Make A Note … Don’t Let It Pass
After repeatedly pledging to bring grocery prices back down to pre-Biden levels, Trump announces bringing prices down would be “very hard” and won’t happen.
EDITORS’ BLOG
Consistency, Mind Games and Power-Plays in the Brave New World of Weird
Member Newsletter
Member Newsletter
I’ve written a few times recently about Donald Trump’s ability to stake out and hold territory in the public mind, the public attention span, with threats that he likely (though not certainly) can’t make good on or won’t even have the attention span or care enough to focus on. So he’ll end birthright citizenship or he’ll jail his opponents. Or maybe not. It’s part of his ability to always be taking the initiative on that mutable and uncanny territory where media narratives and old fashioned reality become a common fabric. He acts and keeps acting and his opponents react and keep reacting.
Pardons and Unmerited Grace
Member Newsletter
Today President Joe Biden commuted the sentences of roughly 1,500 Americans and issued pardons for 39 persons convicted of non-violent crimes. For the remainder of Biden’s term, any use of the pardon power will be shadowed or seen through the prism of his pardon of his son, Hunter Biden. But I wanted to take this opportunity to say something broader about the pardon power. And I want to be clear that this isn’t an opinion that is downstream of or related to the Hunter Biden pardon. I’ve made similar arguments a number of times going back probably 20 years.
Put simply, we don’t have anywhere near enough pardons: both at the federal and the state level.
In fact, much of what passes for pardons or clemency today aren’t really pardons at all. They’re basically fake clemency. Set aside the controversial pardons of recent years. Most presidents at the end of their terms issue pardons to a range of meritorious individuals. They each come with a backstory of bad choices later redeemed by selfless altruism, service or other exemplary conduct. Or they simply turned around their life against the odds. But in almost every one of these cases the recipients have already done their time! They took responsibility; did their time; expressed remorse and then went on to live an exemplary life. What they get is an almost entirely symbolic record wiped clean. That’s not nothing. It’s a nice recognition. It’s also entirely different from an innocent person having a wrongful conviction overturned — a vindication of factual innocence. That remains a big deal even for someone who has already served a lengthy sentence. But it doesn’t free any one from jail.
It is at best a thin, thin clemency.
Listen To This: Poking The Third Rail
A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh discuss Republicans’ perma-desire to cut social insurance, the limp response to Trump’s birthright citizenship claims and Pete Hegseth’s potential resurrection.
You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
The DOGE Asterisk
As I’ve argued in a few different posts, “DOGE” — the grandiosely and absurdly titled “Department of Government Efficiency” — is merely an advisory panel which is probably best understood as a kind of memelord performance art. But there’s one part of this spectacle worth adding to — one separate conversation that is worth having off to the side of this effort while we’re in the midst of rightly trashing it.
Here goes.
Things take far too long to do. Things take too long to build. I saw a statistic recently that New York City used to open multiple new subway stops every year. We’ve opened like two in this century. This wasn’t new to me. It’s something I’ve been wondering about for years. And there are countless examples in your part of the country as well. Some of this is tied to the fact that today we’re more concerned with workers not getting killed on the job or dumping oceans of harmful chemicals into the ground. But it’s not all that. Not even most. There are people who have this as their hobbyhorse and they at least have broad theories of the problem — not so much over-regulation, though there’s that too, but regulatory regimes that give opponents too much power to slow things down, industry regulatory capture, etc. This is adjacent to the broader topic of housing shortages and YIMBY politics. Not the same but related.
Read MoreSomething went wrong. Please refresh the page and/or try again.
Inside The Plot To Write Birthright Citizenship Out Of The Constitution
Welcome back to the team that brought you Trump’s 2020 coup attempt.
Now, after years in the wilderness, the fight to thwart a bedrock Constitutional provision that grants citizenship to nearly everyone born on American soil has been thrust onto center stage.
podcast
Ep. 353: Poking The Third Rail
Kate and Josh discuss Republicans’ perma-desire to cut social insurance, the limp response to Trump’s birthright citizenship claims and Pete Hegseth’s potential resurrection.
listen
recent
Something went wrong. Please refresh the page and/or try again.
