Seeing his dreams of being Speaker of the House in sudden peril and having already bought lots of drapes, Kevin McCarthy has leaked to Axios his plan to save his speakership before it ends before it can begin. He’s rolling out what he’s calling his and the House GOP’s “commitment to America,” a list of bromides that is a sort of governmental version of Bill and Ted’s famed “Be excellent to each other” imperative.

In my posts yesterday I suggested that Judge Aileen Cannon’s ruling — despite its unsupportable claims — was likely just to mean a delay in the progress of the investigation into ex-President Trump’s theft of classified documents and government property. Having read the decision more closely now and read some of your comments, I’m less sure of that. As I noted, this whole decision — and Cannon’s presence on the bench at all — are fruit of the pervasive corruption of the federal judiciary. Private citizens have no right to assert executive privilege against the actual chief executive. The very idea is an absurdity on its face. But there’s much more in this decision which seeks to do everything possible to perpetuate Donald Trump’s invulnerability to the law into the indefinite future.

As I noted in my previous post, Judge Cannon’s special master order seems most likely to me to simply mean a delay in the progress of the case. But I would be remiss if I didn’t also make clear that her ruling and frankly her presence on the court itself is simply more fruit of the poisoned Federalist Society tree, the taproot of the current corruption of the federal judiciary.

The fact that the case is even before Cannon in the first place is an example of forum shopping that should never have been allowed. But her ruling is a tour de force in strained reasoning, novel theories, special pleading and a simple refusal to treat the man who appointed her to office as a citizen like any other.

I don’t think we should be too concerned about President Trump convincing a judge to appoint a special master to evaluate the documents seized from his villa in Florida. Mostly this is simply a delay — a boon for the former President but not a huge one. The special master will review the materials for attorney-client privilege documents which the DOJ has already done. There’s no reason to believe the results will be any different.

In honor of Labor Day weekend I wanted to make sure you saw this Gallup report which shows public support for unions to be at a 57 year high.

As recently as 1999 and 2003 the number was 66% and 65%. Today it is at 71%, comparable to the 72% in 1936 and 71% in 1965. You can see there’s a nadir in 2009. I assume that was driven in part by the political battles over the auto bailout in which the UAW was routinely portrayed as the reason why U.S. automakers were uncompetitive. The upward trend doesn’t seem to be a blip.

CNN’s low energy purge of its news staff continues apace. John Harwood apparently got the news this morning that he was out. The clearest explanation of what’s happening is that the company is now under Republican management, specifically top shareholder and Trump donor John Malone. Many at CNN believe his understanding of and exposure to CNN is essentially what he sees of it through Fox News. They’re probably right. But there’s a deeper structural issue at play that is also important to keep in mind.

News networks like CNN are not designed, purchased or run to be niche operations or only to serve a portion of the public. Their potential market is supposed to be everyone. One might say this is impossible in an era of polarization. There’s some truth in that too. But that’s not exactly it either.

Jezebel: ‘Fuck It, I’ll Kill Us All’: Kristina Karamo’s Ex-Husband Accused Her of Trying to Crash Car with Entire Family Inside

Arizona Republic: Billionaires have helped define him, but Blake Masters needs money (sub req.)

WaPo: Truth Social faces financial peril as worry about Trump’s future grows

Arizona Republic: Candidates for attorney general and governor call for Saudi Arabian water leases to be investigated and canceled

BridgeMichigan: Romance author Nora Roberts helps save MI library defunded over LGBTQ books

You may have seen reports about the ongoing tug-of-war or game of chicken between Peter Thiel and Mitch McConnell. In short, it’s about who picks up the tab for the campaigns of Thiel’s political proteges Blake Masters in Arizona and JD Vance in Ohio. Both campaigns are floundering and both need money badly. Given Ohio’s GOP advantages, even a floundering campaign leaves Vance still in a fairly strong position. But it wasn’t even supposed to be a contest. You can go to others for the inside gossip on the back and forth between the two men. I want to focus your attention on something more general.

There’s no question that Democrats’ chances in the midterms have improved dramatically over the course of the summer. From the point in May when Sam Alito’s draft of the Dobbs decision leaked to the press until now, the generic ballot average has shifted just over 3.5 points in Democrats’ direction. For the generic ballot average, that’s a big shift. But could the polls themselves be underweighting Republican strength? Like many others I’ve been figuring that Trump being on the ballot has been the key in recent elections. He and his party’s chances were underrated in 2016 and 2020. In 2018, they were pretty much on the mark. But Philip Bump of the Post and I were apparently both watching G. Elliott Morris’s Twitter feed yesterday when he noted that this wasn’t quite true. The national averages were on the mark in 2018. But at the state level key contests still underweighted Republican chances. Bump pulled the numbers himself and sure enough, that skew was there in Senate races in 2018 too.

One point TPM Readers have asked again and again is this: why did Trump court all this trouble when he could have just xeroxed the documents and given the originals back? There are a lot of good and not good potential answers to that question. But as the Times notes here, DOJ investigators aren’t convinced he didn’t. The attestation that Trump and his lawyers had turned over all classified information also included a promise that no copies had been made of them. So those claims are in doubt now too.