The Daily Beast noted this about that Jack Smith filing during the holidays arguing against allowing Trump to have immunity:
As Special Counsel Jack Smith makes the case that former President Donald Trump shouldn’t have vast immunity to commit crimes, Smith has compiled a very curious list of theoretical misdeeds that seem to telegraph potential bombshells at his upcoming D.C. trial.
Accepting a bribe, ordering an FBI director to fake evidence against a political foe, ordering the military to murder critics, and even selling nuclear secrets to a foreign enemy—these are the particular and peculiar crimes that prosecutors say Trump could get away with if he succeeds in arguing that presidential immunity gives him king-like powers to do as he pleases from the White House.
Again, theoretically, of course.
“In each of these scenarios, the president could assert that he was simply executing the laws; or communicating with the Department of Justice; or discharging his powers as commander-in-chief; or engaging in foreign diplomacy,” prosecutors wrote to appellate judges on Saturday.
They used nearly identical phrasing in a court filing to U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan in October.
The billionaire and the special prosecutor are currently battling ahead of a criminal trial in the nation’s capital, tentatively scheduled to begin in March on the eve of Super Tuesday. Trump is desperately trying to delay it, with his lawyers openly complaining that the trial could interrupt his presidential campaign at the height of the state primary elections. Meanwhile, Smith wants to start it as soon as possible, something that would allow GOP voters choosing their top Republican candidate to see federal prosecutors finally lay out their evidence that Trump broke the law by trying to overturn the 2020 election.
But D.C. appellate judges must first consider key issues, including whether Trump can effectively render himself immune from criminal prosecution by justifying everything he did as an official presidential act.
That’s what has Smith’s prosecutors warning that Trump’s delusions of invulnerability pose a danger to the fate of the republic.
“The implications of the defendant’s broad immunity theory are sobering. In his view, a court should treat a President’s criminal conduct as immune from prosecution as long as it takes the form of correspondence with a state official about a matter in which there is a federal interest, a meeting with a member of the executive branch, or a statement on a matter of public concern,” they wrote on Saturday.
Over the weekend, the usual legal commentators who weigh in on MAGA madness zeroed in on Smith’s bizarre examples of specific scandals.
“Interesting choice of hypotheticals…” tweeted the lawyer George Conway, whose ex-wife Kellyanne Conway long served as a Trump political adviser.
“It took quite an imagination,” he later added, sarcastically.
Smith’s prosecution team has been incredibly tight-lipped in the run-up to trial, forcing journalists to rely almost entirely on the steady stream of court documents in the case—but leaving the curious crowd of onlookers reading the tea leaves and trying to make sense of hints and innuendo. Some found it humorous when the D.C. indictment charging the 45th American president ran 45 pages. This time around, the peanut gallery swears Smith is telegraphing his case.
I assumed that Smith was just pointing out what might happen in the future if they decide that a president can claim that committing crimes while in office is part of his official duties and granting him immunity from prosecution. That would basically mean we have a dictator without any legal recourse. But who knows? Let’s just say that it wouldn’t surprise me if he did any of those things.
The new year is off to a strong start with two weeks to go to the first primaries, more debates for second place in the offing and legal filings dropping in the Trump cases day and night. And we’re only three days in. I hope everyone got themselves a good rest over the holidays because there’s going to be no time to catch your breath between now and election day next November. The games have officially begun.
The Republicans primaries look to be gelling exactly as predicted. The weak and tepid Trump opposition hasn’t been able to get any real traction despite hundreds of millions of dollars being spent. The race for second place is between Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former S. Carolina Gov. It’s clear that Trump is still the leader of the party and, as predicted, will almost certainly get the nomination.
There have been a number of articles in recent days taking a look at his campaign. The Washington Post published a long piece about how he “reignited his base and took control of the Republican primary” which ends up concluding that he never really lost the base in the first place. In fact, according to a new poll by the same paper with the University of Maryland they have not only stuck with him on the questions about January 6th, a few who believed that he might have done something wrong at the time have now come back to his side. But it isn’t a large number. They loved him then and they love him now.
The good news is that according to that same poll, the majority of Americans are not so enamored. 55% believe that January 6th was an attack on democracy and 56% believe that Trump is definitely or probably guilty of a crime. Only 11% of Republicans are among them but that’s just par for the course. That majority may not be huge but it could obviously make a difference in the election. The New York Times looked at polling over the last six months which asked if a conviction would change voters’ minds about voting for Trump and the numbers were substantial enough to change the outcome. Citing their own findings should Trump be convicted:
[T]he poll found the race in these six [swing] states would seismically shift in the aggregate: a 14-point swing, with Mr. Biden winning by 10 rather than losing by four percentage points. The same poll also provides insights into the effect a Trump conviction would have on independent and young voters, which are both pivotal demographics. Independents now go for Mr. Trump, 45 percent to 44 percent. However, if he is convicted, 53 percent of them choose Mr. Biden and only 32 percent Mr. Trump.
The movement for voters ages 18 to 29 was even greater. Mr. Biden holds a slight edge, 47 percent to 46 percent, in the poll. But after a potential conviction, Mr. Biden holds a commanding lead, 63 percent to 31 percent.
These findings were backed up by severalothers as well.
Acknowledging the general uselessness of these early polls to predict the outcome of the election, I think it’s fair to say that this response may actually be a pretty good gauge of the public’s attitude on this issue. Sure, Republicans don’t care. They’re even starting to warm to the idea of Trump serving from a jail cell. But a majority of Americans still cling to the idea that the president of the United States should not be a convicted criminal.
This explains one bizarre aspect of the Trump strategy. Yes, he rants daily about “deranged Jack Smith” and the other prosecutors, claiming he’s being persecuted by the deep state and whining about the unfairness of it all. That’s just him. But there is a method to his madness. NBC reports his campaign believes the J6 trial was specifically timed to take him off the trail at a crucial stage so they think they are outsmarting the prosecutors by wrapping up the primary early. (That sounds like something they told their client to make him happy…)
But Trump also wants to get the primary race out of the way so that he can legitimately claim to be the presumptive nominee and use that argument to back up his fatuous assertion that that this is a political prosecution and he cannot be put on trial before the election. That’s not going to work but I suspect he thinks it will be politically useful. For the same reason, he’s been strong arming all the elected Republicans to publicly endorse him and according to Politico, they are being good little MAGA sycophants even though it’s obvious that many of them really don’t want to. Trump believes that this will strengthen his argument that the criminal charges he faces are going to be witch trials.
There are many pending legal issues before the courts that will have to be decided, not the least of which is Trump inane claim that staging a coup was part of his official duties and therefore he has immunity from prosecution. If the courts decide in his favor, it’s all over for the January 6th case and it’s unlikely any of the others will come before the election. But if Trump truly believed he was going to prevail it’s unlikely that his campaign would have adopted this current strategy to end the traditional campaign early so that he can wage a different one in court.
Rolling Stone reports that they’re planning to turn the January 6 trial into a “MAGA freak show” based on the infamous Chicago 7 disruption strategy. Apparently, “his legal team — who largely view the Jan. 6 case as a “suicide mission” anyway, and have their eyes on the appeal — are gearing up to turn the volume up to 11 at trial.”
The Special Prosecutors office must have gotten wind of this because over the holidays they filed a brief with the court asking that the judge preclude any such shenanigans. Despite the shrieking from the right about this being an attempt to prevent him from defending himself, lawyers say that it’s perfectly normal for the prosecution to ask for the judge to lay out the boundaries of what the defense is allowed to present to the jury. Most believe that Trump’s plan to call Nancy Pelosi to the stand to grill her about why she allegedly allowed the insurrection to happen or his attempt to “prove” the election was stolen will likely be forbidden by Judge Tanya Chutkan. She won’t want this trial to devolve into another episode of the Trump Show.
Trump doesn’t want this trial to happen and he really doesn’t want to be convicted, despite his lawyers’ assurances about an appeal. Obviously, if he wins the election, he will simply pardon himself and be done with it. What he’s worried about are those numbers that say if he’s convicted his chances of losing the election go up substantially. Evidently, the rule of law and the Constitution still hold some meaning in our political culture after all and that could spell the end for him.
It’s long seemed as if this country is suffering a severe case of mass insanity. The truth is out there. It is more than QAnon, but please see that obligatory nonsense at the bottom later.
The occasion for revisiting societal mental breakdown is a couple of headlines this morning. This will take a moment.
A federal appeals court on Tuesday ruled that Texas hospitals and doctors are not obligated to perform abortions under a long-standing national emergency-care law, dealing a blow to the White House’s strategy to ensure access to the procedure after the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion in 2022.
The federal law “does not mandate any specific type of medical treatment, let alone abortion,” the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit concluded, faulting the Biden administration’s interpretation of the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, or EMTALA. The law “does not govern the practice of medicine,” the court added.
The three-judge panel also faulted the Biden administration’s process of issuing its emergency-care guidance, saying that federal officials did not go through the proper rulemaking process when the administration instructed health-care providers that they were protected by EMTALA if they believed an abortion to be medically necessary. The panel further said that the federal emergency-care law did not “directly conflict” with a near-total abortion ban in effect in Texas, which was written by the state’s Republican legislators and includes exceptions for medical emergencies.
The White House and federal health officials have invoked EMTALA — the 1986 law that requires hospitals and physicians to treat emergency medical conditions or risk fines, civil lawsuits and being blacklisted from federal health programs — in the wake of the Supreme Court’s June 2022 decision that overturned the national right to abortion and led to about two dozen state bans on the procedure. The Biden administration is now engaged in several lawsuits that are expected to set precedent over whether the emergency-care law applies to abortion access, including the Texas case.
Pregnant women in distress in Texas can just die untreated, says the 5th Circuit. No harm, no foul. Abortion rights advocates, the Post reports, “decried the ruling, which they said signaled a disregard for women in life-threatening pregnancy situations.”
Meanwhile, doctors must never stop treating anorexia patients.
Naomi “had been starving herself for 26 years.” Nothing was helping. “I’ll either die of anorexia or I’ll die of suicide,” Naomi told reporter Katie Engelhart when they first spoke. “I’ve accepted that.”
Should Naomi be allowed to check out of the hospital? Should she be allowed to stop medical and psychological treatments and seek palliative care until she dies?
The field of palliative care was developed in the 1960s and ’70s, as a way to minister to dying cancer patients. Palliative care offered “comfort measures,” like symptom management and spiritual guidance, as opposed to curative treatment, for people who were in pain and would never get better. Later, the field expanded beyond oncology and end-of-life care — to reach patients with serious medical illnesses like heart disease, H.I.V. and AIDS, kidney failure, A.L.S. and dementia. Some people who receive palliative care are still fighting their diseases; in these cases, the treatment works to mitigate their suffering. Other patients are actively dying or in hospice care. These patients are made “comfortable,” or as comfortable as possible, until the end.
But not for patients with unremitting anorexia whose conditions appear futile. Naomi’s doctor, Jonathan Treem, discussed options:
To Treem, it felt as if Naomi was asking for something more than his nonintervention; she wanted his mercy. His permission to let go, his compassion. It made him think about the other doctors who had treated her. “This is where it gets into a passionate discussion,” he told me. “If you are going to accept responsibility for the people you save, and you’re going to elevate them as examples of why everyone should undergo compulsory treatment, you had better recognize the blood on your hands. That, on some level, in order to ‘save everyone,’ you are perpetuating suffering in others.”
Yet Treem had his limits. He told Naomi that he could not look away if she was actively suicidal. Several times, after an especially unsettling appointment, Treem walked her down to the emergency room, where she was put on a 72-hour mental-health hold.
It is a very long, very complex story reminiscent of Whose Life Is It Anyway? (1981). It raises serious medical ethics questions:
What’s more, in somatic medicine, a patient didn’t need to have a good reason for stopping care. She didn’t even have to try getting better in the first place. A cancer patient could decline chemotherapy that would very likely save her life. Because she didn’t think the benefit was worth the pain. Because she wanted to go home to her children. Because she preferred to be treated by a homeopath. She could do what she wanted, just because she wanted to. Why should patients with mental illnesses be held to a different standard?
“It doesn’t make sense,” says Dr. Joel Yager. A paper he co-authored argues “that psychiatry needed its own subfield of palliative care: specifically for the 15 to 20 percent of patients whose anorexia developed a ‘chronic course’ and did not respond to standard treatment — and for the fraction of those patients who did not want to keep trying to get better.”
“They’re ‘incompetent’ unless they want treatment?” His critics, he said, had no data at all to back up their claim of universal incapacity among anorexic people. Existing studies showed the opposite. Yager thought his critics were suffering from “positive outcome bias”; they remembered the patients who were saved and were grateful for it, but not the ones who died slowly and suffered all the while.
“Absolutely unconscionable,” a Denver-based forensic psychiatrist focused on eating-disorder care ethics said of the paper’s ideas.
To be or not to be
So here we have America in 2024. U.S. states prevent doctors from easing the suffering of women with nonviable pregnancies, and the conservative 5th Circuit absolves them of responsibility should the women die. Meantime, the medical profession insists Naomi stay alive no matter how much and how long she suffers with anorexia. In both cases, women’s lives are not their own.
I don’t have answers. But excuse me for thinking we’ve gone around the bend.
House Republicans are beginning a crucial election year with a heightened focus on border issues as negotiations in the Senate on asylum policy changes drag on and the conference prepares to bring impeachment proceedings against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R. Ga.) is on the case. Impeached for what, you ask?
Republicans have also claimed Mayorkas has violated the law, failing to meet the standards of the Secure Fence Act, which defines operational control of the border as a status in which not a single person or piece of contraband improperly enters the country.
But not a single secretary of Homeland Security has met that standard of perfection, something Mayorkas has pointed out as the GOP has grilled him on the law.
You were expecting electeds voted in by these people (below) to act reasonably or rationally?
One morning before Christmas, I was working out with a friend who I adore, and workout with regularly. She’s young, smart, and a recent college graduate. In the middle of our session, my phone started going off incessantly and I finally picked it up. It was, of course, breaking news. That day, it was about the Giuliani bankruptcy.
I apologized to her for taking the call. I got off quickly and told her, by way of explanation, “Rudy Giuliani just filed for bankruptcy.”
“Who’s Rudy Giuliani?” she asked.
Vance realizes that her friend born after 9/11 has no idea that Giuliani was once “America’s Mayor.” And has no reason to know.
I decided to get a gut check from my 21-year-old. “Do you know who Rudy Giuliani is?” I asked. He rolled his eyes. Of course he does. He reminded me he’s my son. But then, he schooled me on how it works for his generation. College kids, or most of them, don’t watch TV news or read newspapers. They get it from their social media feeds.
Intellectually I know this.
“Giuliani and Trump are all over your newsfeed Mom but now newsfeeds are customized. The only news I’ve seen today is about chess and rap music. [editor’s note: have I failed as a parent?] The algorithm generates your feed based on what you’re interested in, and over time, you just get what you’re already into.” So it makes sense that my friend hadn’t seen anything about Rudy Giuliani. She’s not a politics junkie or a news junkie.
This explains, in part anyway, why youth turnout in elections is so low. Remember the excited reports of a big percentage jump in the level of youth turnout in 2018 and 2022, the first election after Trump’s ascendance? The stories don’t emphasize where that level started or how far it has to go to match the turnout of voters over 45.
You can run this joint
Vance urges readers to discuss with younger friends urgent matters like, oh, the impending collapse of American democracy if Donald Trump gets reelected in 2024.
Not everyone watched the January 6 committee hearings or has been exposed to the overwhelming evidence of Donald Trump’s perfidy. Take the time to start the conversation, whether it’s over a cup of coffee, in line at the supermarket, or in the gym. One voter at a time.
The youth vote is both democracy’s salvation and its Achilles heel. Younger voters lean left and unaffiliated. They just don’t turn out like us oldsters (see by-now familiar graphic at top). Where is the greatest potential for increasing turnout that favors Democrats? In the blue-shaded area to the left of the white vertical line. I tell the young’uns: If you and your friends just vote, you can run this joint. But not if you aren’t sitting at the table.
Republicans know this. It’s why they make it as hard as possible for younger Americans to vote by splitting university campuses, limiting on-campus voting sites, and passing voter ID laws. And that’s why we’re fighting back.
Folks, the @NCDemParty can proudly say 7️⃣0️⃣ out of 1️⃣1️⃣3️⃣ universities and community colleges will have their students IDs count as *valid voter IDs* for the 2024 election cycle. This would NOT have been possible without the hard work of @linville_nathan & @CollegeDemsNC. #ncpolhttps://t.co/JWvFIVnrUx
I got lunch with my friend after we worked out today. She told me she’d read a few articles about Giuliani and realized what it was about. She asked a couple of questions about the election interference case against Trump. Apparently, those few articles she’d looked at piqued her interest—and influenced her algorithm.
Donald Trump will end American democracy if he’s reelected. He will corrupt our country for his own benefit. He has not made a secret of it. The only question is whether enough of our fellow citizens will be aware of what the 2024 election means for the future and care enough when we go to the polls to prevent Trump from returning to power. The small steps that we take during the next few months will pay big dividends.
That is 100% a lie. They did none of that. All the evidence is available. Nancy Pelosi did not turn down his request for the National Guard on January 6th. And no, unless you are saying that Jonathan Turley represents the “most respected legal minds in the Country” there is virtually no one saying that he’s “fully entitled” to immunity for what he did.
MSNBC keeps saying that they won’t show what Trump is saying because “there’s a cost” to them. Actually, there’s a cost to everyone if they don’t. People need to see it and they need to see the arguments against it. Today I saw them put up Liz Cheney’s response to this but not the post itself which didn’t show just how deranged he really is.
Trump needs to be seen by everyone in all his glory. What they’re doing now is inadvertently covering for him. They need to stop it.
So much information has gone under the bridge about the insurrection that I’ve lost sight of some of the more interesting details that flush out what happened on January 6th — and who is responsible. (People like Marcy Wheeler who follow the trials are very well aware, of course.)
This piece from June 2021 by Amanda Carpenter came to my attention over the holidays and I thought it was interesting. If you still think that Trump didn’t actually incite the insurrection, this is important to consider:
To understand January 6, 2021, we must first look back to June 1, 2020.
That was the day Donald Trump delivered a terse Rose Garden speech threatening to deploy the U.S. military to any city or state that “refuses to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residents.” The speech was prompted by the protests that began on May 26 in Minneapolis and spread throughout the country after George Floyd was killed by police. Trump’s staff argued that the threatened military deployment would have been permitted under the Insurrection Act of 1807, which empowers the president to deploy federal troops for domestic law enforcement under certain circumstances.
As Trump spoke, federal law enforcement officers, joined by officers from other local jurisdictions, clashed with protesters near Lafayette Square, just north of the White House. Officers outfitted in riot gear pushed protesters away from the square, firing rubber bullets at them. Tear gas was used. Army helicopters buzzed the crowds. Trump then marched across the square, flanked by officials and aides, including Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley. All so Trump could have a photo op in front of St. John’s Church.
The message was clear. Trump had a military and was willing to use it. But the backlash from the military community came quickly. Admiral Mike Mullen, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said he was “sickened” to “see security personnel—including members of the National Guard—forcibly and violently clear a path through Lafayette Square to accommodate the president’s visit outside St. John’s Church.” Gen. James Mattis, the respected Marine general who had preceded Esper as Trump’s defense secretary, said he was “angry and appalled.”
Secretary Esper soon distanced himself from Trump, albeit after the fact. He told reporters at a June 3 Pentagon briefing, “The option to use active-duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort, and only in the most urgent and dire of situations. We are not in one of those situations now. I do not support invoking the Insurrection Act.” Gen. Milley later reportedly got into a “heated discussion” with Trump over whether to send active-duty troops to the streets, and in July he publicly apologized, saying, “I should not have been there” for Trump’s photo op.
But Republican politicians and conservative commentators supported Trump’s move. Sen. Tom Cotton wrote an op-ed for the New York Times titled “Send in the Troops”; it was so controversial that the paper later said it should never have been published and one of the responsible editors resigned.
Through it all, Trump never let go of the idea. And as summer changed into fall, talk on the right of an “insurrection” that might be met with a military response shifted from the George Floyd protests and civil unrest to the 2020 election. The same terms and the same proposed action, just a new target.
In a Fox News appearance in September, host Jeanine Pirro asked Trump how he would react if he won the 2020 election and Democrats rioted. “We’ll put them down very quickly if they do that. We have the right to do that. We have the power to do that if we want,” Trump said. “Look, it’s called ‘insurrection.’ We just send in, and we do it, very easy. I mean, it’s very easy.” That same month, in an appearance on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s InfoWars program, Trump’s longtime ally Roger Stone—who would later be pardoned by Trump for witness tampering in the Russia investigation and lying to Congress—also talked up the idea of Trump invoking the Insurrection Act.
Although Trump and his allies were in disagreement with the military community about the Insurrection Act, Trump seemed to have other ideas about whom he could call for backup.
During the September 29 debate, Fox News anchor Chris Wallace asked Trump whether he was willing to “condemn white supremacists and militia groups and . . . say that they need to stand down.” Trump replied “sure” but then said the Proud Boys groups should “stand back and stand by” for the election.
“But I’ll tell you what,” Trump continued, “somebody’s got to do something about Antifa and the left because this is not a right-wing problem.”
After the press called the election for Joe Biden on November 7, Trump quickly fired Esper, who had openly opposed invoking the Insurrection Act, and installed Christopher Miller as acting defense secretary. And, as “Stop the Steal” efforts gained steam through November and December, Trump’s allies Sidney Powell, Lin Wood, and Michael Flynn often advocated using the Insurrection Act as a catch-all solution to any number of problems Trump faced. One disturbing Politico headline makes the point: “MAGA leaders call for the troops to keep Trump in office.”
I know the J6 Committee pursued some of this. But I haven’t seen it put so succinctly before. We knew that Trump had been basically calling for the Insurrection Act since the George Floyd protests and kept talking about it all the way up to January 6th. I think what I didn’t understand before was how much having “insurrection” out there in the ether was being interpreted by his own followers.
If anyone was primed to take marching orders about insurrection from Commander-in-Chief Trump, it was Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes. To him, it must have sounded like a bugle call directly in his ears.
Rhodes, who founded the group in 2009, has been talking about insurrection for years. And the combination of COVID lockdowns and BLM protests apparently triggered his militant aspirations more than ever. He wrote on Facebook in August 2020 that “Civil war is here, right now” and warned there would be “open warfare with Marxist insurrectionists by Election Day.” Shortly after the media called the election for Biden, Rhodes said in a livestreamed speech that viewers should “stand up now and call on the president to suppress the insurrection.”
He meant it.
Court filings from the Department of Justice containing communications from Oath Keeper militants—some of whom are said to have acted as personal security for Roger Stone at “Stop the Steal” rallies, including on the eve of the January 6 insurrection—show how clear Rhodes’s thinking was about it.
According to prosecutors, Rhodes held a planning meeting for the attack on November 9, 2020. During it, he said:
-“We’re going to defend the president, the duly elected president, and we call on him to do what needs to be done to save our country. Because if you don’t guys, you’re going to be in a bloody, bloody civil war, and a bloody—you can call it an insurrection or you can call it a war or fight.”
-He told his followers they needed to be prepared to fight Antifa, which he characterized as a group of individuals with whom “if the fight comes, let the fight come. Let Antifa—if they go kinetic on us, then we’ll go kinetic back on them. I’m willing to sacrifice myself for that. Let the fight start there. That will give President Trump what he needs, frankly. If things go kinetic, good. If they throw bombs at us and shoot us, great, because that brings the president his reason and rationale for dropping the Insurrection Act.”
-He continued, “I do want some Oath Keepers to stay on the outside, and to stay fully armed and prepared to go in armed, if they have to. . . . So our posture’s gonna be that we’re posted outside of D.C., um, awaiting the president’s orders. . . . We hope he will give us the orders. We want him to declare an insurrection, and to call us up as the militia” (emphasis added).
Rhodes was convicted of seditious conspiracy and sentenced to 18 years in federal prison. Others were as well. They heard Trump talking about insurrection and “stand back and stand by” and thought he was giving instructions.
He didn’t evoke the Insurrection Act on January 6th. Instead, he sent the crowd to the Capitol and watched as they stormed the building to stop the peaceful transfer of power.
Paul Krugman agrees that things are looking up. Will people recognize it in time or will they continue to blame Joe Biden for the chaos and ugliness that Trump and his cult are creating?
Almost four years have passed since Covid-19 struck. In America, the pandemic killed well over a million people and left millions more with lingering health problems. Much of normal life came to a halt, partly because of official lockdowns but largely because fear of infection kept people home.
The big question in the years that followed was whether America would ever fully recover from that shock. In 2023 we got the answer: yes. Our economy and society have, in fact, healed remarkably well. The big remaining question is when, if ever, the public will be ready to accept the good news.
In the short run, of course, the pandemic had severe economic and social effects, in many ways wider and deeper than almost anyone expected. Employment fell by 25 million in a matter of weeks. Huge government aid limited families’ financial hardship, but maintaining Americans’ purchasing power in the face of a disrupted economy meant that demand often exceeded supply, and the result was overstretched supply chains and a burst of inflation.
At the same time, the pandemic reduced social interactions and left many people feeling isolated. The psychological toll is hard to measure, but the weakening of social ties contributed to a range of negative trends, including a surge in violent crime.
It was easy to imagine that the pandemic experience would leave long-term scars — that long Covid and early retirements would leave us with a permanently reduced labor force, that getting inflation down would require years of high unemployment, that the crime surge heralded a sustained breakdown in public order.
But none of that happened.
You may have heard about the good economic news. Labor force participation — the share of adults in today’s work force — is actually slightly higher than the Congressional Budget Office predicted before the pandemic. Measures of underlying inflation have fallen more or less back to the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target even though unemployment is near a 50-year low. Adjusted for inflation, most workers’ wages have gone up.
For some reason I’ve heard less about the crime news, but it’s also remarkably good. F.B.I. data shows that violent crime has subsided: It’s already back to 2019 levels and appears to be falling further. Homicides probably aren’t quite back to 2019 levels, but they’re plummeting.
None of this undoes the Covid death toll or the serious learning loss suffered by millions of students. But overall both our economy and our society are in far better shape at this point than most people would have predicted in the early days of the pandemic — or than most Americans are willing to admit.
For if America’s resilience in the face of the pandemic shock has been remarkable, so has the pessimism of the public.
By now, anyone who writes about the economic situation has become accustomed to mail and social media posts (which often begin, “You moron”) insisting that the official statistics on low unemployment and inflation are misleading if not outright lies. No, the Consumer Price Index doesn’t ignore food and energy, although some analytical measures do; no, grocery prices aren’t still soaring.
Rather than get into more arguments with people desperate to find some justification for negative economic sentiment, I find it most useful to point out that whatever American consumers say about the state of the economy, they are spending as if their finances are in pretty good shape. Most recently, holiday sales appear to have been quite good.
What about crime? This is an area in which public perceptions have long been notoriously at odds with reality, with people telling pollsters that crime is rising even when it’s falling rapidly. Right now, according to Gallup, 63 percent of Americans say that crime is an “extremely” or a “very” serious problem for the United States — but only 17 percent say it’s that severe a problem where they live.
And Americans aren’t acting as if they’re terrified about crime. As I’ve written before, major downtowns have seen weekend foot traffic — roughly speaking, the number of people visiting the city for fun rather than work — recover to prepandemic levels, which isn’t what you’d expect if Americans were fleeing violent urban hellscapes.
So whatever Americans may say to pollsters, they’re behaving as if they live in a prosperous, fairly safe (by historical standards) country — the country portrayed by official statistics, although not by opinion polls. (Disclaimer: Yes, we have vast inequality and social injustice. But this is no more true now than it was in earlier years, when Americans were far more optimistic.)
The big question, of course, is whether grim narratives will prevail over relatively sunny reality in the 2024 election. There are hints in survey data that the good economic news is starting to break through, but I don’t know of any comparable hints on crime.
In any case, what you need to know is that America responded remarkably well to the economic and social challenges of a deadly pandemic. By most measures, we’re a nation on the mend. Let’s hope we don’t lose our democracy before people realize that.
Biden didn’t do all of that, of course. The country has shown itself to be resilient in many ways and that’s to our credit. But he’s the guy who presided over this remarkable recovery and he should get the credit.
Unfortunately, we are awash in hideous cultural nastiness caused by right wing authoritarians and it’s caused a sour mood throughout the country. Overcoming that isn’t going to be easy.
I got my law degree from watching “Law and Order” so I’m not what anyone would call an attorney. But I do find this stuff fascinating. I came across this last night on the presidential immunity question. (That question drives me crazy because it seems so obvious I can’t even imagine how it can be debatable but here we are.)
Anyway:
A new wrinkle has emerged in former President Donald Trump‘s immunity battle in his federal election interference case, with a watchdog group filing a brief on Friday calling for his appeal effort to be dismissed and for his trial allowed to resume.
Trump is currently contending with four criminal indictments at the state and federal levels, totaling 91 criminal charges in all. Among these cases is the federal one brought by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and special counsel Jack Smith pertaining to Trump’s alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, which ultimately led to the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot. Trump, the frontrunner in the 2024 GOP presidential primary, has maintained his innocence in the case.
Trump’s current tactic in the case has been to claim that he has complete immunity from criminal prosecution for anything that he did while he was president. This claim was previously shot down by the judge overseeing the case, Tanya Chutkan, and is now set to go before the D.C. Circuit appeals court. Meanwhile, an effort by Smith to try and accelerate the appeals process straight to the U.S. Supreme Court was recently dismissed. As the process winds on, the trial has been put on hold, leading some observers to accuse Trump of trying to delay it as long as possible.
American Oversight, a nonprofit legal watchdog group, filed an amicus brief on Friday that said the D.C. Circuit appeals court lacks the jurisdiction to take up Trump’s appeal, and should therefore send the matter back to Chutkan and allow the trial to resume.
“As the American Oversight amicus brief argues, Supreme Court precedent [from 1989] prohibits a criminal defendant from immediately appealing an order denying immunity unless the claimed immunity is based on ‘an explicit statutory or constitutional guarantee that trial will not occur,'” the group’s official statement explained. “Trump’s claims of immunity rests on no such explicit guarantee. Therefore, given that Trump has not been convicted or sentenced, his appeal is premature. The D.C. Circuit lacks appellate jurisdiction and should dismiss the appeal and return the case to district court for trial promptly.”
In response to the filing, various legal experts and analysts chimed in on social media, with some calling the move “an interesting wrinkle.”
“Interesting wrinkle in the battle over Trump’s claims of presidential immunity: American Oversight, in an amicus brief, says the issue did not merit immediate appeal and the DC Circuit should simply kick the case back to Judge Chutkan for trial,” New York Times legal reporter Alan Feuer wrote on X, the platform previously known as Twitter.
“Interesting argument in new amicus brief by conservative lawyers that Trump’s immunity appeal is subject to final judgment rule and must wait until after trial,” former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade, who previously served the Eastern District of Michigan from 2010 to 2017 and appointed by former President Barack Obama, wrote. “Brief uses textual reading of Constitution to argue stay should be lifted immediately.”
American Oversight describes itself as a nonpartisan group, not conservative.
As I have said before, I won’t be surprised if the Supremes (who will hear it eventually anyway) decide to let this case drag until after the election in which case Trump will have it dismissed or they will let it continue since he’ll be out of politics. (Won’t he???)
It’s going to be a nail biter either way. It’s impossible to believe that even the most ardent “unitary executive” justice would think this man has immunity after he’s out of office because trying to overturn an election that had been fully adjudicated by the courts was part of his job. It’s ridiculous.:
Right:
[Y]ou have to go back to check from past years with respect to signatures. And if you check with Fulton County, you’ll have hundreds of thousands because they dumped ballots into Fulton County and the other county next to it. So what? So what are we going to do here, folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break. You know, we have that in spades already, or we can keep it going.
So what are we going to do here, folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.
Stephen Miller will be a very important influence in Trump 2.0
Judd Legum talks about the Trump threat in his newsletter today. I thought I would highlight just one little passage for those who think it might be useful to punish Biden and the Democrats by letting Trump have another term. It’s pretty clear it won’t just be the Democrats who suffer at Trump’s hands.
He talks about Trump’s close adviser Stephen Miller (and he is extremely influential) and what they have planned for the border:
Miller, on behalf of Trump’s campaign, pledged that “Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown.” Miller described plans to “deport people by the millions per year” with a “blitz” intended “to overwhelm immigrant-rights lawyers.”
New tactics will include “workplace raids and other sweeps in public places aimed at arresting scores of unauthorized immigrants at once.” The scope of these raids would exceed the current capacity of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, so the effort would enlist personnel from the National Guard and other law enforcement agencies. Arrested migrants would be shuttled to “vast holding facilities that would function as staging centers.” These tent cities would be built by the military “on open land in Texas near the border,” according to Miller.
The facilities would initially be “focused more on single adults because the government cannot indefinitely hold children under a longstanding court order known as the Flores settlement.” Miller said a second Trump administration would renew its efforts to overturn the Flores settlement. Reimplementing the child separation policy is also a possibility.
Maybe it’s important to make many, many more people suffer than already are in order to make a political point. But I doubt people of good faith really want that. They must realize that knowingly making things worse for millions more people is a moral abomination.
As further evidence of the total corruption of the conservative movement, despite being shown to have ripped off the membership in the millions LaPierre was welcomed back into the fold. But this could be the end of him, God willing:
For decades, Wayne LaPierre, the National Rifle Association’s longtime leader, has been a survivor. He has endured waves of palace intrigue, corruption scandals and embarrassing revelations, including leaked video that captured his inability to shoot an elephant at point-blank range while on a safari.
But now, Mr. LaPierre, 74, faces his gravest challenge, as a legal showdown with New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, goes to trial in a Manhattan courtroom. Ms. James, in a lawsuit filed amid an abrupt effort by the N.R.A. to clean up its practices, seeks to oust him from the group after reports of corruption and mismanagement.
Much has changed since Ms. James began investigating the N.R.A. four years ago. The organization, long a lobbying juggernaut, is a kind of ghost ship. After closing its media arm, NRATV, in 2019, it has largely lost its voice, and Mr. LaPierre rarely makes public pronouncements. Membership has plummeted to 4.2 million from nearly six million five years ago. Revenue is down 44 percent since 2016, according to its internal audits, and legal costs have soared to tens of millions a year.
When the N.R.A. filed for bankruptcy in Texas nearly three years ago, the step was part of a strategy to move to the state amid the New York investigation. But a Texas judge dismissed the case, saying the N.R.A. was using the filing “to address a regulatory enforcement problem, not a financial one.” Now, longtime insiders say, the organization may be reaching a point where a legitimate bankruptcy filing is necessary.
Even with the N.R.A. moribund, Mr. LaPierre’s legacy as a lobbyist, if not as a marksman, remains intact. The gun rights movement has become a bulwark of red state politics during his more than three decades at the group’s helm. In recent years, significant federal gun control measures have been a nonstarter for Republicans despite a proliferation of mass shootings.
Mr. LaPierre is among four defendants in the suit brought by Ms. James in 2020. Others include John Frazer, the N.R.A.’s general counsel, and Wilson Phillips, a former finance chief. The fourth defendant, Joshua Powell, was the organization’s second-in-command for a time, but later turned against it and even called for universal background checks for those buying guns and so-called red flag laws that allow the police to seize firearms from people deemed dangerous.
Ms. James seeks to use her regulatory authority over nonprofit groups to impose a range of financial penalties against the defendants and to remove Mr. LaPierre; any money recovered would flow back to the N.R.A. Jury selection is scheduled to begin on Tuesday before State Supreme Court Justice Joel M. Cohen. The trial is expected to last six to eight weeks.
Let’s hope a NY jury has the good sense to put LaPierre out of business for good.
