For this Supreme Court to reject abortion restrictions, the argument has to be pretty bad.
“That it?” Justice Amy Coney Barrett cut in tersely as anti-abortion group lawyer Erin Hawley (yes, that Hawley) enumerated the supposed harms to a group of doctors from the Food and Drug Administration lifting restrictions on abortion drug mifepristone.
Continue reading “Right-Wing Justices Toss Scraps To Anti-Abortion Movement While Unable To Embrace Its Shoddy Argument”In response to yesterday’s post on Ronna X TPM Reader JG said I may be missing the true elephant in the room, and by that he means something a number of others have suggested over the last 48 hours or so. That idea is that this doesn’t have anything to do with having Ronna on the air at all. She’s there to prepare for Trump’s possible return to power, an insurance policy, as it were. There’s an additional layer of this. NBC is a big corporation with a bunch of channels and entertainment brands. But it’s part of Comcast which is a huge media and telecom conglomerate with interests across various sectors of the economy. If you’re Comcast this isn’t just a matter of NBC News or NBC. You have to worry about whether Trump is going to go to war with Comcast itself, which is vulnerable on numerous business and regulatory fronts, if he gets mad at NBC News.
I guess I thought this was implicit in what I wrote yesterday. But it definitely wasn’t my emphasis. What I was focused on yesterday was how this works when you don’t have a lawless authoritarian in the White House. But when you do, well … yes, that introduces a whole new dimension to it.
Continue reading “Was Ronna X Trump Bait for a Scaredy-Cat-NBC?”The anti-abortion side emerged from Tuesday’s oral arguments considerably worse for wear after even their ideological allies on the bench questioned their standing to bring the case and the sweeping scope of the restrictions they sought.
At times, it became a full Court pile-on, particularly in response to the anti-abortion group’s quest for nationwide restrictions on the drug due to a handful of doctors’ objection to maybe, perhaps, one day, having to complete an abortion for a woman suffering from mifepristone’s side effects.
While the legal underpinnings of the mifepristone challenge are widely considered to be shoddy, we’ve seen the work that judges’ political preferences can do in bridging the gap to the preferred result. In this case, both Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk and the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals were willing to make that leap. The Supreme Court, based on what we heard today, seems not to be.
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Ronna McDaniel is such a buffoonish and servile character that her presence on NBC News threatens to topple the partisan talking head model around which the news nets build their political coverage.
It’s been a long time coming.
McDaniel, because of her prior role as an enabler of Donald Trump and the Big Lie of 2020, is an order of magnitude worse than the parade of predecessors who took the revolving door from political operative to network news contributor. But they are not fundamentally different from her. Remember Rick Santorum?
The whole fetid paradigm for political coverage – which probably started with the original CNN Crossfire – should be tossed in the garbage. Along with it should go the dubious tradition of the news networks “sponsoring” political debates, which may look on the surface like a civic endeavor but in reality is a ratings and brand enhancer. Multiple reports suggest that the McDaniel fiasco originated in negotiations she conducted as RNC chair with a NBC News political unit desperate to land a GOP presidential primary debate.
The simplistic formula of talking heads from the right and from the left jousting on live TV as a form of “news” or “coverage” is cheap, easy to produce, and positions the news nets as having convening authority. But substantively? They’re vapid. They always have been. They got worse in the reality TV era, where the “jousting” became the entire point. The more provocative, in-your-face, and over-the-top the pundit, the better the spectacle.
The perverse set of institutional and commercial interests that gave rise to cable news’ surfeit of partisan talking heads hasn’t changed. I’m not under any illusion that the news nets will abandon the format anytime soon.
When even the opponents to McDaniel’s hiring concede that it’s “important to have conservative voices on air,” it suggests the format has continued staying power. Before you write in that I’m trying to silence conservatives, consider whether this format truly gives voice to any side in American politics or is merely its own spectacle serving as a poor proxy for genuine public debate.
The liberal-branded cable news net was left spluttering over the decision by its broadcast network sibling (parent?) to pay former RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel $300,000 a year to be political contributor.
The corporate and editorial structure between NBC News and MSNBC has always been a bit Byzantine, and there’s precedent for the two entities to alternatively embrace and distance themselves from each other. But nothing quite like this before.
In her long, 12-minute segment last night on the controversy, Rachel Maddow waded into the internal tensions. “Ronna McDaniel will not be on MSNBC,” Maddow told her audience. “And I say that and give you that level of detail because there has been an effort since by other parts of the company to muddy that up in the press and make it seem like that’s not what happened at MSNBC. I can assure you that is what happened at MSNBC.”
Here’s the full segment:
The corporate interest in mollifying MAGA Republicans in order to maintain their steadfast neutrality is precisely the kind of quiet acquiescence that abets a wannabe strongman like Trump.
Princeton Yale historian Timothy Snyder eloquently spoke of this kind of placation … on MSNBC … yesterday:
The Supreme Court hears oral arguments this morning in the mifepristone case out of Texas. TPM will have live coverage with Kate Riga.
To prep you for the arguments, the legal:
The lawyering:
The practical:
The political:
The trial judge in the New York hush money case was unimpressed by the pre-trial dispute Trump attempted to gin up to force a substantial delay in his upcoming trial. He reset the trial for April 15, which means Trump did succeed in delaying it three weeks but failed to push it past the November election.
A mixed bag for Trump in the civil case brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James when an appeals court gave him 10 extra days to come up with an appeal bond and dramatically reduced the size of the bond to $175 million. Not an inherently unreasonable decision, even though it adds to the general sense that Trump continues to skate. But $175 million ain’t nothing. It’s a lot to cough up and it’s there for James’ taking if Trump through other legal means ultimately loses on appeal, which is easier for her to do than seizing his property to pay the judgement.
Reuters: Billionaires sought to help fund Trump bond in civil fraud case, sources say
The DOJ announced Monday at as press conference in Arizona that it is investigating dozens of threats against election workers and has charged 20 people so far. Arizona has been an epicenter of the threats.
The House GOP majority is now so narrow that the possibility of the lower chamber flipping to Democratic control before the November election can’t be ruled out. To be clear, the House has never changed power from one party to another between elections. But the current narrow GOP majority and disaffection within the House GOP conference are prime ingredients for a mid-Congress flip. Fox News’ Chad Pergram, a longtime Hill reporter, games it out.
Unbelievable video of a container ship knocking over the I-895 I-695 bridge overnight, severing a major East Coast transportation link (especially for truck traffic) and shutting down the busy Baltimore harbor to ship traffic:
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There’s been speculation for some time that Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) filed the Kevin McCarthy motion to vacate — and got seven of his colleagues to join him in ousting the former speaker — as part of a personal vendetta.
Continue reading “McCarthy Uses MTG Motion To Vacate To Spill Some Tea On Matt Gaetz”We’re currently at 437 new members in our Annual TPM Membership Drive. It’s really important we get that to 500 by tomorrow. If you’re not a member, can you make today the day? It’s really important. Just click here.
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We’re seeing an ongoing — and to me, pretty comical — garbage fire at NBC News over the hiring of Ronna McDaniel (or who I guess we might call Ronna X, since her last name may be subject to ongoing contract negotiation) as a paid contributor. I’ll assume you’ve seen at least some reports on the controversy. I want to add three things. First a personal aside, second a guess about what happened and third something about the structural roots of “bothsidesist” news coverage.
Continue reading “The Lonesome Tale of Ronna X”For all of the huffing and puffing and loud attempts to push his Manhattan criminal trial back, Donald Trump only got a few weeks of what he wanted.
Continue reading “Judge Sets Trump NY Criminal Trial For April 15, Rejecting Bid For More Delay”So we have another on-set rewrite on the Saving Private Trump movie.
Today was the day Trump’s 30-day grace period ran out and the State of New York, in the person of NY AG Tish James, could start collecting on the $464 million judgment. But now a New York appeals court judge has stepped in and given Trump a significant reprieve. He now has ten days to come up with a significantly reduced bond of $175 million. Remember that the judgment was actually $355 plus almost $100 million in interest. So the logic of the number seems to be cutting the main judgment roughly in half (that’s my speculation) and making that the amount of the bond. The judgment itself stands. This is just about the bond.
Needless to say, this is a big, big win for Trump, at least for now.
But he’s not necessarily out of the woods.
Continue reading “On-Set Script Rewrite in Saving Private Trump Project!”A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Donald Trump faces a deadline of today to secure an appeal bond or hope for relief from an appeals court to forestall New York Attorney General Letitia James from executing on her $454 million judgment against him.
For obvious reasons, folks are pretty ginned up about seeing some portion of the Trump biz empire dismantled piece by piece, but a few words of caution on what this will look like:
We’ll get more insight this morning on the status of the hush money case in Manhattan, which has been delayed in a pre-trial dispute over new documents provided by federal prosecutors from their closed related investigation. The trial judge is trying to get to the bottom of what happened in deciding whether to grant Trump even further delay. We might even get a new trial date. TPM’s Josh Kovensky will be reporting from the courthouse in lower Manhattan.
“Trump Is in a Race Against Time to Protect His Fortune“
These two paragraphs from the NYT’s inside account of Attorney General Merrick Garland’s effort to prosecute Donald Trump rattled around in my head all weekend:
In trying to avoid even the smallest mistakes, Mr. Garland might have made one big one: not recognizing that he could end up racing the clock. Like much of the political world and official Washington, he and his team did not count on Mr. Trump’s political resurrection after Jan. 6, and his fast victory in the 2024 Republican presidential primary, which has complicated the prosecution and given the former president leverage in court.
In 2021 it was “simply inconceivable,” said one former Justice Department official, that Mr. Trump, rebuked by many in his own party and exiled at his Florida estate Mar-a-Lago, would regain the power to impose his timetable on the investigation.
I really struggle to buy the assertion that the political world had written Trump off as politically dead in 2021. But I really don’t know how anyone can say with a straight face that his future political viability was “inconceivable” at the time.
Former CIA attorney Brian Greer, who posts on X/Twitter as @secretsandlaws, offers a cogent and reasoned explanation for why it is still premature for Special Counsel Jack Smith to try to seek the removal of U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon from the Mar-a-Lago case.
TPM’s Josh Kovensky, who has covered Paul Manafort from Kyiv to NYC, on what we still don’t know about his various misdeeds and murky schemes.
NYT: “Jeff Yass, the billionaire Wall Street financier and Republican megadonor who is a major investor in the parent company of TikTok, was also the biggest institutional shareholder of the shell company that recently merged with former President Donald J. Trump’s social media company.”
Nearly six months into the current fiscal year, a budget for 2024 is finally at hand – thanks mostly to House Democrats who helped Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) get the final budget bill of last year through on Friday. “A total of 112 Republicans voted no on the minibus — including eight committee chairs — compared to just 101 supporting the measure,” Punchbowl noted. The Senate passed the bill after midnight early Saturday, nominally after the shutdown deadline but with little real impact.
Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) surprised party leaders and narrowed the House GOP majority to a single vote with his decision to resign from Congress effective April 19. Gallagher had already announced he wasn’t going to run for re-election. His resignation date is one day after the deadline to call a special election, meaning House Republicans will be hamstrung by his departure all the way through the end of this Congress.
TPM’s Khaya Himmelman reports on Maricopa County, Arizona turning its vote tabulation center into a virtual encampment to ward off threats, with measures like:
Welcome to 2024.
A public revolt is underway over the NBC News decision to bring on recently ousted RNC chair Ronna McDaniel on a paid contributor:
The outcry from MSNBC on-air personalities continued this morning.
It really shouldn’t require falling back on foundational issues like the rule of law, democracy, or civic virtue to realize that Donald Trump is an utter buffoon who has no business near the Oval Office:
Politico: What happens when an AG dares to investigate Leonard Leo’s network
Erle C. Ellis: The Anthropocene May Not Be An ‘Epoch,’ But The Age Of Humans Is Most Definitely Underway
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