The Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled that a couple of red states and individual far-right actors lacked standing to ban the Biden administration from urging tech companies to suppress disinformation.
Continue reading “Supreme Court Uses Biden Social Media Case To Slap Down 5th Circuit Yet Again”A New Trumpian Strategy For Perpetuating The Big Lie
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
The Flood Gates Are Opened
One under-appreciated aspect of Donald Trump’s relentless year’s long campaign to promulgate the Big Lie is how it becomes internalized as gospel all the way down the GOP line to the local dog catcher.
We saw a similar dynamic in the decades-long voter fraud bamboozlement effort the GOP was running. Yes, those efforts were smoked out, the worst culprits identified, and some of the most egregious efforts either thwarted or rolled back. But I observed from our reporting on it over the years that the voter fraud bogosity was so prevalent that even reasonable, non-bad-actor Republicans adopted and advanced it unquestioningly. It was in the drinking water. They didn’t even know they’d been sipping it for years.
That was a sobering realization, a corollary to the old aphorism that if you repeat the lie for long enough it becomes true. Which brings us to the Big Lie.
We’ve seen periodic episodes of local officials thwarting the certification of election results on some Big Lie-style pretense. Heroes in their own minds, they’ve been immersed in the Big Lie for long enough for it to have saturated their entire understanding of the election process. That’s not to let them off the hook, or to excuse their actions. It’s just a different dynamic than what we saw in 2020.
The Washington Post reports this morning on examples from five battleground states since 2020 where county-level officials have tried to block the certification of the vote. The article frames it up as a potential threat to the sanctity of a Biden win in November, a way for Republicans in the thousands of counties around the country to impede, slow, or undermine the ultimate determination of who won. Or worse, to create and sustain unfounded doubts about the result of the election that could fuel election challenges, delegitimize the result, and mire the election in legal battles.
If the 2020 autocoup attempt was from the top down, led by President Trump from the White House, the 2024 version may look more bottom up, a “grassroots” effort that Trump has seeded with a million lies for a dozen years. Or, as I suspect is most likely, a combination of top-down and bottom-up election denialism that work in sync with each other to maximize disruption.
Let’s Check In On the Georgia RICO Case
Things have slowed to a crawl as Trump et al.’s appeal of the trial judge’s refusal to disqualify District Attorney Fani Willis is considered:
- AJC: Trump, co-defendants urge Georgia appeals court to disqualify Fani Willis
- AJC: A determined judge vows to keep Trump case moving
Speaking Of Georgia …
Georgia is the first state to require its law enforcement officers be trained in the nuances of election intimidation and election interference in order to keep them on the right side of the line, TPM’s Khaya Himmelman reports.
Could Be Worse
After a hearing on the matter yesterday, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon does not seem inclined to take Trump’s side and find fault with the validity of the search warrant executed at Mar-a-Lago in the classified documents case.
Judge Eases Trump Gag Order
New York state Judge Juan Merchan reluctantly loosened some of the strictures of the gag order he imposed on Trump in the hush-money case. The revised gag order will remain in place until after Trump is sentenced next month.
Insurrectionists Abound
With Steve Bannon due to report to prison July 1, the House GOP is trying to throw him a lifeline with the Supreme Court.
Election Results
- NY-16: Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D) lost to Westchester County executive George Latimer (D) in the Democratic primary by double digits.
- CO-04: Rep. Lauren Boebert (R) romped to victory in the GOP primary in her new-to-her district, which was vacated by the retiring Rep. Ken Buck (R).
- UT-Sen: Rep. John Curtis (R) defeated Trump-endorsed Trent Staggs (R) in the GOP primary to become the presumptive successor to Sen. Mitt Romney (R).
If You’re Ignoring My Recommendation …
… and are dying to read about Thursday’s presidential debate, this Bulwark piece is about as good as it’s gonna get.
SCOTUS Watch
The Supreme Court is scheduled to release its end-of-term decisions at 10 a.m. ET today, tomorrow and Friday. It’s not yet clear whether they’ll issue all of their outstanding opinions by the end of this week or have to push the end of the term into next week.
In the meantime, read Linda Greenhouse on the high court’s gun decision last week.
Assange Now A Free Man
The Wikileaks provocateur entered his guilty plea to violating the Espionage Act in the far-flung U.S. federal court in the Northern Mariana Islands as part of plea deal that sentenced him to time already served in a British prison. Afterwards, he flew on to his home country of Australia.
As folks assess the implications, some reading for you to consider:
- Charlie Savage: Assange’s Plea Deal Sets a Chilling Precedent, but It Could Have Been Worse
- Marcy Wheeler: The Damaging Precedent Of The Julian Assange Espionage Guilty Plea
Long Time Coming
President Biden will issue a blanket pardon today to gay former service members convicted over a 60-year period of violating the military’s old anti-sodomy laws. Some 2,000 people are covered by the pardon.
Keeping An Eye On This
The two astronauts aboard the first human flight of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft remain stuck indefinitely at the International Space Station while engineers try to figure out technical problems encountered on the voyage there back in early June.
The spacecraft and its crew were scheduled to return after eight days, on June 18. The return date was initially pushed back until today. But yesterday NASA announced an indefinite postponement until sometime in July.
Never Stop
When I saw her onstage early last summer, Mavis Staples was struggling a little bit with the heat, which is understandable for someone in their 80s. By the end of the summer, she was ready to retire. But that didn’t suit her, and she has since changed her mind. The NYT has a lovely profile of the reinvigorated legend.
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NY-16 Wrap Up
We got the result that vibes, conventional wisdom and limited polling — always questionable in a low-turnout primary — led us to expect in NY-16: Rep. Jamaal Bowman went down to a decisive bordering on overwhelming defeat. Current results give County Executive George Latimer 58% of the vote to Rep. Jamaal Bowman’s 42%. “Current” isn’t a throwaway line. The results I’m looking at say that is 88% of the vote. New York is notoriously, verging on comically, slow to count votes. You don’t hear about it as much as you should because we don’t have a lot of high-profile national races, though last cycle and this one we will have a handful of House races that could well determine who controls the House.
Continue reading “NY-16 Wrap Up”Trump Camp Tries To Make Debate About VP Pick And Everyone Is Falling For It
Donald Trump and his 2024 campaign have been teasing the fact that they will announce his running mate sometime before or during the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee next month. Who and when and as a distraction for what remains unclear, likely intentionally on the Trump campaign’s end.
Continue reading “Trump Camp Tries To Make Debate About VP Pick And Everyone Is Falling For It”A Reader on Jamaal Bowman
I just got this note from TPM Reader RL who lives in NY-16 and says he just voted for Latimer. He brings up something that didn’t figure in my piece at all: the fire alarm. I’d always written off the idea that Bowman was trying to delay that vote. It simply didn’t make sense to me. It seemed like he was in a rush. The door was locked. And he pulled the fire alarm to unlock the door. RL says it actually played a significant role in his vote, not because it was a huge deal in itself but because it was just dumb and made him a story when the GOP was imploding. As I told RL, perhaps it’s the same difference. It you’re in a rush and a door is locked, setting off a fire alarm in a large office building is not a smart thing to do. Terrible judgment and possibly even dangerous. It just seems like the kind of move, whatever the motivation, that is very much a Jamaal Bowman thing that you’d never see Hakeem Jeffries, Dan Goldman or AOC doing. Just not ready for prime time, quite apart from ideology.
Now RL …
Continue reading “A Reader on Jamaal Bowman”Scenes From DC Protests On Second Anniversary Of The Dobbs Decision
Two years ago the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade with the disastrous Dobbs ruling that upended abortion access in the U.S. and put all other reproductive rights in harms way. On the second anniversary of Dobbs, abortion activists showed up at the Supreme Court building in Washington D.C. to show their support for access to legal and safe abortions. A group of anti-abortion demonstrators were also in attendance.
Continue reading “Scenes From DC Protests On Second Anniversary Of The Dobbs Decision”Are Trump’s Pro-Wrestling Antics Getting Stale?
We hear a lot that the press is making all the same mistakes with Donald Trump that it did back in 2016. There are certainly many ways this is the case. But not in all the ways. Indeed, I think Trump has perversely and paradoxically benefited from one thing most news organizations have done very differently. They don’t carry his speeches live. They don’t report all his latest nonsense. I think this has been a net plus for him, especially in a rematch with Biden, since there’s less reminder of just how out there, unhinged and violence-inciting he is. That benefit is only starting to ebb now as we’re getting into the meat of the campaign proper and people really are hearing a lot of it. Thursday night’s debate will bring that to the fore.
Which brings us to the debate.
One thing I’m very curious about is whether certain parts of Trump’s schtick will just seem stale the third time.
Continue reading “Are Trump’s Pro-Wrestling Antics Getting Stale?”A Helpful Observation about Trump and Big Capital
I was reading a piece in Axios this morning that happened not only to be smart but also erudite. Surprise! When I looked at the byline: Felix Salmon. Okay, not a surprise. Axios actually publishes a lot of good stuff outside its narrowly political content. There’s good stuff there too. But on politics it’s mostly narrowly captive to DC conventional wisdom and conceits. But to the good Felix Salmon piece: he compares billionaire and business giving to and support of Trump to Pascal’s Wager: It makes sense to believe in God because if God exists you’ll be glad you did and if he doesn’t exist it won’t matter.
Salmon makes the point that high-profile business leaders have a big incentive to support Trump even if they want him to lose or at least think Biden would be a better President or better for the economy. If Trump wins your personal support could end up mattering a lot to your business or your company and vice versa. If Biden wins, he’s not going to try to retaliate against you for supporting Trump. Not how the Biden folks operate. This is a bit far fetched but I could even see how you might have a fiduciary responsibility to support Trump for just the same reason. I know it’s a bit more complicated than that. But the effect on your bottom line could be very, very real.
Continue reading “A Helpful Observation about Trump and Big Capital”Heritage Foundation Funds Blacklist Of Federal Workers
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Keeping A Blacklist And Checking It Twice
The Heritage Foundation is funding the creation of a blacklist of federal government workers who MAGA loyalists claim might obstruct the Trump II agenda, the Associated Press reported Monday.
The work of compiling the list of names of some 100 government employees is being done by a Kentucky fellow named Tom Jones and his American Accountability Foundation. The work is being financed with the help of a $100,000 “Heritage Innovation Prize” from the Heritage Foundation, long a bastion of Reagan conservatism in DC but now fully in MAGA mode. Heritage announced the prize winner back in May, referring to “the presence of anti-American bad actors burrowed into the administrative state.”
In announcing the prize, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts touted it as effort to expose the “Deep State”:
“The weaponization of the federal government under President Joe Biden is only possible because of the deep state of entrenched Leftist bureaucrats in the White House and its agencies. I am proud to support the outstanding work of AAF in their fight to hold our government accountable and drain it of bad actors determined to undermine our constitutional republic and weaponize government against the American people, our economy, and our institutions.”
For his part, Jones is a former staffer to Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), who went on to run the Heritage Foundation, and to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI). Jones also did oppo work for Sen. Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Notably, the plan is to publish the list online. A doxxing in the public square as it were, with all the obvious historical echoes, as the AP rightly notes:
The public list-making conjures for some the era of Joseph McCarthy, the senator who conducted grueling hearings into suspected communist sympathizers during the Cold War. The hearings were orchestrated by a top staffer, Roy Cohn, who became a confidant of a younger Trump.
As for the criteria used to determine who makes the list and how those criteria are applied, the AP provides this chilling methodology: “They’re relying in part on tips from his network of conservative contacts, including workers.”
Sobering …
WaPo:
[T]he nation is experiencing a lull in political unrest — in fact, one of the quietest periods that extremism researchers have recorded in recent years. Chief among the factors explaining the lack of political violence, analysts say, is a simple one: Trump’s supporters believe he will win the presidency. …
There’s little reason for pro-Trump extremist groups or radicalized MAGA fans to demonstrate when they foresee the presumptive Republican nominee coasting to victory over President Biden in five months and positioned to enact promised “retribution” against his enemies in seven, political violence trackers say.
This is consistent with what TPM’s Josh Kovensky found a couple of weeks ago when posed the question: Where Are the Proud Boys?
The problem, of course, is that the election is not rigged and it’s very close, so the risk is growing of the Furies being unleashed in the event of a very plausible Biden win.
Oy Vey
TPM’s Hunter Walker: Jan. 6 Prisoners Recorded A Podcast From Jail With A Camera Someone ‘Accidentally’ Gave Them
On My Reading List
John Ganz’s new book – “When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s” – is yielding book reviews that themselves are worthy of your time and attention. Among them, this reflection by historian Thomas Zimmer on the the origins of Trumpism.
House GOP Gonna House GOP
The usual performative stuff from the Crazy Caucus:
- Exhibit A: “Rep. William Timmons (R-S.C.) introduced a resolution Friday urging the Supreme Court to “intervene” in the hush money case against former President Donald Trump before the 2024 election — a move that experts say is a political stunt that faces significant legal obstacles.”
- Exhibit B: “This House GOP is about to add another item to their long list of abnormal events: voting to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in ‘inherent contempt.’ Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) said she will force a vote this week on the rarely used tool, which would direct the House sergeant at arms to take Garland into custody.”
SCOTUS Will Consider Ban On Transgender Care
The Supreme Court will take up Tennessee’s ban on transgender care for minors in its next term. The Biden administration was seeking Supreme Court review, so this isn’t one of those cases where the high court aggressively reached out to insinuate itself into a still-percolating area of the law.
🚨 Red Alert 🚨
Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern: Sonia Sotomayor Just Sounded a Dire Warning About Marriage Equality
Aileen Cannon Is Off The Chain
Another day, another pointless hearing (or two) in the Mar-a-Lago case, another tongue-lashing of a federal prosecutor by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon. Because media access to the courtroom is so limited, we’re left to pick through after the fact accounts from journalists in attendance:
- Hugo Lowell: Judge scolds classified files prosecutor asking to rein in Trump’s attacks on FBI
- Eileen Sullivan: Judge in Trump Documents Case Hears Arguments Over Special Counsel
- Alan Feuer and Eileen Sullivan: Judge Skeptical About Request to Limit Trump Statements on F.B.I.
Primary Day
- NY-16: It’s put up or shut up time in the most closely watched primary today, where Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) is trying to hold off a strong challenge from Westchester County executive George Latimer (D) in a race in suburban NYC dominated by the Israel-Palestine conflict.
- CO-04: Don’t look now but Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) appears poised to win today’s GOP primary in the new-to-her district she opted to run in because she feared losing her existing seat.
- UT-Sen: For all intents and purposes, Utah will pick Mitt Romney’s replacement in the GOP primary today. Two candidates have emerged from the crowded field: Trump-backed local Mayor Trent Staggs and Rep. John Curtis, who is leading in the polls.
Officially Too Close To Call
The AP declared the final tally in the VA-05 GOP primary too close to call, with incumbent Rep. Bob Good trailing state Sen. John McGuire (R) by some 375 votes (some reports peg it at 373). Because the margin is less than 1%, Good is entitled to a recount but must pay for it himself because the margin is more than 0.5% threshold for a state-funded recount.
I Wondered About This …
How did Sen. Bob Menendez’s allegedly criminal water-carrying for Egypt play inside his Senate office? We got a glimpse of that in testimony yesterday from a former senior aide to Menendez at his ongoing federal corruption trial in Manhattan.
Right Wing Celebrates Assange Plea Deal
A court filing yesterday in the far-flung U.S. territory of the Northern Mariana Islands revealed that Julian Assange will be pleading guilty to a single felony count of illegally obtaining and disclosing national security material.
Assange is scheduled to appear in federal court in Saipan on Wednesday morning local time, where he is expected to plead guilty, be sentenced to time already served, and allowed to travel on to his native Australia, ending his decade-plus legal saga, much it spent in the Ecuadorean embassy in London and in a British jail.
How much things have changed since Julian Assange’s Wikileaks published its bombshells in 2010. It seems like a lifetime ago now. The political landscape surrounding Assange has been turned upside down (though a less generous reading might argue otherwise). To give you some sense of where the core of Assange’s support now comes from:
And of course Russia remains happy to tout Assange:
Just Say It!
A very lively and engaging read from CNN chief climate correspondent Bill Weir on the pressures local TV weatherfolk are under when it comes to speaking to their audiences candidly about climate change.
Do you like Morning Memo? Let us know!
Georgia Becomes First State To Mandate Election Intimidation Training for Law Enforcement — But At What Cost?
Election deniers have put states in a position of having to involve law enforcement more heavily in elections this fall. And while it’s a crucial step in the direction of better protecting poll workers and voters after right-wing chaos was injected into the 2020 election, the changes also have the potential to create an environment of intimidation at the polls.
Continue reading “Georgia Becomes First State To Mandate Election Intimidation Training for Law Enforcement — But At What Cost?”