SCOTUS Blocks Postal Maneuver

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The  second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments. 

Zolan Kanno-Youngs at NYT:

The Supreme Court on Monday dealt President Trump a major blow when it blocked his executive order to restrict mail ballots. But Mr. Trump’s battle to assert control over the election process is far from finished.

The stymied attempt to have the U.S. Postal Service screen mail ballots was just one piece of a broader effort involving the full power of the federal government to take more control of state-run elections.

Just days before the Supreme Court blocked Mr. Trump’s mail ballot order, the Justice Department sent threatening letters to at least 30 top election officials across the country, escalating a fight to gain access to private voter data and election records.

Federal agents are scouring voter rolls managed by states for noncitizens, despite a lack of evidence of widespread fraud. Mr. Trump’s homeland security secretary recently pushed for an investigation into whether a commonly used voting machine can be trusted, casting doubt on digital voting systems.

“This is far from over,” said Benjamin Hovland, who was ousted from the independent, bipartisan Election Assistance Commission by the Trump administration this year.

...

Trump administration lawyers had urged the Supreme Court to step in and clear the way for its plan to use the Postal Service to screen ballot envelopes after they are submitted by state elections officials. The new rules would require states to submit lists of voters approved to receive mail ballots. The Postal Service would then deliver the ballots only to the voters on the lists.

In addition to the loss on Monday, Mr. Trump’s other attempts to pressure states over the election process have faced legal setbacks.

The Justice Department has sued 30 states for unredacted voter lists, which include personal information like driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers.

They have lost 23 of those cases. Decisions are pending in the rest.

NRSC v. FEC

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

 Rick Hasen at Slate:

As disastrous Supreme Court election cases go, Tuesday’s decision in National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission doesn’t make the list of complete abominations, like the court’s decision this term in Louisiana v. Callais killing off the remaining key part of the Voting Rights Act, or earlier decisions like 2010’s Citizens United that kicked off the unraveling of our campaign finance system. Indeed, it’s possible that the NRSC decision makes our campaign finance system a bit less distorted in bringing candidates and parties closer together. But NRSC, written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh for the six Republican-appointed justices, is an excellent example of the Roberts court’s “deregulatory bootstrapping,” in which the court relies on its earlier partial overruling of precedents—that only makes things worse—to justify more changes in the law. Fundamental change to campaign finance will have to wait for a new Supreme Court.

...

The court went through a period in the early 2000s when it was deferential to Congress’ judgments as to the need for contribution limits and for spending limits on corporations and unions, and in one of those cases, Colorado II, from 2001, the Supreme Court held that Congress could limit how much money political parties may spend in coordination and cooperation with candidates. The court reasoned that without these limits, large donors could seek improper influence over candidates by giving money through political parties.

...

In Tuesday’s opinion in NRSC, the court overturned Colorado II, and said that the part of federal campaign finance law limiting how much political parties can spend in coordination with candidates violates the First Amendment. The court pointed to the “unique” role that political parties play in helping candidates win, and that they have their own First Amendment rights.

But the court also pointed to the development of super PACs as a reason to overturn the limits. All of these outside groups are unaccountable, spreading negative messages. Parties help preserve democracy in the court majority’s view, and it was only fair to free the parties of limits on them.

Trump's Predator Problem

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. Scandals persist.  Especially Epstein.

 Kelsey Dallas and Amy Howe at SCOTUSblog:

The Supreme Court on Monday announced that it will not hear an appeal by President Donald Trump seeking review of the $5 million jury verdict entered against him in the sexual abuse and defamation case filed by journalist E. Jean Carroll. The petition for review was conferenced by the justices for the first time on June 25 after being scheduled for a conference in February and then rescheduled more than a dozen times.

Carroll filed the lawsuit that led to Trump’s petition in 2022 in a federal court in New York. She asserted that Trump had sexually assaulted her in a dressing room at a Manhattan department store in 1996 and then defamed her in 2022 after she went public with her assault allegations. A jury ultimately awarded Carroll $5 million, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit upheld that verdict.

Marilyn W. Thompason at The Guardian:

A woman known as Jane Doe 4 in the Jeffrey Epstein files is “staying off the grid” and lives in fear of retaliation from the Trump administration amid an escalating controversy over its handling of her case, according to a family member.

“Trauma is brutal. Chronic trauma destroys,” said the relative, who described the woman’s life as layers of abuse dating back to early childhood. “She’s coping as best she can.”

The woman had four interviews with FBI agents in 2019 that keep resurfacing in the Epstein sex-trafficking scandal. She made unproven allegations she was abused by the New York financier in the 1980s, then sexually assaulted by Donald Trump, when she was between 13 and 15 years old. The White House has called her allegations “completely baseless” and “backed by zero credible evidence”, a claim it said was supported by the fact that the Biden administration’s justice department knew about the allegations but “did nothing with them”.

She is one of the only alleged Epstein victims to have directly accused Trump, and irregularities in the justice department’s handling of her case files have now become a rallying point for critics of acting attorney general Todd Blanche, who is the US president’s nominee for permanent appointment.

A federal judge in Washington last week gave Blanche until 2 July to produce unredacted versions of files the justice department has already released, or provide an explanation for why it cannot produce the unredacted records. The Department of Justice (DoJ) was also ordered to release interview notes related to Jane Doe 4’s allegations. The decision was part of a civil case against Blanche brought by journalist Katie Phang.

 

SCOTUS Decides Case on Mail Ballots

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

California sends mail ballots to every registered voter and allows the counting of ballots postmarked by election day even if they arrive a week later.  This process helps explain why the state's vote count is slow.  Despite the total lack of evidence for significant cheating,  the slow count gives Trumpists an occasion to spread lies about election fraud.

 Amy Howe at SCOTUSblog:

Just over four months before the 2026 midterm elections, the Supreme Court on Monday upheld a Mississippi law that allows mail-in ballots to be counted as long as they are postmarked by, and received within five days of, Election Day. By a vote of 5-4, the justices in Watson v. Republican National Committee rejected an argument, made by the political parties and others challenging the law, that federal law requires mail-in ballots to be received by Election Day.

Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett concluded that “the election-day statutes require the electorate’s choice to be made on election day. That occurs so long as election day is the deadline for individuals to vote—as it is in Mississippi. But the election-day statutes do not set a deadline for ballot receipt, so they do not prevent Mississippi from counting ballots postmarked before election day yet received afterward.”

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Samuel Alito argued that “from this Nation’s founding until the last few decades of the 20th century—a period that spans the enactment of all three election-day statutes—having an ‘election’ on a particular day meant completing ballot collection on that day.”

Mississippi passed the law at the center of the dispute in 2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Four years later, the Republican National Committee and the Mississippi Republican Party, along with a Mississippi voter and a county election official, went to federal court in Gulfport, Mississippi, to challenge the post-election ballot deadline; the Libertarian Party of Mississippi filed a similar lawsuit a few weeks later, which was combined with the first suit. They argued that Mississippi’s law clashes with a federal law, first passed by Congress in 1845, that designates the Tuesday after the first Monday in November as the “election day.”

World War G: Republicans Score Wins in VA and TN

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

Sabrina Moreno at Axios:

The Virginia Supreme Court overturned the results of the state's redistricting referendum, which voters narrowly approved last month.

Why it matters: The ruling upends one of the most closely watched redistricting fights in the country.It follows months of legal challenges over whether the referendum was unconstitutional.

The big picture: The decision effectively blocks Democrats from redrawing congressional maps mid-decade.That's after the state spent $5.2 million to pay for the special election, and outside groups raised nearly $100 million to sway voters.

The new map would have been in effect for the November midterms and was expected to shift the state's congressional split from 6-5 favoring Democrats to 10-1.

 Katherine Chui and Emily Cochrane at NYT:

When the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act of 1965 last week, Republicans saw new political opportunities across the South. Congressional districts that were considered strongholds for Democrats, often with majority Black populations, could be redrawn for the first time in decades.

Among Southern states, Tennessee was the first to redo its map, which Gov. Bill Lee signed into law on Thursday. The new map breaks the Ninth Congressional District — a longtime Democratic base encompassing Memphis — into three Republican-leaning districts.

The new map divides areas of Memphis where most of the population is Black among three districts with overwhelmingly white populations, eliminating the state’s sole majority Black district in the process.

Voting Rights And World War G

 Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

Amy Howe at SCOTUSblog::

The Supreme Court on Wednesday, in the case of Louisiana v. Callais, struck down a Louisiana congressional map that a group of voters who describe themselves as “non-African American” had challenged as the product of unconstitutional racial gerrymandering. By a vote of 6-3, the justices left in place a ruling by a federal court that barred the state from using the map, which had created a second majority-Black district, in future elections. Although Wednesday’s ruling did not strike down a key provision of the federal Voting Rights Act, as Louisiana and the challengers had asked the court to do, Justice Elena Kagan suggested in her dissent (which was joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson) that the majority opinion by Justice Samuel Alito had rendered the provision “all but a dead letter.”

Jack Blanchard and Dasha Burns at POLITICO:

Excitable Republicans hailing the Supreme Court ruling on the Voting Rights Act as the start of a golden age of neverending House majorities may need to pause and take breath.
...

How far can they go this year? With the ruling less than 24 hours old — and with the midterms just six months away — there’s uncertainty about what’s possible. But even in a maximalist scenario for Republicans, none of the experts Playbook spoke to believed this ruling will net the GOP more than a handful of House seats in November.

...

ABOUT THAT UNCERTAINTY: Four big factors will ultimately decide the extent of further Republican redistricting this year.

1. TIME PRESSURE: This was an extraordinary moment for the Supreme Court to drop this ruling. (In Louisiana, absentee ballots for next month’s primaries have already been sent out.) Those Southern states keen to redistrict before November are in for an almighty scramble. What’s possible will vary state to state.

2. GOP APPETITE: Not every state-level Republican will want to redraw maps on short notice. Some may see 2028 as a more realistic target. Others may be reluctant to move mid-decade at all. Don’t forget that state legislatures in Republican-run Indiana and Democratic-run Maryland already resisted pressure to accept redrawn maps this cycle.

3. TRUMP: The president remains the decisive factor. How hard the White House pushes for new maps this cycle remains an unknown factor, but may prove critical in how many states move immediately. Trump sounded keen yesterday —- “I would think that they would want to do it,” he told reporters — but had only just learned about the ruling.

4. LEGALITY: This wasn’t the “clean kill” Republicans hoped for, watering down rather than completely gutting Section 2 of the VRA. Experts believe there are legal uncertainties still to be ironed out. Pro-VRA litigation — even if ultimately fruitless — could slow the process down.

Democrats will likely retaliate.  (And after the midterms, they might control more legislative chambers.)

Reid J. Epstein at NYT:

Some Democrats who backed new redistricting commissions in the 2010s now look back on those efforts as tying one hand behind their back for the future.

“It seemed like a pitchfork moment. It did seem good,” said Michael Li, a senior counsel for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “The lesson is that there are some states that are never going to be able to do this. If you’re not going to do it nationally, you’re going to have an unlevel playing field.”

The California and Virginia referendums to let Democrats seize redistricting power represented mea culpas about political idealism that could spread to other blue states.

One of the nation’s oldest redistricting commissions is in Washington State, where voters in 1983 adopted a provision to shift map-drawing power from elected officials. Now Shasti Conrad, the state’s Democratic Party chairwoman, said that it could be undone if Democrats were to flip a handful of seats in the State Legislature and seize supermajority control next year.

If they do, Ms. Conrad said, Washington voters are likely to be asked in 2027 to allow lawmakers to enact a new congressional map. Now, Democrats hold eight of 10 House seats in the state.

“People have been asking, ‘What can Washington do with redistricting?’” Ms. Conrad said. “They’re seeing other states like Virginia do it, so why can’t we?”

Democratic regrets over their redistricting hurdles tend to quickly morph into the party’s most reliable political stance over the last decade: blaming Mr. Trump.

Trump's Unhinged Reaction to the Tariff Decision

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is has been full of ominous developments.  In 2024, Trump was already showing signs of cognitive decline. It's getting worse.

From a transcript of Trump;'s reaction:

The Supreme Court’s ruling on tariffs is deeply disappointing, and I’m ashamed of certain members of the court, absolutely ashamed, for not having the courage to do what’s right for our country.

...
The Democrats on the court are thrilled, but they will automatically vote no. They’re an automatic no, just like in Congress, they’re an automatic no. They’re against anything that makes America, strong, healthy and great again. They also are a, frankly, disgrace to our nation, those justices.

They’re an automatic no, no matter how good a case you have, it’s a no. You can’t knock their loyalty, one thing you can do with some of our people.

Others think they’re being politically correct, which has happened before far too often with certain members of this court, and it’s happened so often with this court — what a shame — having to do with voting in particular, when in fact they’re just being fools and lapdogs for the RINOs and the radical left Democrats and, not that this should have anything at all to do with it, they’re very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution.

It’s my opinion that the court has been swayed by foreign interests and a political movement that is far smaller than people would ever think. It’s a small movement. I won by millions of votes, we won in a landslide. With all the cheating that went on, there was a lot of it, we still won in a landslide. Too big to rig.

But these people are obnoxious, ignorant and loud. They’re very loud. And I think certain justices are afraid of that. They don’t want to do the right thing. They’re afraid of it.

... 

But I am allowed to cut off any and all trade or business with that same country. In other words, I can destroy the trade, I can destroy the country. I’m even allowed to impose a foreign country-destroying embargo. I can embargo, I can do anything I want, but I can’t charge one dollar because that’s not what it says, and that’s not the way it even reads. I can do anything I want to do to them, but I can’t charge any money. So I’m allowed to destroy the country, but I can’t charge them a little fee. I could give them a little two cent fee, but I cannot charge under any circumstances. I cannot charge them anything.

He took questions.  When a reporter asked if regretted nominating Justices Gorsuch and Barrett, he said:  "I don't want to say whether or not I regret. I think their decision was terrible. Yeah. I think it's an embarrassment to their families, you want to know the truth, the two of them. Yeah."

 

 

Hybrid Regime?

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration  has been full of ominous developments.

Jennifer Rubin:

Whether we are a hybrid regime or a full police state is debatable, but after the events of last week, our democracy and the rule of law appear to be in tatters. Consider that in a single week, Trump:

• Forced out a U.S. attorney to put in an utterly unqualified flunky who overrode the recommendation of career prosecutors and barely obtained a patently absurd criminal indictment (a classic vindictive prosecution) against former FBI director James Comey based on a “false statement.” (That statement is unspecified and, in all likelihood, not false. The government almost certainly cannot prove the requisite mens rea.)
• Demanded a private company fire former Justice Department deputy attorney general Lisa Monaco.
• Fired another U.S. attorney for abiding by a court order.
• Declared his intent to prosecute on nebulous grounds a private foundation that supports liberal causes.
• Issued a blatantly unconstitutional executive decree (based on a specious accusation that liberals are responsible for political violence) that “threatens criminal and civil investigations against nonprofits based on their point of view…. a thinly veiled ruse to crack down on its political opponents.”
• Demanded (with no legal justification whatsoever) that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth deploy military force in the entirely peaceful city of Portland, Oregon. (The long-threatened deployment to Memphis is planned for this week.)
• Unilaterally enacted more taxes (tariffs), this time on prescription drugs (at a 100% rate), heavy trucks, and furniture.
• Gleefully celebrated yet another gift of unchecked executive power from the MAGA partisan majority on the Supreme Court (which again acted by shadow docket decree, without full briefing or a complete opinion.)
• Imperiously threatened to undertake more unilateral firings and dismantle more federal government operations in the event Democrats do not provide votes to keep the government open.

Sources of Trump's Power

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is has been full of ominous developments, with Trump much more powerful than in his first term.

Jason Willick at WP:

Trump has wrought a genuine revolution within his party. His four years out of power might even have been an advantage in that regard. About two-thirds of the current GOP House caucus was elected in 2016 or later. Senators most likely to exercise independent judgment have retired. Trump and his movement have been highly successful at finding loyal, battle-hardened individuals to staff the executive branch at all levels. Even if the Democrats were in top shape, this revolutionized GOP would give Trump significantly more power than he had in 2017.

...

The barrage of prosecutions of Trump while he was out of power probably made his second presidency more willful and vindictive. Arguments for forbearance in the White House and Justice Department presumably have more trouble gaining traction when MAGA’s pit bulls point out that Democrats tried to convict Trump of crimes that could have put him in prison for life. Democrats who still defend the prosecutions ought to at least acknowledge the natural result of them. The failure of the prosecutions probably also contributes to Democratic political demoralization: They used the strongest possible tools against Trump and it didn’t work.

...

For most of Trump’s first term, Republican appointees made up a 5-4 majority on the Supreme Court. That changed only in late 2020 with the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett, shifting the majority to 6-3. The single vote makes a big difference because Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. can no longer decide by himself which side will win the 5-4 split in politically charged cases. The court has been a brake on Trump’s most abusive immigration gambits but has done little else to interfere with his accumulation of power. That might well change as his actions are litigated and appealed, but the change in the Supreme Court’s composition in Trump’s first term probably at least delayed confrontation in his second.

Another Step Toward Authoritarian Rule

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

 Kyle Cheney, Josh Gerstein and Hassan Ali Kanu at Politico:

Though Trump has long admired foreign authoritarians, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele’s repressive regime is in some ways the beta test for Trump 2.0. Bukele calls himself the “world’s coolest dictator.” Trump said he would be a dictator on Day 1. And Trump has floated or deployed many of the same tactics Bukele used to consolidate power: removing judges, intimidating political adversaries, bypassing due process and evading term limits.

Now, Bukele is actively helping Trump sidestep court orders in the United States.

During a White House visit Monday in which the two leaders bantered like old friends, Bukele insisted on one thing: He will not release Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a native Salvadoran who was living in Maryland until the U.S. illegally deported him last month. The upshot of that declaration: It gives Trump cover to maintain that he is powerless to implement a judge’s directive that the U.S. “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s immediate return from a brutal El Salvador prison. The Supreme Court upheld that directive last week.

Lawrence Hurley at NBC:

If an immigrant who the government claims is a gang member can be deported to El Salvador without any due process rights, then why not a U.S. citizen?

That was the nightmarish scenario immigration advocates and constitutional law experts were considering on Monday after President Donald Trump again pushed a provocative plan to deport U.S. citizens who have been convicted of unspecified crimes.

Trump discussed the issue in the White House with El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who has agreed to deposit people deported from the U.S. into a notorious prison.

“We always have to obey the laws, but we also have homegrown criminals that push people into subways, that hit elderly ladies on the back of the head with a baseball bat when they’re not looking, that are absolute monsters,” Trump told reporters. “I’d like to include them.”

...

"It is pretty obviously illegal and unconstitutional," said Ilya Somin, a professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School.

Trump v. the Rule of Law

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start. .

 

Unusual statement from Chief Justice Roberts pushing back against President Trump (but not singling him out by name)

“For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” Roberts… pic.twitter.com/tEFixrhu4H

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) March 18, 2025

Vance, Roberts, and the Constitution

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. 

Charlie Savage and Minho Kim at NYT:

Vice President JD Vance declared on Sunday that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” delivering a warning shot to the federal judiciary in the face of court rulings that have, for now, stymied aspects of President Trump’s agenda.

The statement, issued on social media, came as federal judges have temporarily barred a slew of Trump administration actions from taking effect. They include ending birthright citizenship; giving associates of Elon Musk’s government-slashing effort access to a sensitive Treasury Department system; transferring transgender female inmates to male prisons; and placing thousands of U.S. Agency for International Development employees on leave.

 Chief Justice John Roberts:

It is not in the nature of judicial work to make everyone happy. Most cases have a winner and a loser. Every Administration suffers defeats in the court system—sometimes in cases with major ramifications for executive or legislative power or other consequential topics. Nevertheless, for the past several decades, the decisions of the courts, popular or not, have been followed, and the Nation has avoided the standoffs that plagued the 1950s and 1960s. Within the past few years, however, elected officials from across the political spectrum have raised the specter of open disregard for federal court rulings. These dangerous suggestions, however sporadic, must be soundly rejected.

The Coming Constitutional Crisis

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

German Lopez at NYT:

In the United States, Congress, the president and the courts are supposed to keep an eye on one another — to stop any one branch of government from becoming too powerful. President Trump is showing us what happens when those checks and balances break down.

The president can’t shut down agencies that Congress has funded, yet that’s what Trump did, with Elon Musk’s help, to the U.S. Agency for International Development. The president can’t fire inspectors general without giving lawmakers 30 days’ notice, but Trump dismissed 17 of them anyway. Congress passed a law forcing TikTok to sell or close, and the courts upheld it, but Trump declined to enforce it. “The president is openly violating the law and Constitution on a daily basis,” said Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College.

In doing so, Trump has called the bluff of our constitutional system: It works best when each branch does its job with alacrity. Trump’s opponents are filing lawsuits, but courts are slow and deliberative. They can’t keep up with the changes the White House has already implemented. Congress could fight back, but the Republican lawmakers in charge have shrugged, as my colleague Carl Hulse reported. Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina conceded that what the administration is doing “runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense.” But, he said, “nobody should bellyache about that.”

As a result, most of Trump’s actions stand unchecked.

Calder McHugh at Politico:

Since President Donald Trump took office, federal courts have been busy hitting the brakes on the most ambitious parts of his shock-and-awe agenda. Courts have temporarily blocked the administration’s ability to implement a federal funding freeze, its attempts to cull the federal workforce, the president’s order ending birthright citizenship and even a plan to move three incarcerated transgender women to men’s facilities.

What it tells us is that Trump’s second term seems likely to be defined by a different kind of conflict than his first. This time around, he understands the gears and levers of government better. He’s surrounded by loyalists in every agency. Congress has bent the knee and shows zero interest in serving as a check on the executive branch. Now, it’s the judiciary, which is fielding a deluge of legal challenges against the White House agenda, that’s barreling towards a confrontation with a president who already holds it in low regard.

The contours of the fight between the two branches of government — and exactly how a newly emboldened Trump plans to take on obstinate judges — are just now coming into focus.

After a district judge issued a temporary restraining order on the Trump administration’s ability to implement a blanket federal spending freeze on Monday, many EPA climate and infrastructure grants remain frozen as of today.

The Justice Department has acknowledged receipt of the judge’s order. But the Trump administration has not yet complied with portions of the order. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), described the standoff this way: “It’s hard to tell what is incompetence and what is confusion and what is basically contemptuous trickery.”

The incident might be a one-off, an innocent oversight in the fog of assembling a new administration. But it might also be a preview of what’s to come. There are few enforcement mechanisms that the judiciary can rely on to make other branches of the federal government comply with their orders. If the Trump administration decides to willfully ignore orders from federal judges, it would, at minimum, present a constitutional crisis with no obvious solutions.

That Was Some Weird Stuff

Our books have discussed Trump's low character, which was on display this month At times, his crudeness and weirdness have helped him appear transgressive.  Lately, they have hurt him Trump's rally in Indiana PA was bonkers even by Trump standards.

Trump attacks (legal) Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, prompting "send them back!" chants from his fans in Pennsylvania pic.twitter.com/4XBRMjSLJJ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 24, 2024

Trump: America is at fault for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, not Putin. pic.twitter.com/NUugge6OoM

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) September 24, 2024

All his cultural reference points are from the 1970s and 80s. Music, TV, clothes. It’s like time stopped for the old fossil in 1985. https://t.co/nfzxTvOmEA

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) September 24, 2024

Trump addresses women: "I am your protector. I want to be your protector ... you will no longer be abandoned, lonely, or scared. You will no longer be in danger ... you will no longer be thinking about abortion." pic.twitter.com/x6GXF8WQYH

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 24, 2024

Trump: Americans who criticize the Supreme Court for overturning Roe v. Wade should be imprisoned:

“These people should be put in jail for the way they talk about our judges and justices”
pic.twitter.com/mQXbcaiT5G

— The Intellectualist (@highbrow_nobrow) September 24, 2024

Trump mocks President Zelensky “Every time he comes into the country he walks away with $60 billion dollars" and says he’ll immediately end the war if he wins:
“I’ll call up Zelensky & President Putin”

(Notice he only refers to Putin as “president”)
pic.twitter.com/pdaKTuugPD

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) September 24, 2024

Affirmative Action and 2024

 As we note in Divided We Stand, the defeat of California's Proposition 16 was the most underreported political story of 2020. Like most other Americans, California voters oppose race-based college admissions

Hannah Demissie at ABC:

A majority of Americans approve of the Supreme Court ruling restricting the use of race as a factor in college admissions, though the country is more divided on other high-profile rulings and increasingly viewing the court as driven more by politics than the law, according to a new ABC News/Ipsos poll conducted using Ipsos' KnowledgePanel.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court set new limits on affirmative action programs in cases involving whether public and private colleges and universities can continue to use race as one factor among many in student admissions.

A little more than half of Americans – 52% -- approve of the U.S. Supreme Court decision on restricting the use of race as a factor in college admissions, while 32% disapprove and 16% saying they don't know.

SCOTUS Rejects "Independent State Legislature" Theory

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.

Jordan Rubin at MSNBC:

The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected the “independent state legislature” theory — a GOP-backed effort to radically change federal election rules. Chief Justice John Roberts authored the 6-3 opinion.

Heading into this Supreme Court term, which started in October, voting rights proponents feared Moore v. Harper. North Carolina Republicans brought the case after the state's Supreme Court struck down their partisan gerrymandered congressional map. They cited the fringe "independent state legislature" theory, which, in its most extreme form, claims the Constitution's elections clause gives state legislatures unfettered control over federal elections.

But the U.S. Supreme Court disagreed. The elections clause “does not insulate state legislatures from the ordinary exercise of state judicial review,” Roberts wrote, over dissent from Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch.

Justice Thomas Gives Democrats a Freebie

 Our 2020 book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses how polarization has affected American life.

Clarence Thomas, concurring, explicitly calls on the Supreme Court to overrule Griswold (right to contraception), Lawrence (right to same-sex intimacy), and Obergefell (right to same-sex marriage). https://t.co/bVOozFPA5d pic.twitter.com/yZLA6DhYh5

— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) June 24, 2022

"My administration will remain vigilant as the implications of this decision play out," Mr. Biden said. "I've warned about how this decision risks the broader right to privacy for everyone. That's because Roe recognized the fundamental right to privacy that has served as the basis for so many more rights that — we've come to take for granted that are engrained in the fabric of this country — the right to make the best decisions for your health, the right to use birth control, the right to privacy of a couple in their bedroom, for God's sake, the right to marry the person you love. Justice Thomas said as much today, he explicitly called to reconsider the right of marriage equality, the right of couples to make their choices on contraception. This is an extreme and dangerous path that the court is now taking us on."

 John Wagner at WP:

Democrats seized on a concurring opinion released Friday by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas that suggested he and his colleagues “should reconsider” its past rulings codifying rights to contraception access and same-sex marriage.

“This decision also opens a door to overturning established precedent on many other important rights and freedoms enjoyed by Americans, including contraception access and the right of LGBTQ Americans to marry those they love,” House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D) said in a statement. “No right is safe from this activist group of Republican-appointed justices who see themselves as legislators.”

J6 Committee: Important Revelations, Modest Impact on Opinion

In Defying the Odds, we discuss Trump's dishonesty and his record of disregarding the rule of law.  Our next book, Divided We Stand, looks at the 2020 election and the January 6 insurrection.

 Andrew Romano at Yahoo:

A new Yahoo News/YouGov poll shows that most Democrats (55%) and Republicans (53%) now believe it is “likely” that America will “cease to be a democracy in the future” — a stunning expression of bipartisan despair about the direction of the country.

The J6 Committee has had only a modest impact on public opinion so far: ...

In fact, the new survey of 1,541 U.S. adults — which was conducted from June 10 (the day after the committee’s first hearing) to June 13 (the day of its second) — found that fewer than 1 in 4 (24%) say they watched last Thursday’s initial primetime broadcast live. Only slightly more (27%) say they caught news coverage later. Nearly half (49%) say they did not follow the hearings at all.

...

As usual, partisanship is key to understanding what’s happening here. Live viewership of the hearings was lowest among Donald Trump voters (9%), Republicans (13%) and Fox News viewers (22%); it was highest among Joe Biden voters (47%), Democrats (44%) and viewers of MSNBC (52%). Nearly three-quarters (72%) of those who watched identified as Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents.

In part as a result, less than half of Americans (45%) say they believe the Democrat-led committee’s central claim: that the Jan. 6 attack “was part of a conspiracy to overturn the election.” The rest either say it was not (35%) or that they’re unsure (20%).

Likewise, just 37% of Americans believe there was a conspiracy and that “Donald Trump was at the center of [it]” — the committee’s other major argument.

Scoop: the Jan. 6 committee has obtained emails between John Eastman & Ginni Thomas & is now discussing whether they should spend time during hearings exploring Thomas's role. With @jdawsey1 & @emmersbrown > https://t.co/QjKYRW9lRL

— Jacqueline Alemany (@JaxAlemany) June 15, 2022

Another Trump lawyer, Ken Chesebro, suggested the justices may be more inclined to weigh in if they had “fear” of “‘wild’ chaos” on Jan 6. He said it five days after Trump’s “wild” tweet about his Jan 6 rally https://t.co/aI1hXJOvnm

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) June 16, 2022

Roe Update

 In Defying the Odds, we talk about the social and economic divides that enabled Trump to enter the White House. In Divided We Stand, we discuss how these divides played out in 2020.  

Abortion will be a big, divisive issue in the 2022 midterms. 

Republicans are not getting their messaging stragith.

Mychael Schnell at The Hill:

Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R) on Sunday said a national abortion ban floated by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is “inconsistent with what we’ve been fighting for.”

McConnell told USA Today in an interview published on Saturday that a national ban on abortions is “possible,” as the country reacts to a drafted majority opinion from the Supreme Court that shows the bench poised to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Asked by anchor Martha Raddatz on ABC’s “This Week” if he would oppose a national ban on the medical procedure, Hutchinson said such a move may have “some constitutional issues.”

“I think it’s inconsistent with what we’ve been fighting for four decades, which is that we wanted the Roe v. Wade reversed and the authority to return to the states. And so as a matter of principle, that’s where it should be,” Hutchinson said.

Katherine Tangalakis-Lippert at Business Insider:

Blake Masters, a GOP Senate candidate running on an anti-abortion platform in Arizona, is also taking aim at the case that established the right to access birth control on his campaign website.

"I am 100% pro-life. Roe v. Wade was a horrible decision. It was wrong the day it was decided in 1973, it's wrong today, and it must be reversed. But the fight doesn't stop there," Master's campaign website reads. It goes on to pledge the candidate will "vote only for federal judges who understand that Roe and Griswold and Casey were wrongly decided, and that there is no constitutional right to abortion."

Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey established and protected the right to an abortion in 1973 and 1992, respectively. But the Griswold case, decided in 1965, overturned a statewide ban on birth control and protected citizen's rights to privacy against state restrictions on contraceptives.

Masters identifies himself as a Catholic father of three on his campaign site. The Catholic Church has had an official ban on any "artificial" birth control methods, including condoms and diaphragms, since 1930. Since birth control pills were invented in 1960, the church has maintained its stance that the medication should only be used for non-contraceptive reasons.


"I don't support a state law or federal law that would ban or restrict contraception — period," Masters said in a statement emailed to Insider. "And Griswold was wrongly decided. Both are true."

In a Twitter thread criticizing reporting that pointed out his conflicting campaign positions, Masters stated that his problem with the Griswold case was that the Supreme Court justices "wholesale made up a constitutional right to achieve a political outcome."

Roe

In Defying the Odds, we talk about the social and economic divides that enabled Trump to enter the White House. In Divided We Stand, we discuss how these divides played out in 2020.  

Abortion will be a big, divisive issue in the 2022 midterms.

Josh Gerstein and Alexander Ward at Politico:

The Supreme Court has voted to strike down the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, according to an initial draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito circulated inside the court and obtained by POLITICO.

The draft opinion is a full-throated, unflinching repudiation of the 1973 decision which guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights and a subsequent 1992 decision – Planned Parenthood v. Casey – that largely maintained the right. “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Alito writes.

“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” he writes in the document, labeled as the “Opinion of the Court.” “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”