The most important thing to know about the DNC “autopsy” report on the 2024 election is, who cares? Most of the commentary on this document gives the impression that this is some meaningful disclosure of the inside dope, what really happened, etc. But it’s not. It just the take of the guys they chose to write a report. No more significant or revealing than the million other takes on the 2024 election we’ve all read.

Todd Blanche is basically just making 30-second ads, whether he knows it or not. When asked whether he’s okay with cash bonanzas for people convicted of attacking police officers was his reply, the acting attorney general replied, “Just to be clear, people who hurt police get money all the time …”

Semafor and Punchbowl both have items today reporting that the Senate is about to buck President Trump on both his ballroom and his deserving fascists slush fund (DFSF). They want to cut funding for the ballroom and at least greatly restrict the DFSF. You can see the details here. As the authors point out, there’s the standard pattern that the senators willing to speak freely are the ones who’s severed heads are already on pikes: Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Thom Tillis (R-NC), perhaps John Cornyn (R-TX) in the near future. But the silent ones, according to these reports, are going to vote the same way. Or at least enough of them.

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From TPM Reader JH …

Thanks for publishing so much back and forth.  Apparently we’re all elite lawyers who read TPM!  I’m not sure where I fall in that – practiced at an “elite” DC firm in my younger years, then stopped practicing for a bit working in government, and then have been a GC or in-house at a handful of small-ish tech firms in the bay area.

Anyway – this stood out to me in one of the replies you posted: “A category difference in simply manufacturing new constitutional law in cases where the constitution is simply as clear as it can be.”

From TPM Reader BM …

I’m not a legal academic, but I was a pretty fancy pants lawyer – Harvard Law magna cum laude, federal clerkship, DOJ Civil Rights Division, AUSA for a decade doing public corruption cases, litigation partner, university general counsel’s office, etc.

I’m not sure I can describe the level of despair among many of my contemporaries.

I was discussing this last night with a retired ACLU lawyer and a retired big firm litigation leader.

From TPM Reader AC …

As someone who almost certainly falls into your “elite academic” category, I have some thoughts about the current discussion.

A while back, many people thought that the law was deterministic.  Enter a set of facts, and the law will immediately spit out an answer, one that is replicable regardless of who the judge is.  I think that most now understand that the judge’s identity matters.  This does not mean that the process is necessarily corrupt.  Rather people approach interpretive questions and understand facts differently, with those differences often being based on life experiences.

From TPM Reader JH …

I’ve read with interest some of your posts about the legal academy, and wanted to weigh in briefly. 

I have a somewhat unique perspective here, in that I’ve been adjacent to some of the more elite legal world, but I am not a part of it: I have an Ivy League law degree, and know plenty of people who got fancy clerkships, but I am a lowly practicing lawyer in Minneapolis.