Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

In 1973 the Senate Watergate Committee uncovered a plan that had been hatched three years earlier by a man named Tom Charles Huston, a White House liaison to the Interagency Committee on Intelligence (ICI), a group chaired FBI Director  J. Edgar Hoover to monitor “left wing radicals.” The Huston Plan, as it was known, laid out detailed operations to burglarize the homes and conduct electronic surveillance of these co-called radicals and even detain anti-war protesters in camps to be created in western states. President Richard Nixon signed off on the plan only to rescind his approval a few days later under objections from Hoover himself.

It was one of a number of nefarious plots uncovered during the investigations, including the actual burglarizing of Pentagon Papers whistle blower Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, an order to bomb the Brooking s Institute and the Watergate burglary itself. The Huston Plan was one that was never carried out but went directly to the president who signed the order.

I bring this obscure bit of Watergate lore up because it was the Huston plan that precipitated a very important historical question posed to Nixon by David Frost in their interviews in 1977. Frost asked Nixon:

So, what in a sense you’re saying is that there are certain situations and the Huston plan or that part of it was one of them where the president can decide that it’s in the best interest of the nation or something and do something illegal.

Nixon famously replied, “well, when the president does it … that means that it is not illegal.”

That answer caused a national uproar. The mere idea of a president being above the law, especially one who had been driven from office and then pardoned for his crimes by his successor was outrageous.

Nixon further explained that position in some detail. He said,:

[I]f, for example, the president approves something … approves an action, ah … because of the national security or in this case because of a threat to internal peace and order of, ah … ah … significant magnitude … then … the president’s decision in that instance is one, ah … that enables those who carry it out to carry it out without violating a law. Otherwise they’re in an impossible position.

Frost followed up asking if the “black-bag” jobs that were authorized in the Huston plan would have been made legal by his action. Nixon said:

Well … I think that we would … I think that we’re splitting hairs here. Burglaries per se are illegal. Let’s begin with that proposition. Second, when a burglary, as you have described a black-bag job, ah … when a burglary, ah … is one that is undertaken because of an expressed policy decided by the president, ah … in the interests of the national security … or in the interests of domestic tranquility … ah … when those interests are very, very high … and when the device will be used in a very limited and cautious manner and responsible manner … when it is undertaken, then, then that means that what would otherwise be technically illegal does not subject those who engage in such activity to criminal prosecution. . .

He went on to say that he wasn’t suggesting that a president is above the law just that during war time and “virtual revolution in certain concentrated areas at home” the president does have under the Constitution extraordinary powers.

It sounded completely daft at the time and reinforced most of the country’s belief that Nixon was a tyrannical monster who never should have been anywhere near the presidency. He sounded absolutely nuts. However, there was a small group of conservative legal thinkers who agreed with Nixon’s views of presidential power and thought it was a shame that the congress and the courts had taken upon themselves to usurp the imperial power of the presidency.

The fact is that the presidency had been accumulating power ever since WWII. One of the stalest political tropes around is that once attaining power institutions and leaders rarely give it up and it’s true. By the time Nixon came along to crudely abuse the presidency to punish his political enemies, the presidency was already hurtling out of control. And sadly the reforms put in place after Watergate didn’t hold for very long.

The Reagan administration set about evading and disarming them immediately and a whole generation of young legal Reagan revolutionaries adopted the view that Nixon was right and the presidency had been inappropriately emasculated. They pushed novel new legal concepts like the “unitary executive” theory which puts strong constraints on any congressional authority to grant independent authority to executive branch agencies.

Five members of the Supreme Court came up in that legal atmosphere. Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito were lawyers in the Reagan administration and Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, were in the George W. Bush administration. Justice Amy Coney Barrett didn’t work directly for a president and notably dissented in part of the majority opinion but she did work on Bush v. Gore with Kavanaugh and Roberts. This was a fundamental belief among the elite legal minds of the conservative movement.

But according to NPR Supreme Court correspondent Nina Totenberg, this isn’t just about ideology. They were also shaped by a long-standing gripe that their presidents had been unfairly constrained and harassed. It’s personal for them:

It is apparent that the Supreme Court majority, like the average MAGA voter and Donald Trump himself, is filled with bitter resentment. In fact, I would suggest that this entire unitary executive, imperial president philosophy stems from grievance over Richard Nixon being forced out of office all those years ago.

The ruling in Trump v. United States was the culmination of many years of careful, strategic planning by the right wing legal community. The six partisan justices in the majority played the long game and when they got the chance to implement their dream of an imperial presidency they did not hesitate. Not even the prospect of allowing a corrupt president unlike any other, including Richard Nixon, gave them pause.

Perhaps like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, they are counting on the Democrats to “take care of him” so they feel free to overlook his obvious criminality to advance their pet cause. Or maybe they are just grateful that his crimes gave them the opportunity to address the issue that’s animated them for so long. Either way, they have not only given the Donald Trump a get-out-of-jail free card they have weaponized the presidency knowing what criminals like Nixon and Trump are capable of. It’s not at all unfair to assume that’s exactly why they did it.

Salon

MAGA hates you. They really hate you.

Maybe the problem with getting people to understand the threat posed by Donald Trump, by MAGA, and by Project 2025 is that it has no face.

In the wake of the Supreme Court making the president a de facto king, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts just gave it one. Yes, the “radical left” is the enemy MAGA will defeat “in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” And if we resist?

The Biden-Harris campaign put a short clip on social media.

Brian Beutler, responds, “Incredible to me that this stuff only surfaces because the Biden campaign and media watchdog types tweet it out. To the extent it figures into campaign coverage at all (even pre-debate) it’s just ho-hum, in passing, nbd, etc.”

Actress Taraji P. Henson made a plea for paying attention during the BET Awards on Sunday. “The Project 2025 plan is not a game. Look it up!”

No, it’s not a game, confirms Nicole Wallace. The mission statement for 2025 is “a full-scale reimagining of our entire system of government and who runs it … in Donald Trump’s image.”

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.

As Democrats second-guess themselves and tear out their hair over Joe Biden’s debate performance, foreign adversaries and MAGA Republicans must be gleeful. Ruth Ben-Ghiat (“Stongmen”) reminds Twitter how autocrats think, “To ensure victory, it is optimal for democratic and progressive forces to be divided close to the election. They’ll have plenty of time to be together in jail.”

Piece of cake, thinks Kevin Roberts.

The Maga movement hates you. They really hate you.

The tweet below may or may not be trolling from a “Heritage American,” home-schooling, Mises Institute reactionary, but these days it’s best to believe white men like this one mean what they write:

“Middle Americans are the ones that prioritize the maintenance of their way of life, desire to be left alone by the coastal elites, and identify much more with memories of folk and kin than with postwar America as an ideological engine of world transformation. They understand instinctually that America was a place and a people, an inherited social order, not a propositional nation.”

Despite the flowery language in the Declaration, no, our is not an egalitarian nation dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal.” These guys reject the country’s founding principles.

“We’re coming for the Civil Rights Act next, then the New Deal. We’re gonna repeal the 20th century.”

Believe them the first time. Neo-feudalism, women barefoot and pregnant, minorities in their place, and LGBTQ+ types back in the closet, that’s the ticket. They want to rule.

Act like your very freedoms are at stake, because they are.

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Biden must go? And then what?

Will Bunch observes:

Over the course of a remarkable weekend, I saw the best minds of my boomer generation destroyed by madness — newspaper columnists and other big shots convinced they were cosplayers in a real-world episode of The West Wing, saving America by giving chief of staff Leo McGarry the best words to convince an ailing President Bartlet that it’s time to step down.

Democrats, many of them, are panicked over President Joe Biden’s debate performance on Thursday. This is one time Democrats really do seem in disarray. The press is having a field day, of course. But reporters are wary enough of being blamed for holding the drum while the “Biden must go” team beats it that Brian Stelter tells CNN it is no longer us (the press) but Democratic officials turning against Biden.

In the grocery store, online, on listservs, and in calls, “Biden can’t win” blares self-fulfilling prophecy in spite of the fact that, at least in the polls, there is no Biden free fall.

One in three Democrats believes Biden should leave the presidential race, a Reuters/Ipsos poll that concluded Tuesday finds. Yet both Biden and Donald Trump “maintain the support of 40% of registered voters, suggesting that Biden has not lost ground since the debate.”

(I’d be more confident in a poll of likely voters.)

A new CNN poll conducted by SSRS (again, registered voters) finds:

Three-quarters of US voters say the Democratic Party would have a better shot at holding the presidency in 2024 with someone other than President Joe Biden at the top of the ticket, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS. His approval rating also has hit a new low following a shaky performance in the first debate of this year’s presidential campaign.

In a matchup between the presumptive major-party nominees, voters nationwide favor former President Donald Trump over Biden by 6 points, 49% to 43%, identical to the results of CNN’s national poll on the presidential race in April, and consistent with the lead Trump has held in CNN polling back to last fall.

Philip Bump cautions not to put too much weight on that one poll, but that “there aren’t significant shifts in the favorability of either candidate. Biden and Trump are each viewed more favorably by members of their parties than they were in April.”

In the few conversations I’ve had and read on my lists, panicked Democrats insist Biden must go. But suppose Biden did step aside, then what? What’s the plan? Who’s the candidate? How would this work?

Essentially, they demand that Democrats replace something with nothing. They are freaked out over Biden but offer vaporware to replace him.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll found:

Vice President Kamala Harris, for example, trailed Trump by one percentage point, 42% to 43%, a difference that was well within the poll’s 3.5 percentage point margin of error, making Harris’ showing statistically just as strong as Biden’s.

CNN’s polling queried telephone respondents about several prominent Democrats.

Reuters reports that some 70% of Democrats in its poll had never heard of Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, an upcoming Democrat. Furthermore, “Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer sat behind Trump 36% to 41%, while Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker had 34% support compared to Trump’s 40%.”

The problem with such speculative polling is that replacing Biden with any of these Democrats, capable as they may be, might allow Trump to win in November on name recognition alone.

Meantime, Donald Trump’s verbal gaffs and “glitches” are legend. He blusters through them, changes course, or launches into weird anecdotes about sharks and windmills. Democrats need to get the conversation back onto Trump’s disqualifications for another term. Like 34 felony convictions, multiple indictments, and a childlike desire for godlike powers.

A lot has happened in the last week, and Bunch reviews much of it in a few paragraphs while attacking the “savvy” and the cult that is now the Republican Party:

Except maybe the dangerous cult is the more important crisis, especially when it carries a printed guide to dictatorship and holds six justices in its back pocket. To focus on the actual threat we are facing, I wish America’s top pundits would spend less time watching reruns of The West Wing and maybe pick up a copy of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

The reality of what’s happening in July 2024 — that an authoritarian-minded president, with help from a politicized and unethical Supreme Court, is on track to lead a nation where all power is being vested in him, his MAGA movement, and the corporate polluters — is THE story, and Biden’s health is a subplot in that drama. The current president is walking slowly, but it’s the American Experiment that’s on a ventilator. Journalists aren’t doing their job: performing basic triage and focusing on the sickest patient in the room. With fear for our democracy, I dissent.

For my part, I haven’t heard this much magical thinking from the left since the last (New Age) Whole Life Expo I covered. People are seriously arguing that Biden has to go because he’s not up to doing the job after January 20, as if good governance in the next presidential term is what’s on the ballot and not the fate of our nation. If Trump wins on November 5, we’re a dictatorship on Jan. 20. And right now, Biden is still the best positioned to prevent that.

As I said yesterday, get me an alternate candidate and a plan and we’ll talk.

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Yes, yes they should…

I’m seeing a lot of discussion about whether or not the Democrats should use this Court’s extreme decisions as a primary issue in the fall since there’s not a lot we can do about it. I say yes. It’s all part of the far-right power grab that includes Trump and Project 2025. Of course they must run on it.

Josh Marshall wrote this today:

Obviously, wanting to focus attention on something doesn’t mean you’ll succeed. And for those ready to pounce: No, this is irrespective of who is at the top of the Democratic ticket. The obvious fact is that any day Democrats are talking about Joe Biden’s age is a wasted, lost day. What’s more relevant is that this is not and would not be changing the subject. It is the subject. It’s the actual subject that the campaign and election are about.

Donald Trump threatens the entire existence of the American republic. He is able to do this because the Supreme Court he created is assisting him in doing so. It is a corrupt Court. It overturned a central right for half of our population. It routinely mixes and matches rationales, jurisprudences, logics to arrive at the end point of transforming America into the justices’ extremist vision. We’ve heard that yesterday’s decision was a terrible decision, an extremist decision, that it changes the American experiment fundamentally. No disagreement with any of those points. Most importantly, in my mind, it’s a fake decision. Yes, it will now be controlling within the federal courts. But it doesn’t change the constitution any more than a foreign army occupying New England would make Massachusetts no longer part of the United States. That may seem like a jarring analogy. But it’s the only kind that allows us to properly view and react to this Supreme Court.

The rationale for the decision yesterday has literally no basis whatsoever in the U.S. Constitution. To capture this, comparing it to the earlier, unanimous appellate court decision in the contrary direction is revealing. The argument amounts to: separation of powers, yada. That’s it.

The advantage we can all take from the Dobbs decision is that it takes issues and actions that can seem technical, esoteric, removed from daily life and plants it squarely in the center of daily life. The Supreme Court is hellbent on taking away our freedoms and our liberty? Yes, really. Dobbs, in addition to being a huge deal itself, anchors the larger assault in everyone’s daily lived reality. That’s the way to see this and argue it to the public: the same out-of-control Court, which Donald Trump created and which ended abortion rights, now wants to change the constitution itself to help Donald Trump commit more crimes.

The election is about Donald Trump and the Supreme Court, the two forces working to overthrow the American republic. That’s the subject. It’s not Joe Biden. So both substantively and politically it makes all the sense in the world. The Court has done us all the favor of not always being as aware as it might be of the political and electoral dimensions of the justices’ bad acts. Yesterday’s ruling is a helpful if disastrous reminder of what the election is really about.

I could not agree more. At some point we are going to know if Biden is staying in or not and while the press will dog him relentlessly if he does, the race will reset to focus on Trump again. He will make sure of it. This is the message or at least the primary message. The court ‘s decision is the most far-reaching wrong turn the court has taken probably since Dred Scott. They’ve redefined the presidency as a time-limited (maybe…) dictatorship. The stakes in this campaign were always high. Now they’re truly existential.

This piece at Arc Digital is very good on this subject:

The 2024 election is effectively an up-or-down vote on Constitutional democracy. If Trump loses, the question of what abuses the Supreme Court allows him to do in office becomes moot, and cases will eventually finish litigating the rules and start trying the crimes. The American people asserting their support for the Constitution in the face of such a threat will invigorate pro-democracy forces, and provide opportunities for renewal.

But we have to get there first, which won’t be easy. The institutions of American democracy are hanging by a thread, and the country’s highest court decided to fray it.

Vance said that while he thinks presidents (read: Republicans) should have immunity, it would be up to future Attorney General to decide if Biden should be prosecuted for crimes. I think he undoubtedly speaks for the entire GOP on that. It won’t be hard for them to find a loophole that allows such a thing if Trump is in the driver’s seat.

Amanda Marcotte at Salon had a good piece on this today. An excerpt:

For all the people who are semi-joking that President Joe Biden now has a legal right to have the military assassinate Trump, Chief Justice John Roberts gave himself an out. Roberts insists that the president “is not above the law.” It can still be a crime if the court determines that the behavior falls outside of “his official acts.” But what makes something an official act? Well, that’s a little hazy, you see. As Los Angeles Times legal analyst Harry Litman noted on Twitter, the “test” appears to be whether a prosecution presents a serious “threat of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch.” 

With the nakedly partisan tilt of this court, it’s not hard to see what would distinguish a legitimate vs. illegitimate intrusion on a president’s authority: his political party.

Biden orders a hit on a political enemy? That’s outrageous and therefore cannot be “official.” Trump orders a political assassination? Well, he must have had a good reason! As liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in her dissent, “The official-versus-unofficial act distinction also seems both arbitrary and irrational.”

If that sounds hyperbolic, the context shows it is not. Last week, the conservative justices ruled that their opinions of scientific fact should overrule those of legitimate scientific or medical experts hired to work in federal agencies. But what makes something a “fact” in the eyes of the Republican justices was not evidence, but whether or not it fits their pre-existing policy preferences. For instance, in a related case overturning an environment regulation, Justice Neil Gorsuch repeatedly referenced in his decision “nitrous oxide,” which is laughing gas, instead of “nitrogen oxide,” the toxic emission that causes smog. Now something as concrete as the chemical composition of air pollutants can be legally redefined according to the wishes of a right-wing Supreme Court justice.

There is little hope for a fair or objective measure of what counts as an “official” or “unofficial” executive action. Republicans already speak and act generally as if a president can only be legitimate if he’s a member of their party. As Jamelle Bouie wrote in the New York Times on the eve of January 6, Republicans have embraced the view “that a Democrat has no right to hold power.” Whatever pretzel logic the Republican justices employ, the guiding principle of whether a criminal act is “immune” will likely depend on whether the president is a Republican or a Democrat. 

Of course it will. And anyone who is still laboring under the illusion that the Court is not a partisan institution needs to get their heads examined. Ever since 2000 we have seen them move inexorably in that direction and they have arrived. It is a Republican Court, an official arm of the party. And they have shown that when the chips are down they will deliver.

It’s Gilead rising

This didn’t get much notice but it’s telling:

The only three Republican women in the South Carolina Senate took on their party and stopped a total abortion ban from passing in their state last year. In return, they lost their jobs.

Voters removed Sens. Sandy Senn, Penry Gustafson and Katrina Shealy from office during sparsely turned out primaries in June, and by doing so completely vacated the Republican wing of the five-member “Sister Senators,” a female contingent that included two Democrats and was joined in their opposition to the abortion ban.

For Republicans, the departure of Senn, Gustafson and Shealy likely means there will be no women in the majority party of state Senate when the next session starts in 2025. It could also mean that women will not wield power for decades in the fiercely conservative state where they have long struggled to gain entry into the Legislature.

As South Carolina goes, so goes the nation — under Trump and the Supremes. They’re just going for it.

Polls continuously show that RFK Jr inexplicably garners from 10 to 15% of the vote. We don’t really have a good idea whether he draws more from Trump or Biden but it’s a terrible risk to have him on the ballot. He’s crazy and he just doesn’t care.

Vanity Fair has a new profile of him and it’s actually disgusting. I don’t know if the crazy people who are saying they’ll vote for him will ever know about it but what it says might even make them think twice. Here’s just one little excerpt:

Last year Robert Kennedy Jr. texted a photograph to a friend. In the photo RFK Jr. was posing, alongside an unidentified woman, with the barbecued remains of what appears to be a dog. Kennedy told the person, who was traveling to Asia, that he might enjoy a restaurant in Korea that served dog on the menu, suggesting Kennedy had sampled dog. The photo was taken in 2010, according to the digital file’s metadata—the same year he was diagnosed with a dead tapeworm in his brain. (A veterinarian who examined the photograph says the carcass is a canine, pointing to the 13 pairs of ribs, which include the tell-tale “floating rib” found in dogs.)

The picture’s intent seems to have been comedic—Kennedy and his companion are pantomiming—but for the recipient it was disturbing evidence of Kennedy’s poor judgment and thoughtlessness, simultaneously mocking Korean culture, reveling in animal cruelty, and needlessly risking his reputation and that of his family.

When Kennedy was married to his second wife, Mary Richardson, he was known to text other damning images to friends as well—of nude women. Those friends assumed Kennedy himself had taken the pictures, but they didn’t know whether the subjects had consented to having their genitalia photographed, let alone shared with other people. When one friend lost his phone, he panicked that somebody might discover the images.

Theories about Kennedy’s reckless behaviors abound. Long before it was reported, members of the family knew about the brain worm, which in court testimonies Kennedy conjectured he’d picked up from food he ate in South Asia. He said the tapeworm consumed a portion of his brain and led to protracted “brain fog.” But more often his family points to Kennedy’s 14 years as a heroin user, which began when Kennedy was 15 and didn’t end until he was 29. Kennedy has made his history of addiction part of his campaign narrative, arguing that he is more equipped to fix America’s addiction problem. Critics in his family feel otherwise. One Kennedy has circulated a report from the National Institutes of Health on the impact of long-term heroin abuse, which surmises that the damage can alter the physiology of the brain, “creating long-term imbalances in neuronal and hormonal systems that are not easily reversed” and “which may affect decision-making abilities, the ability to regulate behavior, and responses to stressful situations.”

That’s just the tip of the lunatic iceberg. Perhaps the worst things he’s ever done was this:

With each public and private rejection, whether the retraction of his Rolling Stone article or his breakups with environmental groups, Kennedy dug in deeper and deeper. Increasingly his anti-vaccine work was taking precedent. In 2018 Kennedy involved himself in a largely forgotten vaccine controversy in the American Samoan islands. That year, two children died after receiving the MMR vaccine, sparking an island-wide furor. Though it was later revealed that two nurses made a critical error administering the vaccines, accidentally introducing expired muscle relaxants into the formula, Kennedy’s nonprofit took to social media to hype the deaths as evidence of vaccine dangers.

Under public pressure, the Samoan prime minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi halted MMR vaccines on the island. In June of 2019 Kennedy and Hines flew to Samoa, lending celebrity wattage to local anti-vaccine advocates, giving press interviews, and taking a private meeting with the PM.

Over the ensuing months, the island was hit by the largest measles outbreak in its history, infecting 5,707 citizens and killing 83 people, most of them children. The outbreak was so lethal, the prime minister declared a state of emergency and ordered mandatory vaccinations, eventually curtailing the spread. Later one of Kennedy’s biggest critics, a pediatrician and member of the FDA’s advisory committee on vaccines, Paul Offit, told PBS that “Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had everything to do with that. And that shows you how disinformation can kill.”

In an interview with filmmaker Scott Kennedy (no relation), who made a documentary called Shot in the Arm, which will appear on PBS this fall, RFK Jr. becomes vividly agitated when confronted with the facts of the Samoa case, insisting that “I had nothing to do with people not vaccinating in Samoa, I never told anybody not to vaccinate.”

He had met with the prime minister to discuss implementing a medical system that would, in Kennedy’s own words, “measure health outcomes following the ‘natural experiment’ created by the national respite from vaccines.”

Robert F. Kennedy is a menace. Right now, both parties are circling, thinking he’s taking more votes from the other. But someone with big bucks should step in with a campaign to let those RFK voters know what this guy is really all about. Maybe that dog picture should be circulated everywhere.

We’re starting to get the first real post-debate polling. Today CNN released its poll. It doesn’t show any change in voter intentions but 75% of people say they think the Dems would have a better chance with a different candidate.

In a matchup between the presumptive major-party nominees, voters nationwide favor former President Donald Trump over Biden by 6 points, 49% to 43%, identical to the results of CNN’s national poll on the presidential race in April, and consistent with the lead Trump has held in CNN polling back to last fall.

Not exactly good news, of course. But it’s not the free-fall many expected. (CNN’s poll has had Trump leading by much more than any of the others for months.)

However, there is this, which is intriguing:

The poll also finds Vice President Kamala Harris within striking distance of Trump in a hypothetical matchup: 47% of registered voters support Trump, 45% Harris, a result within the margin of error that suggests there is no clear leader under such a scenario. Harris’ slightly stronger showing against Trump rests at least in part on broader support from women (50% of female voters back Harris over Trump vs. 44% for Biden against Trump) and independents (43% Harris vs. 34% Biden).

I don’t know what to think. I think most Democrats would crawl over hot coals to vote for a sack of rotted garbage over Donald Trump. But we don’t matter in this weird system we have. It’s all about swing voters in swing states and Biden and Harris’ chances in the wake of the debate are still undetermined.

Keep calm and have a drink. We’ll know soon enough.

He’s immune from the rule of law and he can pardon any soldier who follows his orders.