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

It’s Not Supposed To Work This Way

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon being so obviously in the tank for Donald Trump in indefinitely postponing his Mar-a-Lago trial set off a new round of recriminations over various tactical decisions Special Counsel Jack Smith made in bringing the classified documents case.

Smith should have picked a different venue than South Florida! He should have had Cannon recused already! If Garland hadn’t been so slow, this wouldn’t be an issue now!

None of those are availing here, and they miss the larger point that for the rule of law to mean anything it must be sturdier and more enduring than a few tactical decisions by a single prosecutor in a single case.

We can take that notion one step further: A lot of commentary and analysis over the last year has insisted that you can’t rely on the criminal justice system to rid us of Trump – the election is the real tool to remove the Trump threat.

It would be pedantic to say there’s no truth to that, but at the same time it turns the rule of the law on its head for it be susceptible to the results of any one election. No one prosecutor, no one case, no one election should be able to determine the fate of the rule of law.

The rule of law isn’t supposed to be dependent on who wins or loses the presidency. It’s not supposed to turn in the wind like a vane. It is supposed to be lasting, immutable, and consistent. Presidents and prosecutors may come and go, but the principles underlying the rule of law must be resilient to those ephemeral real world changes.

What principles are those? That no one is above the law – and no one is below it either. That justice is meted out fairly without regard to party or ideology. That the rules of the game apply to everyone and aren’t selectively enforced. That the legal system isn’t a weapon to be deployed against one’s political adversaries. That the weakest benefit from the system as much as the most powerful, and that the most powerful are called to account same as the weakest.

Before you scoff at my idealism or naivete, of course these are aspirations. We fall short of them all the time. They’re ideals to be pursued, not a destination we’ve arrived at. The consensus around those principles does ebb and flow, but the principles themselves haven’t been under sustained attack at the level in this way perhaps ever in our history (again, excepting out the consensus’ historic blindness to minorities and disfavored groups). It’s a measure of how far we’ve sunken that we’re squabbling over which tactic, hack, or clever trick we should deploy to shore up the erosion of the rule of law.

We’re in a very bad place when it’s widely agreed that the rule of law hangs in the balance in the 2024 election, as it did in 2020. The democratic experiment cannot long endure if one of the two major political parties is itself anti-democratic. Democracy itself can’t regularly be on the ballot. The democratic consensus must be deeper and broader than that for the rule of law to survive.

The Ongoing Threat Of Another Coup

WaPo: Top Republicans, led by Trump, refuse to commit to accept 2024 election results

Quote Of The Day

Donald Trump is the first American presidential candidate to explicitly threaten the democratic system on which a free press depends. He could win. Considering the stakes for the country, that ought to be the campaign issue that dwarfs all others.

Veteran reporter John Harwood

Liveblogging The Cross-Examination Of Stormy Daniels

TPM’s Josh Kovensky is back at the courthouse this morning, where he’ll be liveblogging Day 2 of the testimony of Stormy Daniels. Her continued cross examination by Trump’s lawyer is expected to be hard-hitting. You can follow along in real time here.

The Complexities Of Sexual Violence

Amanda Marcotte: Stormy Daniels testimony reveals the triumph of #MeToo

Yup

Philip Bump: Trump’s classified documents trial blown apart by Cannon

Georgia RICO Case Ain’t Happening Before Election Either

An appeals court in Georgia has agreed to take up Donald Trump’s appeal of the trial judge’s decision not to disqualify District Attorney Fani Willis from the case over her affair with one of her prosecutors, adding new delays to a case that was already looking likely to spill over into 2025.

MTG Fails To Oust Speaker Johnson

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) easily survived a GOP mutiny led by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). Only 10 Republicans joined her in voting to oust Johnson, while Democrats overwhelmingly voted to save him.

FreedomWorks Is Shutting Down

While the Tea Party era was a forerunner of Trump, it’s not the same as MAGA-ism, and the latest proof of that is the shuttering of FreedomWorks announced yesterday.

Helmed in its heyday by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX), FreedomWorks could not survive in the Trump era, a remnant of an earlier still-poisonous brand of Republican activism but not in the same league as MAGA.

Important

NYT: How Republicans Echo Antisemitic Tropes Despite Declaring Support for Israel

Ya Don’t Say?

Politico: “The U.S. oil industry is drawing up ready-to-sign executive orders for Donald Trump aimed at pushing natural gas exports, cutting drilling costs and increasing offshore oil leases in case he wins a second term, according to energy executives with direct knowledge of the work.”

When MAGA Bites Its Own

Kristi Noem thought she could clean up her dog-killing mess in the friendly confines of conservative media, and it did not go well pic.twitter.com/QkTiWwWSZc

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) May 9, 2024

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

Stick A Fork In The Mar-A-Lago Case

You’ve already seen the top line from U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon’s new order yesterday: She is indefinitely delaying the trial of Donald Trump on charges he improperly retained classified documents post-presidency and obstructed justice to cover it up. But there were at least three headline-worthy decisions in the order. Let’s run through them:

1. Indefinite Delay. Cannon struck the May 20 trial date, but she didn’t set a new one and has no immediate plans to do so. She said she won’t set one until various pretrial matters are resolved and laid out a schedule that won’t resolve them until late July at the earliest. This comes even though she’d previously asked the parties to brief her on trial date options, which they had done. Her rationales for delaying the trial indefinitely were a mishmash of reasons she herself has created. Cannon has let pretrial motions linger unruled upon for months and has repeatedly pushed back the CIPA process. It’s been obvious for weeks that she’s gummed up the proceedings, and now she’s using that as an excuse for further delay.

2. Cannon is treating inane Trump claims as credible. Perhaps the most remarkable decision Cannon made in the order was to devote three days in June to an evidentiary hearing on Trump’s claim that the prosecution team should be defined to include the White House, the intelligence community, and your Aunt Marge. It’s a preposterous claim that Cannon is taking seriously. Ruling in favor of Trump would set a mind-boggling precedent in general, but in particular it would open up vast areas of the federal government to Trump discovery requests that would further delay the case, muddy the waters, and give fodder to hare-brained conspiracy theories about the Deep State targeting Trump.

3. Cannon is in over her head. Trump has thrown everything but the kitchen sink at Cannon – and it seems to have worked. In her new order, she bemoaned the scale of the case, the amount of discovery, and the sheer volume of issues to be resolved. Those aren’t accurate descriptions of the case, but they are how Trump has described it to her. In adopting Trump’s language, she also claimed that the case presents “novel and difficult questions,” which is simply not the case.

What Can Be Done About Aileen Cannon?

Every time I write about the latest corrupt mishandling of the Mar-a-Lago case by Judge Cannon, readers reach out wanting to know why nothing is being done about it. Why hasn’t Special Counsel Jack Smith tried to have her removed? Why hasn’t he appealed? Why hasn’t the appeals court stepped in?

I have reasoned explanations for each of those questions, but they aren’t satisfying answers. Is the system fundamentally rotten and broken? Maybe. It’s clearly failing in this case to do justice in a timely manner.

The next questions are often about Cannon herself. Is she personally corrupt, incompetent, naive and inexperienced? Some measure of all of the above.

So Much To Unpack From Stormy Daniels’ Testimony

The full liveblog that Josh Kovensky did for us yesterday is worth a read to give you the warp and weft of Stormy Daniels’ direct testimony and the first stab at cross-examining her. His end-of-the-day recap is a condensed version if you’re short on time.

A few highlights from the day:

• A porn star testifying about her sexual encounter with a future president is not an every day event, but it was not titillating. It was dark and, the word Josh kept coming back to, “grim.”Daniels went into much more detail about the encounter than Judge Juan Merchan or Trump’s team wanted, but the judge overruled Trump’s motion for a mistrial. In doing so, he cut Trump’s lawyers off at the knees, saying he was surprised they hadn’t objected more and pointing out that he himself had objected on at least one occasion when they failed to do so. I can’t imagine the tongue-lashing Trump must have given the lawyers later.
• The judge also upbraided Trump’s lawyers for Trump’s acting out during Daniel’s testimony, according to the transcript of a bench conference: “I understand that your client is upset at this point, but he is cursing audibly and he is shaking his head visually and that’s contemptuous. It has the potential to intimidate the witness and the jury can see that.”

No trial today. It resumes Thursday with the continuation of the cross examination of Daniels. We’ll have another liveblog running via Josh in the courthouse.

Speak Plainly

Jill Filipovic at The Atlantic:

Today, a clear line of argument has emerged from many progressive commentators: First, the overwhelming majority of the protesters are peaceful and not anti-Semitic. Second, it undermines and mischaracterizes a vital movement to focus on a few bad actors who spout anti-Semitic vitriol, or to emphasize a few chants that glorify Hamas or call for the destruction of Israel. Third, the obsessive coverage of these protests is coming at the expense of the much more important story, which is the war itself. And in many respects, this is a sensible position. A war costing tens of thousands of lives, conducted by a key U.S. ally following a horrific terrorist attack, is a much more important story than whatever college students are doing in the United States. The violent crackdowns on these protests strike many, myself included, as far more troubling than the protests themselves. And it isn’t fair to conflate what a handful of protesters do or say with a much broader movement.

Can’t Even Hack It On Fox Business

Wow! Noem loses it at Varney: "Enough, Stuart. This interview is ridiculous what you are doing right now. You need to stop." pic.twitter.com/SAweDXFJfs

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 7, 2024

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