One more thought on this dismal standoff between President Biden and many in his party. Democrats are now in this weird and sometimes jaw-dropping standoff in which major elected Democrats make statements criticizing their current de facto nominee in the hope he’ll stop being the nominee and make way for a better nominee even though they’re not really clear who that nominee will be. I’m not being as arch as I may sound. I get why they’re doing it. They think he needs to step aside for a more able nominee and this is their way of adding pressure. But to the extent it becomes a process with no clear end point it has some pretty obvious downsides. You have a damaged nominee and you damage him even further and he’s still your nominee. This has to go one way or another and fairly soon.
We’ve noted a few times that there are half a dozen or so Democratic party stakeholders with the clout and standing to force this issue. But among those Pelosi is at least the first among equals. There’s Schumer, Jeffries, Clyburn, maybe Obama. Large groups of officeholders would obviously speak with a force of their own. But I think this really comes down to her. She’s been very quiet over the last few days.
One way or another this has to be brought to a halt. In a very real sense the Biden v Trump contest has been replaced for the moment by a Biden v mostly, but not all, unnamed Democrats contest.
Amid the chaos of the will-they, won’t-they storyline that has seized the Democratic Party in the wake of President Biden’s abysmal debate performance, team Trump has slipped into the quieter moments of the media maelstrom, trying to paint their agenda as much more moderate than it actually is.
This is another one of those focused, factual-question posts. As always, not trying to signal a larger point here. Just trying to address a specific question for the community which a number of TPM readers have asked me via email. Here goes.
There are suggestions out there, in some cases verging on urban legends, that no one is taking into account the fact that in many states the deadlines have already passed for switching the candidate names on the presidential ballots. Heritage has put out that they’ve got a team of lawyers ready to hit the courts. I’ve seen claims the the deadlines have passed in key swing states.
While I’m no election law expert and certainly no expert of individual state laws, I feel highly confident that none of this is accurate.
Just a side or secondary point that I wanted to add to what’s below. As I said, a President can’t lose the support of his congressional party going into an election. Why that happens or whether it’s fair becomes secondary to the fact itself. It’s one thing in ordinary circumstances. But you simply can’t have or survive that going into an election, certainly not one where you appear to be running at least a bit behind. I wanted to mention something about members of Congress themselves. In my experience the vast number of members of Congress have no hidden insight or greater access to information than you or I do. They may in certain instances get access to party polling. But that usually leaks in some form or another fairly quickly. They’re basically just as prone to panic, the groupthink of their social sets or cocoons, wishful thinking as you or I am.
This isn’t universal of course. Some have better political instincts than others. Some have really good political instincts. But on balance they’re just not cut from very different political cloth. That’s my experience at least.
I am going to try to write a few pieces today and tomorrow taking stock of the truly unprecedented and almost unimaginable standoff that is not so much wracking the Democratic Party as simply holding it in place, in limbo, for more than a week now. But before doing that I thought it was important to share some general thoughts on where we are with all of this. First I must say that I can’t think of many other or perhaps any political situation I’ve written about at TPM over decades that was more difficult for me to make sense of, either as a matter of what is happening or will happen, or what should happen. I’ve been mainly focused on the first question.
For the second half of last week I was basically certain that Joe Biden would be forced to end his candidacy and that it was simply a matter of time before he did so. Then, starting Saturday, things seemed to shift. These things work in waves. For any politician the best way to avoid being forced to resign (and here I’ll use “resign” as a proxy for Biden ending his candidacy, not actually resigning the presidency) is simply not to resign. It’s one of those truisms that contains more depth and nuance than one at first realizes.
One week ago today the Supreme Court issued its landmark decision in U.S. v. Trump, creating a monarchial presidency the likes of which the founders would have taken up arms against.
The court’s response to an attempted auto-coup by a defeated president who is poised to potentially regain office in a matter of weeks was to carve out vast new areas of presidential immunity and invent new rules of evidence that no one was even arguing about yet – but to do so with no clear standards or bright lines, reserving to itself the considerable power to set them later or not set them at all and decide things as it sees fit on a case-by-case basis where it can craft its own preferred outcomes.
And yet … the biggest national political story since then has not been the Supreme Court’s unilateral rebalancing of the Constitution’s separation of powers in favor of Donald Trump’s short-term criminal defense and long-term political power, but rather Joe Biden’s decline with age and his fitness to defeat Trump in the November election. Historians will struggle to make sense of this week because it’s impossibly surreal for those of us living through it.
Politics – and covering politics – is hard even in normal times because there is so much uncertainty, so few anchors or touchstones, and compromise is built in, which can blur lines and make things seem adrift. The kind of feeding frenzy were witnessing now is often driven by an unusual level of seeming certainty. The sense that something is suddenly clear and obvious and undeniable – like Biden’s debate failure – can act like a magnet for those exhausted by all of the nibbling at the margins, hedging bets, and the never-ending difficult task of balancing interests that is required in a mature political economy. Moreover, the supposed obviousness of the immediate issue can often override consideration of the downstream consequences. Sometimes, the decision that looks so obvious in the moment gets a whole lot more opaque when you start to grapple with the knock-on effects.
In contrast to Biden’s nationally televised failure, the Supreme Court’s decision on presidential immunity was complex, in writing, and with impacts that while real remain in many ways contingent and forward-looking. In the media economy, it’s obvious which story is easier to tackle. Likewise, the entire march toward authoritarian rule remains murkier and harder to cover than the up-and-downs of a political campaign.
— Ted (Edward) Littleford (@tedlittleford) July 5, 2024
But I want to stay focused on the Supreme Court decision because I think this past week was a fulcrum in U.S. political history.
The Supreme Court Is Now The Kingmaker
I mentioned last week that while on the surface U.S. v. Trump seems like a dramatic expansion of executive power the reality is that at its core it aggrandizes power to the high court itself. We’ll keep returning to this theme, but in the meantime:
I want to direct you to this piece by Asha Rangappa:
[T]here are so many implications written between the lines that fundamentally alter the balance of power among the branches, not only making the President effectively a king, but making the Court’s conservative majority the kingmakers who rubber stamp or veto what kinds of actions get immunity (thereby ensuring that any potential dictator is symbiotically dependent on the Court to preserve his facade of legitimacy).
Former Appeals Court Judge J. Michael Luttig continues to be singular voice of our time, a conservative Republican of the old school horrified by his party’s abandonment of the rule of law as on organizing principle for democracy:
Luttig: The Supreme Court cut the heart and soul out of America with this abominable decision… The defining maxim of America has been that no one is above the law. That can never be said about America again after this decision from the Supreme Court. Without any question… pic.twitter.com/HcY55W2rm1
Richard Bernstein, a former clerk for Antonin Scalia who is cut from the same cloth as Judge Luttig, finds in U.S. v. Trump many of the same hallmarks that conservatives loathed in Roe v. Wade. That’s a provocative point of view for a progressive audience, but he’s exhibiting an intellectual consistency that the Supreme Court’s right-wing justices have abandoned.
SCOTUS Decision Already Impacting The MAL Case
A series of developments in the Mar-a-Lago case since the decision in U.S. v. Trump are a taste of the ways in which the Supreme Court has hobbled the Trump prosecutions:
Trump is seeking to delay the Mar-a-Lago case in light of U.S. v. Trump.
In response, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon has for now delayed the next batch of deadlines in the case and provided a very generous briefing schedule to consider the impact of U.S. v. Trump on the charges against the former president.
Trump is seizing on Justice Clarence Thomas’ concurrence in U.S. v. Trump to renew his claim that Special Counsel Jack Smith was unlawfully appointed.
Cannon rejected Trump co-defendant Walt Nauta’s motion to dismiss for selective and vindictive prosecution but was careful to note that it should not be interpreted as her taking a position on Trump’s still-pending similar motion. She also took a swipe, as per usual, at prosecutors in the final footnote of the ruling.
How to Stop Fascism
Yale historian Timothy Snyder recounts in some detail the five lessons we learned from the rise of Nazism in 1930s Germany:
Voting matters
Coalitions are necessary
Conservatives should be conservative
Big business should support democracy
Citizens should not obey in advance
Well Put
VP: Sadly, the press has not been covering it as much as they should in proportion to the seriousness of what just happened. The Supreme Court essentially told this individual, who has been convicted of 34 felonies, that he will be immune from the activity he has told us he is… pic.twitter.com/98OzjYFCah
Good Decisions Aren’t Made In The Midst Of A Feeding Frenzy
I don’t have much to add to the maelstrom of Biden coverage and whether he will stay or go, or whether that’s a good idea or a bad idea, or who is best positioned to defeat Trump. But I’ll refer you to Brian Beutler’s thoughtful weighing of the most important considerations.
‘Some Folks Need Killing’
Following up on some of the ground-breaking reporting that TPM’s Hunter Walker has done on the GOP nominee for governor in North Carolina, Greg Sargent highlights a June 30 Mark Robinson speech in which he said:
Some folks need killing! It’s time for somebody to say it. It’s not a matter of vengeance. It’s not a matter of being mean or spiteful. It’s a matter of necessity!
MIAMI, FLORIDA – JULY 01: John Cangialosi, Senior Hurricane Specialist at the National Hurricane Center, inspects a satellite image of Hurricane Beryl, the first hurricane of the 2024 season, at the National Hurricane Center on July 01, 2024 in Miami, Florida. On Monday afternoon, the storm, centered 30 miles west-northwest of Carriacou Island, became the strongest hurricane this early in the season in this area of the Atlantic. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Houston/Galveston narrowly dodged a climate-fueled bullet this morning as the necessary ingredients came together a few hours too late for Hurricane Beryl to re-intensify into a monster storm.
For the casual observer, it’s worth noting that Beryl was doing climatologically crazy stuff last week in the tropical Atlantic and Caribbean. With record-high sea surface temperatures creating conditions not typically found until the August/September peak of the hurricane season, Beryl was able to do things in terms of intensity and location at a time of the year that simply would not have been physically (as in, physics) possible before.
Weather is not climate, but Beryl was such an outlier and our understanding of the physics of tropical cyclones advanced enough that the connection is clearer and more concrete than can sometimes be drawn with other weather phenomena.
Shocking and shockingly good news out of France. A longtime TPM reader who I am in constant touch with is an immigrant from France. And through conversations with him over the last few weeks I was expecting — though by no means sure — that Le Pen’s National Rally party would come up short in the run off. But the actual results are even more dramatic. They appear to be coming in third. Not just behind the the parties of the left running as a consolidated new United Front, but actually behind President Macron’s centrist party too. A couple weeks ago I think the best anyone was hoping for was keeping National Rally short of an absolute majority. It was treated as a foregone conclusion they’d get a plurality of seats. But even the Republicans — the old center-right party of government which has been thoroughly marginalized — is over-performing relative to expectations. It’s really a stunning reversal.
As Democrats grapple with a crisis atop their ticket of the sort not seen in generations, Republicans seem to be trying to figure out what they want the press and the public to see when it eventually directs its gaze back toward their party. That has, over the course of this week, developed into an effort to hide the ball ahead of the Republican National Convention.
Former President Donald Trump attempted Friday to publicly distance himself from Project 2025 — an initiative referred to as the “presidential transition project,” spearheaded by the conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation. Over the course of the Biden administration, Project 2025 has put out a series of proposals for how a second Trump administration might radically reshape executive branch power, remaking the federal workforce and instituting a wide range of far-right policies on topics ranging from abortion to climate change to immigration.
