s office carrying a sink—a terrible joke, and one of his better ones—last fall and has subsequently made countless decisions, big and small, all of which have made the platform significantly less viable and less worth spending any amount of time on. It is hard to think of a billionaire who has done more to damage their own reputation in such a short period of time.
Not so long ago, Musk was seen by many as a good tech billionaire, if not the good tech billionaire. While others like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg built digital trinkets that actively made the world a worse place, Musk was something different: a visionary intent on building real things, whether they be electric cars or rockets, that were aimed at accelerating a Jetsons-like vision of the future. While rivals at Google and Facebook—and, for that matter, Twitter—were hauled before Congress to testify about the deleterious effects of their creations, Musk remained relatively unscathed. Now it is clear that he is not just more villainous than all of them but that he is also a deeply stupid and unserious person.
Elon Musk is evil. While he has mostly made headlines for his incompetence, he has unleashed and legitimized truly heinous forces on Twitter: He has welcomed back some of the world’s most toxic people—Alex Jones, Donald Trump, innumerable Nazis and bigots—and has gone out of his way, again and again, to validate them. That Musk would endorse a heinous antisemitic conspiracy theory, as he did last month, is both unsurprising and reprehensible. It is, more than anything else, a reflection of who he is: He may be fantastically wealthy, but he is also deeply hateful, someone who has decided to devote his fortune and his time to attacking diversity and progress on nearly every front.
Musk has insisted again that he bought Twitter to save it from itself—that the platform had become too restrictive and that, to become a true “digital town square” where the best ideas rise to the top, it needed to welcome everyone. It is now abundantly clear that Musk’s real intention is and always has been to put his thumb on the scale: to elevate his own hateful views about, in no particular order: liberals; the media; diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; trans people; and liberal Jews. He sees Twitter as a weapon, a way to not only push his agenda but to sic his army of loyalist losers on anyone he deems an enemy.
For all of the talk about Musk being a “real life Tony Stark,” he has always been a deeply uncool person’s idea of a cool person: He is, in many ways, a sentient m’lady Reddit post circa 2011. It’s hard to think of a more pathetic figure now: someone scraping the internet for conspiracy theories and “jokes” aimed at affirming his status and influence. He has, again and again, done the opposite: Far from showing himself as a swaggering, popular figure, he has revealed himself to be a venal, thin-skinned moron. He may very well be the most unfunny person alive, a fact reified dozens of times a day.
Wow! Read the rest at The New Republic. I wonder if Musk is too stupid to read TNR. If he does read this, he’ll probably sue Alex Shephard
At HuffPost, SV Date assesses the DeSantis campaign: DeSantis’ 2023: More Than $160 Million Spent To Buy A Collapse In The Polls.
A year after Ron DeSantis led Donald Trump in some 2024 presidential primary polls, and with just weeks to go before the first ballots are cast, the Florida governor is already explaining how Democrats conspired to stop him: by repeatedly charging the coup-attempting former president with breaking the law.
DeSantis’ campaign and super PAC have spent more than $160 million to boost him, and he spent the better part of 2023 on the road. But, he now says, it may not have been enough to overcome the advantage he believes Trump received from getting indicted four times.
Jacques Hnizdovsky, born Pylypcze, Ukraine 1915-died New York City 1985
“If I could have one thing change, I wish Trump hadn’t been indicted on any of this stuff,” he told the Christian Broadcasting Network last week. “It sucked out a lot of oxygen.” [….]
“The race was decided totally out of their control,” said one DeSantis donor and supporter who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Trump got indicted. And indicted and indicted and indicted. The race was over after the first indictment.”
Other Republicans are less charitable as they describe DeSantis’ steady decline over the year ― which began with GOP donors giving him unsolicited six- and seven-figure checks, saw him spend far more time and energy attacking the Walt Disney Co. and the nation’s top doctor during the COVID pandemic than he ever did taking on the front-runner in his race, and ended with DeSantis some 40 points behind Trump in national polls.
“He started the primary on third base and stole second,” said David Jolly, who served with DeSantis as a fellow Republican member of Congress from Florida. “We’ve now witnessed one of the most expensive and embarrassing collapses in Republican history.”
Fergus Cullen, a former New Hampshire Republican Party chair, wondered about DeSantis’ apparent strategy of trying to win over the roughly one-third of primary voters who are “only Trump,” rather than the two-thirds who are open to someone else….
The Florida governor’s various missteps over the year ― as well as those of his campaign and his supporting super political action committee ― have been well documented, from the time he called Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a “territorial dispute” to the mass campaign layoffs just two months after he officially began his run to the recent dysfunction at the super PAC, Never Back Down.
There’s more at the link.
Historian Heather Cox Richardson weighed in on Niki Haley’s Civil War gaffe at her substack, Letters from an American:
When asked at a town hall on Wednesday to identify the cause of the United States Civil War, presidential candidate and former governor of South Carolina Nikki Haley answered that the cause “was basically how government was going to run, the freedoms, and what people could and couldn’t do…. I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are…. And I will always stand by the fact that, I think, government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people.”
Haley has correctly been lambasted for her rewriting of history. The vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens of Georgia, was quite clear about the cause of the Civil War. Stephens explicitly rejected the idea embraced by U.S. politicians from the revolutionary period onward that human enslavement was “wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically.” Instead, he declared: “Our new government is founded upon…the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition.” [….]
Haley has been backpedaling ever since—as well as suggesting that the question was somehow a “gotcha” question from a Democrat, as if it was a difficult question to answer—but her answer was not simply bad history or an unwillingness to offend potential voters, as some have suggested. It was the death knell of the Republican Party.
Robert Smithson, American, b. Passaic, New Jersey, 1938–1973
That party formed in the 1850s to stand against what was known as the Slave Power, a small group of elite enslavers who had come to dominate first the Democratic Party and then, through it, the presidency, Supreme Court, and Senate. When northern Democrats in the House of Representatives caved to pressure to allow enslavement into western lands from which it had been prohibited since 1820, northerners of all political stripes recognized that it was only a question of time until elite enslavers took over the West, joined with lawmakers from southern slave states, overwhelmed the northern free states in the House of Representatives, and made enslavement national.
So in 1854, after Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act that allowed the spread of enslavement into previously protected western lands, northerners abandoned their old parties and came together first as “anti-Nebraska” coalitions and then, by 1856, as the Republican Party.
At first their only goal was to stop the Slave Power, but in 1859, Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln articulated an ideology for the new party. In contrast to southern Democrats, who insisted that a successful society required leaders to dominate workers and that the government must limit itself to defending those leaders because its only domestic role was the protection of property, Lincoln envisioned a new kind of government, based on a new economy.
Lincoln saw a society that moved forward thanks not to rich people, but to the innovation of men just starting out. Such men produced more than they and their families could consume, and their accumulated capital would employ shoemakers and storekeepers. Those businessmen, in turn, would support a few industrialists, who would begin the cycle again by hiring other men just starting out. Rather than remaining small and simply protecting property, Lincoln and his fellow Republicans argued, the government should clear the way for those at the bottom of the economy, making sure they had access to resources, education, and the internal improvements that would enable them to reach markets.
When the leaders of the Confederacy seceded to start their own nation based in their own hierarchical society, the Republicans in charge of the United States government were free to put their theory into practice. For a nominal fee, they sold farmers land that the government in the past would have sold to speculators; created state colleges, railroads, national money, and income taxes; and promoted immigration.
Click the link to read more serious history.
The rest of the notable news this morning is Trump-related. Here’s what’s happening:
At her substack, Civil Discourse, Joyce Vance writes about latest on Trump lawyer Kenneth Chesebro, (which Dakinikat covered yesterday): What does the new reporting about Kenneth Chesebro mean?
CNN had a lengthy piece late Thursday on Kenneth Chesebro’s statement to prosecutors in Michigan (he is also talking to prosecutors elsewhere), that included his emails with others involved in the fake electors scheme and some audio of his statement to prosecutors. You will recall that Chesebro is a Harvard educated lawyer, who has been attributed with the role of architect of the fake electors scheme. Chesebro was charged in the Fulton County case, where he pled guilty, but with an asterisk. Chesebro continues to maintain that there was nothing illegal about the fake electors scheme. He pled guilty to one felony count of conspiracy to file false documents. He continues to maintain through his lawyer that the fake electors scheme was a legitimate strategy, put into play to protect Trump’s legal options. Chesebro’s attorney has said Trump has nothing to fear from his testimony.
So, Chesebro doesn’t look like a cooperator in the traditional sense. Cooperation means pleading guilty, making a full confession, and agreeing to testify against others. And that doesn’t seem to be what has happened here, making the deal Chesebro got in Fulton County, something of a mystery. Chesebro, at least on the surface, isn’t much of a witness for the government. It seems like he would testify there wasn’t an illegal conspiracy to interfere with the results of the election. In some cases, cooperating witness’ statements evolve overtime. Every prosecutor has put a cooperator on the stand who started out with lies, maintaining their innocence, but evolved progressively over time towards the truth—which then had to be corroborated with other evidence and a candid confession to the lies as well, as the crimes. But that doesn’t seem to be what’s happening here, either.
Cat with Lantern Woodblock print, by Kobayashi Kiyochika
Chesebro, and his “cooperation” remain something of an enigma, which makes this new report all the more interesting. Is Chesebro being more cooperative with prosecutors in Michigan? Has he finally had his come to Jesus moment? But much of the story is not new. The Washington Post, for instance, reported previously on his proffer in Georgia. But the CNN story is illuminating when we put it in context with everything else, and particularly with what we already know from the work of the January 6 committee.
Perhaps the most interesting new detail comes midway through the story, when we learn that prior to Chesebro’s guilty plea in Georgia, his lawyers reached out to Smith’s team. But they have still not received a response (or an invitation to proffer as have others, like Rudy Giuliani) from prosecutors. No reason is offered for this.
CNN obtained access to audio of some of Chesebro’s proffer with Michigan prosecutors, however. He has apparently been on the circuit, speaking with prosecutors in a number of different states where there are investigations in progress. The audio reveals a petulant, childish witness, upset about what he perceives as lies told about him by other Trump campaign lawyers and his financial problems. You can read the entire report from CNN here.
That’s a lot of questions. Read Vance’s take at her substack link above.
At Aaron Rupar’s substack Public Notice, Liz Dye writes about Jack Smith’s latest filing in the January 6 case: Jack Smith’s new motion could obliterate Trump’s DC strategy.
On Wednesday, Special Counsel Jack Smith asked the court to put the kibosh on Donald Trump’s efforts to “turn the courtroom into a forum in which he propagates irrelevant disinformation.” If Judge Tanya Chutkan grants this motion, it will eviscerate the former president’s plan to defend himself in DC by making the case about anything other than his own plot to obstruct the congressional certification of President Biden’s 2020 victory.
Broadly speaking, Trump wants to make the election interference trial into a glorified segment of Steve Bannon’s podcast. As he screams WITCH HUNT on social media, his lawyers accuse Biden of weaponizing the Justice Department and seek to introduce evidence of every crackpot election theory ever aired on Newsmax.
Unsurprisingly, the prosecution would like to avoid all that, so the special counsel has filed a motion to block Trump from bombarding the jurors with irrelevant and prejudicial evidence. And because Smith takes no prisoners, he’s done it in the most aggressive way possible….
Since before the indictment even dropped in August, Trump screamed daily that Biden is directing the Justice Department to persecute him. He also claimed that Biden is controlling the New York criminal and civil cases, as well as the RICO case in Georgia. He never presents any evidence of this because it’s patently ridiculous. The DOJ has no control over state prosecutions, and the entire purpose of the special counsel statute is to remove investigations which pose a conflict of interest from the immediate control of the DOJ….
Ted Gordon, born Louisville, KY 1924
[The Trump team’s] legal filings are scarcely more subtle. In October, Trump filed a motion to dismiss the case based on “selective and vindictive prosecution” — essentially a claim that the DOJ indicted him solely to kneecap Biden’s 2024 opponent.
The motion itself is a farcical hash of anonymously sourced articles from the supposedly fake news Washington Post and New York Times alleging that Biden confided to his inner circle that he wished AG Garland would be more aggressive. In fact, both stories confirm that Biden stayed far away from the Trump cases, even before Garland handed them off to Smith to avoid the appearance of conflict. Trump’s motion also mangles a quote from a press conference to suggest that “Biden’s publicly stated objective is to use the criminal justice system to incapacitate President Trump, his main political rival and the leading candidate in the upcoming election.” (That’s not remotely what he said.)
Even the most mundane scheduling brief is larded with assertions that “the incumbent administration has targeted its primary political opponent — and leading candidate in the upcoming presidential election — with criminal prosecution.”
In response, Smith argues:
“Through public statements, filings, and argument in hearings before the Court, the defense has attempted to inject into this case partisan political attacks and irrelevant and prejudicial issues that have no place in a jury trial,” Special Counsel Smith argued in a pretrial motion filed Wednesday. “Although the Court can recognize these efforts for what they are and disregard them, the jury — if subjected to them — may not.”
Prosecutors accuse Trump of attempting to engage in jury nullification, that is, securing an acquittal by convincing jurors to disregard the evidence and law in favor of their own personal feelings of justice. They argue that “the defendant should be precluded from raising irrelevant political issues” which might “improperly suggest to the jury that it should base its verdict on something other than the evidence at trial.”
Toward that end, they seek to exclude a broad swath of evidence which maps almost perfectly onto Trump’s motions to compel and to dismiss for selective prosecution.
There’s much more explanation and analysis at the Public Notice link.
Two legal minds weighed in on what the Supreme Court might do about states dropping Trump’s from their ballots.
Adam Liptak at the New York Times: How the Supreme Court May Rule on Trump’s Presidential Run.
The Supreme Court, battered by ethics scandals, a dip in public confidence and questions about its legitimacy, may soon have to confront a case as consequential and bruising as Bush v. Gore, the 2000 decision that handed the presidency to George W. Bush.
Until 10 days ago, the justices had settled into a relatively routine term. Then the Colorado Supreme Court declared that former President Donald J. Trump was ineligible to hold office because he had engaged in an insurrection. On Thursday, relying on that court’s reasoning, an election official in Maine followed suit.
An appeal of the Colorado ruling has already reached the justices, and they will probably feel compelled to weigh in. But they will act in the shadow of two competing political realities.
Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani, born Sacramento, CA 1920-died New York City 2012
They will be reluctant to wrest from voters the power to assess Mr. Trump’s conduct, particularly given the certain backlash that would bring. Yet they will also be wary of giving Mr. Trump the electoral boost of an unqualified victory in the nation’s highest court.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. will doubtless seek consensus or, at least, try to avoid a partisan split of the six Republican appointees against the three Democratic ones.
He may want to explore the many paths the court could take to keep Mr. Trump on state ballots without addressing whether he had engaged in insurrection or even assuming that he had.
Among them: The justices could rule that congressional action is needed before courts can intervene, that the constitutional provision at issue does not apply to the presidency or that Mr. Trump’s statements were protected by the First Amendment.
“I expect the court to take advantage of one of the many available routes to avoid holding that Trump is an insurrectionist who therefore can’t be president again,” said Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a law professor at Harvard.
Read the rest at The New York Times.
Shan Wu at The Daily Beast: Here’s What SCOTUS Should Do With the Trump Ballot Cases.
The U.S. Supreme Court needs to understand that the disqualification of former President Donald J. Trump under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment from running again for President of the United States is going exactly as it should. The Maine Secretary of State ruled in an administrative proceeding that Trump is disqualified, and the Colorado Supreme Court ruled similarly.
Both states followed the law set forth in the U.S. Constitution that anyone who once took an oath to support the Constitution but then “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to enemies of the same” cannot again serve our country. But four other states (Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, California) came out the other way, while fourteen other states (Alaska, Arizona, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming) still have disqualification cases pending. This sets up a potential crazy quilt map of states where Trump is on the ballot in some state but not in others. There is nothing wrong with this. It’s federalism at work.
Under the Constitution, the states have primary power over administering federal elections with Congress also possessing authority to regulate how the elections are run—voter registration being an example. So, the fact that who can run, who can vote and the “time place and manner” in which voting takes place varies from state to state is normal—and, arguably, the high court need not concern itself with these issues.
Woman and Cats, Will Barnet, born Beverly, MA 1911-died New York City 2012
Given this, SCOTUS does not have to take the ultimate appeal of any of these cases. Its discretion to take cases is complete, and letting the different cases stand would be an unreviewable decision on their part that would both keep them out of a repeat of their gross interference in the 2000 presidential election where the high court, not the people, made George W. Bush the 43rd President, and perhaps staunch the bleed out of their credibility. But the justices—liberal and conservative alike—are unlikely to be able to resist the glamour of taking on a case that can decide who will be president in 2024, and most legal experts believe they will take on the case.
If the justices do take on the cases, then they should limit what issues they decide to the ones that most clearly relate to Constitutional interpretation. Chief among those is the question of whether the president of the United States is an “officer” of the United States since some—including Trump—argue that the President is not an officer of the United States, and therefore the disqualification provision does not apply.
The justices should dispose of this question by holding that the President is an officer of the United States. To conclude otherwise begs the question of what is the president then? Trump would like the answer to be that the president is an emperor or a king rather than a mere officer serving the Constitution, and that’s what SCOTUS would be anointing him if it concludes that presidents do not hold office.
Read more analysis at The Daily Beast.
I hope everyone is having a nice, peaceful end-of-2023 weekend. All the best for the new year!
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