Editors’ Blog
Nothing at all reassuring here about the role Barr’s DOJ will play in the election. You gotta see this.
Like clockwork, President Trump on Wednesday sparked a new controversy centered on his shirking of democratic norms. This time, it was Trump refusing to commit to a peaceful transition of power if he loses the November election. Read More
Among the various ways the Trump administration is seeking to bend and rework the rules of government this year is a policy, announced by the President in July, to exclude undocumented immigrants from the apportionment count.
This has been a long-time goal for some on the political right. But what would the policy mean in practice?
Our design team has a snazzy new graphic explaining the Trump policy and its potential impact:
In the midst of the orchestrated mayhem of the moment it is important to step back from the chaos and take stock of what has happened in recent weeks. Yesterday the President again refused to commit to leaving office peacefully if he loses the election. It was credibly reported that the President’s advisors are laying the groundwork and lobbying state legislators to press friendly state legislatures to reject the vote counts in their states and declare President Trump the winner. President Trump meanwhile says a ninth Justice must be on the Court to decide the outcome of the election. In his threats to reject the results of the election at yesterday’s press conference President Trump said he might concede the results of the election if they “get rid of the ballots”, by which he seemed to me end voting by mail.
The notional justification for all these wild claims and threats, almost entirely unprecedented in American history, is the false claim of voter fraud and the more general specter of election chaos – delays, missing ballots, interminable legal disputes, insoluble legal questions that leave the decision in the hands of the Supreme Court or grants some spurious rationale for overruling a botched election.
California will outlaw the sales of all new gasoline-powered passenger cars and trucks by 2035.
Allies of the president have been murmuring ominously about potential October surprises all year. There’s the Durham investigation, Giuliani’s conspiracy theories, and Senator Ron Johnson’s (R-WI) investigation into Ukraine-related Biden allegations, to name a few.
We got the results of that last one this morning. But, alas! There is no surprise.
As I’ve mentioned a number of times, beyond our ordinary tasks of government, I think an audit of the executive branch is critical after President Trump leaves office. But in these perilous final weeks before the 2020 election we can see another pressing need spotlighted by a lawless President but not created by him: the scaffolding of the US government, the state, the Republic itself, simply isn’t up to code. Like an old house that long predates all the codes and regulations that are mandatory in new structures it’s held up well enough and it simply makes no sense to force a renovation. But in a storm all those problems come to the surface. And in the aftermath of damage you wouldn’t rebuild it in the old way.
There was never any real doubt that Republicans would move swiftly to fill the seat of the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And now a number of key Republican senators have come out to endorse Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) effort to do so. Whether a vote will happen before or after Election Day remains something of an open question, but once McConnell has the votes he will say “go.”
As you’ve seen me argue, Democrats must add either two or four seats to the Supreme Court if Republicans proceed with another corrupt Court appointment and Democrats win the presidency and the senate. There may be other remedies I haven’t thought of. There may be better ones. But I’m certain we are at the point where a real, practical and credible remedy is essential. With that in mind I wanted to make a point about general principles.
Over the weekend I had a specific granular COVID-safety related question that I wanted an answer to to guide our family’s safety protocols. It was a weird response to observe in myself that I routinely disregarded information from the CDC and the FDA as I searched for information on Google. Today we have another good example of why they’ve lost credibility.
President Trump wasted no time declaring when his SCOTUS nomination announcement will be because the Senate majority leader wasted no time — literally no time, maybe minutes after the late justice’s death broke news Friday night — to declare he’d bring him or her to the Senate floor.
I’ve told you many times that elite DC journalism is wired for the GOP. That continues to be the case, notwithstanding the political shifts in the country over the last twenty years. It continues to be the case even as it is driven by stakeholders who in many cases are not themselves Republicans or conservatives.
Here’s a tweet this morning from Axios, the preeminent insider DC publication.
Furious Democrats are considering total war — profound changes to two branches of government, and even adding stars to the flag — if Republicans jam through a Supreme Court nominee, then lose control of the Senate. https://t.co/H7RV446zdW
— Axios (@axios) September 20, 2020
Mainer TPM Reader AF follows up with some important detail and correction about my note on Susan Collins and her statement. I stand by the point I made last night. But it was an – I hope – uncharacteristic imprecision to call it a “promise”. As AF states, it’s definitely not. If Collins thinks it is in her interest I definitely think she will vote to confirm before the election. And I think it’s highly likely she’ll do so, win or lose, during the lame duck session after the election. But my same point holds, she’s judged it is strongly against her interest to vote at all before the election. It’s Democrats’ challenge to press her on this purported commitment and her history of breaking such commitments for the next six weeks. TPM Reader AF …
Susan Collins’ statement is punditry, without any promised actions.
Collins said a vote on a nomination should wait until after the election. She didn’t say a word about what she would do or not do.
Take a closer look at Collins’ statement. She says Trump has the right to make a nomination. She says she has “no objection to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s beginning the process of reviewing his nominee’s credentials.” After that she says there shouldn’t be a vote before the election.
Collins’ decision here on replacing Justice Ginsburg is very interesting. What’s notable here is her priorities: She wants to be reelected. And she sees – rightly – that a pre-election confirmation fight likely seals her fate.
Defeat is currently likely but not inevitable. Now she can spend the last six weeks of the campaign playing to what has always been her electoral strength: the principled moderate who isn’t beholden to her party. The alternative is absolutely lethal for her reelection prospects: closing the final six weeks of the campaign with an exercise that puts the lie to the whole premise of her candidacy.
If she thought it would help her I think she will go back on this promise in a second. But I’m not sure she will. Because this course seems clearly in line with preserving her seat.
Lindsey Graham is exactly who we knew him to be. Susan Collins? She’s not as she usually is, notoriously concerned. But let’s wait and see.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death is a grave, sorrowful and ill-timed calamity in the escalating crisis of American democracy, the crisis of the American state. The only relevant and timely thing I can think to add is this: You can’t work this kind of problem or operate in this kind of environment unless you’re ready to say what you’re going to do. You can’t start by saying McConnell has to follow his rule. You need to say what you’ll do when he doesn’t. Otherwise you’ve got one side with words and the other with the ability to act. And that’s a loser’s hand.
The thing to do, if Republicans take this course and the Democrats take the presidency and the Senate, to add either two or four new seats to the Supreme Court, for a total of 11 or 13.
Mitch McConnell just consigned the McConnell Rule to the same trash bin of history as the non-precedential Bush v. Gore ruling. Another shoddy expedience momentarily gilded until it was no longer expedient.
Justice Ginsburg is dead, and one can barely utter the words without thinking of the battle to fill her seat, not out of disrespect for her and her enormous imprint on the course of American legal history, but because of how quickly Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump will move – tonight – to lock down that Trump will fill the seat before his term ends. The mourning will inevitably be colored by the rush to lock in a historic conservative majority on the court.
Federal judge rips Trump’s USPS “reforms” as a clearly intentional effort to undermine the pandemic election.
To send you into the weekend with conviction, a striking bit of BLM music and oratory from Kentucky musician Tyler Childers:
In the last 24 hours, we’ve seen two former Trump administration officials take significant steps to speak out against President Trump and Vice President Pence, flinging their White House secrets-laced weight behind Democratic candidate Joe Biden.
We are now back in one of those recurrent waves of bad publicity for Facebook. It deserves every bit of it. Facebook is the prime online, global incubator of racist, quasi-fascist propaganda, conspiracy theories, state-run psyops and agit-prop operations, even in at least one case actual state-backed programs of population transfer and arguable genocide. But to really understand the problem with Facebook we need to understand the structural roots of that problem, how much of it is baked into the core architecture of the site and its very business model. Indeed much of it is inherent in the core strategies of the post-2000, second wave Internet tech companies that now dominate our information space and economy.
Facebook is an ingenious engine for information and ideational manipulation. Good old fashioned advertising does that to a degree. But Facebook is much more powerful, adaptive and efficient. That’s what all the algorithms do. That’s why it makes so much money. This is the error with people who say the fact that people do bad things with Facebook is no different from people doing bad things with phones. Facebook isn’t just a ‘dumb’ communications system. It’s not really a platform in the original sense of the word. (The analogy for that is web hosting.) Facebook is designed to do specific things. It’s an engine to understand people’s minds and then manipulate their thinking. Those tools are refined for revenue making but can be used for many other purposes. That makes it ripe for misuse and bad acting.
The core of all second wave Internet commerce operations was finding network models where costs grow mathematically and revenues grow exponentially. The network and its dominance is the product and once it takes hold the cost inputs remained constrained while the revenues grow almost without limit. With the possible exception of Apple, which is still driven mostly by the production of physical products, that’s the core feature of all the big tech Goliaths.
TPM Reader MH:
I cannot think of a better example than the Stanford Med letter of how conservative money influences our public debate.
Only a few days I mentioned a dark new trend that went big with the Gawker lawsuit, backed by Peter Thiel and then was further empowered by President Trump himself, who essentially adopted the lead lawyer, Charles Harder, as his and the White House’s house lawyer threatening new publications with ruin over criticism of the President. Here’s another part of the same broad story.
Tired of the advice he was getting from his actual public health advisors President Trump recently brought in a rightwing radiologist with no experience in epidemiology to advise him on COVID. Scott Atlas is generally held to be an advocate of ‘herd immunity’ strategies for COVID. A group of 78 of his colleagues at Stanford Medical School wrote an open letter accusing him of hawking “falsehoods and misrepresentations of science” in his advice to the President.
Atlas has now gotten another Trump house lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, to send a threat letter to the group threatening a defamation lawsuit.
We covered news this morning of White House chief of staff Mark Meadows attempts to distance President Trump’s own CDC director from the vaccine development process in order to adhere to Trump’s own political narrative surrounding its creation.
This week David and Kate and I talk about Trump’s storyline of putting down protestors by force on election night and more. Watch after the jump or listen on the audio version of The Josh Marshall Podcast.
Before more time goes by a brief follow up on yesterday’s post about the Trumpian build up for a violent showdown after the election. In his late afternoon press conference yesterday President Trump again found an opportunity to declare his readiness to put down election night “riots” or “protests” by force using the US military. He quickly joined this to a conversation about purported voter fraud and election rigging using mail in ballots.
One of the major issues of the 2016 election was the claim that then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch had to recuse herself from any involvement in a charging decision with respect to Hillary Clinton because she briefly met with former President Clinton on a tarmac. Now Bill Barr is saying we need political appointees to personally manage criminal prosecutions and have them all reviewed by the Attorney General, especially when they involve the President’s friends.