A lot of savvy people don’t see how flighty and fickle (and disinspiring to voters) they appear with their post-debate insistence that Joe Biden step aside for another Democrat. They’re dressing up their panic as strategery.
Steadfastness is a virtue Dems need more of. Much more.
We can't depend on the mainstream/Right-wing media to report the entire story. How did we get to this point where a President gets non-stop coverage for showing his age and the smaller story is the lying, flatulent narcissist felon on stage next to him? https://t.co/OAmNrS2LJb
The other point I’d make in this is a lack of any global sense of the race from the Biden-panicked. Dobbs, Chevron, Trump v. U.S. might as well not exist. Someone I spoke with shrugged off Monday’s SCOTUS decision as “expected”! None of the commentary I’ve seen offers any perspective on how Trump himself may be bleeding support, on his electability. All some Democrats can see is Biden’s bad debate. One play is not the whole game.
The focus needs to be back on Trump’s perfidy, on his cognitive and legal impairments, and on the conservative thirst for a urinary unitary executive. There’s a conspiracy to end America. Thanks to the Supreme Court, we’re poised for dictatorship if Trump wins.
Every Republican saying the SCOTUS ruling only applies to official acts and the rules, institutions, and guardrails of Washington will prevent a second Trump administration from using the “official acts” cover to engage in the most heinous acts imaginable can fuck right off.
I was at the Raleigh Biden rally about 15 hours after last Thursday’s debate and Biden was ON. Hot, even. “Oh, but he was using a teleprompter,” several who weren’t there told me. Teleprompters inject stimulants now?
"When I thought about his 34 felony convictions, his sexual assault on a woman in a public, he's has been fined $400 million for business fraud." "I thought to myself, Donald Trump isn't just a convicted felon–Donald Trump is a one man crime wave." pic.twitter.com/L1pVcBWip2
Hillary was not a good campaigner. But despite the forest of Trump signs out in the countryside, I felt sure (well, pretty sure) and told people who asked that the country was not crazy enough to elect a buffoon like Trump. Then I spent part of Election Day 2016 greeting voters beside Talks To The Sky. That night, Trump happened. I abandoned any pretensions of predictive ability.
Which is why I’m confounded by the certainty of the “Biden can’t win” chorus after the bad debate. There’s a lot of concern over whether he’s too old for the campaigning and for doing the job. I get that. Frankly, we’ve seen worse win. But Biden can’t?
So when I hear with surety that some unnamed, younger, other Democrat can win when there’s no plan, no funding, no campaign, and no candidate, I’m wondering if that’s the sort of wishful thinking that tripped me up in 2016.
I don’t care at this point if Biden is up to the job. Trump-the-idiot wasn’t. This election isn’t about responsible governance at this point. What I care about is winning and keeping Trump out of office again. Biden beat Trump once and, until data suggests he’s toast, has a shot as incumbent of doing it again. Whether he’s in decline is not the point. This one’s for all the marbles. I need more than Another Democrat before I board the dump-Biden train this late in the process. Get me an alternate candidate and a plan and we’ll talk.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday all but guaranteed this country has dictatorship in its future. If not under “your favorite president,” as Trump the imperial might say, then under another, smarter, more skilled autocrat. “[T]his ruling is a brazen and dangerous expansion of presidential power in ways that entrench a deep climate of impunity,” constitutional scholar Aziz Rana tells The Ink. But you knew that.
Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen report at Axios that if elected Trump will “immediately test the boundaries of presidential and governing power.” (What boundaries?)
The big picture: Trump promises an unabashedly imperial presidency — one that would turn the Justice Department against critics, deport millions of people in the U.S. illegally, slap 10% tariffs on thousands of products, and fire perhaps tens of thousands of government staff deemed insufficiently loyal.
He’d stretch the powers of the presidency in ways not seen in our lifetime. He says this consistently and clearly — so it’s not conjecture.
You might like this or loathe this. But it’s coming, fast and furious, if he’s elected.
Thanks to Monday’s Supreme Court ruling, Trump could pursue his plans without fear of punishment or restraint.
What to watch: To hear Trump and his allies tell it, this is how early 2025 would unfold if he wins:
1. A re-elected Trump would quickly set up vast camps and deport millions of people in the U.S. illegally. He could invoke the Insurrection Act and use troops to lock down the southern border.
3. He’d centralize power over the Justice Department, historically an independent check on presidential power. He plans to nominate a trusted loyalist for attorney general, and has threatened to target and even imprison critics. He could demand the federal cases against him cease immediately.
4. Many of the Jan. 6 convictscould be pardoned — a promise Trump has made at campaign rallies, where he hails them as patriots, not criminals. Investigations of the Bidens would begin.
5. Trump says he’d slap 10% tariffs on most imported goods, igniting a possible trade war and risking short-term inflation. He argues this would give him leverage to create better trade terms to benefit consumers.
6. Conversation would intensify about when Justices Clarence Thomas, 76, and Sam Alito, 74, would retire.
Lists of potential successors are already drawn up.
President Biden said last month that “the next president is likely to have two new Supreme Court nominees.”
If Trump were to win and the two oldest justices retired, five of the nine justices would have been handpicked by Trump.
There’s more if you have the stomach for it.
This toxic, authoritarian movement, for all it’s flag-waving and pretensions to patriotism, is anything but American. And never was. It is a knife to the throat of this republic. There are people in this country who want a dictator and a one-party state. Some of them wear black robes and accept bribes. But the bribes are just a perk. They are true believers in something other than the Constitution they are tasked for life with interpreting.
"Somewhere along the way there are a majority of justices on this court who decided that they needed to be the last word on everything. That they could no longer trust the apparatus of democracy." Sherrilyn Ifill emphasizes the severity of the Supreme Court's immunity ruling pic.twitter.com/UpgnIvYmSk
It can never again be said that in America “no man is above the law.” The Supreme Court held today that the President of the United States — and the former president in particular — is above the law, and the only person in America who is above the law.
Guess who had televised "trials" and "confessions" for dissidents/businessmen accused of corruption/non-loyalists? Gaddafi. I analyze them in #Strongmen, propaganda chapter. https://t.co/p7zVBT6fYy
But at the end of election night we still count votes, not age or ideology. Best you round up as many as you can before Trump 2.0 starts rounding you up.
I don't think anyone expected the Court to issue a decision so trimmed to help Trump personally. Not @ElieNYC, not @Dahlialithwick, not me. We all thought they'd take the high road after the low road of delay. Instead, this decision was designed to help Trump.
Steve Bannon: Here's what's going to happen in another Trump administration. A whole big part of Trump's Project 2025 is going into the apparatus, into the post-Constitutional leviathan, and starting to take apart the administrative state brick by brick. I have 900 pages right… pic.twitter.com/W2H7T9SnQt
Trump and his henchmen may all be convicted felons but what Steve Bannon says there is absolutely true. I’m sure he’ll be writing all that out in his Mein Trumpf manifesto from jail.
Here he is before surrendering this morning:
Priest shows up outside Danbury prison to say a prayer over Steve Bannon as he is about to go in: “Father, don’t pray for me, pray for our enemies. They’re the ones that are going to need the prayers!” pic.twitter.com/3g8b8LsylL
"Lock him up! Lock him up!" — Steve Bannon and Marjorie Taylor Greene are trying to hold a news conference right now and it's not going well pic.twitter.com/5AvgXGcqxM
Marge is now ranting that Pelosi wanted MAGA J6ers to kill her: “I was a brand new Member of Congress. I’d only been there 3 days. I could’ve been killed because of Nancy Pelosi!” pic.twitter.com/YiRrPOySdC
Trump v. United States is an astonishing opinion. It holds that presidents have broad immunity from criminal prosecution — essentially, a license to commit crimes — so long as they use the official powers of their office to do so.
Broadly speaking, Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion reaches three conclusions. The first is that when the president takes any action under the authority given to him by the Constitution itself, his authority is “conclusive and preclusive” and thus he cannot be prosecuted. Thus, for example, a president could not be prosecuted for pardoning someone, because the Constitution explicitly gives the chief executive the “Power to Grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States.”
One question that has loomed over this case for months is whether presidential immunity is so broad that the president could order the military to assassinate a political rival. While this case was before a lower court, one judge asked if Trump could be prosecuted if he’d ordered “SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival” and Trump’s lawyer answered that he could not unless Trump had previously been successfully impeached and convicted for doing so.
Roberts’s opinion in Trump, however, seems to go even further than Trump’s lawyer did. The Constitution, after all, states that the president “shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.” So, if presidential authority is “conclusive and preclusive” when presidents exercise their constitutionally granted powers, the Court appears to have ruled that yes, Trump could order the military to assassinate one of his political opponents. And nothing can be done to him for it.
As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson writes in dissent, “from this day forward, Presidents of tomorrow will be free to exercise the Commander-in-Chief powers, the foreign-affairs powers, and all the vast law enforcement powers enshrined in Article II however they please — including in ways that Congress has deemed criminal and that have potentially grave consequences for the rights and liberties of Americans.”
Roberts’s second conclusion is that presidents also enjoy “at least a presumptive immunity from criminal prosecution for a President’s acts within the outer perimeter of his official responsibility.” Thus, if a president’s action even touches on his official authority (the “outer perimeter” of that authority), then the president enjoys a strong presumption of immunity from prosecution.
This second form of immunity applies when the president uses authority that is not specifically mentioned in the Constitution, and it is quite broad — most likely extending even to mere conversations between the president and one of his subordinates.
The Court also says that this second form of immunity is exceptionally strong. As Roberts writes, “the President must therefore be immune from prosecution for an official act unless the Government can show that applying a criminal prohibition to that act would pose no ‘dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch.’”
Much of Roberts’s opinion, moreover, details just how broad this immunity will be in practice. Roberts claims, for example, that Trump is immune from prosecution for conversations between himself and high-ranking Justice Department officials, where he allegedly urged them to pressure states to “replace their legitimate electors” with fraudulent members of the Electoral College who would vote to install Trump for a second term.
Roberts writes that “the Executive Branch has ‘exclusive authority and absolute discretion’ to decide which crimes to investigate and prosecute,” and thus Trump’s conversations with Justice Department officials fall within his “conclusive and preclusive authority.” Following that logic, Trump could not have been charged with a crime if he had ordered the Justice Department to arrest every Democrat who holds elective office.
Elsewhere in his opinion, moreover, Roberts suggests that any conversion between Trump and one of his advisers or subordinates could not be the basis for a prosecution. In explaining why Trump’s attempts to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to “fraudulently alter the election results” likely cannot be prosecuted, for example, Roberts points to the fact that the vice president frequently serves “as one of the President’s closest advisers.”
Finally, Roberts does concede that the president may be prosecuted for “unofficial” acts. So, for example, if Trump had personally attempted to shoot and kill then-presidential candidate Joe Biden in the lead-up to the 2020 election, rather than ordering a subordinate to do so, then Trump could probably be prosecuted for murder.
But even this caveat to Roberts’s sweeping immunity decision is not very strong. Roberts writes that “in dividing official from unofficial conduct, courts may not inquire into the President’s motives.” And Roberts even limits the ability of prosecutors to pursue a president who accepts a bribe in return for committing an official act, such as pardoning a criminal who pays off the president. In Roberts’s words, a prosecutor may not “admit testimony or private records of the President or his advisers probing the official act itself.”
That means that, while the president can be prosecuted for an “unofficial” act, the prosecutors may not prove that he committed this crime using
That. Is. Terrifying.
We are on the verge of electing an already convicted criminal who has also been found liable for rape and defamation to this office. If there is a better argument for voting for Biden or anyone else I don’t know what it is. Trump is a corrupt criminal already. Now they’ve given him carte blanche to break any laws he wants.
If there’s one bright spot in the very dark weekend just passed it’s that we didn’t have to hear much from Donald Trump and his henchmen. He was very unhappy about that and whined on his Truth Social platform that nobody was giving him the credit he deserved:
Mostly he’s just been yelling at the clouds while his people have been keeping a low profile. It’s been years since we’ve had such a respite and it almost makes the hell of this Biden debate debacle bearable. Almost. It’s been a very rough few days and from the looks of it it’s not going to let up any time soon.
We’re still awaiting the poll results to see if voters have decided to vote for Trump in light of Biden’s miserable debate performance last Thursday. We’ve seen some numbers that show more people think he shouldn’t run for president again than said that last month but the number was always pretty high. (A majority say the same thing about Trump although fewer than say it about Biden.) But we haven’t yet seen the effects of the debate on voter preferences. Those will start coming in over the next few days and we’ll get a much better sense of just how serious the damage is among actual voters.
Among political pundits and analysts it has been catastrophic. While there are those who say that Biden should stay the course and, so far, the Democratic establishment is backing the president, the vast majority of liberal writers, talking heads and newspaper editorial boards have decided that Biden must go. It’s easy to just dismiss those voices and say they don’t reflect the needs and desires of the American people but it would be a huge mistake to underestimate how hard it will be for Biden to have to fight both Trump and a media establishment that is convinced that he should withdraw from the race. As Biden would say, it’s a big f-ing deal.
Part of this is driven by the fact that many members of the press apparently believe that they were lied to by the White House about Biden’s fitness and are personally offended by that. Throughout many of the op-eds and analyses of the situation is a clear sense of self-righteous anger running through them that they were not let in on the secret. It’s not an uncommon reaction. I recall that the media had a similar solipsistic view of President Bill Clinton’s refusal to admit to them that he had had an affair with a White House employee. In that case the public had a much more nuanced opinion of the scandal and the beltway media’s objections didn’t carry much weight. Clinton not only survived, he had a high approval rating and kept it throughout the rest of his term.
Of course, Bill Clinton wasn’t running for re-election. His Vice President Al Gore was and he paid the price with the media which treated him woefully during that election, largely as a result of the burning resentment they felt toward Clinton. You’re all familiar with how that went. And you know how the lingering effects of that relationship dogged Hillary Clinton over the next 16 years as she pursued her own political career.
Here’s an example of how the new media narrative is shaping up, from media reporter Brian Stelter who says it’s now a referendum on Biden and there’s no more reason to bother covering Trump’s lies since his base and the GOP’s elites don’t care.
To those who say "what about Trump's lies:" There's been no shortage of media coverage of his conduct. But his base doesn't seem to care. GOP elites have mostly made peace with Trump's lies. Conversely, many Dems are very concerned about Biden's capability, so it's more salient.
So, even if the public decides that Biden’s performance wasn’t a deal breaker and his numbers have remained close to Trump’s despite the voters’ clear concerns about him, he’ll have an even tougher uphill climb that he already had with that media narrative. It’s not illogical or untoward even for people who think Biden should stick it out to be genuinely concerned about that since the stakes are so high.
While that may be the prevailing consensus among the media, what should happen next is not so clear. There are people demanding an open convention in which there would be a floor fight and delegates rather than voters would decide who the candidate should be. I maintain, as I did right after the debate, that as entertaining as it might be, it would likely be a disaster. The Democratic Party is not known for its discipline and cohesion on a good day. The last thing they need is a knock down drag out internecine fight before the whole country just two months before the election.
In my view that leaves only one option. If Biden decides that in good faith he can’t continue, the only answer is for him to formally pass the torch to his Vice President, the person 81 million people voted for four years ago to replace him if he could not longer be president through illness or death. {Let’s face it, as the oldest president in history we were all very aware of that possibility.} If that’s more or less happened now there’s no reason to look anywhere but the person who has been on the ticket from the beginning for that very purpose. That’s why we have Vice Presidents.
Yes, it’s meant for a president’s term not a campaign but the principle is the same, particularly under these conditions. It’s just too late for a full blown nomination battle. If this happens the party should strive for a seamless transition that’s seen as a continuation of the Biden administration and the Biden campaign that’s already been laid out. There’s no time to completely re-tool.
And there are important technical reasons for that as well. As legal historian Mary Beth Williams pointed out on twitter, the campaign war chest assembled by the Biden Harris campaign cannot be easily transferred to any other candidate. (You’d have to get the permission of every original donor.) She writes:
The B-H campaign fund can donate to candidates, but is subject to the same limits as individual contributors.
Any or all of the war chest can be transferred to federal, state, and/or local political parties, but then the limits on party donations to candidates are in effect. It can also be transferred to a super-PAC, but no coordination with campaigns is allowed.
The DNC could run the general election campaign, but my experience on three “coordinated campaigns” (Gore, Kerry, and Obama ’08,) leaves me very cold on that option.
It took B-H four years to build that war chest, and no candidate could come close to raising that amount in four months. Plus, all the media time is already purchased, the campaign offices are contracted, staff hired, etc.
The only two candidates with full, easy access to all that money and infrastructure are Biden or Harris.
Harris is being a loyal soldier and has been out there forcefully backing Biden. And if he decides to stay in, the campaign should make sure that she stays front and center going forward because all eyes will be on her like never before. Whether anyone wants to admit it, the prospect of a Vice President having to step in, one way or another, has never been so acute.
The next couple of weeks are going to be agonizing for everyone, not the least of whom is Joe Biden himself. James Fallows put it well in a tweet on Sunday: be wary of anyone who says this is an easy call.
The most consequential decision yet from the six-justice Roberts supermajority was sandwiched between President Biden’s debate pratfall Thursday night and this morning’s Supreme Court decision on former President Trump’s immunity from criminal prosecution. So before it gets wiped clean from the front pages, I want to just take a moment before the immunity decision comes down to re-cast the current court.
The Supreme Court’s decision Friday to overrule Chevron will have vast consequences, many of then unseen or hard to detect, but one of the things we were discussing internally Friday as we assessed the Supreme Court’s term and its four years with a 6-3 conservative supermajority is how the defining characteristic isn’t conservatism at all but the accrual of power to the judiciary at the expense of the executive and legislative branches.
Rather than taking a conservative view of the role of the courts – a modest, humble, restrained posture that is wary of its own power and applies it carefully – the Roberts supermajority has taken a radical course where the judiciary is increasingly the final arbiter not just on the law but on the facts, the interpretation of those facts, the application of those facts in given situations, and the technical, scientific, and professional implications of those facts in the real world.
There’s nothing conservative about it, and you only have to look to conservatives’ exact same complaints about the Warren and especially the Burger courts to see the obvious. We’ve taken to calling the court “right wing” rather than conservative because it’s a more precise description (though it’s still a pretty blunt term). Rather than being driven by a guiding conservative judicial philosophy, however odious it might have been, the current Supreme Court is most consistent when it comes to consolidating power for itself.
It’s one decision after another, wiping out precedent, common sense and centuries of understanding about the meaning of the constitution. They are taking a wrecking ball to the rule of law and our government’s ability to function as a 21st century society.
If you wonder just how far this immunity really stretches:
Roberts: “And some Presidential conduct — for example, speaking to and on behalf of the American people — certainly can qualify as official even when not obviously connected to a particular constitutional or statutory provision.”
So when Trump tells his mob to march to the capitol and fight like hell or they won’t have a country anymore, it’s part of his official duty because he’s speaking “to and on behalf” of the American people? I’m guessing he means yes.
The January 6th case will not be tried before the election, but we knew that. The Supremes decided that presidents are immune from prosecution for their “official acts” and sent the J6 case back to the district court to decide which charges may apply. They explicitly said that his attempts to force the Department of Justice to lie for him and say that they found evidence of fraud when they did not are official acts. So I think it’s fair to say they believe the definition of “official” is extremely broad.
It will take a bit to digest this but it’s clear that it’s pretty bad. If you don’t believe me, read this excerpt from Justice Sotomayor’s dissent:
“When [the president] uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune. Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today. Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done. The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”
The Chief Justice also decimated the independence of the DOJ with this opinion as a bonus:
If you thought Trump was an existential threat before wait until you see what happens if he wins another term and becomes a veritable King.
Update:
The majority opinion in Trump says that (1) official acts can't be evidence; and (2) motive is irrelevant.
If that's the case, how could a president ever actually *be* prosecuted for ordering the military, in his capacity as commander in chief, to kill his chief political rival?
With all the freaking out about Joe Biden and the debate, I keep thinking about the 1984 presidential election. Ronald Reagan, who was in his mid 70s, had a really weak first debate performance, and the political chattering classes came out wondering if he was too old to be president. The dynamic was just like it is today. There was one major difference, though: in that election, the Republican Party universally rallied around their president, reassuring the press and public that he was just fine. In the next debate, Reagan did better, and their campaign rolled on to one of the most decisive wins in American history, a landslide the size of which we haven’t seen since.
There is something about the culture of our Democratic Party that reacts to a setback with panic instead of steady determination and rallying around the flag. We need to calm ourselves down and buck the f’’k up.
Yeah, I know: Biden wasn’t exactly full of youthful energy at that debate. But I do have a question: did y’all not know he was an old guy? That he would be slow in walking to the podium? That he would stumble over some words? As they might say in Casablanca: how shocked are you that there is gambling in this establishment?
But Democrats should not be so quick to forget another set of facts about Joe Biden: he has been the best and most effective president since FDR. He has passed more major legislation, including more than $4 billion in investments in our people and economy, than any president since the New Deal. He has signed the best set of executive orders of any president maybe ever. His appointees at DOJ, the FTC, the SEC, the NLRB, and other key agencies of government have done more to take on corporate greed, monopoly power, and price gouging than any in almost a century.
Why are we talking about dumping the best president in modern history because he had a weak debate performance and is a little old?
Reagan, the next oldest president in American history, was — unfortunately, because his policies were terrible — the most effective, influential, and successful president in modern history. He went on from that debate stumble not only to win re-election decisively, but to also decisively reshape the way American government has worked in the 40 years since. Joe Biden, unlike the younger and hipper Democratic presidents after Reagan, has begun to finally wrest our government back from the big corporate serving policies of the GOP to a policy agenda that seeks to help working families.
With that track record of success, the idea that Democrats should dump Biden after one shaky debate performance is profoundly wrong. We need to rally around the flag, gang, and fight like warriors to get the best president of our lifetimes re-elected.
And folks, we are positioned to win this election.
We have a far more popular agenda than the right wing’s monstrous proposals. (Google Project 2025 if you want to check out their workshop of horrors.) We have a track record of remarkable legislative and executive branch accomplishments that is superior to any president at least since LBJ. We have a series of powerful issues — abortion rights, health care, green energy jobs, infrastructure, Social Security, veterans benefits, rebuilding our manufacturing base, and taking on Big Pharma, monopoly power, and price gouging — where we have the political high ground. And we are running against the most horribly flawed candidate of all time.
So my fellow Democrats, it is time to stop freaking out and time to stop worrying about one bad debate. We have an election to win and only about four months to do it. Let’s kick our fighting spirit into full gear, and knock on doors, make calls and texts, take our case to social media, reach out to our friends, and give money. Let’s stop worrying and get to winning.
As the late, great Stan Lee would advise, “‘Nuff said.”
Except:
America: Let's #BucktheEffUp and get back into the fight.
