Editors’ Blog

Don’t miss this subscriber-only analysis of the current military situation in Ukraine from TPM’s Josh Kovensky. Josh lived and worked in Ukraine for about three years. So he knows the geography and political geography that eludes most of us who only know most of this as lines on maps. I really recommend it.

As one of, if not the most vulnerable, senator seeking reelection this midterm cycle, Sen. Ron Johnson’s (R-WI) been staking out his policy positions on a number of issues rather publicly in recent weeks — after mid-August polling from Marquette Law School found that the incumbent was trailing behind his Democratic rival. Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes has a 7-percentage point lead over Johnson with 51 percent of the vote compared to his 44 percent.

And his latest remarks — clarifying where he stands on a same-sex marriage bill that could soon come before members of the upper chamber — include a few too many references to “religious liberty” to not be read as a scrambling effort to satisfy the religious right after initially appearing to be open to the bill.

Nathan Gonzales has an interesting observation in Roll Call. Presidents generally lose ground in public support during first midterm election years and they never become more popular. That is until Joe Biden.

Gonzales looks back 70 years to Harry Truman and finds the pattern is consistent. The only marginal exception is Donald Trump in 2018. But that’s largely because he started off at 39% and was at 40% by election day. Biden was a great exemplar of this pattern until about seven weeks ago. He started the year weak, treaded water until the spring and then saw his numbers drop consistently. Then about seven weeks ago he started an upward trend which now has him at about 43% support.

Needless to say these are not great numbers. They’re a bit below Barack Obama’s at his first midterm, a bit over Trump’s at the same period. Both had big midterm losses. But the upward trend this late in the cycle is basically unprecedented.

Steve Bannon faces new criminal charges in New York state, charges which appear to mirror the ones for which he received a pardon from then-President Trump before Trump left office. He is expected to surrender to authorities in New York tomorrow.

In response to last night’s Post revelation about documents found at Trump’s villa, I said that the most likely foreign countries whose defense secrets were found there were the United Kingdom, France and Israel. This was guesswork and a process elimination. But a few of you have written to tell me you suspect it’s Iran. I don’t think so. But the information we have to go on is so minuscule that almost anything is possible. Let me explain.

The Washington Post just published a story with two notable details. One is merely atmospheric. Some of the documents recovered from Trump’s Florida villa were so highly classified that none of the people involved in the investigation were allowed to look at them. “Only the president, some members of his Cabinet or a near-Cabinet-level official could authorize other government officials to know details of these special-access programs,” says the Post.

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.

Some top Senate Democrats are reportedly considering weaving same-sex marriage legislation into a coming spending bill that would keep the government open past the end of the month.

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.