Editors’ Blog

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss a big election in Ohio, John Eastman’s admission that he did try to overthrow the government and an eyebrow-raising New York Times opinion column.

You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.

From TPM Reader DS …

I was in college from 2002-2006 so the Iraq War for better or worse will always be one main prism through which I think about American politics. And one of the things that always amazed me most about the whole thing was that the neocons and armchair strategists had spent more than a decade obsessed with toppling Saddam Hussein, yet had absolutely no idea what to do the day afterwards.

The defeat of Issue 1 and the win for abortion rights in Ohio last night stands as another datapoint in an ongoing trend: abortion rights have consistently prevailed when placed on the ballot — an observation that, notably, holds in red and purples states — since Roe’s overturning last year. And it emboldens ongoing efforts by pro-abortion rights and left-leaning groups to push Democrats to embrace the issue as a wedge that could help them hold the Senate and take back the House in 2024.

Robbie Robertson of The Band has left us. This one really hits like a gut punch. Robertson also has extensive collaborations with Bob Dylan and Martin Scorsese. Robertson was The Band’s principal songwriter though others in the band usually took the lead vocals. The announcement says only that he died after a long illness, surrounded by family.

Following up on the post below, I read through the criminal complaint against Craig Robertson, the man killed this morning during an FBI raid tied to threats he allegedly made to kill President Biden, New York City DA Alvin Bragg, New York AG Letitia James, AG Merrick Garland as well as Vice President Harris and California Governor Newsom.

As you’d expect, the complaint details numerous social media posts showing Robertson threatening to kill the men and women above and showing that he possessed a sniper rifle and a substantial arsenal of assault rifles. Two FBI agents recently visited his residence and asked to speak with him about his posts. He essentially told them to get lost and then, in follow-on posts, started threatening to kill them if they returned

A short time again ABC moved a story reporting that a man, Craig Robertson, wanted for threats against the lives of President Biden and others was shot and killed this morning during an FBI raid. Presidents draw threats and sometimes raids go wrong, either because the suspect wanted to go out in a blaze of glory or because of bad or culpable decisions by the team conducting the raid. All told not a terribly surprising story.

The arrest was apparently triggered by specific threats Robertson had made to kill Biden during a visit today to Utah. But ABC seemed to bury a key element of the story. The threats appear to have been tied at least in part to the charges brought against former President Donald Trump.

A paragraph toward the end of the piece reads …

The complaint includes numerous social media posts believed to have been made by Robertson threatening to kill Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, as well as several officials involved in prosecuting former President Donald Trump.

Curious to know more.

Another election night, another resounding victory for abortion rights in a red state. It is yet another confirmation that the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision has created a revolution in American politics, the scope of which is even today only dimly perceived in most national political debates. On its face Ohio’s Issue 1 was an amendment to the state constitution to require a 60% threshold for ballot referendums to change the state constitution. But it was understood from the start as a tool to short-circuit a November ballot initiative to codify abortion rights in the state constitution. On both sides of the question it was fought out on that basis. As I write, “No” (the de facto abortion rights side) is winning by 57% and that may go higher when all ballots are counted.

Abortion rights advocates still need to win the abortion constitutional amendment in November. But it seems highly likely they will succeed. Ohio thus joins Kansas and Kentucky in rejecting restrictions on abortion rights in their respective state constitutions. Last year voters in Michigan enshrined abortion rights in their state constitution and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer leveraged the issue to win unified control of the state in Democratic hands for the first time in decades.

In all but the very most conservative states the only path forward for abortion restrictionists is simply to keep the issue off the ballot.

The far-right Christian legal group whose work you’re almost certainly familiar with is in the news today for an incredibly befuddling reason: a Trump-appointed judge in Texas ordered lawyers with Southwest Airlines to attend eight hours of “religious-liberty training” courses with the group, Alliance Defending Freedom.

Jack Goldsmith has an op-ed in today’s Times in which he argues that the prosecutions of Donald Trump are likely to have terrible consequences for the country, regardless of the bad acts he may have committed. The gist of his argument is straightforward: Prosecution will only further delegitimize the Department of Justice for a large segment of the population, further criminalize the political process and open the Pandora’s Box of Presidents prosecuting their predecessors. I struggled with this piece a bit because I think Goldsmith is a good faith interlocutor. But while the sentiment is genuine the reasoning is sloppy and derives most of its strength from simply ignoring the most obvious counterarguments. 

This core weakness begins right in the first sentence. 

Like many who write this kind of op-ed, Goldsmith starts by saying that while it might be emotionally “satisfying” to see Trump held to account for his misdeeds, the damage greatly outweighs whatever benefit it brings. This is a dodge that turns out to be more consequential than one vaguely condescending throwaway line. In a highly polarized political culture of course there will be people celebrating. But the reason such indictments are important, really critical, is that a republican government cannot exist if electoral losers routinely use fraud, state power and violence to reject the outcome of free and fair elections. Accepting electoral defeat and orderly transfers of power is the glue that allows a republican government to function. 

While the details of and procedural developments surrounding the Big Indictment against the former president have consumed the news cycle since it came out last week, there’s still (at least) one more indictment heading toward Donald Trump that may come, if it comes, before we close out the summer.