The case is “at the apex of public importance” Josh Kovensky at TPM reports: Special Counsel Jack Smith asked the Supreme Court on Monday to take up Donald Trump’s claim of presidential immunity, seeking to speed up a question which could delay the former president’s trial on charges he conspired to subvert the 2020 election. The trial is currently scheduled for March 4, 2024 in D.C. Trump lost his claim of absolute immunity at the district court and has appealed that ruling to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. But rather than wait for the appeals court to hear the case, Smith is now asking the Supreme Court to weigh in on whether presidential immunity protects Trump from prosecution for crimes related to his efforts to reverse his defeat in the 2020 election. “It is of imperative public importance that respondent’s claims of immunity be resolved by this Court and that respondent’s trial proceed as promptly as possible if his claim of immunity is rejected,” Smith wrote in the petition for writ of certiorari. Smith asked the high court to consider two issues.
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Kate Cox, the Texas woman who is carrying a fetus with a fatal anomaly, has been forced to leave the state to get her needed abortion: The announcement came as Kate Cox, 31, was awaiting a ruling from the Texas Supreme Court over whether she could legally obtain an abortion under narrow exceptions to the state’s ban. A judge gave Cox, a mother of two from the Dallas area, permission last week but that decision was put on hold by the state’s all-Republican high court. “Her health is on the line. She’s been in and out of the emergency room and she couldn’t wait any longer,” said Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which was representing Cox. This is horrifying. Cox has the ability to pay for this and pay for an attorney. Other women in her position aren’t. The horror of these creepy men like the criminal Ken Paxton and that grotesque anti-abortion zealot Supreme Court just John Devine deciding such issues is overwhelming. I think this will be a problem for the Republicans politically but many, many people will have to suffer in the meantime.
They’re making an effort. Will it be enough? Columbia Journalism Review’s Jon Allsop takes a look at how the media is handling Trump’s threats to democracy. He notes the flurry of articles in recent days exposing the authoritarian Trump agenda for his second term and examining his increasingly fascistic language and makes the same observation that I did earlier about the Trump campaign obviously getting nervous about it. However: Back in January, as part of an article laying out the media dynamics CJR’s staff would be watching this year, I wrote that I would be interested to see how media outlets continued to center—or didn’t—threats to democracy; I’d observed some progress on this front in 2022, but also feared that last year’s midterms—which brought defeat for the most ardent Trumpian election deniers running to assume oversight of the country’s election infrastructure—could push the question down the media agenda even though the threat hadn’t dissipated.
What else is new? Axios reports that there’s some dissonance in the House Freedom caucus. They’re voting for new leadership and there seems to be a bit of a problem: An influential member of the House Freedom Caucus won’t run for a leadership spot, citing a recommendation by the group’s board that Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.) serve as its next chairman. “I am concerned that our group often relies too much on power (available primarily due to the narrow majority) and too little on influence with and among our colleagues,” Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) told his fellow members in a letter sent Sunday. “I ask that we consider how to best increase our influence while preserving our power to move policy in the right direction.
Free speech for me, but not for thee It’s that time of year again. A nip is in the air (regionally). Christmas trees whiz by strapped to the roofs of sedan. Clauses are everywhere this time of year. Thus, Baby Jesus is battling Lucifer over the Establishment Clause. One of the battle fronts this year is in Iowa “where the Satanists have antagonized the Christians with a goat’s head wreath in the Des Moines capitol building.” See, because the Supreme Court ruled that Christians could erect Christmas displays on state property if other faiths get to erect theirs … you know where this is going. Satanists each year make a pointed point about the foolishness of it all by erecting displays honoring Lucifer. Amanda Marcotte weighs in on this less-clebrated holiday tradition: Every year, Christian conservatives discover the Satanic display and have a loud, public temper tantrum about it. In this, Satanists prove their point: Conservatives claim to respect religious plurality, but it’s a lie.
They’re all in on abandoning Ukraine and NATO A global far right get together: Allies of Hungary’s far-right prime minister Viktor Orbán will hold a closed-door meeting with Republicans in Washington to push for an end to US military support for Ukraine, the Guardian has learned. Members of the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs and staff from the Hungarian embassy in Washington will on Monday begin a two-day event hosted by the conservative Heritage Foundation thinktank. The first day includes panel speeches about the Ukraine war as well as topics such as Transatlantic Culture Wars. It is expected to feature guests including Magor Ernyei, the international director of the Centre for Fundamental Rights, the institute that organized CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) Hungary. Kelley Currie, a former ambassador under then president Donald Trump, said she was invited “but declined”. According to a Republican source, some of the attendees, including Republican members of Congress, have been invited to join closed-door talks the next day.
The latest filing takes on the Big Lie directly We are told by the TV legal beagles that, in the interest of expediency, Jack Smith is going the extra mile to lay out the case he is planning to make and it’s becoming clear that he plans to make it clear that the election was not stolen which would be a real service: Special counsel Jack Smith on Saturday sharply rejected former President Donald Trump’s contention that foreign governments may have changed votes in the 2020 election, laying bare new details about his team’s extensive probe of the matter and its access to a vast array of senior intelligence officials in Trump’s administration. In a 45-page filing, Smith’s team describes interviewing more than a dozen of the top intelligence officials in Trump’s administration — from his director of national intelligence to the administrator of the NSA to Trump’s personal intelligence briefer — about any evidence that foreign governments had penetrated systems that counted votes in 2020. “The answer from every single official was no,” senior assistant special counsel Thomas Windom writes in the filing.
This is more that just the usual, tiresome “I know you are but what am I” nonsense. He’s right about Bannon, Giuliani and Trump but not because Joe Biden is threatening to put them behind bars if he’s re-elected (like someone else we know is doing.) It’s because all of them are under indictment. Unless he knows something we don’t, Gaetz was actually let off the hook by the DOJ for his predatory behavior with drugs and underage girls. But yes, these people are accused criminals and they are going to trial and if they are found guilty they could go to jail. That’s how the Law and Order Party believes it should be for anyone but their crooked leaders.
None. None at all. I realize it’s cheap and easy to make fun of Trump and that’s not what I’m trying to do here. I just think it’s vitally important that people are reminded of what he really is and how his mental faculties are going. Everyone has a slip now and again. I do too. And I know he’s always loved to sing his greatest hits. But that’s not what these are. They’re takes on these scandals and events from the past as if they’re fresh. And he literally makes no sense at times, like the clip below when he says he wants to build a wall on Day One and literally in same breath says he already built it. Also, he is dumb as a post. The following aren’t examples of decline. He’s always been this stupid:
Economic theory vs. economic reality Reaganism was the Grinch that stole Christmases for decades. The rich got the elevator and the rest got the shaft. The chart above from Forbes is illustrative (although out of date). George Packer reflects on several books on the era for The Atlantic. One, “Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream” by David Leonhardt of the New York Times I finished recently. It examines the economic and working class realignment away from Democrats since the early 1970s. Leonhardt notes the red-shift, and that Reaganism was part of it, but sees broader trends. A more technocractic turn among Democrats took their focus off the working class and neoliberal economics ascendant under Reagan undermined labor. Leonhardt “shows that the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which liberal politicians sold as nondiscriminatory but still restrictive, opened the gates to mass immigration. The result put downward pressure on wages at the lower end of the economy.