Josh Marshall
The US economy finally gots its fat jobs report after two shaky months. The US economy added 850,000 jobs in June.
Never Trump Republicans come in for a lot of grief and often rightly so. But at least they’re not JD Vance. He’s the Yale graduate looking to start a political career whose 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy presented him as a voice for the forgotten culturally conservative culture of rural America who actually came from that world as opposed to Queens. An authentic intellectual from ‘real America’ who eschewed the hyperpartisanship of the times. Alas, it turned out that Trump was a political meal ticket after all. And now he’s deleting his old tweets asking God’s forgiveness for Trump to start running as the new MAGA senator from Ohio.
TPM Reader TL follows up on my discussion yesterday of Teddy Roosevelt and where he fits in the ranking of US Presidents, specifically whether the seemingly consistent decision to place him 4th is rating him too high. TL makes what I think is probably the best case that can be made, and it’s a pretty good one. It focuses on the fact that Roosevelt is in many ways the first modern President. He’s the first American President who approached the job in a way that would be fundamentally recognizable to us today.
Considering the Meaning of the American Revolution and the Promise of Liberation
As we move into the July 4th weekend, I wanted to make a bid for an appreciation of the liberationist impulse at the heart of the American Revolution and its radical character.
As I explained a few weeks ago, there is a strong argument for the deficiency of the first American Republic, which in this view is the constitutional order created in 1787 and reconstructed through war and constitutional revision in the late 1860s. But the constitution created in 1787 is not synonymous with the American Revolution. Indeed, in critical respects it was in tension with it. Some of the constitution’s greatest opponents viewed it as a betrayal of revolutionary tumult.
The Declaration of Independence is the work of the Continental Congress, a revolutionary and illegal body which managed the process of the disintegration of Britain’s American empire. The document was drafted by a committee made up of John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston, with Jefferson, because of knack with words, writing a first draft.
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Defying McCarthy’s Ban
Kevin McCarthy overnight threatened to take committee assignments away from any member of his caucus who agreed to serve on the new Jan 6 select investigative committee. That’s the equivalent of the death penalty for a member of a political party. Liz Cheney has just agreed to join the committee at the invitation of Speaker Pelosi.
Pelosi just announced these members in a just released announcement.
A Republican lawmaker from Washington State wears a Star of David to an anti-masking, anti-vaccine event to protest the oppression of COVID dissidents.
Ranking the 44 Former American Presidents
CSPAN has its latest historians’ ratings of American Presidents out. There are some interesting conclusions.
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The one upsmanship continues. Coming hot on the heels of South Dakota’s national guard deployment to protect the US southern border, Florida is now sending game wardens, presumably to crack down on Mexican lizards trying to run the border.