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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: The high-wire diplomacy of Pope Francis [1]

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Date: 2023-08-31  

We begin today with Matt Stieb of New York magazine’s “Intelligencer” reporting on Rudolph Giuliani and his broke a*s losing the defamation suit filed by Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Wandrea “Shaye” Moss.

Strangely, Giuliani essentially lost the defamation case in Georgia because of his financial struggles. Giuliani stated in court in Georgia on Wednesday that he could no longer contest that he made defamatory statements made against poll workers Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss because he could no longer pay to access his own electronic records, which were seized by the FBI when they took his phones in 2021. Since then, he has been paying a $20,000-per-month hosting fee to access his records. Judge Beryl Howell, who was overseeing the case, also ordered Giuliani to forfeit because he had only handed over a “sliver” of relevant documents in discovery — though Giuliani did provide “blobs of indecipherable data.” Giuliani’s lawyers stated on Thursday that the forfeiture did not mean that he admitted wrongdoing but was simply an effort to avoid an expensive discovery process. But according to Howell, Giuliani’s defense that he was protected by the First Amendment had “more holes than Swiss cheese.” Howell declared him liable for “defamation and the intentional infliction of emotional distress.” (A spokesperson for Giuliani told Intelligencer that the ruling was a “prime example of the weaponization of our justice system, where the process is the punishment.”) Following Giuliani’s false claims about Freeman and Moss, the pair were subject to a vicious harassment campaign by Trump supporters. “Donning a cloak of victimization may play well on a public stage to certain audiences, but in a court of law, this performance has served only to subvert the normal process of discovery in a straightforward defamation case,” Howell wrote. A trial to determine the amount of damages is expected to begin within the next year, and Giuliani could be on the hook for millions of dollars. Giuliani has paid almost $90,000 for Freeman’s and Moss’s attorneys fees and owes hundreds of thousands of in assorted legal fees and fines. More costs are expected to mount as he prepares for his defense in Georgia, in a defamation suit filed by Dominion Voting Systems, and in a sexual-harassment case unrelated to his work with Trump. But at least his boss is starting to pitch in: After Trump refused Giuliani’s desperate requests to pay his legal bills, Trump agreed to host a $100,000-per-plate fundraiser on September 7 for his loyal henchman.

Chris Whipple writes for The New York Times about what Number 45’s former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’ incompetence and possible criminality augur for a second Trump Administration.

Historically, a White House chief of staff is many things: the president’s gatekeeper, confidant, honest broker of information, “javelin catcher” and the person who oversees the execution of his agenda. But the chief’s most important duty is to tell the president hard truths. [...] In their motion to remove the Fulton County case to federal court, the lawyers for Mr. Meadows addressed Mr. Trump’s now infamous Jan. 2, 2021, call with Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger — during which Mr. Meadows rode shotgun as the president cut to the chase: “All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes ….” Addressing Mr. Meadows’s role, his lawyers wrote: “One would expect a Chief of Staff to the President of the United States to do these sorts of things.” Actually, any competent White House chief of staff would have thrown his body in front of that call. Any chief worth his salt would have said: “Mr. President, we’re not going to do that. And if you insist, you’re going to make that call yourself. And when you’re through, you’ll find my resignation letter on your desk.” Mr. Meadows failed as Mr. Trump’s chief because he was unable to check the president’s worst impulses. But the bigger problem for our country is that his failure is a template for the inevitable disasters in a potential second Trump administration.

Theodore R. Johnson of The Washington Post reports on the all-too-real racial pendulum for Black Americans.

… But that pier in Montgomery had come to represent a Colosseum where solidarity and self-defense were the victors. Observing that unity in the face of violence was a thrill. The laughs that soon came were the overflowing sentiments of pride looking for somewhere to go. The memes became vessels. For my father, though — raised in South Carolina during the dark days of Jim Crow — fighting back often meant violence from the state and vigilantes was not far behind. Montgomery was a painful reminder of a powerless past. For some, experience saw beyond the veil, changing Montgomery from a prideful moment of righteous indignation into a flashing warning of imminent racist backlash. Wisdom cautioned that a bad thing lay up ahead; my father had already steeled himself for it. The wait wasn’t long. August’s pendulum soon swung to pain. Last Saturday, a self-avowed white supremacist on a racist mission to kill Black people shot up a Jacksonville, Fla., store in a predominantly Black community. He took three lives and then his own. The backlash had arrived. The shooting wasn’t necessarily retaliation in direct response to Montgomery, but the white-supremacist ideology that inspired it was driven by a sense that Black people no longer know their place. Violence has always been used to remind us.

But we laugh anyway because, I believe, it is too important to our collective mental health not to laugh.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo has a few thoughts about American resilience and perhaps the coming American “breakdown.”

There is however one cluster of data that I do keep coming back to as a signal of some more thoroughgoing breakdown that goes beyond headlines about Trump or MAGA craziness. Back in 2003 I wrote a review essay for The New Yorker about the frenzy of neo-imperialist thinking that swept so many of the country’s elites in the brief span of time between the 9/11 attacks and the start of the Iraq War. It didn’t make it into the piece. But one of the books I was given to review was After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order by the French demographer Immanuel Todd. Lefty books predicting the decline of American empire are a dime a dozen. In part I didn’t include it because the arguments didn’t seem entirely persuasive to me. Even more it was just very different kind of book than the others I was reviewing. But what made and makes Todd hard to dismiss entirely out of hand was a 1976 book he’d written predicting the decline and collapse of the Soviet empire. In much of the world in the early 1970s, the Soviet Union seemed a robust incumbent superpower on the world stage, as ephemeral and transient as mountains or water. Many U.S. foreign policy elites believed the Soviet Union was as on the march around the world. The way the Reagan cult would have it, Reagan was a sunny optimist who realized the old Soviet Union just needed a good shove to usher it off the stage. Far from it. Read what the rightwing intellectuals around Reagan were saying at the time and it’s a message not of optimism but pessimism about the America’s staying power against the Soviet colossus. The idea that in little more than a decade it could teeter and collapse seemed absurd. Equally interesting was the basis of Todd’s argument, which was not geopolitical big think or game theory but a more quotidian analysis of demographic and trade data — notably rising infant mortality. [...] The opioid epidemic and the importation of fentanyl are clear vehicles of this trend...There is some deeper breakdown or shift afoot, something so thoroughgoing that it shows up in the nation’s vital statistics much as one might see a diagnostic signal of some underlying disease in an individual patient. To me the rise of the culture of mass shooting seems inevitably, though in a way that is hard to connect formally, part of the same underlying social malady.

Josephine Lee of the Texas Observer reports that a Texas judge has overruled Texas House Bill 2127, Texas’ so-called “Death Star” law, which would have severely limited the ability of Texas cities and counties to enact local laws.

Travis County Judge Maya Guerra Gamble ruled Texas House Bill 2127, also known as Texas’ “Death Star” law—aimed at kneecapping cities’ and counties’ authority to enact local laws—unconstitutional two days before it was to take effect. In her judgment on a lawsuit brought by the City of Houston and joined by the cities of San Antonio and El Paso, Gamble declared, “House Bill 2127 in its entirety is unconstitutional—facially, as applied to Houston as a constitutional home rule city and to local laws that are not already preempted under Article XI, Section 5 of the Texas Constitution.” [...] HB 2127 would have barred cities and counties from enacting local ordinances related to agriculture, business, finance, labor, natural resources, occupations, and property. In its lawsuit, the City of Houston argued that not only was this “unconstitutionally vague,” it also violates provisions that require the state to demonstrate that there is a “direct and irreconcilable” conflict between state and local laws before the state can preempt them with “unmistakable clarity.”

Alex Brown writes for Stateline News about the difficulties that various states may have in addressing environmental racism in the face of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decisions regarding affirmative action.

Now, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision striking down race-conscious college admissions policies, state lawmakers are facing a new conundrum: Can they remedy environmental racism without mentioning race? “The [Supreme Court] majority really reinforced the idea that a generalized government policy of rectifying past discrimination would not pass constitutional muster,” said Emily Hammond, an environmental law expert and professor at the George Washington University Law School. Lawmakers are scrambling to figure out what the ruling will mean for their environmental justice efforts. In some states, legislators expect lawsuits to threaten their policies. The question is whether they can defend those measures in court, or if they need to revise the laws in a race-neutral way to ensure they’re not struck down. Studies have shown that communities of color face disproportionate levels of air and water pollution, less access to green space and significant health disparities as a result of those factors. Such communities often have been carved up with highways, refineries, fossil fuel plants and waste dumps.

Mark Joseph Stern of Slate writes about the efforts of the gun safety group Moms Demand Action in researching previous gun safety regulations.

In 2022’s Bruen decision, the Supreme Court struck down bans on concealed carry and expanded upon the previous standard for determining the constitutionality of gun regulations, declaring that authorities had to find analogous gun laws that existed prior to 1900. Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the court, found that before that date, concealed carry bans were not part of America’s history and traditions, and they were thus unconstitutional. Yet here, in a basement archive, Birch found evidence to the contrary, lost to history. And she had barely scratched the surface. Birch is one of about 20 volunteers with Moms Demand Action, part of the gun safety group Everytown, who are scouring archives across the United States for historical firearm regulations. The project is far from academic. In Bruen, the Supreme Court demanded proof that a firearm regulation is rooted in “longstanding” tradition in the form of “historical analogues”—old gun laws that show how Americans “understood” the Second Amendment in the past. The historical record of firearm regulations, however, is far from complete. So motivated volunteers like Birch, a product designer by trade, are stepping in to fill the gaps. What they’ve found directly contradicts the Supreme Court’s conclusions. While the academic research already relied upon by Thomas and other judges to strike down gun laws has been shaky at best, the stakes of attempting to satisfy the test he laid out could not be higher. For just one example, see next term’s big gun case, which asks whether the Second Amendment prevents the government from disarming people who are under a restraining order for domestic violence.

Jason Horowitz and Ruth Graham of The New York Times report on Pope Francis putting some American conservative Catholics on blast for their “backwardness.”

The pope lamented the “backwardness” of some American conservatives who he said insist on a narrow, outdated and unchanging vision. They refuse, he said, to accept the full breadth of the Church’s mission and the need for changes in doctrine over time. “I would like to remind these people that backwardness is useless,” Francis, 86, told a group of fellow Jesuits early this month in a meeting at World Youth Day celebrations in Lisbon. “Doing this, you lose the true tradition and you turn to ideologies to have support. In other words, ideologies replace faith.” His words became public this week, when a transcript of the conversation was published by the Vatican-vetted Jesuit journal La Civiltà Cattolica. His comments were an unusually explicit statement of the pope’s longstanding lament that the ideological bent of some leading American Catholics has turned them into culture warriors rather than pastors, offering the faithful a warped view of Church doctrine rather than a healthy, well-rounded faith. It has become a major theme of his papacy that he sees himself as bringing the church forward while his misguided conservative critics try to hold it back.

On the other hand, there’s Claudia Chiappa of POLITICO Europe reporting on the continuing backlash against Pope Francis’s words to a Russian Catholic youth group that appeared to support former Russian emperors.

A spokesperson for Lithuania’s foreign ministry on Wednesday told POLITICO they had invited the Apostolic Nuncio (a Vatican diplomat) for a chat. Local media reported the conversation would happen after Archbishop Petar Rajic returns from his vacation in early September. [...] During a video speech to the All-Russian Meeting of Catholic Youth in St. Petersburg, a clip of which was posted online, the pope invoked former Russian emperors Peter I and Catherine II, two rulers who played key roles in expanding Russia’s conquests in Europe, and who are known as symbols of Russian imperialism. [...] A Vatican spokesperson strongly denied the accusation, saying Pope Francis “intended to encourage young people to preserve and promote what is positive in Russia’s great cultural and spiritual heritage, and certainly not to glorify imperialistic logics and governmental personalities.” In the rest of his speech, posted online by the Vatican, the pope had told Russian youth to be “artisans of peace” and to “sow seeds of reconciliations.”

Finally today, Ahmadi Ali of Al Jazeera explains why the expansion of BRICS will not result in a new Cold War.

The grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa will be joined by Saudi Arabia, Iran, Ethiopia, the United Arab Emirates, Argentina and Egypt as part of an expanded collective. [...] Many argue we are in the midst of a new Cold War. Even members of the United States Congress have lent credence to that concept. But that is an imperfect analogy. [...] During the Cold War, one could awkwardly divide the world into three camps: the Western bloc, the Soviet bloc and the countries that were part of the so-called non-aligned movement. After the Cold War, many of the norms of the Western bloc formed what is often referred to as the liberal rules-based international order. This new order was enshrined into new organisations like the World Trade Organization and older venues like the United Nations during a “unipolar moment”, when democratic capitalism and trade liberalisation seemed to have vanquished every foe. But today, the rising power balancing the US is not looking to form a Soviet-type bloc. The reasons are both material and ideational.

Have the best possible day everyone!

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