Kate and I just recorded a pod that will be out in a bit. We shared our thoughts on how it went there if you’re interested. But it didn’t go great. Which is kind of an understatement. Biden came in hoarse with a cold. That made him sound feeble and frail. And he was unfocused. He didn’t respond strongly or even coherently to many open opportunities. He got substantially better in the second half of the debate when the topics moved to foreign policy and January 6th. But the conventional wisdom and impression had kind of taken hold by then. Trump was Trump. Abrasive, nasty, belligerent — lying and making things up constantly. But he seemed focused and vital. The contrast was not good for Biden at all. I do think there were some lies from Trump that will have legs. He again refused to agree to accept the results of the election. He again complained about non-existent fraud in 2020. He praised the shock troops of January 6th. But this debate is going to spur a huge freak out among Democrats and several days of terrible commentary. And that’s just when the shape of the race was moving, at least to a significant degree, in Biden’s direction. Let’s remember that no tent pole event in this cycle has had a big impact on the race. We don’t know what the impact will be. But at best this was a missed opportunity.
Okay, Folks. You Ready?
10:31 PM: Something snapped in you when you lost. Biden’s saying the things he needed to now. But it’s late.
10:29 PM: Can’t say he’ll accept the results of the election.
10:20 PM: “I just won two club championships.”
10:09 PM: “Never seen anger like this before.”
10:01 PM: Biden campaign now putting out that Biden has a cold. That’s clearly true. And very unfortunate.
9:50 PM: Okay, the first twenty minutes of this debate were simply awful for Biden. I do not see any other way to put it. He was unfocused, hoarse, lost his train of thought a few times. That’s shifted in the last half hour. Enough? I don’t know. Trump has also gone further into his weak spots, the conspiracy theories, inability not to start threatening retribution, denial about January 6th. Biden has definitely gotten more focused and is landing some punches. He’s still hoarse. It seems like he has a cold. But he starting to make the points he needs to.
9:47 PM: Biden is finally, finally starting to get some traction, get out the lines he needs to get out. But it’s half way through the debate and the impression get set early.
9:46 PM: Trump started by saying his retribution would be success. But he’s now worked his way back around to threatening to prosecute Biden.
9:38 PM: Again, Biden picking up a little speed. Far more focused on the wars he’s spent most of his time working on.
9:35 PM: It’s interesting that Biden’s far more on the ball about the situation with Israel. Probably because that’s what he’s been working for months. The rest has been a jumble.
9:33 PM: As I said, Biden’s picking up a bit of momentum as we move to foreign policy. But the contrast in energy is still stark. And Biden simply isn’t hitting Trump on the big vulnerability points. I mean, on Russia Ukraine, this is the guy who is in league with Putin. That’s a massive vulnerability.
9:30 PM: Trump is making so many nonsensical points that it’s really unfortunate that Biden isn’t counterpunching.
9:29 PM: Biden’s getting moderately better in the last few minutes. But the impression of the two is largely determined in the first half hour or so. So this is a big problem.
9:28 PM: No Trump is going way off into the arcana of MAGA conspiracy theory.
9:26 PM: I don’t know what the time for each candidate it is but it *feels* like all the talking is Trump. But I think that may be because he’s just controlling the tempo and speaking more forcefully.
9:20 PM: Biden should have focused on the point there that they had a bill and Trump killed it. But he didn’t mention that.
9:15 PM: The energy contrast is stark.
9:10 PM: Biden seems hoarse and sick. And that’s really not great.
8:58 PM: Having Van Jones and David Axelrod on the CNN panel is basically a war crime.
8:52 PM: I always have to get a feel for how much I can write and still keep up with actually watching the thing. But here’s where I’ll be sharing my thoughts. My colleagues will have more in the site Live Blog.
Bezos, Bored Billionaire Theory and What Happens to the Post?
There’s a big and very long piece this morning about the travails of The Washington Post published at The Atlantic. It’s a reported piece by media reporter Brian Stelter. There’s a lot there. It runs almost ten thousand words. But the gist seems pretty clear, which is that the new villain is Jeff Bezos. “Villain” is a bit strong, certainly. What I really mean is Jeff Bezos as the root of the problem, a realization that some at the Post appear to be coming around to. And not because he’s done anything bad. By all accounts he’s been entirely legit on editorial non-interference. Write whatever you want about me and Amazon, etc.
The issue is that the Post essentially has an absentee, hands-off owner. And that has created perhaps not a vacuum at the top, but a lack of direction. Executives who weren’t getting the job done were kept around too long. Other executives were hired to shake things up but they weren’t the right fit. Now you have a CEO and publisher, Will Lewis, whose tenure is clearly and perhaps fatally damaged by the mix of staff revolt and miscellaneous scandals. And yet he’s still in place while Bezos is touring the Greek isles on his mega-yacht with his fiancee.
Continue reading “Bezos, Bored Billionaire Theory and What Happens to the Post?”If Trump Loses, Expect Big Liars To Blame Voter Roll Maintenance For Fraud In The Fall
Republicans are mounting legal challenges against voter roll maintenance practices in various states across the country — public actions that do little but perpetuate lies about the accuracy of voter rolls as Republicans and election deniers set themselves up to cry voter fraud if things don’t go their way in November.
Continue reading “If Trump Loses, Expect Big Liars To Blame Voter Roll Maintenance For Fraud In The Fall”Sizing Up Tonight’s Old Man Thunderdome Debate
Let me share a few thoughts on tonight’s debate.
Needless to say, we will be providing live coverage of tonight’s debate and commentary and discussion afterwards. Depending on how everything shakes out, we may record a quick instapod version of The Josh Marshall Podcast Featuring Kate Riga to discuss our initial reactions.
In the old days, when we had two more or less professional politicians debating each other, the debates had a certain degree of predictability. There might be gaffes or gotcha moments. But the room for really big surprises was limited. That’s not where we are anymore. Now we have one candidate, Trump, who knows no bounds and will try to do everything he can to disrupt the proceedings or throw the other participants back on their heels. He brings his pro-wrestling mentality right onto the stage. Meanwhile, Democrats go into these affairs in spite of themselves terrified that Biden will have some gaffe or senior moment that will send his campaign into a terminal tailspin. Both of these factors together create a feeling of maximal unpredictability and tension — and moments like that are Donald Trump’s happy place.
Continue reading “Sizing Up Tonight’s Old Man Thunderdome Debate”Jackson Dings Court For Punting On Abortion Case When Idaho Is So Clearly Wrong
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote alone in a major abortion ruling (officially) released Thursday, cutting through her colleagues’ posturing on why they needed to send the case back down to the lower courts.
Continue reading “Jackson Dings Court For Punting On Abortion Case When Idaho Is So Clearly Wrong”Sotomayor Blasts Majority For ‘Unleashing Chaos’ With New, 6-3 Anti-Agency Decision
The Supreme Court on Thursday extended its record of anti-agency rulings, this time upending how the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) adjudicates some of its cases — a process blessed by Congress.
This undermining of both agency and congressional power demonstrates a danger beyond curtailing how the SEC can go after fraudsters, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a dissent, joined by her two liberal colleagues.
“The majority today upends longstanding precedent and the established practice of its coequal partners in our tripartite system of Government,” she wrote. “Because the Court fails to act as a neutral umpire when it rewrites established rules in the manner it does today, I respectfully dissent.”
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority. Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in concurrence, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas.
The conservatives telegraphed their intent to come down this way during November’s oral arguments, their hostility towards the government’s position all the more notable given that the SEC was established and its powers strengthened during periods of glaring malpractice by financial institutions.
“A defendant facing a fraud suit has the right to be tried by a jury of his peers before a neutral adjudicator. Rather than recognize that right, the dissent would permit Congress to concentrate the roles of prosecutor, judge, and jury in the hands of the Executive Branch,” Roberts wrote, echoing some good faith arguments against in-house adjudication (though in a way that advances the conservative majority’s typical anti-agency goals).
Still, the decision was more limited than some experts feared. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, for example, had found that Congress letting the SEC choose whether to adjudicate certain cases in federal courts or in-house violated the“nondelegation doctrine,” an idea spun up in the 1920s and seized upon in recent years by conservative scholars. The “doctrine,” which the conservative legal world has found very helpful to its war against the administrative state, holds that Congress can’t outsource any of its legislative authority to agencies. In a maximal reading, agencies would hardly be able to do anything without a new statute. In Thursday’s ruling, the Supreme Court did not reach that prong of the appeals court’s argument.
Under the ruling, some targets of SEC enforcement could also choose to waive their right to a jury trial — which is long, expensive and potentially riskier than going before an in-house judge who understands the technicalities of the pertinent law. On the other hand, the SEC may opt to pursue fewer enforcement actions, similarly to skirt the cost and resource intensiveness of a jury trial.
Sotomayor, though, points to the uncertainty the decision unleashes, given that many other agencies operate like the SEC. And perhaps even more concerningly, some can only pursue civil penalties in-house.
“The Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission, the Department of Agriculture, and many others, can pursue civil penalties only in agency enforcement proceedings,” she wrote. “For those and countless other agencies, all the majority can say is tough luck; get a new statute from Congress.”
Ultimately, Sotomayor placed Thursday’s ruling in the greater tapestry of this Court’s chipping away at agency power — the long-running project of the legal right.
“Today’s decision is a massive sea change,” she wrote. “Litigants seeking further dismantling of the ‘administrative state’ have reason to rejoice in their win today, but those of us who cherish the rule of law have nothing to celebrate.”
Read the ruling here:
How Federal Workers Will Be The First Casualties Of Trump II
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Consequences Big And Small
This off-the-cuff thread by David Roberts is spot on about one of the foundational shifts that would occur almost undetected in a Trump II presidency:
People lament the “post-truth” era we’re living in. Misinformation. Epistemic bubbles. Algorithmic distortions. Etc. But I need people to understand that we really haven’t seen anything yet. Though we take them for granted & they’ve seen better days we still have largely functioning information-producing institutions. We still have something approximating a handle on what’s happening around us. All of that goes away under Trump – any vestigial connection to objective reality. Then *everything* is propaganda.
All of this is undergirded by a relentless projection by Trump and his acolytes: They assume all government information is propaganda because that’s exactly what they would do if in charge. So in their own minds, they’re just wresting back the propaganda apparatus from their foes. It’s a deeply flawed logic, but there is a logic to it.
It reminds me of a similar projection that right-wing media orgs were making a decade or so ago about news outlets like TPM. There must be an all-hands-on-deck daily morning call among all the lefty pubs to get their messaging straight for the day ahead because that’s exactly what the top-down right-wing would do: Take marching orders and proceed to execute them.
Nothing even remotely like that was actually happening on the left (or … I never got the memo). But it was partly why there was such a freakout over JournoList, because that seemed to confirm the assumption: a cabal of left-leaning journalists conspiring to manage and direct news coverage via a hidden hand.
So much about that was laughable, including the capability of left-leaning journos to manage or direct much of anything. But what made it kind of sweet was that quite a few emerging right-wing outlets at the time used their erroneous projections about places like TPM to formulate their own business plans and then were surprised to see them flop. They’d totally misdiagnosed the underlying reasons for (modest) success and tried to emulate the wrong thing. No surprise that that didn’t work.
The analogy runs out of usefulness at that point because the government isn’t a going business concern that can be run into the ground fairly quickly. The metrics are different. The consequences are much more vast. Liberty, freedom, equality, and democracy are at stake, not a financial bottom line.
Right now, all across the federal government, people are acutely aware of what a Trump II would mean for them and their work. Whether it’s the good folks at NOAA (the Sharpie photo above is a bitter reminder of what we may face again) doing the hard work of marrying science with public communications, the line prosecutors bringing Jan. 6 rioters to justice, or the phalanx of inspectors, auditors, and examiners who do the daily work of the government, they’re not oblivious to the three years of Trump threats of retribution and revenge.
You can only hope that they’re not already consciously clipping their wings to take the edge off their work or minimize their exposure. It would be a mistake to self-censor, but you can certainly sympathize with their plight. Some may be self-protective, with careers, pensions and personal financial viability on the line. Others may be legitimately trying to shield their work in the short term so they can resume it in earnest later. Regardless, it’s hard to imagine it’s not having an effect subconsciously already. You think they don’t remember Trump I episodes like vindictively moving BLM’s headquarters from DC to Colorado?
If Trump were to win, we’re only a few months away from reaping the whirlwind, and the government workers once again will be among the first and hardest hit.
Join Us Tonight!
The TPM crew will be covering the first presidential debate tonight live. Stop by for the liveblog or Josh Marshall’s musings in the Editor’s Blog. Or … if you just can’t bear to watch the debate, check in after the fact for our analysis and highlights. Either way, we have you covered.
Our Occasional Peek At The Polling Numbers
- NYT/Siena: Donald Trump leads Joe Biden 48%-44% among likely voters nationwide, his largest lead to date in this poll.
- Marquette Law School Poll: In Wisconsin, Biden has a narrow 51%-49% lead over Trump among likely voters in a head-to-head matchup, a four-point swing in Biden’s favor since April. In a hypothetical six-candidate race, Trump takes a similarly narrow 44%-42% lead over Biden.
- Nate Silver has unveiled his new post-FiveThirtyEight election model: It gives Trump a 66% chance of winning in November.
2024 Ephemera
- Politico: Here’s where the House GOP is spending this fall
- Under the Radar: Biden quietly had his biggest online fundraising day after Trump was convicted.
- TPM’s Emine Yücel: Republicans’ Pasts Haunt Them As They Rush To Support Reproductive Rights They Put In Harm’s Way
Supreme Court Snafu
The Supreme Court inadvertently published to its website what may have been the final draft of its decision in the Idaho emergency abortions case. Bloomberg was the first and maybe only outlet to spot it.
There’s a lot to chew over there, even as it remains unclear whether this was a draft or the actual decision:
- Politico: Supreme Court ‘inadvertently’ exposes opinion that would restore emergency abortion access in Idaho
- Mark Joseph Stern: The Supreme Court’s New Leaked Abortion Draft Reeks of Cynicism
- Steve Vladeck (sub. req.): The EMTALA Glitch
SCOTUS Does Normal Thing In Jawboning Case
First off, now that the case has been resolved in a positive and normal way, I want to celebrate the fact that it ushered in a new era for the marvelous term “jawboning.” I’m not sure if the term was at risk of being lost to the dustbin of history, but it’s sure been brushed off and buffed to a new shine with this case. Nice to see!
TPM’s Kate Riga writes on the substance of the decision written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, which focused on standing and did not need to reach the underlying merits. I will say, though, that this is one of those cases where the standing issue was so glaring that it ends up feeling like a merits decision anyway.
Well Played, Sir
In yesterday’s other Supreme Court decision, it ruled that federal law distinguished between bribery (illegal) and after-the-fact gratuities to reward prior actions (not illegal). The court, consistent with its decade-long pattern of antipathy towards anti-public corruption statutes, opened a hole in the law big enough to drive an armored car full of goodies through. But let me yield to Elie Mystal on this:
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Quite Possible
From TPM Reader JS on the Idaho abortion decision which was unofficially released today.
Don’t miss the big issue here: There were four votes to decide the case on the merits, Justice Jackson along with Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch. Jackson says she’d vote in favor of abortion rights and the latter say they’d vote against. Five Justices, however, voted to dismiss the case altogether and essentially punt for another day (but dissolve the stay on the district court’s injunction). Among those five are Justices Kagan and Sotomayor. Had just one of them voted in favor of deciding the case, the Court would HAVE to reach the merits. So that tells us that Kagan and Sotomayor believed the merits would have gone against abortion rights. While I understand their decision, I have to say I strongly disagree with it. They should have forced the Court to decide the issue, rather than let Roberts push it off to a non-election year. Sure, this will temporarily help women in Idaho, but allowing Roberts and his colleagues to gut further abortion rights AFTER the election is a long-term bad thing. I commend Justice Jackson for recognizing this.
SCOTUS Mistakenly Posts A Draft Opinion With A Surprising Conservative Split
The Supreme Court’s behind-the-scenes administrators confessed Wednesday that someone “inadvertently and briefly uploaded” a draft opinion, prematurely making public a decision that would dismiss on technical grounds a case that stems from Idaho’s abortion ban.
Continue reading “SCOTUS Mistakenly Posts A Draft Opinion With A Surprising Conservative Split”