Incentives

No Sift next week. The next new posts will appear on May 13.

If someone with those kinds of powers, the most powerful person in the world, with the greatest amount of authority, could go into office knowing that there would be no potential penalty for committing crimes, I’m trying to understand what the disincentive is from turning the Oval Office into the seat of criminal activity in this country. … If the potential for criminal liability is taken off the table, wouldn’t there be a significant risk that future presidents would be emboldened to commit crimes with abandon while they’re in office?

– Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson during the discussion of presidential immunity

This week’s featured posts are “The Manhattan case against Trump is stronger than I expected“, “What to make of student protests?“, and “The Supreme Court is breaking America’s faith in the law“.

This week everybody was talking about student protests

This is the subject of a featured post.

After I pushed the button on that piece, I noticed this tweet by GOP opinion-shaper Frank Luntz:

Last night at the [White House Correspondents] dinner, I spoke privately with 4 members of Congress: 2 Dems and 2 GOPers. All 4 are big foreign policy players and all 4 are strongly pro-Israel in every way. However… All 4 spoke with significant and serious concern (bordering on anger) about Israel’s impact on humanitarian aid in Gaza. None of them called for a ceasefire, but all of them were deeply critical of what they believe is Israel’s interference and lack of cooperation in getting aid to the Palestinian people. For more than a decade, some Israeli leaders dismissed what was happening on college campuses. They were wrong then, and they would be wrong now to dismiss this warning about what’s happening in Congress.

and Trump’s trial

This is covered in another featured post. I’ll include here some details that didn’t fit into that article.

The trial has given Trump many things to complain about, from the courtroom being cold to the judge’s gag order that takes away “my constitutional rights to speak“, i.e. fairly ineffectively preventing him from trying to intimidate witnesses and jurors.

His weirdest complaint, though, was that the trial prevented him from being with his wife Melania on her birthday Friday. The court proceedings ended for the day at 4:30, so there was plenty of time for the Trumps to have a night on the town, if only Melania had decided to leave their Florida home and come to their Trump Tower apartment to support her husband during his trial. But clearly it is Judge Merchan’s cruelty and not Melania’s indifference that is keeping them apart.

Another reality-denying Trump complaint is that his supporters are being kept away from the trial. He posted:

Thousands of people were turned away from the Courthouse in Lower Manhattan by steel stanchions and police, literally blocks from the tiny side door from where I enter and leave.

None of that is true. In fact, MAGA supporters have almost unanimously ignored his pleas for them to act out. More than a year ago, Trump predicted “potential death and destruction” if he were charged in this case. Again and again, he has warned that the American people would not stand for any attempt to put him on trial, and has done his best to incite January 6 style violence. But it hasn’t worked. Every day, a mere handful of docile Trump supporters show up outside the courthouse.

and the Supreme Court

People who believe in our legal system generally found Thursday’s discussion of Trump’s “absolute immunity” claim not just annoying or enraging, but depressing. Our highest court is corrupt. There’s just no getting around that any more. I discuss why in the third featured post.

One aside, concerning several cases discussed this week: The arguments underline a basic difference between how liberals and conservatives think: Liberals are more grounded in reality. Again and again, the liberal justices referenced things that are actually happening, while the conservative justices were far more interested in imagining scenarios that could happen, but are highly unlikely.

I’ve made this observation before, with respect to guns.

If you’ve ever wandered into an argument over guns and gun control, you’ve undoubtedly noticed that the two sides talk past each other. Proponents of gun control quote statistics: how many more shooting deaths we have in America than there are in countries with fewer guns, how many more suicides or police deaths there are in well-armed states, and so on.

Pro-gun advocates are more likely to tell stories, and often those stories are dark what-if fantasies: What if home invaders came to kill you, kidnap your baby, or rape your teen-age daughter? What if you were a hostage in a bank robbery? What if you were at a restaurant or grocery store when terrorists broke in and started killing people? Wouldn’t you wish you had a gun then?

Such stories are easily stretched to indict even the mildest forms of gun control, like limiting magazines to ten shots: Picture your wife hiding in a closet with a handgun. Before she hid, she already gotten off a few shots at the invaders, and now she’s not sure how many shots she has left. Don’t you wish now you’d been able to buy her a gun with a larger magazine?

In the featured post on the Court, I described how Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh wanted to discuss just about every possibility other than the one in front of them, where a grand jury has found probable cause to charge Trump with crimes.

Something similar happened in the Court’s discussion of how the federal EMTALA law conflicted with Idaho’s abortion law. Conservative justices wanted to talk about bizarre hypotheticals in which deceitful women could lie about their suicidal impulses in order to get late-term abortions. Liberals wanted to talk about actual cases in which women with problem pregnancies have to wait until they are near death to get care.

You can see it across the board: Men might claim to be women to get into your daughter’s bathroom. Has that ever happened? Well, maybe not, but it could. Librarians could be grooming your children for pedophilia. Can you name one? Transwomen might drive “real” women out of women’s sports. Well, we just saw the NCAA basketball tournament. Is that happening? On and on.

and new indictments in Arizona

This week Arizona indicted a number of people involved in the Trump fake-elector plot, including all the electors themselves, Mark Meadows, Rudy Giuliani, and a few other Trump administration insiders.

and you also might be interested in …

Harvey Weinstein’s rape conviction was overturned by the New York court of appeals, on the grounds that the trial judge allowed the jury to hear too much about crimes that weren’t directly related. The state has the option to try him again, and in the meantime New York can send him to California, where he faces a 16-year sentence.

It’s a tricky point of the law, which comes up again in the current Trump trial: You’re supposed to be on trial for the specific crime in the indictment, and not for being a bad person in general. But if other crimes indicate a pattern of behavior, they might be relevant. So a judge has to decide: How does the illustrative value of a defendant’s previous bad behavior balance against the possibility of prejudicing the jury against him?

Texas Senator Ted Cruz may have thought his arrangement with iHeart Media circumvented both Senate rules banning outside jobs and election laws preventing candidates from coordinating with or directly raising money for their super PACs. But he may have gotten a little too clever.

Here’s the arrangement: Cruz hosts a three-episodes-a-week podcast, which would be a full-time job for a lot of people. He does it “for free” in the sense that he does not get direct payments from iHeart, which carries the podcast and sells advertising on it. However, iHeart does make regular payments to Cruz’ super PAC, which so far have totaled at least $630K and constitute more than a third of the PAC’s total contributions.

It’s undeniable that this violates the intention of the laws regulating super PACs. But it’s possible Cruz has found an unethical loophole in the law. No one can say for sure at the moment, because Cruz and iHeart refuse to reveal the exact terms of their agreement.

One line of the Texas Observer article on this strikes me as hilarious:

Cruz claims he does the podcast as a service to the public by pulling back the curtain on corruption in Washington.

I can’t argue with him there.

BTW, you might wonder how Cruz’ podcast differs from a Substack blog I often quote: Quick Update by Rep. Jeff Jackson (D-NC). The difference is that Jackson’s blog generates no revenue: subscriptions are free and there are no ads.

President Biden at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner:

The 2024 election is in full swing, and yes, age is an issue. I’m a grown man running against a six-year-old.

I don’t know what to make of South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem’s account of killing her 14-month-old dog Cricket. She tells the story in her new book No Going Back, which isn’t out yet. The Guardian, which got an advance copy, summarizes:

She includes her story about the ill-fated Cricket, she says, to illustrate her willingness, in politics as well as in South Dakota life, to do anything “difficult, messy and ugly” if it simply needs to be done.

Maybe this is where the Republican Party is these days. In 2022, many GOP candidates carried or shot guns in their ads. So maybe the next step is to show you’re not afraid to kill. Or maybe Noem is sending a message specifically to Trump, who is said to be considering her as a possible VP candidate: Mike Pence wasn’t willing to betray the Republic for you, but I’ll do whatever ugly things need doing. (And Trump famously hates dogs.)

and let’s close with something ominous

I suspect I’m not the only one who sees himself Tom Gauld’s “To Be Read” cartoon.

April 29, 2024 – 12:43 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (4)

The Supreme Court is breaking America’s faith in the law

It’s no longer possible to explain the justices’ behavior
without accounting for partisan politics and corruption.

Hacks? Back in 2021 at the University of Louisville, Justice Amy Comey Barrett addressed criticism of the Court she had joined less than a year before:

“My goal today is to convince you that this court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks,” the conservative Barrett said, according to the Louisville Courier Journal. She said the high court is defined by “judicial philosophies” instead of personal political views. “Judicial philosophies are not the same as political parties,” Barrett said.

Most of the legal experts who have appeared on MSNBC or CNN since then have more-or-less given that view the benefit of the doubt. Sure, some things have been hard to explain. In particular, the Court’s “originalist” rulings — “originalism” being one of the philosophies Barrett cited — have been suspiciously selective about the “history” that informed their majority opinions, and overall the originalist justices have shown little interest in history as it is taught by professional historians. On its shadow docket, the Court was far more responsive to the Trump administration’s requests to move quickly than it has been to the Biden administration. And then there’s Clarence Thomas, who takes six-figure gifts from billionaire “friends” he had never met before he ascended to the Court.

But hackery? No. Surely not. This is the Supreme Court we’re talking about.

These talking-head legal experts are almost entirely institutionalists: ex-prosecutors, retired judges, law professors, and even one ex-Acting-Solicitor-General. They’re deeply invested in the idea that the legal system works.

They’ve had a tough week.

Thursday, the Court heard oral arguments on Donald Trump’s claim that he has “absolute immunity” for anything he did as president. That claim is holding up his federal prosecution in the January 6 case.

Partisan delay. It’s already been clear that the Court has been shading the process in Trump’s favor. The original purpose of this immunity claim was to delay Trump’s trial past the election, so that he can order the Justice Department to dismiss the case if he becomes president again. Both the district court and the appellate court found no legal merit in “absolute immunity” — or in any kind of immunity that would cover this case — and the Supreme Court didn’t have to hear the appeal at all.

But instead, the Court has dragged its feet. Back in December, Jack Smith asked the Court to hear the appeal immediately, skipping the appeals court, so that Trump’s trial could get under way. They refused, waited for the appellate ruling, and then spent weeks deciding whether to review that ruling. When they finally did decide to hear the case, they scheduled oral arguments on the last day of the term for hearing arguments, burning as much time as possible.

But still, the institutionalist commentators told us, while the conservative majority might manipulate the calendar in a partisan fashion, it wouldn’t distort the law to favor Trump. Surely it would find, as both lower courts did, that there was no legal merit in this claim.

After Thursday’s hearing, though, that outcome is seriously in doubt. The conservative justices gave Trump’s attorney a far more sympathetic hearing than he deserved.

Breaking faith. Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick expressed a disillusionment I heard from many professional commentators:

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

Former Assistant US Attorney Andrew Weissmann said, “Big picture: I’m in a very, very depressed mode.” And his podcasting cohost Mary McCord (a former Assistant Attorney General) replied “It’s been a rough several weeks of listening to Supreme Court arguments.”

Weissmann characterized the justices’ discussion of presidential immunity as “almost like a policy debate in Congress”. (It’s worth listening to this part, because you can hear the heartbreak in his voice.)

What was missing from that [discussion] was the text of the Constitution, the intent of the Framers, the history of the United States. I mean, it so belied the originalism/textualism credo of the so-called conservative justices. … And then, even within that policy debate, what was missing from the conservative justices was any record support, in terms of 200 years of history. …

It was remarkable to me the antipathy towards the actual criminal justice system that you were hearing from Alito and Gorsuch. Which was Alito saying, “You know, you can indict a ham sandwich.” I mean, this is our criminal justice system! … It was remarkable to me that you had people sitting in the Supreme Court denigrating the entire infrastructure of and edifice of our criminal justice system that they are a huge part of creating.

Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern summarized this same discussion with equal amazement and horror:

Alito had [Michael] Dreeben [representing the special prosecutor’s office] walk through the layers that protect a president from a frivolous or vindictive prosecution. Then he dismissed each one out of hand. So Dreeben said: First, you need a prosecutor who’s willing to bring charges; then you need a grand jury to indict; then there’s a criminal proceeding in open court where a jury of his peers decides whether he’s been proved guilty. And Alito just laughs it off as though it’s a big joke. Because we all know Justice Department attorneys are hacks who’ll do whatever they want, right? And a grand jury will indict a ham sandwich—nobody believes a grand jury will do anything worthwhile. And then, oh, sure a jury of his peers, like that’s going to do anything. [1]

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

And Lithwick replied:

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

For his part, bribe-taking Clarence Thomas said little, but his very presence in the room said much: His wife Ginny traded texts with Mark Meadows in the lead-up to January 6. She probably won’t be called as a witness, but she could be. Under any sane system of ethics, he should have recused himself from this case.

But this is Clarence Thomas. He has no ethics. And this is the Supreme Court, where ethical standards have no enforcement mechanism. So there he sat. He will presumably vote on this case and perhaps even write a self-serving opinion.

Restraint? Another longstanding principle of conservative jurisprudence is judicial restraint: A court should decide the case brought before it, and not make wide-ranging rulings that are not needed to decide that case.

But Thursday, the conservative justices could not be bothered to discuss the actual case — Trump’s attempt to stay in office despite losing the 2020 election. Kavanaugh said as much: “I’m not as concerned about the here and now, I’m more concerned about the future.” Gorsuch echoed: “I’m not concerned about this case, but I am concerned about future uses of the criminal law to target political opponents based on accusations about their motives.” And Alito added: “I want to talk about this in the abstract.”

These justices seemed to take for granted that this case is precisely the kind of vindictive prosecution Trump’s lawyers warned about, and to discount entirely that a president might abuse his power to stay in office illegally, as a grand jury has indicted Trump for doing. These prior assumptions are entirely political assessments of the situation. They cited no facts of the case that would point in this direction, and no legal problems with the indictment.

What happens next? What seems likely to come out of these arguments is a ruling — probably on the very last day of the term in June, continuing to burn as much time as possible — that attempts to define a doctrine that is not really needed in this case, and has not been needed in the two centuries of American history so far: drawing a line between presidential acts that are immune from subsequent prosecution and those that are not. Having drawn this line, the Court can remand the case to Judge Chutkan with instructions to apply the new doctrine. Her ruling, whatever it is, can then be appealed back up the ladder, pushing the trial well past the election.

Fly free, Mr. Trump!

Jay Kuo, however, finds hope in an ironic place: Amy Coney Barrett. Barrett, Kuo reports, actually seemed to be paying attention to the case at hand, and might be looking for a way for the legal system to do its job, rather than grind its gears until the case is moot. So perhaps it will fall to her to fashion a way around the partisan hacks whose existence she denied in 2021.

As I remarked in my piece yesterday, so much of our future, and indeed even the plight of the world, has depended on just one or a few traditional conservatives still managing to do the right, principled thing. It might happen again here, who knows?

Barrett was interested in drawing a line between a president’s private acts and his officials acts.

Okay. So, in the Special Counsel’s brief, on pages 46 and 47, he urges us, even if we assume that there’s—even if we were to decide or assume that there was some sort of immunity for official acts, that there was sufficient private acts in the indictment for the trial to go, for the case to go back and the trial to begin immediately.

Barrett outlined scenarios that included much of Trump’s indicted conduct, such as the conspiracy to present false electors to Congress. Kuo speculates that Barrett might convince Roberts and the three liberal justices to support a majority opinion along these lines.

Another possible way forward consists of Judge Chutkan taking the remand and getting creative with it. In deciding which of Trump’s acts might fit the Court’s brand-new definition of immunity, she might have to hold an evidentiary hearing — not a trial — in which much of the prosecution’s case could be presented. It would not result in a jury verdict, but at least testimony from witnesses like Mike Pence and Mark Meadows could get onto the record.

This is decidedly a second-best (or third- or fourth-best) result. In a nation with an uncorrupted Court, a full trial would be completed and a jury verdict reached before the election. But we don’t live in such a nation. At least until Democrats can win enough elections to rebalance the Court — hopefully naming honest jurists with liberal philosophies rather than just more partisan hacks who lean left rather than right — we’re stuck with the corrupt Court we have.

[1] It’s worth pointing out that juries were the difference between the legitimate performance of Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the politically motivated Barr-Trump special counselship of John Durham. Mueller obtained convictions of a number of Trump associates like Paul Manafort and Roger Stone. But Durham’s drawn-out expensive investigation resulted in only two jury verdicts, both unanimous acquittals.

Juries are in fact what Trump is afraid of in his current cases. If his indictments were indeed the political witch hunts he claims, he should want a jury to expose this fraud to the voters. Instead, he seeks every delay possible, so that if a jury rules at all, it will come to late to inform the electorate.

April 29, 2024 – 11:47 am Categories: Articles | Comments (8)

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What to make of student protests?

Dangerous antisemitism or peaceful protest against genocide?
You can find whatever story you want to read.

Protests against Israel’s US-backed war in Gaza have broken out on college campuses around the country, with a wide variety of responses from campus officials and police. Some of the tent encampments are being left alone, while on other campuses the demonstrators are being forcibly removed.

Similarly, press coverage has been all over the map. Some sources essentially repeat the Netanyahu claim that “antisemitic mobs have taken over the leading universities”, while others interview demonstrators with more sympathy.

Even the coverage from supposedly liberal sources has been mixed. I was listening to MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Wednesday when host Joe Scarborough cited the fact that students had not protested the mass killing of Arabs by Saddam in Iraq or Assad in Syria, clearly implying that Israel is being viewed differently because of antisemitism. I couldn’t decide whether Scarborough was being clueless or actively disingenuous: The obvious difference is that Israel is carrying out its operations with American funds, American weapons, and American support at the UN. Whether we see Israel’s Gaza war as just or unjust, Americans should view these Palestinian deaths differently because we are implicated in them.

Given this diverse press coverage, I should probably go visit an encampment and make my own judgment, but I haven’t. The conclusion I’ve come to from reading a variety of sources is that, as is true with any large group of people, you can find whatever you look for. If you look for antisemitism, you can find it, like the Columbia student who said “Zionists do not deserve to live.” He has been banned from campus.

The large majority of demonstrators, though, look to me to be exactly what they say they are: peaceful protesters who think the killing in Gaza is unjust, want it to stop, and want the US (and their universities) to stop supporting it.

Vox reports:

Student protests on Columbia’s campus have been nonviolent so far. Representatives from the New York Police Department said during a press conference Monday that there had been some incidents in which Israeli flags were snatched from students and unspecified hateful things said. But they said that there have not been any reports of Columbia students being physically harmed or any credible threats made against individuals or groups associated with the university community ahead of the start of the Jewish holiday of Passover.

… On Tuesday, a student draped in an Israeli flag spoke to reporters from within the fenced-in area of the encampment. Jewish students who have been suspended from Columbia and Barnard stated that they had celebrated a Passover Seder within the encampment at a press conference.

I agree with Robert Reich:

Antisemitism should have no place in America — not on college campuses or anywhere else. 

But there is nothing inherently antisemitic about condemning the ongoing bloodshed in Gaza that has so far killed at least 34,000 people, mostly women and children.

Protesting this slaughter is not hate speech. It is what should be done on a college campus — taking a stand against a perceived wrong, at least provoking discussion and debate.

In the end, you may decide that Israel’s actions in Gaza are entirely justified, given the horror of Hamas’ October 7 attacks and the likelihood of similar attacks in the future. (Or you might not.) But reasonable people can disagree about this, and they should be allowed to express their views in public.

Many Republican politicians have responded cynically to the protests, trying to recreate Ronald Reagan’s successful demonization of campus protests during the Vietnam War. For example, it’s hard to take Texas Governor Greg Abbott seriously when he talks like this:

These protesters belong in jail. Antisemitism will not be tolerated in Texas. Period.

But Abbott is only intolerant of apparent left-wing antisemitism; he’s always been fine with right-wing antisemitism. Reporter Steven Monacelli of the Texas Observer comments:

I’ve seen no credible reporting of actual antisemitic incidents at the UT Austin protest. What I can tell you is that I’ve reported on numerous neo-Nazi events and Greg Abbott never once tried to put any of them in jail.

April 29, 2024 – 9:43 am Categories: Articles | Comments (8)

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The Manhattan case against Trump is stronger than I expected

I had doubts about this indictment. But they’re being answered.

The New York state trial of Donald Trump for 34 felony counts of falsifying business records has now completed its first full week of testimony. There’s still a lot to come, but already the case appears much stronger than I had expected.

Before the trial started, I (and a lot of other people) thought prosecutors faced two big potential problems:

  • Their case depends on the jury believing Michael Cohen, who is a convicted perjurer.
  • Falsifying business records is only a felony if the false records were intended to support or cover up some other crime. Establishing that other crime might be difficult.

Well, I shouldn’t have worried. By the time Cohen takes the stand, he’ll just be coloring in a picture that has already been outlined by other evidence. Documents and more trustworthy witnesses will establish that meetings were held, topics were discussed, agreements were made, and money was paid. Very little of the case relies on believing things purely on Cohen’s say-so.

As for the other crime, at least one is already well on its way to being established. National Enquirer publisher David Pecker has told the jury that the catch-and-kill scheme that kept several bad-for-Trump stories out of publication was intended to influence the 2016 election, and that he knew at the time their agreement violated campaign finance laws.

Simultaneously, the defense looks weak. Trump’s apparent strategy is to challenge the prosecution’s points piecemeal, but his lawyers are offering no alternate narrative that pulls everything together. So it’s already easy to picture what will happen when the jury deliberates: Some juror will repeat the defense’s challenge to some detail in the prosecution’s case, and another juror will respond, “Maybe. But then why did this other thing happen?” If there was no agreement with Trump, why did The National Enquirer suppress stories that would have sold a lot of papers? If Trump didn’t order it, why did Michael Cohen borrow money to pay Stormy Daniels? (And what about that document where Allen Weisselberg added up all the numbers to arrive at Cohen’s reimbursement?) If there was no crime, then what did Cohen go to jail for? And so on.

To the extent that it tells a story at all, the defense is claiming that Trump did nothing wrong, while all around him other people were doing odd things they had no reason to do. Believing that is not impossible, I suppose, but it requires something well beyond reasonable doubt of the evidence presented. [1]

This scattershot approach is a tactic Trump uses in all his scandals: He never settles on a single explanation of what happened, leaving himself free to spin different stories at different times to different audiences: I didn’t do it. I did it, but it’s not illegal. Maybe it’s not legal, but everybody does it and gets away with it, so singling me out is political persecution. Biden, Hillary, Obama, or somebody else I don’t like has done worse. In fact, it was the right thing to do and I’m proud I did it; nobody else would have had the guts to do it.

That works in a political world of short news cycles and shifting attention spans, but in court it fails. (We’ve already seen it fail in his civil trials.) The jury is required to sit there for weeks and keep paying attention, so distracting them for a moment or two doesn’t get him off the hook. They get to see all the evidence, and they want to form a complete picture of what happened. So if one side can paint them a complete picture and the other side can’t, they notice.

[1] One thing I remember from my own jury experience was the judge’s explanation of “reasonable doubt”, which is literally doubt that has some rationality behind it. Just being able to imagine that the defendant might not be guilty is not good enough. That’s why evil-twin theories don’t usually fly in court.

April 29, 2024 – 9:11 am Categories: Articles | Comments (4)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

It’s another multiple-featured-post week, as attempts at short notes repeatedly got out of hand. Fortunately, all three featured posts will be relatively short.

The subjects are obvious: the student protests, Trump’s Manhattan trial, and the depressing Supreme Court discussion of Trump’s immunity claim.

The main thing I learned from the Manhattan trial so far is captured in the post’s title: “The Manhattan case against Trump is stronger than I expected”. In particular, two aspects of the case I expected to be problems are looking pretty solid: The jury isn’t going to be asked to trust Michael Cohen’s word for much of anything, and connecting Trump’s fraudulent business documents to another crime shouldn’t be that hard. That post should be out shortly.

Next, the student protests. I realized I had to write about this because the mainstream coverage has been all over the map. Is it true (as Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu claims) that “antisemitic mobs have taken over the leading universities”, or are the pro-Palestinian encampments made up of peaceful students who just want the killing to stop? That post should appear by 10 EDT.

Finally, Thursday’s arguments before the Supreme Court were deeply disillusioning to the liberal legal experts on cable news networks. Most of them are institutionalists, and had been strongly committed to the idea that the Court’s recent behavior has been due to a difference in philosophies, rather than partisanship and corruption. That view was really hard to square with what we heard Thursday, particularly from Justice Alito. A lot of crow has been eaten on CNN and MSNBC these last few days, as people who have devoted their lives to the US justice system have had to admit that, no, the Supreme Court really is a bunch of partisan hacks. I’ll try to get that out by 11.

After diverting all those stories to separate posts, the weekly summary should be short. There are new 2020-election indictments in Arizona. Harvey Weinstein’s rape conviction was overturned, but he won’t be going free anytime soon. There’s that bizarre story about Governor Noem and the dog. A few tidbits related to the Trump trials didn’t fit into the featured posts. And I’ll find a few other things. Hopefully that appears by noon.

April 29, 2024 – 8:49 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

Trustworthiness

I wouldn’t believe Donald Trump if his tongue were notarized.

– potential juror not seated for Trump trial

This week’s featured post is “Defending American Values: Trial by Jury“.

This week everybody was talking about the dysfunction of the House GOP

I guess all’s well that ends well. Saturday, pro-Russia House Republicans were finally overcome and the Ukraine aid President Biden requested last September was approved. The aid passed with Democrats voting 210-0 in favor and Republicans 101-112 against.

The road to that vote was very strange. Typically, passing a bill begins with passing a set of rules for the vote. The rules resolution defines the process for passing the bill, including the timing of the vote and what amendments will be in order. This is done through the Rules Committee, which typically is a rubber-stamp for the Speaker, whose party has a majority on that committee. Rules Committee votes are often party-line.

This time, though three Republicans voted against the rule, which only got out of the committee because Democrats supported it. Similarly on the floor of the House, 55 Republicans voted against the rule, which would have failed without Democratic support.

The Senate is expected to pass the Ukraine aid package tomorrow, and the weaponry (some of which is already stockpiled in Europe), should start arriving within days.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, who Colorado Republican Rep. Ken Buck accused of “mouthing Russian propaganda“, reiterated her threat to oust Johnson (in the same manner Kevin McCarthy was removed in October after refusing to shut down the government), but did not bring her vacate-the-chair resolution to the floor before the House adjourned.

That could mean that she knows she doesn’t have the votes, but it’s hard to say for sure.

This whole episode points out the dysfunction of the House’s right wing. They managed to delay Ukraine aid, but not stop it. And they got nothing in exchange for letting it pass.

In February, Senator Lankford (R-OK) had negotiated a Ukraine-aid package that included very much of what the GOP wanted in a border bill. But Trump decided he wanted the border as an issue in November, so he torpedoed that compromise.

So now Republicans get to complain that we are spending money to secure Ukraine but not to secure our southern border, but it’s empty rhetoric. Democrats were willing to take action on the border, but Republicans weren’t.

One of the most ridiculous stories of the week was the Freedom Caucus worrying that Speaker Johnson was going to launch a surprise attack on them.

Conservatives in the House Freedom Caucus are signing up to take shifts to monitor the chamber floor in order to prevent their own party leaders from making unilateral moves that could curb their power.

This group called itself the Floor Action Response Team, a.k.a. FART. You can’t make this stuff up.

and Trump’s trial

Last week I was hearing that it might take as long as a month to find a jury for Trump’s Manhattan trial, which began last Monday. In fact, 12 jurors and six alternates were in place by Friday. Opening statements are happening this morning.

The most unsettling story of the week (other than the disturbed man who set himself on fire to send a message that no one has been able to decipher) was MAGA-world’s attempt to rig and intimidate the jury. In the featured post, I take a step back and consider Trumpists’ attacks on the jury system as part of their larger authoritarian project.

Trump has quite obviously been defying Judge Merchan’s gag order. The judge will hold a hearing tomorrow. What he decides to do should tell us a lot about how the trial will proceed.

It’s obvious that Trump believes he can’t be jailed, and that any fines will just be the cost of doing business. I’ll be curious to see how Merchan punctures that confidence. I hope he has had somebody working on the logistical problem of jailing a man with Secret Service protection. A good first step would be to send Trump on a tour of the facilities Merchan has picked out.

Trump is having trouble accepting the fact that he has been indicted by a grand jury of American citizens, and so is a criminal defendant.

Case in point: Barron Trump’s high school graduation. Trump asked Judge Merchan to adjourn the trial for a day on May 17 so that he can go to the ceremony. Merchan said maybe; if the trial is on schedule then, an adjournment might happen. Trump took this as a rejection and complained bitterly on social media, inciting his followers to denounce the judge. (Michael Cohen then posted that Trump had never attended his other children’s graduations, which seems not to be true.)

But the upshot is that Trump is being treated like what he is: a criminal defendant. Defendants don’t typically get to arrange the court schedule for their own convenience. They also don’t get to control the court sketch artist or the room’s thermostat, or to prevent reporters from mentioning that they fall asleep in court.

Merchan is simply using the levers he has to keep Trump under control: If Trump keeps trying to delay the trial any way he can, he won’t get to go to Barron’s graduation. In other words: If you want something from me, behave yourself.

My conclusion: Trump knows he won’t behave, and is already setting up to deny that it will be his own fault when he misses the graduation.

Trump scheduled a rally Saturday in North Carolina, but cancelled it due to weather. It’s got to be wearing on him to go so long without the encouragement of a worshiping crowd.

If there’s one person who’s enjoying all this, it’s Jimmy Kimmel. While he was hosting the Oscars over a month ago, Kimmel read aloud Trump’s social-media rant against Kimmel’s performance, and then addressed Trump directly:

Thank you for watching. I’m surprised you’re still [up]. Isn’t it past your jail time?

Five weeks later, Trump hasn’t been able to let that go, so Wednesday he used his day off from court to post another rant about Kimmel and the Oscars, pretending it was Kimmel who couldn’t get over it.

Stupid Jimmy Kimmel, who still hasn’t recovered from his horrendous performance and big ratings drop as Host of The Academy Awards, especially when he showed he suffered from TDS, commonly known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, to the entire World by reading on air my TRUTH about how bad a job he was doing that night, right before he stumbled through announcing the biggest award of all, ‘Picture of the Year.’

Wednesday night, Kimmel took this apart line by line: Ratings were up, and as the host, Kimmel didn’t present any awards.

The person who presented the [Best Picture] award was Al Pacino, not me. We are different people. … You’d think he would know that because I’m pretty sure ‘Say hello to my little friend’ is what he said to Stormy Daniels that got him in all this trouble.

Kimmel later suggested that if he hosted again next year, Trump might be able to watch “on the TV in the Rec Room at Rikers”. The whole monologue is worth watching, and proves that a politician should never get into a back-and-forth with a comedian.

The phrase “Trump derangement syndrome” is a classic projection, as Kimmel pointed out. (“There’s only one person who suffers from Trump derangement syndrome. His name is Donald Trump.”) The surest way to get yourself diagnosed with TDS is to look at facts about Trump, apply ordinary standards of morality and decency, and reach the obvious conclusion that the man is a piece of shit.

But what’s truly deranged is the way Trump cultists distort reality to justify whatever their idol does. Take sexual assault, for example. At least two dozen women have publicly accused Trump of some form of inappropriate sexual advances, up to and including rape. Their stories are remarkably similar, and they track with the behavior Trump bragged about on the Access Hollywood tape.

The Trump cult explanation is simple: All the women are lying, and Trump’s confession was meaningless “locker room talk”.

Who’s deranged here?

Kevin McCarthy is trying to normalize Trump’s denial of the 2020 election by asking “Has Hillary Clinton ever said she lost the 2016 election?” Yeah, she did. On national TV. There’s video.

and Israel/Iran

Cooler heads may be prevailing. The tit-for-tat between Israel and Iran seems to be dying down and may have ended. After Israel bombed Iran’s diplomatic compound in Damascus, Iran vowed to retaliate. On April 13, it sent over 300 drones and missiles flying towards Israel, nearly all of which got knocked down. Then it was Israel who vowed to retaliate, which it did early Friday morning.

Israel attacked a military base very close to a major Iranian nuclear facility. So the attack was mostly a message: If we had wanted to strike something much more important, you couldn’t have stopped us. So far, Iran seems to be ignoring this attack, at least in public.

So we can hope that this particular episode is over, and Iran will go back to fighting Israel through proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah.

and the Supreme Court

The Court has some interesting cases lined up this week, which is the final week of arguments in this term. Thursday, it will hear arguments on Trump’s claim of criminal immunity. The big question here is not whether it will find in his favor, but whether it will continue playing along with his delay strategy. (I have a fantasy in which the Biden administration files an amicus brief, urging the Court to decide this case quickly so that Biden knows what laws he can break before his term ends. In particular, can he order the assassinations of certain justices while he still has time to nominate replacements?)

Liz Cheney writes:

Mr. Trump believes he can threaten and intimidate judges and their families, assert baseless legal defenses and thereby avoid accountability altogether. Through this conduct, he seeks to break our institutions. If Mr. Trump’s tactics prevent his Jan. 6 trial from proceeding in the ordinary course, he will also have succeeded in concealing critical evidence from the American people — evidence demonstrating his disregard for the rule of law, his cruelty on Jan. 6 and the deep flaws in character that make him unfit to serve as president. The Supreme Court should understand this reality and conclude without delay that no immunity applies here.

Today, the Court is hearing arguments in Grants Pass v Johnson, which involves a longstanding principle of American law: In order to break the law, you have to do something, not just be a certain kind of person.

The issue here is homelessness. Grants Pass has such sweeping laws against sleeping in public that it is nearly impossible for a homeless person to live there and stay within the law. On the one hand, it seems like it shouldn’t be illegal simply to be homeless. On the other, municipalities want to have some way to regulate homeless encampments, which can be health hazards.

Wednesday, it’s time for Idaho v United States. Here the issue is a Reagan-era law known as the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, Emtala for short. Emtala requires emergency rooms to treat people who show up there (or risk losing Medicare and Medicaid funding).

The case was brought after Idaho imposed a near-total abortion ban that allowed doctors to perform an emergency abortion only if a pregnant patient was on the brink of death.

That law is in direct conflict with Emtala, which requires doctors to stabilize emergency patients so they won’t face severe health consequences – a radically lower bar for intervention than Idaho’s. Shortly after Roe was overturned, the Biden administration issued a guidance stating that the federal law pre-empts state abortion bans, ultimately suing Idaho over its ban.

So if a woman with a problem pregnancy shows up at an emergency room in Idaho, and isn’t at death’s door, but needs an abortion to, say, preserve her future fertility or prevent some problem that may lead to death in a week or two, what should happen?

These cases should all be decided by the end of the term in June.

and you also might be interested in …

Not content to simply waste its own time, the House Republican majority tried to waste the Senate’s time as well. The Senate refused.

The House had impeached Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas essentially for policy differences. Ostensibly, he was charged with refusing to observe a 1952 law requiring applicants for asylum to be detained until a decision is reached — something no administration has done in recent years, largely because Congress hasn’t appropriated the money to do it. (One of the goals of the border bill that Trump torpedoed was to streamline the asylum process by funding more courts and judges.)

Once an impeachment has been voted by the House, the Senate is supposed to drop all its other business and hold a trial. Republicans were hoping for a grand show trial that would give them a stage to pontificate about border issues.

Democrats refused to play ball. In short order, a party-line vote (where Republican Lisa Murkowski voted Present rather than No) ended the trial because the bill of impeachment “does not allege conduct that rises to the level of a high crime or misdemeanor” as required in the Constitution.

Workers at a Volkswagen factory in Chattanooga overwhelmingly voted to join the United Auto Workers. The factory had rejected the union in 2014 and 2019, but this time the union held nearly a 3-1 majority. Historically, the South has not been welcoming to unions.

and let’s close with something spectacular

Two of nature’s most striking spectacles are the Northern Lights and a volcano erupting at night. In Iceland, you can sometimes get both.

April 22, 2024 – 11:19 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (2)

Defending American Values: Trial by Jury

If we can’t trust ordinary people to be jurors, then we’ve already given up on Democracy.

The central mission of a rising authoritarian movement is to destroy public trust in any institution that can stand in its way, and in particular, in any source of truth that is independent of the movement and its Leader. And so over the last few years the MAGA movement has told us that:

  • We can’t trust our public health institutions to guide us through a pandemic.
  • We can’t trust what climate scientists tell us about global warming.
  • We can’t trust the FDA’s opinion on the safety of abortion drugs.
  • We can’t trust historians to recount the story of American racism, or librarians to make sound decisions about books that discuss either race or sex.
  • We can’t trust women who tell us they were sexually assaulted, or any women at all to make decisions about their own pregnancies.
  • We can’t trust the news media to report simple facts (like the size of Trump’s inaugural crowd).
  • We can’t trust our secretaries of state and local election officials to count votes.
  • We can’t trust the FBI and the Department of Justice when they fail to find evidence of voting fraud.
  • We can’t trust our intelligence agencies when they tell us about Trump’s friend Vladimir Putin.
  • We can’t trust a judge of Mexican ancestry to oversee the Trump University fraud lawsuit, or any judges appointed by Democrats to handle Trump’s other trials.

And so on. Because in an authoritarian system, the Leader defines Truth. Only he can be trusted.

In each of these situations, we are presented with a Manichean choice: There is MAGA and there is the Deep State. There are Trump followers and Trump haters. If you are not one, you are the other — and that’s all that matters. No one can be trusted to simply do their job in a fact-based, objective, or professional manner.

This week we saw another example of that authoritarian trust-destroying mission: We can’t trust juries. Specifically, we can’t trust a jury of New Yorkers — or any jury convened in a blue state — to stand in judgment over the Great Leader himself. Most New Yorkers didn’t vote for Trump, and so by definition they are Trump haters who are incapable of listening to evidence and forming objective opinions about his guilt or innocence.

Already in August, Kellyanne (alternative facts) Conway was telling Fox News that Trump couldn’t get a fair trial in three of the four venues where he has been indicted — “the most liberal county in Georgia, D.C., New York City, all these places that voted against him”. Apparently only in south Florida, under the supervision of a judge he appointed himself, could Trump possibly get a fair shake. Because a courtroom is just another political arena where all that matters is the love or hate you feel for Donald Trump.

It’s important to push back on this insidious belief, because it strikes at the heart of any notion of Democracy. If ordinary people can’t be trusted, then they can’t be allowed to govern themselves. If they are too unreliable to be jurors, why should these same untrustworthy people be allowed to vote or protest or express themselves in any way at all? If ordinary people can only be trusted when they belong to the Leader’s party, then why let any other party compete for power?

There’s a reason that trial by jury goes back to the Magna Carta, and was guaranteed by the Founders in the Sixth Amendment. A belief in juries is fundamental to the whole project of Democracy.

Encouraging corruption. Once you convince yourself that an institution is inherently corrupt, the obvious next step is to make that corruption work for you rather than against you. So conservative talk-radio host Clay Travis made this plea to his listeners:

If you’re a Trump supporter in New York City who is a part of the jury pool, do everything you can to get seated on the jury and then refuse to convict as a matter of principle, dooming the case via hung jury. It’s the most patriotic thing you could possibly do.

In other words: Don’t answer the judge’s questions honestly, and once you get on the jury, don’t do your job with integrity. Don’t listen to the evidence and form an objective opinion. Refuse to convict “as a matter of principle”.

What principle would that be? That the Leader can do no wrong? That he is above the Law?

Rep. Byron Donalds (who a few months ago was in the running to be Speaker of the House) similarly denied that there was any need for jurors to listen to the prosecution’s case:

My plea is to the people of Manhattan that may sit on this trial: Please do the right thing for this country. Everybody’s allowed to have their political viewpoints, but the law is supposed to be blind and no respecter of persons. This is a trash case; there is no crime here; and if there is any potential for a verdict, they should vote not guilty.

But of course, there is a crime: falsification of business records, which is illegal in New York. Donalds knows this, just as he knows that Michael Cohen has already served time for his role in this illegal plot. If he truly believed Trump to be innocent, he could simply urge jurors to do their jobs with integrity, and express faith in the outcome. But he didn’t, did he?

Fox News has been doing its best to out the jurors, so that they can be vulnerable to intimidation and coercion from the violent MAGA faithful. In one case they have already succeeded: A juror who was seated on Tuesday came back Thursday asking to be excused because people had already begun to guess her identity. Fox host Jesse Watters had picked her out (by number) as a juror who might be difficult for Trump. (The evidence against her? She had blasphemed by saying: “No one is above the law.”) He then slandered (and Trump retweeted him) the jurors in general.

They are catching undercover Liberal Activists lying to the Judge in order to get on the Trump Jury.

In reality, Trump’s lawyers had caught people with liberal views saying that they could be objective. There is no reason to believe they can’t, beyond the dogma that all liberals are irrational Trump-haters.

In the face of this attack on a core democratic value, it’s important to reaffirm our faith in it, as Vox’ Abdallah Fayyad does:

Regardless of what the former president says, the demographics of New York or Washington, DC, won’t determine whether or not he will receive a fair trial. That will depend on how the prosecution makes its case, and whether the jurors will take their jobs seriously and evaluate the case on its merits rather than on their views of the defendant — something that juries are more than capable of doing.

That’s why Trump’s disingenuous attacks on the jury are dangerous: not because he’s questioning their potential fairness (juries can indeed be unfair, and defendants have the right to point that out), but because he’s broadly deeming some Americans — that is, anyone who doesn’t support him — as inherently illegitimate jurors.

If you believe in Democracy, the legitimacy of jurors doesn’t depend on who they voted for in 2020 or plan to vote for later this year or what they think of Donald Trump. Trials are not popularity contests. You can believe Trump is the scum of the Earth, and still evaluate fairly whether the prosecution has proved its case against him. As many a defense lawyer points out in summation: “You don’t have to like my client to find him not guilty.”

Could I be a juror? As I watched (from a distance) the Manhattan court’s effort to form a Trump jury, I did what I think a lot of people did: wondered how I would answer the questions prospective jurors were asked. In particular: Could I be objective? Could I listen to the evidence and arguments from both sides and reach a fair verdict?

I decided that I could. Now, as anyone who reads this blog or follows me on social media knows, I have a very strong negative opinion of Donald Trump. I have openly said that I think he’s guilty, not just in this case but in the other three cases as well. Had I been in that courtroom, the defense would undoubtedly have used one of their peremptory challenges to make sure I never came anywhere near the jury box. So how could I imagine being a fair juror?

Here’s how: I have a clear sense of the duties of a juror takes on. And the principle of trial by jury is more important to me than the fate of one man. Demagogues and grifters like Trump will come and go in American history, but trial by jury is something that I hope will endure through the centuries. I wouldn’t want to be part of screwing it up.

In particular, I believe that everyone accused of a crime deserves a fair trial, and that the prosecution has a responsibility to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. I also believe in the rules of evidence. As a juror, it wouldn’t matter to me what I had read in the news media or what I thought I remembered from the internet: The real evidence, the trustworthy evidence, isn’t what I heard on Fox News or MSNBC, it’s the evidence that shows up in court. And so when the trial ground to its conclusion, I would ask myself: Given what I’ve heard in court, has the prosecution proved its case? If it hadn’t, I would vote to acquit.

Now, I sincerely doubt that anything that might happen in this trial will change my opinion of Trump. At the end of the trial, I’m sure I will still believe he’s a fundamentally dishonest man who cares for no one but himself. I may even still believe that he’s guilty of the charges against him.

But if I’m a juror, that doesn’t matter. The question isn’t “Do you believe he’s guilty?” but “Has the prosecution proved he’s guilty.” If they haven’t, I could vote to acquit — even as I continued to hope that the prosecutors in one of his other cases would have more success.

Can this jury be fair? I have great faith that it can.

Part of my faith comes from having served on a jury several years ago in an emotionally fraught federal drug case. The defendant came from a household that in many ways exemplified the American dream: He and his wife were Hispanics who had worked their way into the middle class and were raising several children, all younger than 10. He worked in a local factory, and she was a nurse. The real bad guy here seemed to be the defendant’s brother, a career drug dealer that the government had been failing to make a case against. He sold drugs out of the defendant’s basement, and when the undercover cop showed up wanting to buy, he was too smart to sell. But the defendant trusted the cop, so the brother in essence said, “If you trust him, you sell to him.” The defendant did, and that was how he came to be on trial.

After the evidence was presented, we deliberated for an afternoon and most of the next morning. We were all over the map, and I had a very difficult night while I shouldered my responsibility. All of us sympathized with the wife and children. Several jurors who had been leaning not-guilty in the afternoon changed their minds overnight: By morning they were angry at the defendant for letting his brother sell drugs out of the house where his kids lived.

In the end, we answered the question we were given: Had the government proved that he sold the drugs? It had, and we convicted him. (We also had a meeting with the judge where we pleaded for him to sentence mercifully. I never checked whether he did.)

I learned a few things from this experience: First, the ritual of the court is powerful magic. You may come in with all sorts of impressions and opinions. But you very quickly learn to appreciate the awesomeness of the power you have been delegated and the responsibility it puts on you. (Spider-Man is right: With great power comes great responsibility.)

Second, no matter how different the individuals are, some kind of group loyalty develops. Not reaching a verdict feels like failure, and the jury doesn’t want to fail. We had each given a week of our time to this trial, and we didn’t want to believe our time had been wasted.

This is why I have faith in the Trump jury. Yes I can imagine all sorts of scenarios where somebody follows Clay Travis’ instructions: lies to the court so that they can get on the jury and rig the outcome. But that’s a harder mission to pull off than you might think.

My jury only met for a week. This one will probably sit for a month or more. During that time, they’ll share a lot of cups of coffee and more than a few lunches. They’re not supposed to discuss the trial until deliberation, but they’ll undoubtedly find other things to talk about: kids, jobs, the weather, TV shows. They’re going to see each other as people and develop a sense of common purpose.

Imagine spending that whole month with people while animated by a single malevolent thought: “I’m going to make sure you all fail. Because of me, this month we’ve all sacrificed will come to nothing.”

That would be a hard mission to carry out.

Even if you came onto the jury with a fairly strong belief in Trump, I think the ritual of the court and the camaraderie of the jury might well capture you. Every day you will look at Trump and realize that he is (as one prospective juror put it) “just a guy”, and not the great savior you imagined him to be. You will see him glower and bluster and doze off and treat you and your fellow jurors and the judge with disrespect. You will hear the prosecution witnesses assemble the case against him step by step. (You will have heard that the case is all politics, but in fact no one is talking politics. They’re presenting evidence.) When the defense takes its turn, you will hope for some grand revelation that shatters the prosecution’s case. And you will be disappointed.

During deliberation, you will have no real argument to make against your fellow jurors who want to convict. Over the month, you will have learned that they are not the frothing Trump-haters Fox News led you to expect. They’re just ordinary people trying to do their civic duty. Are you then going to look them all in the eye and admit that out of sheer stubbornness, you are going to make them fail?

Maybe. But I doubt it.

April 22, 2024 – 8:52 am Categories: Articles | Comments (12)

Tagged , |

The Monday Morning Teaser

This week, a Trump criminal trial actually started, and a jury is already in place. Opening arguments should begin this morning.

During jury selection, we saw right-wing media mount an all-out offensive against the fairness of the jury system. Trump, they claimed, could never get a fair trial in New York, or in any venue where most people didn’t vote for him. In the Manichean world of MAGA, there are Trump lovers and Trump haters, and no Trump haters could possibly put aside their hatred to listen objectively to the evidence of the case.

In this week’s featured post, I push back on that. I think we need to, because trial by jury is close to the heart of Democracy. If ordinary people can’t be trusted to be jurors, then how can we trust them to be voters?

I think it’s important to see this attack on the fairness of juries as part of a larger authoritarian attack on all sources of truth other than the Great Leader himself. Over the last few years, we have heard that we can’t trust public health officials, climate scientists, women, the news media, judges, election officials, historians, librarians, or pretty much anyone else. Only the Leader speaks the Truth. Only he can be trusted. That’s the essence of any authoritarian system.

I look back on my own experience on a jury and argue that we can trust juries, including this jury. Rigging a verdict, even if that’s what you intend at the beginning of the trial, is actually pretty hard.

That post should appear shortly.

The weekly has a lot of other news to cover, including some Trump trial news other than jury selection. But the big news is that Speaker Johnson stood up to Marjorie Taylor Greene and let Ukraine aid come to a vote. It passed easily, as it would have if it had come to the floor six months ago. The House also passed aid to Israel and Taiwan, as well as humanitarian aid to Gaza. MTG is promising a vote to depose Johnson as speaker, which may or may not turn into yet another pointless Republican circus.

It looks like the Iran/Israel trade of attacks won’t escalate into a larger war. A VW plant in Tennessee voted to unionize. The Senate gave the Mayorkas impeachment effort exactly as much attention as it deserved. The Supreme Court is about to consider several interesting cases. And somebody shot a video of an Icelandic volcano erupting under the Northern Lights.

I’ll aim to get that out around noon EDT.

April 22, 2024 – 8:29 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (4)

Dreams of ease

The fact of the matter is that almost nobody who works for a living has the time they wish they did to look, feel or be their best, much less to cultivate a highly aesthetic relationship with a thing called ease.

– Monica Hesse
“Tradwives, stay-at-home girlfriends and the dream of feminine leisure”

This week’s featured posts are “A Different Take on Retro Conservative Fantasy“, “The Arizona Abortion Ruling“, and “Republicans Scramble to Contain their Abortion Disaster“.

This week everybody was talking about abortion

My thoughts about the week’s developments are parceled out between two featured posts. I specifically examine the Arizona Supreme Court’s reinstatement of a draconian 1864 law in “The Arizona Abortion Ruling“. (Surprise: I agree that the majority read the state’s horrible laws correctly.) And I look at the larger political situation in “Republicans Scramble to Contain their Abortion Disaster“.

and Iran’s retaliation against Israel

Ever since Hamas’ October 7 attacks, one of the main goals of the Biden administration has been to keep the situation from escalating into a larger war involving Iran directly, and possibly drawing in Saudi Arabia and other regional powers. That got more difficult two weeks ago when Israel bombed an Iranian consulate in Syria, killing two Iranian generals.

Iran vowed to respond, and Sunday it launched hundreds of drones and missiles at Israel. With American help, Israeli air defenses seem to have handled the attack, which resulted in little damage.

If this were a playground spat — something I think the Middle East often resembles — the proper Israeli response would be something like “Nyah, nyah, missed me.” But apparently not everyone thinks so. So Biden is now trying to talk Israel out of launching some kind of attack on Iran.

and Trump’s first criminal trial

So the day has actually arrived: Trump is in court as a criminal defendant. Jury selection is underway.

Nobody has come up with the right name for this case yet. Sometimes it’s called the “hush money” indictment, but that makes it sound as if Trump were accused of paying hush money to cover up his affair with porn star Stormy Daniels — which isn’t true. Cheating on your wife with a porn star and then paying her not to tell anybody may be sleazy, but it isn’t illegal.

The actual charge here is falsifying business records, which makes the case sound like some technical bookkeeping error. That also is misleading. The course of illegality here is more circuitous: Trump had his fixer, Michael Cohen, pay for Stormy’s silence out of his own funds just before the 2016 election. (I can imagine the conversation where Cohen explained to his wife that he had taken out a home equity loan so that he could give money to a porn star.) That money wasn’t recorded as either a campaign expense or an in-kind contribution. And then the Trump Organization reimbursed Cohen, recording the expense as legal fees. Those legal-fee invoices are the false business records.

So at its root, the case is about defrauding the electorate in 2016.

Anyway, all Trump’s last-minute motions to try to get the trial delayed failed, so here we are. Estimates on the timing vary, but most legal commentators predict a verdict well before the summer conventions.

There’s a lot of debate over what political impact the trial will have. One school of thought says this is all good for Trump, because it plays into his persecution narrative. His voters are never going to believe he’s guilty anyway, so there’s nothing to gain by convicting him.

I disagree. Trump is strongest politically when his campaign can spin gauzy tales about how great everything was in 2019. (They’ve shoved the nightmare of 2020 down the memory hole.) He’s weakest when his personality is front and center, reminding people of how much most of us hated having him as our president.

Trump on trial is going to be Trump at his worst: glowering, muttering, unable to control himself, and doing his best to incite violence against the long list of people he thinks have wronged him. The main issue at the trial is going to be whether Trump knew how this whole scheme worked, and numerous witnesses are going to say that he did. The only person in a position to testify that he didn’t is Trump himself, and Trump (as we’ve seen in the E. Jean Carroll defamation case) is a terrible witness. If he testifies — which he says he’ll do, but I doubt — he’ll insult the judge, alienate the jury, and probably convict himself.

One thing I’ve picked up from online interactions with Trump defenders is that most of them have preserved their faith in his general innocence by refusing to see the evidence against him. They didn’t watch the January 6 Committee hearings, haven’t read the indictments, and so on. They don’t have some alternate interpretation of the evidence that clears him, but they just say “politically motivated persecution”, believe him when he says “I did nothing wrong”, and refuse to delve any deeper. That kind of intentional ignorance is going to be hard to maintain once this trial takes over the news cycle.

In particular, it’s going to be hard for members of the jury. So even if a juror or two comes in as a Trump sympathizer, they might end up voting to convict. Especially after he glowers at them for several weeks.

Trump’s cognitive decline is getting harder to explain away. Here, he doesn’t just get the wrong word (as Biden sometimes does), his verbal center seems to glitch completely.

and you also might be interested in …

Kansas’ Democratic governor, Laura Kelly, vetoed a bill banning gender-affirming care, saying that it “tramples on parental rights”. Republicans have a supermajority in the legislature and are going to try to override the veto.

This is typical of Republicans: They support the rights of parents until the parents do something they don’t like. Similarly, they support local control until local governments do something they don’t like. All their apparent “principles” are just rhetoric.

The NYT is reaching the point where parodies just can’t keep up. Wednesday, it did a both-sides treatment of abortion: “Two Imperfect Messengers Take On Abortion“. I mean, Trump brags about torpedoing Roe v Wade and Biden supports legislation to restore it, but they’re basically the same.

The WaPo talked to Trump Media investors who are trying to keep the faith in the face of a plunging stock price. No matter how much they lose, they’ll never admit that they’ve been had by a lifelong conman.

Meanwhile, the conman and his insider cronies took steps this morning to offer more shares for sale, driving the stock price down to a new low: $27.55 a little before noon today. That’s down 15% since this morning, and down from its March 27 peak around $70.

So O. J. Simpson died of cancer this week. I’m somewhat amazed by how much coverage this has gotten. Yes, his murder trial dominated the news in 1994 and was an important moment in the transition to news-as-entertainment. But if you’re under 40, you may not know who he was.

I thought I’d add something to the discussion nobody else seems to remember: what a cultural presence OJ was before the murder and the trial. Here’s a 1978 clip from the Robin Williams comedy Mork and Mindy, where Mork was an alien sent to explore Earth. (This was the role that first made Williams famous.)

Every episode would end with Mork reporting to Orson, his contact back on Ork. This episode’s report included a terrible pun. Mork told Orson that some Earth people worship O. J. Simpson. “The Juice?” Orson asked, displaying a mysterious familiarity with OJ’s nickname. Mork replied: “Yes. And the gentiles also.”

and let’s close with something dark

Last Monday’s eclipse dominated public attention for a few hours. Maybe you watched a partial eclipse, or traveled to see totality, or missed it completely. But never mind. Lots of people took pictures. Here’s Wired magazine’s selections of the best ones.

April 15, 2024 – 11:53 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (5)

Republicans Scramble to Contain Their Abortion Disaster

Trump’s let-the-states-decide statement looked clever until Arizona actually decided.

All across the country, the abortion issue has been helping Democrats and hurting Republicans.

For decades it worked the other way: Pro-choice women were confident the Supreme Court would protect their rights, so they mostly ignored the extreme positions Republican politicians took and based their votes on other issues. But since the Dobbs decision reversed Roe v Wade last year, the intentions of elected officials matter again.

After taking their lumps in the 2022 elections, Republican politicians have been trying to figure out how to finesse the issue. How do they avoid the ire of female voters without alienating their personhood-at-conception base? Last fall, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin thought he had the formula: a “compromise” abortion ban at 15 weeks. But that idea went down in flames as Republicans lost control of the Virginia legislature.

Trump also has been searching for an answer. For a while he also toyed with a 15-week ban, but then last week he stalled for time, saying he’d make a statement this week. I was skeptical about this, because Trump often says he’s going to do something and then doesn’t. But in fact he did make a statement on Monday.

I don’t usually post Trump videos, but I think you need to see this to appreciate just how far off-the-rails this guy has gone. To start with, his make-up is comical; he almost looks like he’s wearing blackface. Then there are the obvious, how-stupid-do-you-think-we-are lies about how “all legal scholars, both sides, wanted and in fact demanded” the end of Roe, and Democrats “support abortion up to and even beyond the ninth month”. (In fact, Biden supports restoring the pre-Dobbs status quo, which drew a line at viability, i.e. 24-28 weeks. More radical people, like me, want the government to butt out completely and let women decide how to handle their own problem pregnancies. But describing that view as “support” for abortion is dishonest. I, for one, am neutral on abortion; I have never tried to persuade a woman to get one.)

But the gist of the statement is that Trump is proud of engineering the conservative Supreme Court majority that decided Dobbs, and he doesn’t want to take any public position beyond letting the states (and not women together with their families and doctors) decide when abortion is permissible. He later said he wouldn’t sign a federal abortion ban if Congress presented him with one. (But then, Trump says a lot of things, and most of them turn out not to be true. When he was president, he claimed his tax plan wouldn’t help the rich. But when Paul Ryan gave him a plan that focused most of its benefits on the rich, he signed it. And we’re still waiting to see the “terrific” health care plan he promised in 2015. )

He’s also proud of being opportunistic on the issue.

You must follow your heart on this issue. But remember: You must also win elections.

That let-the-states-decide position looked clever for about a day. But then a state decided: Tuesday, Arizona’s Supreme Court reinstated an 1864 law banning all abortions that aren’t necessary to save a woman’s life. (In the previous post, I explain why I believe this is a correct reading of a horrible legal situation. It’s the legislature, not the court, that should never have allowed this to happen.)

Then Trump had to scramble: He said Arizona went too far, and predicted the situation would be “straightened out”. Arizona’s mini-Trump, Senate candidate Kari Lake, completely reversed her position. Previously, she had specifically endorsed the 1864 law (by its number in the legal code). But now she says

I oppose today’s ruling, and I am calling on Katie Hobbs and the State Legislature to come up with an immediate common sense solution that Arizonans can support.

So far as I know, this is the first time Lake has admitted that Katie Hobbs (who defeated Lake in 2022) is indeed governor. I also love the invocation of “common sense solution”, a conservative buzz phrase Sarah Palin popularized: It’s a placeholder. You’re supposed to insert whatever position you think makes sense, and then imagine Lake said that.

But Lake hasn’t said anything. As of this moment, neither Lake nor Trump (nor any other Republican who either has real power or is running to get it) has made an actual proposal to fix Arizona’s draconian abortion law. When it comes time to govern — and not just posture — that’s what you need to do: put a real proposal on paper and vote it up or down, knowing that you’ll make some people unhappy.

Are any Republicans, at either the state or national levels, ready to govern? That’s what the coming weeks will tell us.

April 15, 2024 – 10:20 am Categories: Articles | Comments (3)

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