Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: A native New Yorker returns

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 Elizabeth Spiers of The New York Times noting the irony of the return of a certain native New Yorker to the city he now claims to despise.

With jury selection underway in Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Lower Manhattan, the former president’s chickens have finally come home to roost. It feels uniquely appropriate that Mr. Trump will have to endure the scrutiny on his old home turf. New York City residents have been subjected to his venality and corruption for much longer than the rest of the country, and we’re familiar with his antics — the threats, the lawsuits, the braggadocio, his general ability to slip through the tiniest crack in the bureaucracy or legal system just fast enough to avoid the consequences of his actions. He rose to fame here, but was never truly accepted by the old money elites he admired. The rich and powerful sometimes invited him to their parties, but behind his back they laughed at his coarse methods and his tacky aesthetic. His inability to succeed in New York in quite the way he wanted to drove much of the damage he did to the country as a whole, and arguably his entire political career.

[...]

It’s harder for Mr. Trump to avoid the actual untelevised reality of who he is in New York City, where he grew up the son of a wealthy Queens real estate developer and used his inheritance less to grow the family business than to grow his personal brand. His business dealings were murky, sometimes mob-connected and riddled with high-profile failures and bankruptcies. Serious real estate investors did not regard him as a peer. Eventually, banks began to refuse to lend him money. He was ruthlessly skewered by New York publications, most famously by Spy magazine, which called him a “short-fingered vulgarian.” [...]

If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere, the song goes, but Mr. Trump couldn’t make it here — at least not the way he craved — despite being born here and being one of the few people who could afford it.

So it’s easy to understand why he bashes his hometown as a crime-ridden hellscape, and why the Oval Office appealed. Washington offered him political power but also something he may have wanted even more: the respect New York denied him.

David Lerman and Aidan Quigley of Roll Call write that the stage is set for Saturday’s showdown over President Joe Biden-endorsed foreign aid bills for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan that may cost House Speaker Mike Johnson the speaker’s gavel.

Appropriators released three separate bills for Ukraine, Israel, Indo-Pacific allies and the domestic submarine industrial base totaling $95.3 billion.

The contents are similar to the Senate-passed version, with $60.8 billion for the Ukraine war effort, and nearly $26.4 billion in military aid to Israel and humanitarian assistance for Gaza. A third bill, totaling $8.1 billion, would provide nearly $4 billion in security assistance to Taiwan and other regional allies along with money to replenish depleted U.S. stocks, $3.3 billion for submarine infrastructure and more.

But there’s a key difference: Roughly $9.5 billion in economic aid to Ukraine would be structured as a loan, with repayment terms set by the president.

[...]

President Joe Biden signaled he didn’t have any problems with the new set of bills, saying he “strongly” supports the package in a statement Wednesday.

“The House must pass the package this week and the Senate should quickly follow,” Biden said. “I will sign this into law immediately to send a message to the world: We stand with our friends, and we won’t let Iran or Russia succeed.”

Danny Hakim of The New York Times reports that the prosecution of “fake electors” continues to gain steam in multiple affected states.

Georgia, Michigan and Nevada have already brought charges against a total of 25 fake electors, including current and former Republican Party leaders in those states. The Georgia case, led by Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, has gone further, bringing charges against Mr. Trump himself and a number of his advisers.

Investigations are also playing out in Wisconsin as well as in Arizona, where the state attorney general, Kris Mayes, is expected to bring charges soon. Grand jury subpoenas were recently issued to the people who acted as fake electors in Arizona, including Kelli Ward, a former state Republican chairwoman. Mike Roman, a former Trump campaign official who is already facing charges in Georgia, is also among those subpoenaed in the Arizona case.

There are so many state investigations going on that “they all kind of run together,” said Manny Arora, a lawyer for Kenneth Chesebro, an architect of the fake-electors plan who has emerged as a key witness in the investigations.

“Most of the jurisdictions are keeping it local and leaving the big stuff to the feds,” Mr. Arora said, adding that he did not expect most of the state cases to “be quite as sweeping as Georgia.”

Kimberly Atkins Stohr of The Boston Globe concedes that while charging Jan. 6 Capitol rioter Joseph Fischer under 18 U.S. Code § 1512 may be ‘novel’ (but appropriate), charging the shoe salesman under the same statute isn’t novel at all.

Trump wasn’t mentioned by name during the argument. But it seemed clear that his charges were on the mind of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee, when she asked whether the charge would apply to a defendant who tried “to obstruct evidence because he was trying to obstruct the arrival of the (electoral) certificates to the vice president’s desk for counting.”

Joseph Green, the attorney arguing on Fischer’s behalf, replied that his client’s actions were very different from “actually changing a document or altering a document or creating a fake new document.”

Funny — that is exactly what Trump is accused of. Trump may demand loyalty from his supporters, but Fischer’s lawyer was quick to throw Trump under the legal bus to protect his client.

And he has good reason. Charging the rioters under this statute is novel, but charging Trump for his actions in pressuring state officials not to certify the election results, trying to “find” additional votes in his favor, and creating a slate of phony electors in an effort to overturn the will of voters is not. The Justice Department has brought — and won — the same types of charges against those who hid, falsified, and destroyed documents that were a part of an official federal process, as US Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar told the justices. Jack Smith knew exactly what he was doing when he chose this charge among others to include in Trump’s indictment.

Eric Neugeboren of The Nevada Independent touts a Nevada Secretary of State report showing that election fraud is very very very rare in the state of Nevada, of course.

The Nevada Secretary of State’s Office has referred 14 cases of potential election fraud for criminal prosecution since 2020 out of hundreds of reports received and more than 2.4 million votes cast, reinforcing that voter fraud is not widespread in the Silver State, according to a report the office released this week.

In recent years, the office has received a rising number of reports of potential violations of election law, ranging from allegations of people voting twice to voter history discrepancies. These complaints represent a minuscule proportion of total votes cast in the state over that time, and many of them were found to not violate state law, with nine prosecution referrals made from 2020 and five from 2022.

The release of the report, the first of its kind in Nevada, comes seven months before the November general election and years after false allegations of widespread voting fraud spread across Nevada and the rest of the country, fueling the false narrative that former President Donald Trump won the 2020 election. Such claims were key talking points for some Republicans running for statewide positions in 2022.

Mary Jo Pitzl, Stacey Barchenger, and Ray Stern of The Arizona Republic report that while Arizona House Republicans voted down a ban to repeal the 1864 abortion law twice yesterday, the Arizona Senate was able to successfully introduce a repeal bill in their chamber.

The House action was orderly and relied on procedural motions, but the result was clear: There was no appetite among most House Republicans to nullify the law that was revived last week by a 4-2 state Supreme Court ruling.

Rep. Matt Gress of Phoenix was the only Republican who backed the motion from Democratic Rep. Stephanie Stahl Hamilton to bring a repeal up for a vote. But without another Republican, the repeal supporters lacked the 31 votes they needed to surmount objections from House Speaker Ben Toma.

[...]

But in the Senate, Republicans Ken Bennett of Prescott, T.J Shope of Coolidge and Shawnna Bolick of Phoenix joined Democrats to reject three GOP attempts to shut down a vote to introduce a repeal bill. Bolick and Shope then voted with Democrats to introduce the repeal bill.

The measure, which will be called Senate Bill 1734, received its "first read" on Wednesday. That means the bill is active but still needs to work its way through the legislative process. The state constitution requires new bills be heard by each legislative chamber on three separate days, unless lawmakers approve it with a two-thirds majority.

Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution looks at the likely overall political impact of the abortion referenda in multiple states taking place in November.

Since 2022, when the Supreme Court eviscerated Roe in the Dobbs case, we have been undergoing a reluctant national seminar in obstetrics and gynecology. All over the country, legislators—mostly male—are discovering that pregnancy is not simple. Pregnancies go wrong for many reasons, and when they do, the fetus needs to be removed. One of the first to discover this reality was Republican State Representative Neal Collins of South Carolina. He was brought to tears by the story of a South Carolina woman whose water broke just after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Obstetrics lesson #1—a fetus can’t live after the water breaks. But “lawyers advised doctors that they could not remove the fetus, despite that being the recommended medical course of action.” And so, the woman was sent home to miscarry on her own, putting her at risk of losing her uterus and/or getting blood poisoning. [...]

...As these stories accumulate, the issue will continue to have political punch. We have already seen the victory of pro-choice referenda in deep red conservative states like Kansas, Kentucky, Montana, and Ohio; and in swing states like Michigan and in deep blue states like California and Vermont. In an era where almost everything is viewed through a partisan lens, abortion rights transcend partisanship.

[...]

What is the likely political impact? Judging from what we’ve seen so far, these referenda are likely to succeed even in the most conservative states. The question is: What is the likely impact on other races? There are two states, Arizona and Florida, where turnout for the pro-choice referenda could help President Biden. Biden won Arizona last time but by a very small margin. Trump won Florida by just over three percentage points, so putting it in Biden’s column is tougher but not impossible. Besides the presidential, there are Senate races in Arizona, Nevada, and Maryland that could be affected by the abortion referenda. Arizona and Nevada are competitive races. Maryland should be a Democratic seat given how strong Democrats are there, but the popular ex-governor, a moderate non-Trump Republican, is running for Senate, increasing the odds that a Republican could take the seat. Finally, there are seven competitive House seats that could also be affected by turnout for the abortion referenda—two in Arizona, one in Colorado, one in Nebraska, and three in New York. Deep red states like Arkansas, Missouri, and South Dakota don’t have any races that are likely to be so impacted by the abortion referenda that the election outcomes would flip the seats from one party to the other, but any large increase in Democratic-leaning voters could affect races in the future.

Doron Taussig of Columbia Journalism Review notes that nowadays, Republicans are as mistrusting of their local news outlets as they are of national media outlets.

Local news is a darling of the moment in the journalism world. Thinkers and funders have trained their attention on (variously) “saving,” “rebuilding,” and “reinvigorating” journalism that serves communities outside of major cities and the national spotlight. For good reason. The capacity of local news to share useful information across a community (there have been multiple traffic accidents at intersection x), enable civic engagement (neighbors want to install a traffic light), and hold leaders accountable (the mayor used the traffic light money to put a hot tub in town hall) is obvious. What’s more, local news really does need saving. There’s no clear, sustainable revenue model for news outlets that cover zoning-board hearings and water main breaks, and as a result, local newspapers have been dropping like flies or getting caught in the deadly web of private equity ownership. Much of the country is now served by no local news outlet at all.

There’s another reason for local journalism being in fashion: it feels insulated from the ugliness of partisan politics. The most recent Great Hopes of media research and philanthropy, misinformation and disinformation studies, are falling out of favor, perhaps in part because they acquired the familiar stench of polarization. Proponents of local news, however, boast about the trust local news still enjoys, even across party lines. After all, what do high school sports and Girl Scouts building a sensory garden for shelter dogs have to do with Joe Biden and Donald Trump?

But if money and energy are going to be poured into local news with the assumption that local journalists are and will remain trusted across partisan lines, we’re going to be in for an unpleasant surprise. Yes, polling shows that local news is more trusted across the political spectrum than national news, but only 29 percent of Republicans surveyed by Gallup in 2021 said they trusted their local news, down from 34 percent in 2019. This is consistent with what I’ve heard from journalists who work for local outlets (mostly but not exclusively in Pennsylvania) and conservatives who read or have stopped reading them. In fact, the striking thing when you examine the relationship between local news and conservative audiences is that, in spite of all the differences between the Bucks County Courier Times and the New York Times, their alienation from conservatives sounds dishearteningly similar.

Brett Murphy of ProPublica reports that some U.S. State Department personnel are speaking out about Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s failure to act on a report that some Israeli military and police units committed ‘serious human rights abuses’ that took place prior to the Oct. 7 massacre by Hamas.

A special State Department panel recommended months ago that Secretary of State Antony Blinken disqualify multiple Israeli military and police units from receiving U.S. aid after reviewing allegations that they committed serious human rights abuses.

But Blinken has failed to act on the proposal in the face of growing international criticism of the Israeli military’s conduct in Gaza, according to current and former State Department officials.

The incidents under review mostly took place in the West Bank and occurred before Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel. They include reports of extrajudicial killings by the Israeli Border Police; an incident in which a battalion gagged, handcuffed and left an elderly Palestinian American man for dead; and an allegation that interrogators tortured and raped a teenager who had been accused of throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails.

Recommendations for action against Israeli units were sent to Blinken in December, according to one person familiar with the memo. “They’ve been sitting in his briefcase since then,” another official said.

[...]

Multiple State Department officials who have worked on Israeli relations said that Blinken’s inaction has undermined Biden’s public criticism, sending a message to the Israelis that the administration was not willing to take serious steps.

Finally today, Moisés Naím writes for El País in English praising the “regime” of the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons but fears that it may be falling apart.

Eight decades after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, only nine countries currently have nuclear weapons. Perhaps this is the most underappreciated achievement of the past 80 years, and it is a triumph of an entity often scorned and fiercely criticized: the “international community.”

There’s never been any such thing. What we have had, and continue to have, is a formal agreement through which the world’s major powers commit to diligently limit the spread of nuclear technology and to limit their arsenals. This was largely achieved thanks to “the international community,” that is, a group of countries agreeing to work together to achieve goals they could not accomplish acting alone.

Containing proliferation was not easy. Shortly after 1945, the Soviet Union (now Russia), the United Kingdom, France and China became nuclear powers. A more recent group included India, Pakistan and North Korea. Although Israel has not formally acknowledged its status, it is generally assumed that it had a significant number of nuclear weapons. [...]

Unfortunately, despite its successes, the Non-Proliferation regime is weaker today than ever before. The fragmentation of the international arena has increased, making international cooperation increasingly challenging. The Islamic Republic of Iran longs to have a weapon that would perpetuate the theocratic dictatorship in power and provide parity with Israel.

Iran is surrounded by neighbors it can’t get along with, including the very wealthy but ill-governed Saudi Arabia. For the House of Saud, the idea of living just kilometers away from a Shiite theocracy with nuclear weapons is simply intolerable: the pressure for Saudi Arabia to also acquire a nuclear weapon could become overwhelming. Furthermore, if Iran and Saudi Arabia got hold of nuclear weapons, Turkey would also feel pressured to get nuclear weapons. With four nuclear powers all in close proximity and at odds with each other, the risks of sliding into an unimaginable tragedy are enormous.

Have the best possible day everyone!