Swing state trials
Why it matters: Trump's delay, delay, delay strategy appears to be working for him, but many loyalists are facing stiff consequences from civil and criminal cases.
- Even a dragged-out process on presidential immunity after Thursday's Supreme Court hearing — which has frozen his federal Jan. 6 case — could avoid a verdict before the election.
But for Trump's allies in the alleged schemes to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, there's no such luck.
- Pro-Trump lawyers have faced sanctions and censure, and Rudy Giuliani risks being disbarred in the backlash to the efforts.
- In a civil settlement in Wisconsin, former Trump lawyers Kenneth Chesebro and Jim Troupis agreed to never participate in future schemes.
Zoom out: At least four of the seven swing states have active criminal cases against pro-Trump fake electors.
George Stephanopoulos Opens His Show With a Blistering Commentary: ‘Bedrock Tenets of Our Democracy Are Being Tested’
This Week’s George Stephanopoulos opened Sunday’s show with a blistering commentary on the state of American politics today brought about largely by “what’s happening in courtrooms” and not on the campaign trail.
Stephanopoulos checked off the litany of legal cases against Donald Trump, and reminded viewers that none of this is “normal.”
“Until now, no American president had ever faced a criminal trial,” Stephanopoulos began, continuing:
No American president had ever faced a criminal indictment for retaining and concealing classified documents. No American president had ever faced a federal indictment or a state indictment for trying to overturn an election, or been named an unindicted co-conspirator in two other states for the same crime. No American president has faced hundreds of millions of dollars in fines for business fraud, defamation, and sexual abuse.
Oh, and by the way, here’s Joe Biden on Howard Stern’s show via TikTok. His public appearances have been pretty solid.
Greg Sargent/TNR:
Shocker From Top Conservative Judge: Trump Likely To Skate Completely
J. Michael Luttig sees two potential outcomes from Thursday’s Supreme Court arguments. Both are grim for our democracy.
“I’m profoundly disturbed about the apparent direction of the court,” J. Michael Luttig told me. “I now believe that it is unlikely Trump will ever be tried for the crimes he committed in attempting to overturn the 2020 election.
I called Luttig, a former federal judge with extensive conservative credentials, to solicit his reaction to this week’s Supreme Court hearing over Donald Trump’s demand for absolute immunity from prosecution for any crimes related to his insurrection attempt. On Thursday, Luttig posted a thread critiquing the right-wing justices for their apparent openness to Trump’s arguments—but that thread was legalistic and formal, so I figured Luttig had a lot more to say.
EJ Dionne/Washington Post:
A Republican and a Democrat confront our era of bad vibes
Are you skeptical of bipartisan dialogues and commissions that pretend away differences in a chase after a lowest-common-denominator “center”? Me, too.
Yet there is good reason to be weary of a political culture so saturated with negative partisanship and mutual mistrust that it makes discussing our nation’s most intractable problems impossible. That’s especially true of challenges that defy easy ideological categorization: social disconnection, loneliness, the damaging side effects of social media, the shattering of families, the curse of drug addiction.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who has made it a personal crusade to move these challenges to the forefront of politics, told me he sees “a lot of room between right and left to work hard” on these questions.
Rural Communities Can Benefit From Infrastructure Funds—if Rollout Is Done Right
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act’s nearly $1.8 trillion marks a profound boost in infrastructure spending; but to make the most of new resources, the federal government must address communities’ wariness of projects because of past treatment.
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) might be remembered as the act that, quite literally, rebuilt America for the 21st century. With collective expenditures of upward of $1.8 trillion, the act emphasizes public works and private investments in what has been called a generational down payment on the nation’s infrastructure.1 IIJA, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), and the CHIPS and Science Act also reflect a profound change in federal infrastructure policy: All three are part of a broader policy goal to simultaneously rebuild domestic supply chains for national competitiveness and resilience, build a clean energy system to address the climate crisis, and ensure investments produce an inclusive and just economy.
Realizing these goals will require rebuilding America’s electrical grids, bridges, telecommunications, and other infrastructure on a scale not witnessed in decades, and many infrastructure projects will be built in rural communities. In particular, IIJA addresses long-standing shortcomings and underinvestment in broadband2 and water and wastewater facility development3 that have systematically left behind rural areas with low population density. Infrastructure improvements necessary to transition away from fossil fuels—such as wind and solar farms, transmission lines, battery manufacturing facilities, and mining for critical minerals—will likely be concentrated in resource-producing regions and rural areas.4 And stabilizing supply chains will require scaling up domestic resource production and transporting goods to manufacturing centers along reliable shipping corridors.5
Alex Burness/Bolts magazine:
In Oregon Primary, A Study In Contrasts on How to Strengthen Democracy
Oregon’s legacy of strong participation lives alongside lingering exclusions, like a ban on prison voting. Secretary of state candidates share how—and whether—they’d tackle those.
Even a state with a reputation for generally excellent voter services always has room to improve, their testimonials stressed.
That is not lost on the leading Democratic candidates to be Oregon’s next chief elections official.
James Manning, a state senator, and Tobias Read, Oregon’s treasurer and a 2022 candidate for governor, each told Bolts that they believe the state can do more to encourage participation and broaden voter access.
But they also offered different priorities and visions for what needs fixing. In his interview with Bolts, Manning emphasized the urgency of reversing the restrictions and structural neglect that keep some at the margins, including by ending the ban on people voting from prison. He talks of lingering exclusions as stains on democracy, stemming from a history of racism that Oregon should immediately confront.
Read feels the state should focus on fine-tuning the mechanics of Oregon’s existing systems before considering an idea, like voting from prison, that may be more divisive. His priorities, he said, include ironing out Oregon’s universal mail voting and automatic registration laws to address ways in which they may be tripping up the people that they’re meant to help.
Will Bunch/Philadelphia Inquirer:
Storming colleges with riot cops to keep them ‘safe’ should scare America about what’s next
A violent coast-to-coast, riot-cop crackdown on campus protests threatens the right for all dissent on the eve of the presidential election.
History doesn’t repeat but it rhymes, gratingly. As a new generation of young people speaks out against attacks on women and children halfway around the world — this time in Gaza — college administrators from Boston to L.A. are racing to call in heavily armored riot cops to shut down protest encampments at campuses they’d sold to applicants as bastions of academic freedom, open expression, and historic demonstrations that had changed the world.
They are destroying the American university in order to keep it “safe.” In a week when decades happened, the lowest moments in what became a nationwide assault on college free speech by militarized police veered from shock to tragicomical irony.
Cliff Schecter covers Joe Biden hazing Trump:
Greg Dworkin April 29, 2024 at 12:00PM From Daily Kos
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