“The stage was decorated with a swastika and a picture of Hitler. The speakers started ranting. There were only 15 of us, but we went into action. We … threw some of them out the windows … Most of the Nazis panicked and ran out. We chased them and beat them up … We wanted to show them that Jews would not always sit back and accept insults.”
— Meyer Lansky, gangster, remembering breaking up meetings of the pro-Nazi German-American Bund in Yorkville on New York’s Upper East Side in the 1930s.
This morning I was reading this Slate article by Rick Hasen and Dahlia Lithwick on newly released papers which seem to show the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist held on to his segregationist views well into his time as chief justice. (For background, as a SCOTUS clerk in 1952, Rehnquist wrote a memo explicitly defending the constitutionality of Plessy v Ferguson and the segregationist system that was built up on it. He later played a key role in organized voter suppression efforts in Arizona in the 1960s.) Hasen and Lithwick tie Rehnquist to the current Court majority’s view that the 14th Amendment is essentially a warrant for color blindness in the law.
The 14th Amendment particularly has implications which were very much by design that go beyond the fate of post-war ex-slaves. It essentially creates a thing we now take for granted, the status of citizen of the United States. It also has implications beyond things the architects of the amendment could have conceived of. But there are certainly concrete things that are totally clear about it and the other Civil War amendments if you spend even some basic time understanding why they were created, what they mean and what they meant to accomplish. Reading Hasen’s and Lithwick’s piece was helpful, reminding me of this by showing the bust-up collision between the actual Civil War amendments and the theoretical latticework that gets promoted in Federalist Society world and in some ways (albeit often in a much more benign form) in law schools generally. In the latter case, there’s nothing wrong with theory. It has its place. It’s necessary if your aim is not simply historical understanding of the amendments but some level of application to present-day realities.
Continue reading “SCOTUS, ‘Color Blindness’ and the Invented Past”A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
Before we dive into the new reporting, a quick caveat: Criminal charges against Trump in the Mar-a-Lago (and now Bedminster!) documents case are not guaranteed. That said, all signs point to charges coming sooner than later. Okay, here’s the latest:
The key elements of the big CNN story:
The NYT followed up CNN’s report with some additional details:
Reporter Hugo Lowell has been all over the MAL case:
As if the Bedminster news weren’t enough, the NYT has new details on Jack Smith’s investigation into whether Trump et al. obstructed justice in response to a grand jury subpoena for Mar-a-Lago security footage.
Former President Trump is seeking the recusal of Judge Juan Merchan, who is overseeing the criminal hush money case in state court in Manhattan.
Meanwhile, Trump is still trying to get the case removed to federal court. Morning Memo hasn’t bored you with the procedural details there.
For what it’s worth, I’m skeptical that either prong of Trump’s belt-and-suspenders approach will be successful. Merchan presided over the tax fraud trial of the Trump Org and refused to recuse in that case, too.
The House passed the Biden-McCarthy debt limit deal Wednesday evening, with a majority of Republicans voting in favor of the package. Democrats supplied enough votes to push it over the top, 314-117. It now heads to the Senate, where the only question is how quickly it passes. They’re up against the deadline for when Treasury’s obligations exceed its cash reserves, but I wouldn’t lose much sleep over the bill in the Senate.
A couple of the more interesting aspects of this entirely unnecessary saga:
HuffPo: After Calling Joe Biden Senile, Republicans Complain He Outsmarted Them
The House GOP is still full Of insurrectionists and conspiracists.
House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-KY) is still threatening to hold FBI Director Chris Wray in contempt for failing to turn over a confidential investigative document purportedly accusing then-Vice President Joe Biden of bribery, despite Wray offering to show it to Comer privately.
It’s all a bunch of nonsense except for what it shows about the corrupt GOP misinformation factory. In this instance, the document has its roots in the special pipeline Attorney General Bill Barr set up for Rudy Giuliani to funnel misinformation from Ukraine directly into the Justice Department, and now Comer is using it all these years later to attack Biden, as originally intended:
Project Veritas’ lawsuit in federal court in Manhattan accuses James O’Keefe of breach of contract, trade secret violations, breach of fiduciary duty and loyalty, and conversion, among other claims. “Being known as the founder of an organization does not entitle that person to run amok and put his own interests ahead of that organization,” Project Veritas said in the complaint.
The musician brother of Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) in a Facebook post beseeched people not to mistake him for his brother: “Due to recent statements by him promoting racial stereotypes, white nationalism and other various controversial topics, I feel compelled to distance myself from his ignorant, hateful rants.”
WSJ:
Sen. Bob Menendez hosted a 2018 meeting in his Washington, D.C., office with a New Jersey businessman who is a focus of a federal public-corruption probe of the Democratic lawmaker that has broadened in recent weeks, according to people familiar with the matter.
The meeting, which hasn’t been previously reported, came months before the businessman, Wael Hana, secured a contract with Egyptian officials for certifying halal meat exports. The contract is a key part of the probe examining whether Menendez, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, or his wife received gifts in exchange for political favors.
The losing GOP candidate in New Mexico who is accused of shooting at the homes of Democratic officials has been brought up on new federal charges. That’s in addition to the existing state charges against him.
Abortion clinic and Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph was captured 20 years ago this week.
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Today Marjorie Taylor Greene announced on Twitter that at her request Speaker Kevin McCarthy is providing unrestricted access to Jan. 6 surveillance tapes to discredited journalist John Solomon, a Jan. 6 conspiracy theorist named Julie Kelly and another unnamed party.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s debt ceiling hostage-taking gambit came to a close Wednesday evening after he managed to convince a large chunk of Democrats to join Republicans to pass the legislation to avoid allowing the nation to run out of money and, in so doing, tank the national and perhaps global economy. The bill was the product of a compromise with the White House after McCarthy used Republicans’ leverage as the majority party in the House to hold the debt-ceiling hostage and forced some budget concessions out of Democrats.
While progressive House Dems were vocally opposed to the bill, Democratic leadership said Wednesday they’d get behind the measure in order to avoid default.
After the deal was reached this weekend, it seemed fairly likely the bill would pass the House. But far-right Republicans who mucked up McCarthy’s speakership bid tried to flex their muscles again, this time threatening to block the bill and oust McCarthy, believing the proposed cuts didn’t go far enough.
Catch up on our live coverage below:
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) is seemingly trying to get a handful of far-right members of the Freedom Caucus to chill out and stop threatening to redo the speakership election. They’re not likely to successfully depose him, but no one is eager for a redo of the January spectacle as a few loud members seek to reassert their authority. And, so, in what is seemingly a half-hearted effort to throw them a bone, McCarthy went on Fox News and promised to create some vague “commission” that’ll review further cuts to next year’s budget.
The speaker then took it a step further. Instead of just promising that “this isn’t the end” and proposing some sort of additional amorphous cuts to quell a hardliner uprising, McCarthy doubled down, raising the possibility that this next step commission could look into gutting Social Security and Medicare. Music, in theory, to the ears of a salivating Freedom Caucus.
Continue reading “Where Things Stand: Save This Clip For Next Time They Pretend They Don’t Wanna Cut Soc Security, Medicare”With Ken Paxton awaiting his impeachment trial, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) has appointed a onetime Trump attorney to take his place.
Continue reading “Paxton’s Replacement Fought To Overturn 2020 Election—But Not Like Paxton Did”Former President Donald Trump is continuing to attack Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, his closest — though still fairly distant — rival in the polls amid an increasingly crowded Republican presidential primary field. On Tuesday evening, Trump’s campaign blasted out a press release that claimed DeSantis had “blatantly” plagiarized the former president’s 2020 State of the Union address. The accusation hinged on a single phrase: the “great American comeback.”
Continue reading “Trump Attacks DeSantis For ‘Blatantly’ Plagiarizing A Speech Line That Trump Actually Took From Reagan”As we analyze and try to make sense of how this debt ceiling drama has worked out, there’s one important difference with the original crisis 12 years ago to keep in mind. Back in 2011, President Obama was very much bought into the idea of deficit reduction and “the grand bargain.” Some of this of course is the distinct matter of inoculating against Republican fiscal politics — nods to fiscal probity, deficit reduction and so forth. To really understand politics it’s critical to distinguish between true agendas and reactive, positioning politics of that sort. But, to a degree, he was actually bought into it.
Continue reading “The Secret History of ‘Debt Ceiling,’ the Original Movie”A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
The ongoing attacks from the far right against federal law enforcement have been so unrelenting and manifested in so many different ways that I’m afraid even astute observers are beginning to lose the forest for the trees. So a quick reality check.
It’s one of the most reliable truisms of the Trump era and its fits neatly into the scholarship on authoritarianism: Any power center outside of Trump and the right wing is a threat that needs to be neutralized. Media. Universities. Corporations. Law enforcement.
You’ve seen the script run over and over. Discredit external power centers, draw them into ridiculous fights over their credibility and legitimacy to turn them into political actors that are no better than Trump, sow distrust and suspicion so that any actions they take are de facto illegitimate.
Trump attacks on the FBI are not new. He corruptly fired FBI Director James Comey way back in 2017, prompting the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel. He savaged deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe and FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. We’re many years into this now.
What distinguishes the latest round of wholesale attacks on the FBI is that eliminating it has become a tenet of GOP politics, not just Trump, not just the far-right fringe. These are just a few examples from the past 24 hours:
I haven’t troubled you with the bizarro claim that the FBI is sitting on evidence of a massive bribery scandal involving Joe Biden when he was vice president, but House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) has been touting this nonsense for weeks as evidence of the lefty FBI being in the tank for Biden:
The NYT has a story out this morning on two new angles in the Jan. 6 investigation by Special Counsel Jack Smith, but both angles seem to run through the White House Personnel Office, which you’ll recall was being run by the uber-Trump loyalist John McEntee, a 30-something neophyte who was allowed to run amok:
The firing of Krebs was always deeply corrupt and fit logically into the Trump-led conspiracy to subvert the 2020 election, so I’m glad to see it getting renewed scrutiny.
We have another in the long and sometimes confusing series of stories about what Special Counsel Jack Smith has found in his Mar-a-Lago investigation.
The latest iteration from the WaPo is about investigators’ focus on what happened at Mar-a-Lago after a federal grand jury subpoenaed the resort’s surveillance video:
Authorities have also examined events in mid-July surrounding a different subpoena,which sought footage from security cameras on the property. Around that time, the employee allegedly had a conversation with an IT worker at the site about how the security cameras worked and how long images remained stored in the system, the person familiar with that aspect of the investigation said.
The employee later told investigators that the conversation was innocent and was not about trying to hide anything from authorities, saying that he didn’t know at the time about the investigation or subpoena, according to another person familiar with the probe.
But those answers were met with skepticism, people familiar with the situation said.
Like a few other recent stories, this one is focused on and seems derived from what one lowly Mar-a-Lago employee has told investigators. Given that, I’m not sure how much these stories give us the full picture of the scope and nature of the investigation. Just be cautious.
At this point it looks like we’re over the hump on raising the debt limit. Never say never, etc, but there’s no obvious impediment to this getting done.
Some additional reading if you’re a hardcore debt limit junkie:
Rep. Chris Stewart (R-UT) is expected to announce his resignation from Congress as soon as today due to his wife’s undisclosed health issues. It’s a safe GOP seat, but Stewart’s resignation would temporarily shrink the already slim GOP majority in the House until a special election is held in Utah.
In case you missed it, losing GOP nominee for Secretary of State Mark Finchem of Arizona was ordered to pay his winning Democratic opponent $40,000 in legal fees for his baseless challenge of the election results. Finchem’s lawyer was also sanctioned with a $7,434 penalty for his role in the lawsuit.
Former first lady Rosalynn Carter, an advocate for mental health care for decades, is suffering from dementia, the Carter Center announced. She is still at home with former President Jimmy Carter, who remains in hospice care.
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