Immediately after I started saying that Democrats should expand the number of Justices on the Court in response to Republican court packing, I heard from a couple people telling me that the coteries around Pelosi and Biden were saying, no way. Not happening. (Interestingly, I heard a pretty different message from within the Senate caucus leadership – which is and should be the real locus of decision-making.)

But things are changing. Last week Joe Biden shifted his public statements to explicitly connecting his decision on expanding the Court to the outcome of the Barrett confirmation process. Her confirmation is of course a foregone conclusion. But clarifying the cause and effect, the order of events is critical: Democrats are reacting to and trying to repair the damage caused by Republican court-packing and corruption. If Republicans are upset by the prospect of all their hard work and corrupt acts going up in smoke with a simple majority vote they can take the opportunity to rethink their next actions.

There is an unfolding development which you can miss in the muddy onrush of campaign events but is nevertheless important to take note of. As President Trump’s electoral prospects appear increasingly dire, national security officials, intelligence officials and his own top political appointees are talking more openly and critically to the press about the President. There are many examples of this. But yesterday’s Washington Post article about intelligence warnings about Rudy Giuliani are a good example. If you read the article closely the sourcing seems to come either directly or with the okay of the President’s National Security Advisor, Attorney General and other top appointees. It’s not new information. It goes back almost a year. It’s new willingness to talk. The NYPost “emails” story is the peg. But the willingness is new.

Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) should’ve learned from Jeff Flake.

Two articles were published this evening which suggest that the FBI is investigating Rudy Giuliani’s Delaware laptop caper as a potential Russian intelligence operation targeting Vice President Biden. At NBC Ken Dilanian reports that “Federal investigators are examining whether the emails allegedly describing activities by Joe Biden and his son Hunter and found on a laptop at a Delaware repair shop are linked to a foreign intelligence operation.”

The article suggests the probe long predates the New York Post’s publication of the purported emails on Tuesday.

For the GOP, clinging to austerity is a task employed only when it’s most convenient. Or most desperate.

There’s a reason this came out through the media rather than some official DOJ press release.

Right on time we seem to have our first Giuliani-linked foreign intelligence drops into the 2020 campaign. The New York Post ran a story today purporting to suggest Hunter Biden had introduced a Burisma colleague to his father in 2015. They appear to all be from the Ukrainian colleague thanking Biden for purportedly making the introduction.

I should note that the purported blockbuster only really amounts to anything of consequence inside the maze of Ukraine conspiracy theories but I want to focus on the alleged chain of custody. We’re told that an unidentified computer story owner had someone bring in three computers for data recovery. He/she thinks but can’t confirm that that person was Hunter Biden. They seem to base this on a Beau Biden Foundation sticker on one of the laptops. The unidentified computer store owner says the hard drives were subpoenaed by the FBI. But before turning over the drives he made his own copies of their contents and then gave a copy to Rudy Giuliani.
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The nation’s top news outlets are no strangers to the task of weighing how to cover this unprecedented president. Over the last few years, they’ve wrestled with how to avoid both-siderism, what to do with his distraction techniques, and whether or not to fact-check the blustering, evidence-free speaker.

But now newsroom leaders are facing a new challenge with President Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis: How do they justify risking reporters’ lives in order to cover the public health-defying campaign?

Given the wreckage of the Trump administration and the vulnerabilities in the office of the Presidency it has exposed, is it possible to retrofit the office to prevent or at least limit its vulnerability to Trump-like abuses? Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith, two lawyers who served respectively at the highest levels of the Obama and Bush administrations, have written After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency, a systematic review of how to bring the office of the Presidency up to code after the debacle of Trumpism.

Watch my conversation with Bauer and Goldsmith in this Inside Briefing from earlier this month.

I don’t think TPM Reader PT’s prediction here is at all likely. John Roberts is a conservative ideologue and holds the pinnacle position in the world of jurisprudence. Why he’d surrender that plum as a relatively young man isn’t at all clear to me. Still, I found PT’s discussion of the different equities in play quite perceptive and interesting.

I’ve argued before that I think it’s at least plausible that John Roberts will retire during Biden’s first term. My argument is that Roberts appears to be the only one of the Court’s conservatives who cares at all about the legacy and perceived legitimacy of the Supreme Court, both of which were badly damaged by the way that Neil Gorsuch ascended to his seat. Of course, there were cross-pressures for him: he clearly cares about the conservative project of wielding power through an unelected Court that in practice can only rarely be overruled, he presumably likes being on the Court and being Chief Justice, and by Washington DC standards he is fairly young (mid-60’s).

Now, however, I think that the near-certain ascent of Barrett to fill Ginsburg’s seat will change the calculus and makes it more likely that he will retire.

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