(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Think tank [1]
['Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags', 'Showtags Popular_Tags']
Date: 2022-06-30
Peter Wehner of The Atlantic says that the Republican Party has been standing right along with Trump’s assault on American democracy.
This new account of what Trump did leading up to, on, and after January 6 was shocking, yet not surprising. His behavior did not amount to an abrupt about-face by an otherwise honorable man, but was the last link in an almost unfathomably long chain of events—vicious, merciless words and unscrupulous, unethical acts that were said and done, many in public view, in ways that were impossible to deny. All of the signs of Trump’s corruption and disordered personality were obvious for years. Perhaps the case against Trump presented by the January 6 committee and previous Trump loyalists—by now so overwhelming as to be unquestionable—will cause some members of Congress, academics, and “public intellectuals” in the right-wing infrastructure to distance themselves from Trump. Of course, until now Trump has crossed no ethical line, has shattered no norm that caused them to say “Enough!” Instead we’ve heard whataboutism and strained-to-the-breaking-point excuses. However this plays out, this needs to be said: For the past half-dozen years, the Republican Party and the American right—with a very few honorable exceptions— stood with Trump, defended him, and attacked his critics. Some went silent in the face of his indecency and lawlessness; many others gleefully promulgated his lies and conspiracy theories. Together they attempted to annihilate truth on his behalf, in his name, for their party, to seize and to hold power.
That includes Cassidy Hutchinson, as well.
x Republican Representative Liz Cheney said that Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election were ‘more chilling and more threatening’ than first imagined
https://t.co/sYU56JshmM pic.twitter.com/Ts6zfEaFX0 — Reuters (@Reuters) June 30, 2022
Liz Cheney, too.
Norman Eisen writes a review of the Select Committee’s proceedings to this point for The New York Times.
informed repeatedly that he had lost the election; he was also told it could be illegal to attack the election results, but he did so anyhow. Whatever he believed about winning or losing an election, he could not lawfully conspire to find 11,780 votes that did not exist, counterfeit electoral certificates or trigger violence. Indeed, previous hearings focused on and bolstered cases for two possible crimes: solicitation of election fraud (in a Georgia state case) and conspiracy to fabricate electoral certificates (which federal authorities seem to be pursuing). [...] In each hearing, the committee has skillfully built on a foundation of fact. It previously showed that Mr. Trump wasthat he had lost the election; he was also told it could be illegal to attack the election results, but he did so anyhow. Whatever he believed about winning or losing an election, he could not lawfully conspire to find 11,780 votes that did not exist, counterfeit electoral certificates or trigger violence. Indeed, previous hearings focused on and bolstered cases for two possible crimes:(in a Georgia state case) and(which federal authorities seem to be pursuing). [...] Each hearing has saved a surprise for the end. Last Thursday’s, for example, ended with the revelations that six members of Congress had sought presidential pardons. On Tuesday it was screenshots, presented by Representative Liz Cheney, of messages presumably from supporters of Mr. Trump to witnesses, insinuating that Mr. Trump was watching and “does read transcripts” and “knows you’re loyal.” They showed possible witness tampering and potential obstruction of justice. The hearings have very gradually introduced villains, first focusing on Mr. Trump, then on legal helpers for his attempted coup, John Eastman and Jeffrey Clark. On Tuesday we met a fourth, Mr. Meadows. That is part of how the committee has been so shrewd; it has slowly expanded the cast of characters.
Jon Allsop of Columbia Journalism Review worries that while the Jan. 6 Select Committee hearings are good television, this past Tuesday’s bombshell hearings might render future committee hearings to be judged as “flops” in comparison.
That Hutchinson’s testimony delivered was, of course, a victory for the committee, which has consistently shown in recent weeks that it has mastered the art of the hype. The committee had already been lauded, in a series of recent articles, for imbuing its first televised hearings with the tight, gripping narrative arc of a TV miniseries, a far cry from the bloated, pompous proceduralism of hearings past; yesterday—as James Poniewozik, the TV critic at the Times, put it—the committee added what’s known in the biz as a “bottle episode,” breaking the narrative to zoom in on a single character. The reason for the hearing’s surprise last-minute organization still isn’t totally clear and could reflect many factors—the committee’s sincere eagerness to put new evidence in front of the American people, Hutchinson’s security, Hutchinson’s recent change of lawyer, a desire to preempt possible witness tampering—but it’s not outlandish to speculate, as some media watchers have, that the surprise itself was the point: an act of stagecraft to amp up the drama. That was certainly the effect. Poniewozik likened the hearing to Watergate “as punched up by the writers’ room of 24.” As I’ve also written, while media critics often scorn efforts to judge serious political proceedings as TV drama, doing so isn’t inherently trivial; the problem, to my mind, has lain more in many pundits’ shallow, artificial conception of what makes for dramatic TV. The January 6 committee, unlike many of its forebears, has managed to put on hearings that are actually good TV while also meeting the expectations of such pundits while also laying out and hammering home important truths. Yesterday was the apogee of that achievement. And yet the act of judging democracy by televisual standards does have to stop somewhere. For a scripted series, “the price of success,” as Poniewozik put it, “is raising the bar” for future episodes; in the real world, if future January 6 hearings don’t match yesterday’s dramatic standards, they shouldn’t be written off as flops. (This is West Wing world, not Westworld.) More important, while yesterday’s hearing also cleared the factual, worse-than-we-knew bar, it never actually needed to—that bar is extremely high because what we already know of Trump’s conduct is utterly devastating. Some of the details Hutchinson laid out might be important in a future legal case against Trump—but they might not be necessary to that case, and journalistic accountability need not always be concerned with meeting legal standards. It matters, of course, whether what Hutchinson said is true, and journalists should try to corroborate her account—already, various outlets are reporting that the Secret Service agent present when Trump allegedly grabbed the wheel of his car is prepared to testify under oath that that never happened—but we shouldn’t obsess over it as if the committee’s probe and the broader January 6 story hinge upon it. On TV, exquisite metaphors don’t need to be true. In real life, they do. But in neither case are they more important than the deeper truth they’re illustrating.
John Cassidy of The New Yorker says that the Democrats can learn a few lessons from the conservative campaigns to overturn Supreme Court precedents.
The first lesson Democrats can take from the Court’s latest rulings is that persistence pays off. When the Court reaffirmed a right to abortion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in 1992, the conservative activists didn’t give up. Groups such as the Federalist Society intensified their efforts, making staunch rightist views and allegiance a litmus test for any prospective Court appointment—a test that, in 2005, Harriet Miers, the White House counsel to George W. Bush, failed to meet. Miers’s alternative, Samuel Alito, is now a key member of the ultra-conservative bloc that dominates the Court. A second lesson from the conservative counter-revolution is that it sometimes pays to steal your opponents’ arguments, even when that involves jettisoning any semblance of intellectual consistency. In attacking liberal rulings, the conservatives originally relied on the doctrine of judicial restraint, lambasting an “activist Court” for going far beyond the intentions of the Founders. But some leading conservative lawyers—the most prominent being Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas—also took another tack. Where convenient, they adopted the liberals’ language of rights, claiming to have discovered hitherto undiscovered ones residing in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, including the right to carry guns for self-defense.[...] The third lesson from the past few days is that brazenness and ruthlessness pay off, or, as Mitch McConnell might put it, “There are no absolute rules of conduct, either in peace or war. Everything depends on circumstances.” Actually, this quotation comes from Leon Trotsky’s autobiography, but he and McConnell aren’t so far apart. In the past few decades, the G.O.P. has turned into a party of permanent counter-revolution, and its leaders wage this campaign with a wanton disregard for established rules and norms that the old Bolshevik would have admired.
I agree wholeheartedly with #1.
Furthermore, it is beyond me how some Democrats expect that The President can overcome a 50-year effort to overturn Roe v. Wade in 6 days.
Lesson #2 and #3...Meh.
Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post addresses some of the criticisms of President Biden about the Administration’s response to Dobbs.
The complaints on the left center on two issues: The first is the filibuster in the Senate, which some argue President Biden should be opposing more aggressively. But Biden has no ability to change this political reality. If Democrats want to break the filibuster, they must elect more Democrats to the Senate. are frustrated that the White House hasn’t embraced this. The second has to do with whether the administration can use federal lands or public facilities in states where abortion is illegal to provide the services. Some Democratsthat the White House hasn’t embraced this. But the idea is not as easy as it sounds. Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement last week that “federal agencies may continue to provide reproductive health services to the extent authorized by federal law,” but that only pertains to government doctors (e.g., military doctors) and only to the extent permitted under the Hyde Amendment, which bars federal funding of abortions except in cases of rape, incest or that threaten the life of the mother. This does not allow treatment for the public at large or allow such doctors to perform abortions beyond the Hyde Amendment. Even if a federal government doctor on a federal property were to provide abortion services covered by the Hyde Amendment, the state might still try to go after the doctor’s medical license. (This would then raise an interesting Supremacy Clause, the outcome of which would be uncertain.) notEven if
Charles Blow of The New York Times writes that because of “the pack mentality” among men, it may be up to women to save us.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/6/30/2107359/-Abbreviated-Pundit-Roundup-Think-tank
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
