Prime

The Michigan Supreme Court has ruled 5-2 that the proposed abortion rights measure will appear on the state’s ballot in November. This is good news for all Democratic candidates in the state, since it will literally put robust abortion rights protections on the ballot in the state. That will almost certainly mean robust protections in the state going forward. It will likely also bring marginal Democratic candidates to victory with the tide of voters who turn out to vote for the amendment.

But it’s a very important development in a more general way.

There’s so much news today besides the impending news out of the United Kingdom that I just wanted to hit big points briefly because there’s no way to delve into all of it at once.

In this week’s podcast, Kate Riga and I talked about the on-going talent purge at CNN. We’ve discussed this before. CNN is under new Republican management and the top shareholder has announced his intention to make the network less “liberal” and more “centrist.” There are both ideological and business drivers, which I discussed last week. But I want to dig into the mechanics, which seem to be getting short shrift in the media discussion. Two rungs down the ladder from the top corporate boss is CNN boss Chris Licht. The game plan may come from on high (i.e., Trump donor billionaire John Malone) but Licht is the implementer. So far Brian Stelter and John Harwood have been axed and the rumor mill is now fixated on Brianna Keilar, a CNN host deemed “too liberal” or too critical of Trump for the new “centrist” CNN.

In response to last night’s Post revelation about documents found at Trump’s villa, I said that the most likely foreign countries whose defense secrets were found there were the United Kingdom, France and Israel. This was guesswork and a process elimination. But a few of you have written to tell me you suspect it’s Iran. I don’t think so. But the information we have to go on is so minuscule that almost anything is possible. Let me explain.

The Washington Post just published a story with two notable details. One is merely atmospheric. Some of the documents recovered from Trump’s Florida villa were so highly classified that none of the people involved in the investigation were allowed to look at them. “Only the president, some members of his Cabinet or a near-Cabinet-level official could authorize other government officials to know details of these special-access programs,” says the Post.

Seeing his dreams of being Speaker of the House in sudden peril and having already bought lots of drapes, Kevin McCarthy has leaked to Axios his plan to save his speakership before it ends before it can begin. He’s rolling out what he’s calling his and the House GOP’s “commitment to America,” a list of bromides that is a sort of governmental version of Bill and Ted’s famed “Be excellent to each other” imperative.

In my posts yesterday I suggested that Judge Aileen Cannon’s ruling — despite its unsupportable claims — was likely just to mean a delay in the progress of the investigation into ex-President Trump’s theft of classified documents and government property. Having read the decision more closely now and read some of your comments, I’m less sure of that. As I noted, this whole decision — and Cannon’s presence on the bench at all — are fruit of the pervasive corruption of the federal judiciary. Private citizens have no right to assert executive privilege against the actual chief executive. The very idea is an absurdity on its face. But there’s much more in this decision which seeks to do everything possible to perpetuate Donald Trump’s invulnerability to the law into the indefinite future.

As I noted in my previous post, Judge Cannon’s special master order seems most likely to me to simply mean a delay in the progress of the case. But I would be remiss if I didn’t also make clear that her ruling and frankly her presence on the court itself is simply more fruit of the poisoned Federalist Society tree, the taproot of the current corruption of the federal judiciary.

The fact that the case is even before Cannon in the first place is an example of forum shopping that should never have been allowed. But her ruling is a tour de force in strained reasoning, novel theories, special pleading and a simple refusal to treat the man who appointed her to office as a citizen like any other.

I don’t think we should be too concerned about President Trump convincing a judge to appoint a special master to evaluate the documents seized from his villa in Florida. Mostly this is simply a delay — a boon for the former President but not a huge one. The special master will review the materials for attorney-client privilege documents which the DOJ has already done. There’s no reason to believe the results will be any different.