Lazy Caturday Reads

Girl reading with a cat, by Aaron Shikler

Happy Caturday!!

I was really depressed on Thursday night after the “debate.” I couldn’t stop scrolling Twitter and obsessing on the horrible CNN “moderators,” who might as well have been replaced with cards with their idiotic questions on them. But it never occurred to me that Biden should step down and be replaced by “someone else.”

I had a mostly sleepless night, but by morning I had calmed down quite a bit; and after I watched Biden’s energetic speech in South Carolina, I felt much better. Here’s the way he ended that speech:

From NBC News: ‘I don’t debate as well as I used to’: Biden tries to move on from his tough debate at an energized rally.

RALEIGH, N.C. — President Joe Biden tried to turn his disappointing debate performance into a rallying cry for his supporters at an event on Friday, painting himself as down but not out as some in his party whisper about replacing him atop the ticket.

“I know I’m not a young man. I don’t walk as easy as I used to. I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to. I don’t debate as well as I used to, but I know what I do know — I know how to tell the truth!” an energetic Biden said, nodding at the criticism he received following Thursday night’s debate while contrasting it with assessments about the accuracy of several statements by former President Donald Trump.

“When you get knocked down, you get back up,” Biden yelled, to a cheering crowd

“I intend to win this state in November,” Biden said about North Carolina. “We win here, we win the election.”

The campaign event, in a state that hasn’t voted Democrat for a presidential candidate since Barack Obama in 2008, comes after what many political observers and some Democrats have said was a poor debate performance by Biden Thursday night against former President Donald Trump. 

About last night, Biden said on Friday, “I spent 90 minutes on the stage and debated the guy who has the morals of an alley cat.”

Though he coughed at times during Friday’s remarks, Biden’s demeanor was more lively, delivering attack lines and riling up the crowd.

A small child reading to a cat by Emile Munier

Biden said that when he thought about Trump’s 34 felony convictions, his sexual assault on E. Jean Carroll, and being fined millions of dollars for business fraud, “I thought to myself, Donald Trump isn’t just a convicted felon — Donald Trump is a one-man crime wave.”

A senior Biden adviser said the campaign team worked closely with the president Friday morning to draft his closing remarks in Raleigh about the debate. It was not, the adviser said, a response to negative coverage or the calls growing in the party for him to consider stepping aside. Biden, the adviser said, knows full well he didn’t deliver the performance he needed to last night and knew he needed to directly address it Friday.

This is what Barack Obama tweeted yesterday:

Bad debate nights happen. Trust me, I know. But this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life and someone who only cares about himself. Between someone who tells the truth; who knows right from wrong and will give it to the American people straight — and someone who lies through his teeth for his own benefit. Last night didn’t change that, and it’s why so much is at stake in November. http://joebiden.com

Biden’s performance in the debate was dreadful, but it was just one night; and as Lawrence O’Donnell pointed out on MSNBC last night, very few people actually watched it. Probably most of the people who watched were political junkies like us.

This morning I see that lots of pundits are still calling on Biden to step down. Most of the young white men who are calling for a replacement (e.g. Ezra Klein, Greg Sargent) have no good suggestions for how this would happen and how that person would get on the state ballots and raise millions in donations to fund his/her campaign. They mostly want to pass over Kamala Harris too. Can you imagine the turmoil that would cause in the Democratic base, which is dominated by African Americans and women?

The last time the Democrats replaced a presumptive nominee was in 1968. Ezra Klein probably isn’t old enough to remember what happened then. Click below to watch a sample video of the Chicago riots.

There was a “police riot” outside and chaos on the Convention floor. Hubert Humphrey was chosen, even though he didn’t enter a single primary. He went on to lose to Richard Nixon, and the rest is painful history. And this year the Democratic Convention is once again in Chicago!

I didn’t realize that the new rules that George McGovern pushed through in 1972 changed the nomination process so much that replacing a nominee would much harder now than in 1968. Political scientist Rachel Bitecofer explains on Twitter:

[O]nce the direct primary evolved from the McGovern-Fraser commission after the 1968 shitshow the conventions really lost their institutional role. It is an officiating ceremony that *could* get disrupted given the rules but which neither party could ever really do bc so much of the state level infrastructure runs way ahead of the formal moment of nomination. Thus it would guarantee destruction to broker a convention. If Election Twitter had bothered to get academic training I have, they would understand that too. Military ballots mail months ahead of the election. It’d be like nuking ourselves trying to change him out. Even if he wanted us to.

In my opinion, we have to keep ridin’ with Biden. 

A couple more examples of pushback on the “he should step down” crowd:

Mediaite: Biden Team Hits Back After Debate With Whopping ’50 Lies Trump Told On The Debate Stage.’

President Joe Biden’s campaign hit back after a widely-panned debate performance by listing a whopping 50 “lies” ex-President Donald Trump “told from the debate stage.”

President Biden and Trump finally went head-to-head at CNN’s debate Thursday night in the earliest general election presidential matchup ever, and the reviews are in. After some deadly early stumbles, President Biden’s performance improved, but not enough to ward off abject panic from some Democrats, and calls for him to drop out.

Vice President Kamala Harris made the rounds after the debate, including during CNN’s Debate Night in America coverage to defend Biden’s “slow start” and to assail Trump over his many falsehoods.

And shortly after midnight, Biden-Harris 2024 released a memo listing 50 of them:

All 50 of Trump’s Lies

16 More Lies Than Felonies, 48 More Lies than Impeachments

Here it is. Every single lie Donald Trump told on the debate stage.

He lied about the economy. He lied about foreign policy. He lied about his record. He lied about his crimes. He lied about women’s rights. He lied about immigration. He lied about his lies. He lied about our soldiers he disrespected. He lied about law enforcement attacked by his supporters. He lied about who he has had sex with. He lied about his racism. He lied about our country.

That is what the substance of this debate was about: Donald Trump, a liar and a felon vs. Joe Biden, a fighter for our families.

Read the entire list at Mediaite.

Huffpost: ‘Chill The F**k Out’: John Fetterman Urges Democrats To Stick With Joe Biden.

Before I get to more of today’s news, here is a review of Rachel Bitcofer’s (quoted above) book, Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game.

Paul Rosenberg at Salon: Rachel Bitecofer’s tough-love lesson for Democrats: Time to Fight Dirty. (The article was published in February.)

America’s future — as a multiracial democracy or an ethno-nationalist authoritarian state — is very much on the ballot this year, as a wide range of observers have noted. But you’d be hard-pressed to see that reality reflected in the mainstream media, much less from the mouths of the randomly-selected potential voters interviewed on the ground, the folks who will supposedly determine the outcome in November. It’s a dire situation that political scientist turned election strategist Rachel Bitecofer tackles head-on in her new book, “Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game.” She describes it as “a battle-tested self-help book for America’s fragile democracy.”

Back in 2019 I first noted Bitecofer’s acumen for election predictions, shown in her forecast of Democrats’ big 2017 gains in the Virginia legislature and then her spot-on prediction of the 2018 blue wave, based on fundamental voter demographics and her perception of partisan polarization and negative partisanship, rather than following the polls. In 2021, I interviewed Bitecofer about her evolution from academic into brand messenger, as she put those methods to work in fighting to counter the expected “red tsunami” of 2022. The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision and its aftermath helped shift a substantial number of campaigns along the lines she predicted, as she lays out in the book, drawing on insights from decades of political science research.

Bitecofer’s most basic point is simple: Democrats as a whole — despite their “reality-based” self-image — have been unable or unwilling “to accept that the American voter is, at best, rough clay,” and to work with it accordingly. On the other hand, she writes, “Republicans have long understood this and have built an electioneering system that shapes the electorate and meets voters where they actually are.” The point of “Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts” is to convince Democrats to change their strategic approach while there’s still time to rescue democracy, and to focus relentlessly on the threat posed by Republicans in terms that hit voters where they are. 

The good news is that some Democrats have already made that shift, while others are groping their way towards it. But to be effective, this needs to be comprehensive, bottom-to-top systemic change, Bitecofer believes, and that hasn’t happened yet. She also discusses the effects of the right-wing media ecosystem, and the think-tank and donor infrastructures that underlie it, to paint a fuller picture of America’s perilous political situation. But in fact, she argues, Democrats and their allies can turn the tide by focusing on low-hanging fruit — the things that are easiest to change. Salon interviewed her with a particular focus on those most immediate concerns and the 2024 election. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Head over to Salon to read the interview.

More stories to check out today:

Dan Froomkin at Press Watch: CNN fails the nation.

The signal failure of the American media during the Trump era has been the refusal to hold Donald Trump accountable for his behavior – and, in particular, his endless lies.

That has never been more obvious than it was at Thursday night’s presidential debate.

The CNN moderators who should have corrected Trump’s outrageous and easily disproved assertions – about immigration, abortion, Covid, Jan. 6, NATO, you name it – instead thanked him obsequiously.

Girl reading with a cat, by Merle Keller

The result was a debate where performance meant everything, and substance meant nothing.

Biden’s performance was stumbling and inept – highly concerning to anyone who fears a Trump victory.

But Trump’s incessant lying, refusal to answer direct questions, and general lunacy would have been the other major takeaway from the debate if the moderators had done their jobs instead of acting like polite potted plants.

They even let him know ahead of time that they wouldn’t do live fact-checking – an obvious and colossal mistake that I decried earlier this week. That gave Trump the green light to let loose without consequences.

Twitter (I still call it that) is not a reliable forum for much of anything these days, but it was alive and well Thursday night as people I follow realized, in real time, what a debacle CNN’s no-fact-checking rule had become.

Richard Stengel wrote: “A debate where one candidate flagrantly lies again and again without a mechanism for correction is not a debate.”

David Rothkopf wrote: “The lack of challenges from moderators has the effect of making it appear that the lies flowing from Trump’s mouth are the same as the facts in which Biden is dealing.”

Jessica Valenti wrote: “I’m sorry, but Trump just claimed that Democrats allow ‘after birth’ abortion and the moderators’ only response was ‘thank you’???”

Ruth Ben-Ghiat wrote: “The debate is about information warfare for Trump. As I said earlier today, you don’t let a proven propagandist on stage without stopping him when he lies. Instant refutation is key. Have we learned nothing in the last 9 years?”

Will Bunch wrote: “CNN’s lack of fact checking and wooden questions are just as bad for democracy as everything else that’s happening.”

Read more comments at the link.

Josh Fiallo at The Daily Beast: Bannon Is ‘Quite Concerned’ About His New Prison Digs: Source.

MAGA loyalist Steve Bannon is dreading his soon-to-be-reality of being housed alongside sex offenders and violent criminals when he reports to prison in Connecticut on Monday, a source close to him told The Daily Beast on Friday.

Bannon, 70, was told to face the music on Friday when the nation’s highest court declined to indulge his pleas for a last-minute reprieve. With a one-sentence ruling, the Supreme Court ordered that he could no longer delay his sentence while he appeals the conviction.

Woman reading, by Will Barnet

Bannon is set to spend four months at FCI Danbury—a low-level prison in Connecticut where he’ll be housed alongside people convicted of sexual and violent crimes. The source said that’s something Bannon is “quite concerned with.”

His charges stem from him blowing off a subpoena from the House committee investigating the Capitol riot. He has spent two years since then trying every avenue of appeal, arguing that he was only following the advice of his lawyer, who told him then-President Donald Trump had evoked executive privilege. (Multiple courts ruled that there was no executive privilege since Trump had already left office.)

Bannon, however, insists publicly that he has no regrets and will only benefit from a prison sentence, according to ABC.

“I’m a political prisoner… It won’t change me. It will not suppress my voice. My voice will not be suppressed when I’m there,” he told This Week co-anchor Jonathan Karl.

“If it took me going to prison to finally get the House to start to move, to start to delegitimize the illegitimate J6 committee, then, hey, guess what, my going to prison is worth it,” he said.

Politico prisoner? I don’t think so.

Joyce Vance is always a good read. From Civil Discourse: Thursday in the Courts.

These days, it’s a race to the bottom to see who can move more slowly to decide important issues related to the former president that are in front of them: Judge Aileen Cannon or the Supreme Court. It is a tense moment in our history, abetted by a slow-moving federal judiciary.

The Supreme Court has yet to decide whether Donald Trump will be cloaked in presidential immunity for his efforts to steal an election he lost. That’s something that seems completely nonsensical when you try to write it out in a sentence. But it has apparently kept the Court, or at least some of the Justices, tied up in knots for months now.

Hugo Lowell at the Guardian reported today that DOJ still holds out a slender hope that, depending on how the Supreme Court decides the case and whether it sends it back to the Court of Appeals or to Judge Chutkan, there could be a very narrow potential trial window in September. The sun, moon, and stars would have to all align for that to happen now. But, it didn’t have to be this way. We are here because this Supreme Court didn’t act expeditiously like the Court did with President Nixon or in Bush v. Gore.

Judge Cannon, too, is allergic to ruling on matters before her when it comes to Donald Trump. Earlier this week, she heard argument from the lawyers on the Special Counsel’s motion to change Trump’s conditions of pre-trial release—the government wants the Judge to prohibit him from continuing to say the FBI was out to assassinate him when they executed the search warrant at Mar-a-Lago. That’s something that even his own lawyer was forced to concede isn’t true in court.

Elizabeth Allan Fraser, Seated Reading with a Cat, by Patrick Allan Fraser

Rather than making a decision (which would be immediately appealed by the losing party to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals), Judge Cannon has ordered another go-round of briefing by the lawyers with a due date on July 5….

Judge Cannon is also going to reconsider the decision made by Judge Beryl Howell, in Washington, D.C., that the government is entitled, because of the crime-fraud exception to the attorney-client privilege, to use notes kept by one of Trump’s attorneys to prove the former president’s intent to obstruct the investigation into his retention of classified material. The hearing before Judge Howell was detailed and Trump was provided with the opportunity to make all of the same arguments he will raise again before Cannon. It’s surprising to see a judge relitigate an issue between the same parties that a court previously decided, but Judge Cannon wrote that because the first decision took place before Trump was indicted, she is entitled to revisit the issue. This issue has been pending for some time and Judge Cannon seems to be in no hurry to rule.

A Judge’s job is, literally, to make decisions. We see precious little of that going on in the Southern District of Florida. Delay. Delay. Delay.

This slow-walking of the cases essential to holding the former president accountable came to a crescendo just as Trump and Biden took to the debate stage in Atlanta. Trump lied shamelessly. With no fact-checking, it sounded a lot like a typical Trump stump speech. For instance, Trump lied and said he was responsible for lowering Insulin prices. That’s a bald-faced lie—it was done by Biden. But it went unchecked. President Biden’s performance was off; his raspy voice sounded like he was coming down with something, and especially early on, he didn’t convey the same State of the Union speech energy people hoped to see tonight.

Nicole Santa Cruz at ProPublica: U.S. Supreme Court Ruling Will Allow More Aggressive Homeless Encampment Removals.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to give cities broader latitude to punish people for sleeping in public when they have no other options will likely result in municipalities taking more aggressive action to remove encampments, including throwing away more of homeless people’s property, advocates and legal experts said.

In its 6-3 decision on Friday, the conservative majority upheld Grants Pass, Oregon’s ban on camping, finding laws that criminalize sleeping in public spaces do not violate the Eighth Amendment’s protections against cruel and unusual punishment.

Writing for the majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch said that the nation’s policy on homelessness shouldn’t be dictated by federal judges, rather such decisions should be left to state and local leaders. “Homelessness is complex,” Gorsuch wrote. “Its causes are many. So may be the public policy responses required to address it.”

“At bottom, the question this case presents is whether the Eighth Amendment grants federal judges primary responsibility for assessing those causes and devising those responses. It does not,” he wrote.

A lower court ruling that prevented cities from criminalizing the conduct of people who are “involuntarily homeless” forced the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit to confront what it means to be homeless with no place to go and what shelter a city must provide, Gorsuch wrote. “Those unavoidable questions have plunged courts and cities across the Ninth Circuit into waves of litigation,” he wrote.

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that, for some people, sleeping outside is a “biological necessity” and it’s possible to balance issues facing local governments with constitutional principles and the humanity of homeless people. “Instead, the majority focuses almost exclusively on the needs of local governments and leaves the most vulnerable in our society with an impossible choice: Either stay awake or be arrested,” she wrote.

Criminalizing homelessness can “cause a destabilizing cascade of harm,” Sotomayor added. When a person is arrested or separated from their belongings, the items that are frequently destroyed include important documents needed for accessing jobs and housing or items required for work such as uniforms and bicycles, Sotomayor wrote.

Brandi Buchman at Law and Crime:  The Trump Docket: SCOTUS hands victory to Jan. 6 rioters, but Trump should hold off on celebrating.

With the Supreme Court handing down its ruling in Fischer v. United States, there are many convicted Jan. 6 rioters who have something to celebrate this weekend — but whether the same can be said for Donald Trump isn’t so clear.

Undoubtedly, the Fischer ruling is a win for Trump politically speaking: Now he can hit the campaign trail and cite the high court’s opinion that federal prosecutors misapplied their efforts when charging some of his supporters.

But no matter what he says — or how he may or may not distort the legally-complex decision itself — there’s still the problem of his own case for alleged crimes connected to Jan. 6. The high court said Friday that its last opinions for the term will be released on Monday and by all expectations, that means that the question of whether Trump has so-called “total immunity” from his Jan. 6 case is imminent.

But short of receiving that immunity, Trump still faces four charges in Washington, D.C., two of which are related to obstruction….

The way the justices in Fischer linked prosecution of the statute to documents and records, specifically, matters because this is part of what underlies Trump’s prosecution in Washington, D.C.: Prosecutors argue he acted corruptly and arranged a set of shadow electoral slates, using falsified records in seven states, to certify him as the winner. In his original indictment for the Jan. 6 prosecution, Smith wrote that Trump was “attempting to mimic the procedures that the legitimate electors were supposed to follow under the Constitution and other federal and state laws.”

You can also read a longer piece on this by Richard Hasan at Slate: That Big Jan. 6 Supreme Court Decision Is Not the Win for Trump People Think It Is.

That’s it for me today. I hope you all are having a nice weekend, despite the disappointing debate.