A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.

POWER GRAB

The most consequential decision yet from the six-justice Roberts supermajority was sandwiched between President Biden’s debate pratfall Thursday night and this morning’s Supreme Court decision on former President Trump’s immunity from criminal prosecution. So before it gets wiped clean from the front pages, I want to just take a moment before the immunity decision comes down to re-cast the current court.

The Supreme Court’s decision Friday to overrule Chevron will have vast consequences, many of then unseen or hard to detect, but one of the things we were discussing internally Friday as we assessed the Supreme Court’s term and its four years with a 6-3 conservative supermajority is how the defining characteristic isn’t conservatism at all but the accrual of power to the judiciary at the expense of the executive and legislative branches.

Rather than taking a conservative view of the role of the courts – a modest, humble, restrained posture that is wary of its own power and applies it carefully – the Roberts supermajority has taken a radical course where the judiciary is increasingly the final arbiter not just on the law but on the facts, the interpretation of those facts, the application of those facts in given situations, and the technical, scientific, and professional implications of those facts in the real world.

There’s nothing conservative about it, and you only have to look to conservatives’ exact same complaints about the Warren and especially the Burger courts to see the obvious. We’ve taken to calling the court “right wing” rather than conservative because it’s a more precise description (though it’s still a pretty blunt term). Rather than being driven by a guiding conservative judicial philosophy, however odious it might have been, the current Supreme Court is most consistent when it comes to consolidating power for itself. For more on this:

• Lisa Needham: SCOTUS completes the biggest power grab in modern US history
• Kim Wehle: The right-wing Court just made another massive power grab
• Judd Legum: Supreme power grab

Trump Immunity Decision Coming From SCOTUS This Morning

Today is the final day of announced decisions by the Supreme Court before it breaks for the summer. The big remaining case for our purposes is the Trump immunity case that is blocking/slow-rolling his prosecution in the Jan. 6 case in DC.

The Supreme Court convenes at 10 a.m. ET. It has more than one decision to issue today; if I had to guess, I would say the immunity decision will be the final one in that batch, both because of its significance and because it was the last case in which the court heard oral arguments this term and because Chief Justice John Roberts is expected to author it.

Please join us for live coverage this morning as we make sense of the immunity decision and its implications for the timing and direction of the Jan. 6 case against Trump.

In the meantime, I’d refer you to what I wrote a few days ago about the various forms of disingenuousness to be on the look out for from the justices when the immunity ruling comes down.

Not Many Clues From SCOTUS’ Other Jan. 6 Decision

An unusual lineup that saw Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson join the right-wing majority and Justice Amy Coney Barrett defect to write a dissent with Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor produced a decision that narrowed the application of a key obstruction statute used in the prosecution of Jan. 6 rioters.

The opinion didn’t provide much in the way of hints on the how the court would come down in the immunity decision. As for its implications for the Trump prosecution, it doesn’t seem as dire as initially feared when the court took the case, but the real-world impacts are going to take some time to watch play out.

How The Criminal Justice System Works For Non-Trumps

Radley Balko:

As someone who writes and reports on those everyday abuses, it’s been especially surreal to hear these typically wealthy, often very powerful people simultaneously claim that police, prosecutors, and courts are unfair and biased against them and far too permissive and lenient with everyone else.

The truth is that Trump has been getting the criminal justice system’s “platinum door” treatment from the start. His cases are unusual in that he’s a former president. But his status and political position have helped him far more than they have hurt him.

Balko is essentially putting some meat on the bone of Wilhoit’s law.

Steve Bannon To Prison

Former Trump campaign manager and White House adviser Steve Bannon is set to report to federal prison today to begin serving a four-month sentence for contempt of Congress for his refusal to comply with a subpoena from the Jan. 6 committee, after the Supreme Court Friday rejected Bannon’s last-ditch appeal.

Trump Prosecution Miscellany

Sweeping up some of the developments from late last week that got swamped by the presidential debate:

• MAL: U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon rejected Donald Trump’s claims that the FBI misled the court to obtain the search warrant for Mar-a-Lago, but in the same order she called for two bizarro evidentiary hearings on other specious pre-trial claims by Trump that will continue to drag the case out at a snail’s pace.
• MAL: Cannon still hasn’t ruled on Special Counsel Jack Smith’s motion to modify the terms of Trump’s release to prevent him from savaging federal law enforcement. Instead, she gave both sides until Friday to file yet another round of briefs on the matter.
• GA-RICO: Former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows has been involved in a quiet legal battle to obtain from the National Archives documents from his time in the West Wing to use in his defense of the criminal charges in the Georgia RICO case. That effort spilled into public view last week for the first time.

Good Read

Greg Sargent: Trump’s Shameless, Corrupt Wooing of Plutocrats Is Suddenly Backfiring

Where Does Biden Go From Here?

Round II of post-debate analysis:

• TPM’s Josh Marshall: A Few Thoughts on Last Night
• Brian Beutler: What We Can Expect Of The People Closest To Joe Biden

Debate Fallout: How The Bigs Are Covering It

• CNN: Democrats fear replacement scenarios as much as keeping Biden
• Politico: Biden’s family privately criticizes top advisers and pushes for their ouster at Camp David meeting
• NYT: Biden’s Family Tells Him to Keep Fighting as They Huddle at Camp David
• AP: A private call of top Democrats fuels more insider anger about Biden’s debate performance
• Politico: Whitmer Disavows ‘Draft Gretch’ Movement

Oklahoma Follow Louisiana’s Lead On Bible In Classroom

Whereas Louisiana passed a law requiring the Ten Commandments be posted in every public school classroom, Oklahoma’s state superintendent of public instruction took it upon himself to order that the Bible be taught in public schools.

The Stunning Collapse of New York’s Congestion Pricing

WSJ: “The epic collapse in New York shows how a fear of dramatic change can give the status quo stubborn power over those trying to solve some of America’s most intractable challenges. That leaves policymakers nibbling at the edges of deeply rooted problems, even after investing huge sums of money and political capital.”

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A special edition of Morning Memo focused exclusively on last night’s presidential debate. Sign up for the email version.

Say It Ain’t So, Joe

I loathe theater criticism-style debate coverage, but by any standard it was a disastrous performance by President Biden. But for all the mumbled answers, muffed one-liners, and inability to seize control of the tempo, volume, and direction of the debate, his physical presentation was more damaging than anything he said or failed to say.

All of the signs of aging were there: the stiff-legged gait, the blank stares into the middle distance, the frozen expression on his face, and the slow reaction times.

Biden’s right-wing foes have been spinning out cheap fakes for weeks, selectively editing videos to cast him in the most decrepit, senile light possible. Last night, Biden embodied those videos, breathing life into them in a way that confirmed the worst attacks of his detractors and left his supporters in something approaching shock.

A Strategic Blunder

What makes this probably the worst presidential debate performance ever wasn’t the presentation itself, it was that Biden sought this debate, forced it on Trump, agreed to its terms, and then fell on his face. It was a strategic move to try to change the course of the campaign, put to rest the concerns about his age and vitality, and put Trump — fresh off his criminal conviction — back on his heels. This is what it looks like to swing for the fences and miss. You can’t blame the man for being old, but you can blame him for failing to seize the opportunity that he went out of his way to create for himself.

You can carp about CNN’s debate moderators abdicating any fact-checking responsibilities. You can bemoan Trump’s fountain of lies or the difficulty of debating a narcissistic sociopath on live TV. But Biden asked for this. He agreed to the rules. He set the agenda. And none of what happened was unforeseeable. Not only was it predictable, it was in fact predicted.

Which Audience Are You Talking About?

I’ve already made my disdain for presidential debates known, and I won’t belabor the point here. Instead, let’s try to untangle some of the conflicting and contradictory analyses that bedevil not just the coverage of debates but how people absorb and react to them. The problem writ large overwhelmingly comes down to conflating which debate audience you’re taking about. Let’s hit the three biggies:

The Partisans

You don’t need to convince the candidate’s base of support of anything. They’ve already decided. But you want to energize them, give voice to their hopes and concerns, turn them into legions of folk using your language, spreading your message and reinforcing your campaign.

For their part, many partisans tend to observe debates and campaigns like sports fans, rooting for outcomes over which they have little or no control. I don’t recommend that approach for your mental health, but it also sucks up an enormous amount of human and emotional capital, like spending all day on the sofa watching sports on TV instead of getting out and exercising yourself. The partisan-as-sports-fan risks becoming more deeply invested in their preferred outcomes and the roller coaster of emotions along the way than in the underlying cause.

But of course the partisan audience also includes the campaign’s volunteers, donors, and the people who do the hard work on the ground, too. In short, you as the candidate want to lead them all in a highly demonstrable way.

Biden left his partisans dismayed at best; many descended into panic.

The Media

Most people, even partisans, don’t watch the debates, getting much of their information about what happened through media coverage and the general buzz associated with the event and the after-action analysis. So the campaign wants to exert as much influence as it can over the media coverage. That starts with pre-debate expectation-setting, extends through the candidate’s performance itself, and immediately shifts into spin and image-crafting after the candidate leaves the stage.

In an ideal world, you cement a conventional wisdom favorable to your candidate and maybe if you’re lucky elevate their performance into the zeitgeist. The worst case scenario is that a bad performance becomes part of the zeitgeist, which is what happened last night.

While the efforts to influence the media coverage are partly about influencing members of the media themselves, a huge part of the effort is intended to try to shape the coverage so that those who consume it get a particular version of events that is favorable from the campaign’s point of view. It’s a very difficult bank shot to pull off.

Complicating the effort further is the media’s own sense of itself. So much of what passes for political news — grading the candidates on how good they are at performing for the media, reporters on the campaign trail talking to “real” people, media-sponsored public opinion surveys and the thousands of polling stories they generate — is the media positioning itself as gatekeeper between candidate and public. The media has its own notion of what “real” voters, “common folk,” and the people out there in the “heartland” are all about it. It’s a pose, a posture, and a positioning driven by a host of factors that would take a separate essay to unpack. But the campaign’s bank shot attempt must pass through this distorted media prism before it reaches the intended audience.

Critiques of the media tend to confuse all this further. Partisans have their own notions of what they want the media coverage to look like in order to influence people other than themselves. Rarely is anyone shouting at the media because they feel let down by the quality of information they themselves are getting. They’re exercised about what they perceive other people to be getting from the media coverage and how those other people will or won’t react. It becomes a hall of mirrors very quickly.

Low-Information Voters

Low-information voters exist in a world completely different from the one partisans inhabit. I have no real idea where they get their information. It’s not remotely like how you and I get information.

You’ve probably noticed by now that much of the public discourse in the mass media era (let’s peg it as starting with the 1960 election) is focused on these persuadables. Partisan minds change, too, over time, but slowly and in herd-like ways. The persuadables are more up for grabs more often, especially as partisan allegiances have become more fixed, and so the focus naturally turns to them. But this is where things start to get more opaque.

Political campaigns in the modern era have fallen back on the techniques developed for mass marketing consumer products. It’s a totally different world than Schoolhouse Rock, high school civics class, or academic political science. It’s not a Lincoln-Douglas debate. It’s Coke v. Pepsi. Ford v. Chevy. McDonalds v. Burger King. Apple v. Microsoft. Google v. Meta.

Political reporting has never quite caught up. It’s still predicated on old-fashioned notions that emerged before the mass media era, what I think of as the all-politics-is-local conceit. It’s quaint and even has residual charm to paint a picture of yard signs and door-to-door campaigning and stump speeches, a candidate amongst the people, precinct by precinct breakdowns, and all the other hyperfixations that persist decades after politics was nationalized, regional differences were flattened, and the vast majority of campaign spending was shifted to mass media advertising.

There’s another strong current in the political coverage that I blame on Teddy White, even though that’s what I was weaned on, too. It’s the hyperfocus on the candidate as a world-historic figure, a great man (usually) fixation. In this coverage, the currencies are psychology and inner turmoil on the one hand and petty jousting among campaign personalities on the other. This is the coverage that later came to elevate political consultants into nationally known gurus.

When you talk about these forms of coverage in isolation you sort of get the idea, but when you consider that these are stand-ins for billions of dollars in political spending, you start to see the real limitations of these coverage conceits. They’re pernicious but they’re not intentionally deceptive or misguided. It’s a grasping effort to make sense of exceedingly difficult things to cover. Imagine covering a Pepsi v. Coke advertising campaign. It would suck!

Are You Still With Me?

If you’re still following along, you probably see where this goes next. The modern political campaign has reduced partisans and the media to trying to guess, predict, and pseudo-analyze whether the mass marketing campaign underway out there is effectively reaching the low-information voter. Much of the backbiting against candidates and their campaigns involves would-be Don Drapers armchair-quarterbacking over mass marketing techniques.

Another chunk of the discourse comes down to would-be media critics arguing not over the substance of politics but over the coverage and how it will be perceived by people who may never see it and who we don’t understand very well in the first place.

Brace Yourself

I broke this all down into some of its constituent parts — simplifying it somewhat — because we’re going to be in a whirlwind of emotional outbursts, severe backbiting, and unsolicited campaign advice from everyone and their mother over the next few days given how last night’s debate went. Most of it will be misdirected in the ways I’ve outlined here.

In particular, there’s a subset of media and partisans that I’ll call the “Do Something!” caucus. It’s a cost-free position to take. Do something! Anything! It demands action as an emotional release valve. It doesn’t matter what the action is, so long as it’s not inaction.

Demanding that Biden step down and Democrats come up with a new nominee without a plan for how or for who replaces him is a patented “Do Something!” caucus move. The “Do Something!” caucus loves pretending that politics is chess and that chess is winnable with clever moves. The “Do Something!” caucus obsesses over messaging strategies.

Biden gave the “Do Something!” caucus a lot to work with last night.

What’s Next?

I do not know.

I repeat: I do not know.

That’s part of what draws me to politics. It is not predictable. It surprises you. Making predictions robs me of the joy of the unexpected, though in truth much of the unexpected in politics over the past 8 years has brought little joy.

For my part, the emotional edge to last night’s debate came from the knowledge that tens of thousands of Americans are working night and day to shore up the foundations of democracy and to protect them from another assault by Donald Trump. It is the calling of our time.

On balance, Joe Biden has been a remarkably effective leader of that effort. More so than I would have imagined. But he fell down on the job last night, and that let a lot of people down.

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