Protesters will be shot in the legs, per Trump’s previous wishes.
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It’s funny, all of the ferocious defenders of AG Garland seem to have gone strangely quiet these days…
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Very much needing a Puppy fix. thank you. To be so innocent.
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No reason surrogates can’t do this.
Surrogates names are not on the presidential ballot.
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Called the local office for Schumer yesterday. I’ll try the DC office next. Thanks!
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I called all mine. Thanks for the phone number.
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They have no problem scaling back or trashing Executive Orders from Democratic presidents.
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I am seriously concerned what happens when Trump suspends posse comitatus or actually orders seal team six, but some of the generals won’t go along. They swear an oath to the constitution or the SCs interpretation of it?
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I hate to cite Reagan but his famous quote from his speech opposing Medicare ought to apply after yesterday’s Supreme Court decision “We are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free."
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Same sentiment here. Whatever benefit this new system has, is not worth making it perform worse with the core function of being able to read and post comments. Today’s MM link from the main page showed no comments and no ability to post until 20 minutes later after refreshing the page, just like yesterday.
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If it wasn’t for “her emails” none of this would be going down. Roe would still be on the books. No Jan. 6. No book banning. Contraception in no danger…
But I guess it was worth it after all “what about her emails”. In fact…what about them?
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The sloth is my spirit animal, so I thank you for that.
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We need to not just rally behind Biden, we need to get winning majorities in Congress. The rethug membership needs to be sent to 1996 levels.
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Try left-clicking on the SEARCH icon, and typing in the article title (or a chunk of it). When that brings up the article, click on the title, and The Hive thread should open up in the current window.
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We watched Frasier reruns and Downton Abbey. Fighting continual nausea.
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It took me an hour for the same.
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Not so. Everything except trump’s effort to install Jeff Clark as acting AG is still on the table, at least for now. Roberts’ opinion – unintentionally, I’m sure – left some really wide openings for Judge Chutkan to drive the truck through. And now she has to hold a very thorough evidentiary hearing to examine everything Jack Smith has to determine what trump is and is not immune from. It will be the prosecution’s case from top to bottom, and it will all be presented in open court. This is gonna be fun.
Just for fun, I looked up the Supreme Court’s rule on return of the mandate to the lower court yesterday. I was afraid it might be something terrible like 90 days. But nope, they don’t do mandates with the lower federal courts. The clerk just sends a notice with a copy of the opinion. Judge Chutkan should have the case back in her control in very short order. Good luck, donnie!
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A Better Way To Respond To The Supreme Court’s Intolerable Immunity Decision
Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
JUL 02, 2024
∙ PAID
If you’re about my age or older, and a subscriber to this newsletter, you’re familiar with this uncanny sensation of living through a moment when history turns. It’s happened every few months or years since Bush v. Gore : First, Bush v. Gore itself. Then 9/11. The Bush torture regime. The collapse of the false case for the war in Iraq. The global financial crisis. The election of Barack Obama. Then of Donald Trump, with control of the Supreme Court again on the line. COVID-19. The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Dobbs . And now this: The Supreme Court’s whole-cloth fabrication of criminal immunity for presidents, just as the incumbent’s path to re-election is closing, and his challenger flaunts dictatorial ambition undisguised.
Of all these hinge-point moments, the latter is the grimmest and most ominous.
Yes, it means Donald Trump won’t face a real criminal trial for trying to overthrow the government in 2020 before the 2024 election, or possibly ever. But it also means much more than that. It means the Supreme Court’s six Republican appointees have lined up behind Samuel Alito, who was recently caught on a live mic explaining his view of power in America as factional, because “one side or the other is going to win.” They’ve chosen their side, with the party that brought them to power. They have chosen to embody the warning Brett Kavanaugh screamed at Senate Democrats before Senate Republicans confirmed him to the high court for life: “What goes around comes around.”
We can infer this not simply because they invented “official acts immunity” to protect President Trump from prosecution, but through the wider context. They did it knowing he’s a criminal, after he was convicted of 34 felonies in state court, because he pleaded with them to, and because he has promised to abuse powers in ways that will require him to enjoy immunity from criminal law after a second term. They know all this about him and decided to provide him a roadmap to dictatorship anyhow. They want him to be president again, this time fully unconstrained. And the real tell is they did it despite certain obvious ways it conflicts with their other, radical holdings.
Joe Biden should want to expose those contradictions, and he can.
Uncertain as the future of Biden’s candidacy is right now, and alien as raw power politics are to him, he is still president and likely will be for at least six and a half more months. He is also now absolutely or presumptively immune from later prosecution for “official acts.” And though he should not use this power immorally, it would be immoral of him to cede it entirely to Republicans and their corrupt leader.
IMMUNITY LOVES COMPANY
Unfortunately, that seems to be his intent. “I know I will respect the limits of the presidential powers, as I have for three and a half years,” Biden said Monday night, as though the Supreme Court hadn’t just removed those limits. “But any president, including Donald Trump, will now be free to ignore the law.”
It amounts to a promise not to use the presidency’s vast new powers, but a warning that his opponent will exercise no such restraint. The political logic of conceding unilaterally to two sets of rules is to create contrast: You can trust me, you can’t trust him. But as a bargaining proposition, it’s terribly weak.
By way of analogy, when Republicans made clear that they would oppose any national effort to ban partisan gerrymandering—that they would instead to gerrymander aggressively wherever they could, while decrying Democratic gerrymandering in blue states—Democrats could have stood on pure principle and unilaterally disarmed. Instead, they did something more suited to the circumstance: They advanced (or attempted to advance) their own partisan gerrymanders, while running simultaneously on a plan to make nonpartisan gerrymandering the law nationwide: We fix this problem for everyone, or we fix it for no one.
The same principle should apply here: Biden could introduce a plan to restore accountability to the presidency, and implement a simultaneous plan to wield his new immunity to advance the common good.
It’s perversely liberating that every path forward for Democrats now reads like some bizzaro-Sorkin fantasy. But even a scenario in which Biden disavows his new immunity powers and limps to the election, unbowed by calls for him to yield to another nominee reads like political melodrama that ends either in Shakespearean tragedy or triumph.
With no “normal” way to respond, Biden should endeavor to make the Republican justices regret their conduct.
He should do this whether he accepts the Democratic nomination next month or not. In many ways, it’d be better for him to demonstrate the new and fearsome extent of presidential power as a lame duck, rather than as an incumbent candidate, diffusing political accountability. The Democratic nominee will have clean hands, and Biden will be liberated from fear of backlash to govern with enormous power—but in the public interest.
Consider that just days before placing the president above the law, the Supreme Court also called much of the functioning of the executive branch into question. They overturned the doctrine of “Chevron deference,” under which expert policymakers in the executive branch were empowered to interpret and implement the text of ambiguous legislation. As of last week, that power has been arrogated to unelected judges (or, in exceedingly rare circumstances, elected-branch trifectas), such that many executive-branch regulatory functions will be paralyzed, and ultimately voided by the court.
It’s only a small stretch to say the new Supreme doctrine holds that the president is a king but also that a powerful executive branch is illegal.
The contradiction is obvious, and Biden can magnify it across many realms of federal power. To take one example, imagine the following scenario: Joe Biden interprets the law (or restates his old interpretation of the law) to empower him to forgive student debt en masse , reviving a program the Supreme Court already threw out.
He encourages eligible beneficiaries to apply for it, and assures them that their forgiven debt won’t be collected while he’s in office. Republican-aligned interest groups quickly sue, seeking a nationwide injunction, which they’re quickly awarded by a Republican-appointed judge. Joe Biden ignores the injunction as unconstitutional in itself. He’s held in contempt of court, and ripe for impeachment. The House impeaches him. But because all of his actions invoke official powers, most if not all Democratic senators refuse to vote to convict him. In so doing they will have effectively sanctioned Biden’s contempt, and he can leave his rules in place without fear of consequences down the line. Student loan forgiveness might eventually be withdrawn, but only if a Republican wins an election and reimposes the debts.
Taking just one example undersells Biden’s new potential to govern aggressively, because he can do something similar in every realm, imposing whatever regulatory regime he wants, overwhelming Congress and the courts. Treating Supreme Court opinions regarding the scope of his power as advisory would quite obviously be an official, rather than personal, act. He can now do it with impunity. He can pardon civil servants and appointees who fear they won’t enjoy his immunity. The number of votes required to affirm his agenda is now 34—the minimum required for him to be acquitted in an impeachment trial.
And if the Republican justices get mad? Well, they can simply overrule themselves.
LEGITIMATE POLITICAL DISCORD
Biden could obviously go much, much further than that. The scope of potential abuses is vast.
Well short of dystopian Seal Team Six fantasies, Biden could order Jack Smith to compile his evidence of Trump’s malfeasance into a report, and release it promptly. He could order the Justice Department to charge all of Trump’s co-conspirators in the January 6 case—the ones who do not have immunity—who were omitted from the Trump indictment in order to move the trial along more quickly. Well, since that’s out the window…
Biden could release all of the government’s Epstein files. He could withdraw Donald Trump’s Secret Service protection, insofar as the detail requires taxpayers to funnel money into Trump’s pockets. He can impose severe policy consequences on states that have banned abortion. He can order federal agents to block all of the RNC’s widely touted voter-intimidation and vote-count manipulation schemes. He can impound appropriations to the Supreme Court. Hell, he can probably order a military tribunal for the untried leaders of the January 6 insurrection.
And to make clear that this madness has an endpoint, he can promise to re-establish a healthy balance of powers if he’s elected. He likely can not restructure courts on his own even with this new immunity—at least not without veering into the tyrants’ realm of false imprisonment or assassination. But he can treat the limits courts have imposed on his presidency as non-binding, and promise that he’ll sign legislation—I’d call it the Supreme Court Legitimacy Restoration Act—if he (or his Democratic successor) has unified control of government next year. If Republicans recognize their own error and agree to correct it, they’d be more than welcome to pass a bill like that now.
The point is not that dictatorial power is good. It’s horrific. The point is that dictatorial power now exists because the Supreme Court created it. It will continue to exist unless Democrats win the next election. And under these dire circumstances, Biden should feel compelled to use it as necessary both to advance admirable civic goals and to maximize the odds that this rotten new regime is short-lived.
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Same here!! We get points for being honest about our intrinsic energy levels.
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I think they can aim higher up, now.
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