(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: The legacy of Chief Justice John Roberts is now sealed [1] [] Date: 2024-07-02 Abbreviated Pundit Roundup is a long-running series published every morning that collects essential political discussion and analysis around the internet. We begin today with the thought that sometimes you simply have to laugh in order to not cry or cuss someone out. Sometimes you have to go ahead and do all three. Case in point: x A dictatorial, unelected majority in the Supreme Court has just rendered America a dictatorial president above the law. Thank you Hillary Clinton, whose blundering campaign let the dictatorial Trump become president and led to a rightwing dictatorial majority on the Supreme… — Ralph Nader (@RalphNader) July 1, 2024 Isn’t that special? Look … I have a policy on Ralph Nader that I’ve followed for over 20 years. Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate, is the finest consumer advocate that this country has ever seen. That cannot be diminished and I would never attempt to do so. But Ralph Nader, the Green Party presidential candidate, the man who is indirectly (?) responsible for the placement of Chief Justice John Roberts (the author of Monday’s 6-3 majority decision in Trump v. United States) and Justice Samuel Alito on the U.S. Supreme Court? He can kiss the entirety of my natural Black ass for all eternity. Speaking of Trump v. United States, let’s get to what other pundits say about the surprising revelation that Donald Trump will become King Shoe Salesman if he ever occupies the Oval Office again. And a few other matters of note. Chris Geidner of LawDork has the nitty gritty details of the 6-3 majority decision, authored by Roberts, that grants the U.S. president “a presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts.” Roberts did so, moreover, with no clear textual support in the Constitution — and a considerable historical record to the contrary. “[T]he system of separated powers designed by the Framers has always demanded an energetic, independent Executive,” Roberts wrote. “The President therefore may not be prosecuted for exercising his core constitutional powers, and he is entitled, at a minimum, to a presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote for the Democratic appointees in dissent of the bottom-line result, “The Court effectively creates a law-free zone around the President, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the Founding,” concluding, “With fear for our democracy, I dissent.” It was another ruling — to quote Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent in this term’s earlier corruption case decision — that “only today’s Court could love.” More on the “absurd paradox” of the SCOTUS majority opinion in Trump v. United States from Adam Serwer of The Atlantic. The Court’s opinion presents an absurd paradox that defeats the purpose of a constitutional democracy governed by the rule of law. It has little basis in the Constitution or in the words of the Founders. It is the outcome that most benefits the Court’s preferred presidential candidate, while allowing the justices to live with themselves for defacing beyond recognition the Constitution and the concept of democratic self-determination. [...] Throughout the opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts often sounds more like Trump’s lawyer than the impartial judge he presents himself as. Roberts writes that “with respect to the President’s exercise of his core constitutional powers, this immunity must be absolute.” If that applies, as the Court holds, to a sitting president manufacturing a scheme to avoid relinquishing power after losing an election, then there is no legal constraint on a president simply refusing to leave office and using his authority to find a pretext for doing so. We can debate the nuances of history, the Framers’ intentions, or the text of the Constitution. What the Founders of the United States did not intend to do, when they designed a constitutional system of checks and balances, was establish a government that would allow someone to declare themselves president for life if they felt like it. The Court writes that presidents cannot be prosecuted for “use” of their official powers, but what it actually means is they cannot be prosecuted for the flagrant abuse of them. That renders the plain disclaimer on which the opinion rests—that the president is not above the law—a lie. More significant, this opinion depends on an implicit belief that the only person who would act so brazenly is Trump, and that because the majority of the justices on the Court support Trump and want him to be president, he must be shielded from prosecution. In this backhanded manner, Trump’s justices acknowledge that he poses a unique threat to constitutional government, one they just happen to support because he is their guy. These are not justices; these are Trump cronies. This is not legal reasoning; this is vandalism. Richard L. Hasen of Slate notes that Roberts has now sealed his legacy. Tellingly, Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion spends not a moment condemning the violence in the Capitol on Jan. 6 or saying how awful the allegations against Trump are if true, or even celebrating peaceful transitions of power and reaffirming American democracy. It fell to Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson to do this in their dissenting opinions in this case, in the Fisher case, and in Trump v. Anderson, the case holding that Colorado could not remove Trump from the ballot on grounds that Trump engaged in insurrection in violation of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. [...] Near the end of his majority opinion in the immunity ruling, Roberts plays the role of the faux minimalist, as he often likes to do, pretending that when he is making major changes in the law he is really doing very little. He did this, for example, in the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder case killing off a key part of the Voting Rights Act. There he told us that Congress could tinker and fix the formula used to figure out which states need federal supervision of their voting rules, and that there were other voting rights protections under the law. He wrote that knowing Congress would not act. The Roberts Court would then whittle away those other protections in subsequent years. [...] Even putting aside the risks for future presidential authoritarianism, Roberts offers no acknowledgement that the court’s fact-intensive, slow-moving process has let Donald Trump run out the clock on claims of election subversion in 2020. Roberts surely was aware that this was an implication of the decision and surely the risks to democracy from this decision had to have crossed his mind. Ian Millhiser of Vox brings us some decent news from the U.S. Supreme Court, with a 6-3 decision in Moody v. Netchoice. Just a few minutes before the Supreme Court handed down its Trump decision, however, it also handed down another case reaffirming that the First Amendment does not permit Republican-led legislatures to seize control of what content is published by media companies. That decision, in Moody v. Netchoice, was 6-3, with three Republican justices who also held that the leader of the Republican Party was allowed to commit many crimes while he was in office joining Justice Elena Kagan’s majority opinion. So, on the same day that the Supreme Court appears to have established that a sitting president can commit the most horrible crimes imaginable against someone who dares to speak out against him, the same Court — with three justices joining both decisions — holds that the First Amendment still imposes some limits on the government’s ability to control what content appears online. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined both decisions in full. Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the Netchoice opinion in full, plus nearly all of the Trump decision. It’s impossible to comprehend the value system that would lead a justice to join both decisions, but nevertheless here we are. That said, the Court’s decision in Netchoice is a victory for free speech, even if it comes the same day as one of the most chilling decisions in the Court’s history. I guess that Jay Caspian Kang of The New Yorker drew the magazine’s short straw in the contest to provide the “balance” to the overwhelming outpouring of legacy media punditry insisting that President Joe Biden must be replaced. Biden’s debate performance also carries the potential of affecting other races. Democratic-leaning voters with genuine concerns about how an infirm man will handle running the country might choose not to vote in the election, which will hurt all the other Democratic candidates on the ballot. And, aside from the electoral concerns, it might be immoral to allow an entitled octogenarian to handle foreign policy at a time of global crises. It’s one thing when you can’t get your elderly father to stop driving their car because you’re worried they will run over a child. It’s quite another when the elderly father has the power to invade another country. These are all extremely compelling reasons to ask Biden to step aside or to start an insurgency leading up to the convention in August. But if the point of this election is to defeat Trump—and I imagine for many Democrats it is—then you have to do some dirty calculations and realize that you don’t have a Plan B because all the backups aren’t ready yet, and because introducing one of them in the middle of the game is a risky gamble, at best. There are countless problems that would come with the process of choosing a new candidate—if you bypass Kamala Harris, for example, does she just go quietly? And how do you sell the optics of nullifying the logical norms of succession for the first Black person and first woman to ever serve as Vice-President? If you’re a supporter of Gavin Newsom, are you even sure he will agree to take on a potential losing and chaotic run at an office he could much more credibly run for in 2028? If you believe Gretchen Whitmer has the best chance of defeating Trump, because of her advantage in the “blue wall” states, does her relative paucity of national connections tank her chances in a convention setting? Perhaps none of these are as weighty of a concern as Biden’s bad debate, but every road you go down with any of the possible substitutes kicks up potentially endless questions like these. Can you invite such chaos when you can’t even decide on the successor? Or are Biden’s chances so dismal that any warm body would be preferable to watching him decline in public, get mercilessly ridiculed by Trump for the next four months, and then ultimately lose a low-turnout landslide that also takes out Democrats in the House and Senate? What are the chances that the Party can actually coalesce around a plan, whatever that might be? There is also a question of timing: How do you litigate a potentially toxic battle for the candidacy and settle on a coherent message? How do they prepare candidates who haven’t been vetted for possible October surprises? A Biden replacement would not have the benefit of a primary season that would have increased their name recognition. Though it’s true that a bake-off convention might generate a lot of positive press coverage and excitement, it’s also possible that there just might not be enough time to craft any sort of pitch to the American people other than “This is the understudy for Biden and you should vote for them because they are not Donald Trump.” Paul Krugman of The New York Times points out that there aren’t that many similarities between France’s far right National Rally party, known as the R.N., and the Trumpist Republican Party in the United States, especially concerning economic policy. Like almost every other wealthy nation, France experienced a burst of inflation as the world economy recovered from the Covid-19 pandemic — in fact, if you use comparable measures, prices in France have risen by roughly the same amount as prices in the United States. But also as in America, inflation has declined rapidly without a jump in unemployment, and the current state of the economy looks quite good by historical standards. [...] … on economic policy the R.N. has basically campaigned against Macron from the left. It has promised to lower the retirement age for many workers while cutting the value-added tax — basically a sales tax — on energy. How would it pay for these measures? By cutting benefits to immigrants. In case you’re wondering: No, the numbers don’t work. But setting math aside, the R.N. has, in effect, staked out a position in favor of big government and generous social benefits, but essentially only for people with the right ethnic background. The contrast with Trumpism should be obvious. Stephen Rand writes for The Article that the debacle of the Reform Party in Britain has paved the way for revival of the Liberal Democrats. The party might secure a handful of seats, which is hardly worth the cost if it catapults Labour into a “supermajority”, enabling the Left to act with impunity. Reform is meant to work as a way to pull the Conservatives further to the Right, allowing it to dictate the agenda. The Reform tail is most effective wagging the dog. If the tail is cut off it can’t wag, let alone control the dog. As it currently stands, Reform’s direct competition for votes against the Conservatives will keep any Right-of-centre agenda out of power for a generation. [...] But the unexpected winner in all of this appears to be the Liberal Democrats – so unexpected that few have truly grasped the reality of what is happening. Many, myself included, have been so absorbed by the psycho-drama on the right of British politics that we’ve failed to notice what’s occurring in the centre. Nick Clegg took the Liberal Democrats into coalition government in 2010 with 57 seats. They were decimated in 2015, winning only 8 seats, and have struggled to recover since. However, recent polling suggests they could be on course to win up to 67 seats. Similar polling projections could place the Tories at around 50 seats and Reform at 5. Rand may be overestimating in his projection of the number of seats the Liberal Democrats will be able to win this coming Thursday—but not by much , according to some of the latest polling. Abel Alvarado and Omar FaJardo of CNN report that the United States and Panama have reached an agreement concerning the repatriation of migrants that enter via the Darién Gap. “In the agreement signed today by the Panamanian Foreign Minister Javier Martínez-Acha and the Secretary of Homeland Security of the United States Alejandro Mayorcas, the US government undertakes to cover the cost of the repatriation of immigrants who enter illegally through Darién,” the Panama government said in a statement. It said that under the memorandum of understanding the US would also support Panama with “equipment, transportation and logistics” regarding foreigners found “in violation of the immigration laws of Panama.” Panama agreed to “comply with all international agreements and conventions on the rights of immigrants and those in refugee status,” it added. Panama is home to the Darién Gap, a mountainous rainforest region connecting South and Central America, that has seen an increase in the number of migrants willing to risk their lives and safety to cross it. The 66-mile (106-kilometer) hike through the Darien Gap brings migrants from Colombia to Panama and is a crucial passage for those hoping to reach the United States and Canada. Finally today, Siobhan Roberts of The New York Times celebrates the 50th birthday of the Rubik’s Cube. Mr. Rubik dates the Cube to the spring of 1974. Preparing a course on descriptive geometry and tinkering with the five Platonic solids, he had become especially taken by the cube. But, as he wrote in his 2020 memoir, “Cubed, The Puzzle of Us All,” for quite a while it “never once occurred to me that I was creating a puzzle.” [...] CubeLovers was among the first internet mailing lists — the inaugural message was sent by an M.I.T. student in July 1980: “I don’t know what we will be talking about, but another mailing list cannot hurt (too much).” In March 1981, with the Cube having been renamed for Rubik and populating American toy stores, the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter diagnosed the craze as “cubitis magikia” — “a severe mental disorder accompanied by itching of the fingertips, which can be relieved only by prolonged contact with a multicolored cube,” he wrote in his column for Scientific American. He added: “Symptoms often last for months. Highly contagious.” By November 1982, the mania had subsided — “Rubik’s Cube: A Craze Ends,” declared a headline in the The New York Times. But it was resurrected in the 1990s by the World Wide Web. In 2023, Spin Master, the toy company that now owns the brand, globally sold 7.4 million units, including both the classic Cube and related twisty puzzles. Ben Varadi, a Spin Master co-founder, noted that Rubik’s has “95 percent brand awareness” — virtually everyone has heard of it. Rubik’s lore also holds that one in seven people on Earth have played with the Cube. “It gives me hope about the world,” Mr. Rubik told his audience in San Francisco. “It brings people together.” Here’s a five-year old interview of the creator of the Rubik’s Cube, Erno Rubik. Have the best possible day, everyone! 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