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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Immunity For Thee

Published by digby on July 2, 2024

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.

Meanwhile, Back In The Red States

Published by digby on July 2, 2024

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.

The Spoiler

Published by digby on July 2, 2024

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:

RFK Jr. posing alongside an unidentified woman with the barbecued remains of what appears to be a dog.

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.

The Numbers Start To Roll In

Published by digby on July 2, 2024

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.

In Light Of Yesterday’s Declaration of Presidential Monarchy

Published by digby on July 2, 2024

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

November is a Bidenary choice until it isn’t

Published by Tom Sullivan on July 2, 2024

What’s the plan, Stan?

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. 

I’m with Rick Wilson on this. November is a Bidenary choice until it isn’t.

Steadfastness is a virtue Dems need more of. Much more. 

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.

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? 

Perhaps Thursday’s debacle was a bad reaction to cold medicine. (That happened to me at 16.) Perhaps it’s more, as Carl Bernstein told Anderson Cooper last night. (He’s been saving this for his next book?)

Whatever. By request:

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.  

BTW, Biden could be the official Democratic Party nominee in three weeks (as early as July 21), not a month later in August.

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The Trump Dictatorship

Published by Tom Sullivan on July 2, 2024

What are you prepared to do to stop it?

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?)

Axios:

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.

2. In Washington, Trump would move to fire potentially tens of thousands of civil servants using a controversial interpretation of law and procedure. He’d replace many of them with pre-vetted loyalists.

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 convicts could 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.

Monday made it all that much more chilling.

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.

Oh, and MAGA? Turn in your flags.

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In Case You Were Wondering

Published by digby on July 1, 2024

I think that says it all, don’t you think?

And he knows it.

Bannon Is In Jail

Published by digby on July 1, 2024

A tiny silver lining

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:

We All Laughed When Nixon Said “When The President Does It It’s Not Illegal”

Published by digby on July 1, 2024

Who’s laughing now?

Ian Milhiser’s write-up of Trump v US :

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.