This is so important I’m going to start with a tl;dr: Elon Musk got caught with his hand in the national security cookie jar, sabotaging or blocking a major Ukrainian military operation after conversations with a Russian government official.

Now let’s unpack this.

Last month I wrote about the rise of the global oligarchs and I made particular mention of Elon Musk. Even if you set aside the various things you may not like about Musk he has amassed a degree of economic power that is novel and dangerous in itself even if he had the most benign of intentions and the most stable personality. More than half the operating satellites in the sky are owned and controlled by him. Overnight we finally got confirmation of something that has long been suspected or hinted at but which none of the players had an interest in confirming. Last September Musk either cut off or refused to activate his Starlink satellite service near the Crimean coast during a surprise Ukrainian drone attack on the Russian Navy at anchor at its Sevastopol naval port.

Could insurrection disqualification spur a new and much bloodier insurrection? From TPM Reader EK …

In your recent commentary on this matter, including in the link above, I haven’t seen anything about the very real civil peril that would come with taking Trump off the ballot.

If Trump is actively removed from a ballot(s), whether that’s with the Supreme Court’s blessing or not, how are we not going to have armed rebellion? And I’m not just referring to swing states. I live in Oregon. We’re a blue state. But like many other blue states, the vast majority of our geography is deep red. Do you think that if Oregon’s all D leadership took Trump off the ballot that the Rs here would just load more Let’s Go Brandon! Flags on their trucks, roll some more coal, and call it a day?

TPM Reader CB responds to JS by arguing that case law and precedent about insurrections in one context doesn’t necessarily settle the question of what counts for the purposes of the 14th amendment’s disqualification clause. As I told CB I partly agree but not entirely. I subscribe to an older of who in our system gets to interpret the constitution. Each branch has a right and a duty to interpret the meaning of the constitution. The courts may get the last word. But it’s not the only word.

My perspective as a reader/subscriber with over a decade of strategic impact public interest litigation experience:

I couldn’t disagree more with the reader who said “The question is clear to me: would the President have the authority under the *1807* Insurrection Act to federalize troops in this case?”

Here’s a follow up from TPM Reader JS on law and precedent tied to what constitutes an insurrection. (See their earlier post.) I’m basically where they are on this. I want to be crystal clear with everyone that this will not work as a way to prevent Trump’s election. (See my earlier post.) I’m uncomfortable with where this leads us in policy terms. But that’s not a standard we apply to constitutional text. I’m super uncomfortable about the electoral college text too. But we all agree that doesn’t matter.

I would just add that, sure, it’s bad policy to deny a bunch of voters their choice and that’s generally how we read the law in light of provisions of the very same amendment. But it’s also bad policy to let a few judges’ sense of good policy override the clear, plain meaning of the Constitution. That’s not the rule of law. It’s about as clear as it gets here. He swore an oath when he took office and then he fomented an insurrection. Sure, no one has done a fact finding on that yet, but they will in the trials on this matter, won’t they? It doesn’t have to be res judicata from a criminal trial at all.

As you can see we’re looking closely at the efforts unfolding around the country to bar Donald Trump from appearing on the 2024 ballot because of his role fomenting and leading an insurrection against the United States government. It’s hardly a crazy idea since Trump did plot to overthrow the constitutional order, i.e., the government of the United States and there’s clear language about this in the US constitution. But I’d like to go on the record suggesting people not get too wrapped up in this morsel of anti-Trump activism as a or the thing that’s going to drive the outcome of this election. We are covering it not rooting for it. At the end of the day, this election is going to come down to whether Democrats can sustain an anti-Trump coalition in the electoral college just like they did in 2020. There’s simply no administrative or courtroom shortcut around that necessity. My own view of this whole issue is one of what I would call benign disinterest.

What do I mean by this? Let’s start with the practicalities. The most probable outcome here is that Trump will be removed from the ballot in blue states he had no shot at winning in the first place. (The Supreme Court probably torpedoes that too for reasons we’ll return to in a moment.) In that case, anti-Trump voters will get some emotional satisfaction and Trump supporters will gain a ripe and succulent new grievance. But it won’t change any reality about the outcome of the race.

I went into some detail in the latest episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast on my thoughts on efforts to bar Trump from appearing on the 2024 presidential ballot. My general view remains one of well-wishing disinterest. The 2024 election is going to be decided not by eligibility challenges but by results of the election as mediated by the electoral college. But I found this perspective from TPM Reader JS very interesting.

There really is no good legal argument against Trump being disqualified by the 14th Amendment. He’s not eligible under it. But as you argued there’s more to it. I also think the “law” is pretty clear on the platinum coin, but it was the economists who said it wouldn’t actually solve the problem. Here I just think the Supremes will bullshit their way through it, like you said.

By virtue of having been a JAG in a dual state/federal setup like the National Guard makes all of the insurrection stuff something you deal with more routinely. Think sending in the 101st to integrate Little Rock. That was—had to be—an “insurrection” or else it would have been the Arkansas National Guard because of posse comitatus.

This is a fascinating and deeply weird story just out from Politico about a little known character in the broader Trump coup story, a woman named Katherine Friess, who up until a bit more than a decade ago had a fairly conventional career in Republican politics. She’s a lawyer, or was a lawyer. (She claimed to practice law in Colorado but her license in the state is inactive.) She worked on Capitol Hill. Then she worked as a lobbyist for longtime GOP operative and lobbyist Charlie Black. Most people who knew her from those years — Black, former Sen. Larry Pressler (R) — had lost track of her. But somehow she pops up as a consultant working for Rudy Giuliani trying to overturn Trump’s 2020 defeat.

This USA Today article about McConnell’s health issues is a good reminder that Rand Paul is unquestionably one of the biggest a&$holes in American politics in a way that entirely transcends politics or ideology. As Thomas Hobbes might have put it, the guy is nasty, brutish and short. But the article slips in this subtly devastating comment about Sen. Josh Hawley’s concerns about McConnell’s episodes. Hawley, the paper notes, “hopes the minority leader’s health is not a distraction for Republicans ahead of the 2024 elections, adding that the episodes make it difficult to criticize Biden for his age.”

That about captures the consequence of this issue.

With the comedy and politics out of the way, let me share a few thoughts about McConnell’s health issues themselves.

Because Twitter is no longer a publicly traded company with a public stock price there’s no straightforward way to assess its current value. But most market analysts estimate the company is now worth no more than a third of the $44 billion Musk paid for it a year ago. To be fair, Musk clearly overpaid for the company. He paid a premium over the company’s current stock price and even that price was probably inflated. But there’s no question Musk’s erratic and destructive reign has dramatically damaged the company, torching its public reputation and leading to a catastrophic decline in ad revenues which Musk and independent press reports have pegged at between 50% and 60%.

But Musk has found a new scapegoat: the Jews. Or rather, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish community’s largest and oldest organization dedicated to fighting not only anti-Semitism but all forms of racial and religious bigotry and other forms of discrimination. But I suspect the “rather” or the distinction in general might be lost on Musk’s 155 million Twitter followers. Over the past several days Musk has gone on a tear claiming that the catastrophic decline in his company’s value since he purchased it is mostly or entirely the fault of the ADL and churning up Twitter debates that at least big time anti-Semitic accounts think is clearly boosting their cause.

We have another pretty sobering general election poll out. This one is from the Journal. Toplines are 46% to 46% horse race number, widespread misgivings about Biden’s age. In general, as you’d expect, Trump’s supporters and potential supporters are basically 100% united behind him whereas Biden’s are far less so. Among the poll respondents actually interviewed for the article are two independents who voted for Biden in 2020 to get Trump out of office. One is considering writing someone else’s name in; another is considering voting for Cornell West.