Josh Marshall
Can Any Centers Hold? 
I’ve reading up on those end-of-the-year “what the year meant” columns. 2023 was the year of this; 2023 was the year when that happened. You know the genre. It’s a silly exercise since years aren’t about anything. Or to the extent they are it’s all but impossible for those of us living through them to make any sense of what it might be. But it’s still an interesting canvas onto which people paint an experienced moment. To me it was the year when people seemed to settle into, get comfy with the idea that our present is one of never-ending terribles. Put differently, it was the year that many of you decided that the annus horribilis of 2016 was not a comically bad demolition derby of years or a bad year with several relatedly bad years following it but simply the arrival of a new normal.
(Don’t worry. This post gets better! Follow me after the jump.)
Read MoreJosh Kovensky looks at the “day one” executive orders ex-President Trump is planning if he returns to the White House.
Big News in Wisconsin
It’s not unexpected. In many ways it was inevitable after Republicans (technically the races are non-partisan) lost their state Supreme Court majority with the election of Janet Protasiewicz back in April. But it’s still a very big deal. The Wisconsin state Supreme Court has ruled that the state’s GOP gerrymander is unconstitutional and ordered the legislature to draw new maps for the 2024 general election. If the current gerrymandered legislature can’t agree on a plan with Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, the court said it’s prepared to create its own.
Read MoreThe Court deciding to slow roll Trump’s appeal when it often happily fast rolls topics it’s eager to make law on speaks for itself. It’s also important to remember that the arguments themselves, by any standard of existing legal understanding, are wholly specious. It’s been DOJ policy and conventional understanding for half a century that a sitting president cannot face criminal charges. The president isn’t above the law, the argument goes, but for a mix of practical and separation-of-powers reasons, charges have to wait for after the president leaves office. Trump is arguing that a president can’t ever be charged with a crime. Call it neo-Nixonian reasoning: If the president does it, it can’t be a crime. He’s further arguing, among other things, that if you get acquitted at your impeachment trial you have legal immunity for those acts going forward.
Justice delayed is justice denied. The American republic is waiting for justice. There’s no rationale for this decision other than assisting Trump’s strategy of delay which he hopes, and which may, allow him to end the whole prosecution if he wins the 2024 election.
I very much doubt a majority on the Court has the stomach to actually entertain these arguments. But giving Trump an assist on the calendar? Sure. Absolutely.
Getting the Biden-Trump Algebra Right
We’ve been around the block many times on this question of why Joe Biden is unpopular, whether he’s a weak candidate, whether some other Democrat should replace him, etc. My general take has been that we should be clear with ourselves that it is basically an academic point because Biden will be the nominee. Recently, one of the numbers analysts I follow on Twitter, Lakshya Jain, pointed me to the actual poll data showing that none of the apparently attractive national Democratic possibilities do any better than Biden. Indeed, he seems to do a bit better, if not by a huge amount.
Read MoreI wanted to flag your attention to two articles on Hamas and the Israel-Hamas War generally.
On the fate of the hostages, the Times of Israel reports that senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad tells Al Jazeera that his group is not interested in releasing any more hostages, even for a ceasefire lasting multiple weeks. I take this as more confirmation of the point we discussed yesterday, which is that the remaining hostages, or at least a substantial number of them, are the sole remaining strategic asset Hamas has. Hamas’ leadership rightly see itself as in a war to the death with Israel. So they’re not going to give those hostages up.
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Wait, What? Biden’s Ahead?
Over the last three months many Democrats have gotten accustomed to seeing absolutely abysmal presidential poll numbers and reacting in one of two ways. Either they slip into despair or they wall off the information on the reasoning that we’re almost a year out from the election and the numbers have limited meaning so far in advance. There was a period in the middle months of the year when Biden was a bit ahead of Trump or the two were roughly tied and then starting in the fall Trump appeared to move meaningfully, though still only marginally, ahead. But something odd happened this week. It illustrated a few points about the ways in which polls operate, how they’re interpreted and what meaning we can draw from them.
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Strength to Strength from The Dean Phillips Clown Show
Even if many things are bleak, we still get to make fun of the comical dweeb Dean Phillips, the soon-to-be-former representative from the 3rd District of Minnesota. Philips at first claimed he was considering running for president to get someone else with a better shot to get into the race to challenge Joe Biden. It was, he said, not about issues or even about Biden. The party just needed a more youthful nominee and he wanted someone else to jump into the race. That didn’t happen. And somewhere along the way to getting in himself Phillips dropped the “God, it pains me to have to do this” routine for something more like “I’m gonna take this senile old coot down!” Having failed to get someone else to hop in the race Phillips decided his moment had indeed arrived. He got into the race and rapidly moved to challenge Biden from the right. He even hopped on the Hunter Biden-bashing bandwagon.
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What To Think About Colorado and the 14th Amendment
Let me briefly address this Colorado disqualification issue. Does it apply and should it apply to ex-President Donald Trump, disqualifying him from serving again as President?
Before delving into the constitutional text, let’s discuss how we should think about this issue, because there’s a lot going on here besides the plain text of the 14th Amendment. Criticisms that I hear are that barring Trump from the ballot is simply undemocratic. Trump has many supporters and they should be allowed to vote for him. At least in the abstract, good point. Another is that attempting to disqualify Trump and barring him from the ballot may actually help him, allowing him to play the victim and, perversely, to wear the mantle of democratic legitimacy.
Read MoreFollowing up on what I wrote earlier today about future hostage releases, I think we’re started to see some of what I described. Yesterday, Hamas released a video of three elderly male Israeli hostages. Just a short time ago Palestinian Islamic Jihad released a video of two other hostages, one 79, another 47. PIJ is a separate group. It’s been known since the beginning that a smaller subset of the hostages are in their hands. It’s unknown the extent the two groups are coordinating their strategy in terms of the hostages or how much influence or control Hamas has over PIJ’s decisions about the hostages it’s holding.
So far these videos have basically been the hostages demanding their own release, pretty obviously coerced. In the one just released by PIJ the elderly man appears to have his hands handcuffed or tied behind the chair he’s sitting it. As yet they don’t seem to contain any threats. But we can likely expect more of this. When you’re on the ropes you use what you have. And what they have is hostages.