Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Americana

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 Neal K. Katyal writing for The New York Times that clearly Judge Aileen Cannon’s decision to throw out the classified documents case because of the illegality of special counsels is not based the law and is dangerous.

Since 1966, Congress has had a specific law, Section 515, giving the attorney general the power to commission attorneys “specially retained under authority of the Department of Justice” as “special assistant[s] to the attorney general or special attorney[s].” Another provision in that law said that a lawyer appointed by the attorney general under the law may “conduct any kind of legal proceeding, civil or criminal,” that other U.S. attorneys are “authorized by law to conduct.” [...]

Eight separate judges had already rejected the claim that Judge Cannon has now endorsed (including, by the way, the judge presiding over Hunter Biden’s criminal case). It is true that one Supreme Court justice, Clarence Thomas, recently wrote a concurring opinion in the Trump immunity case questioning the legality of the position of special counsel. No other justice joined that opinion, and even Justice Thomas did not come to the conclusions that Judge Cannon did — he simply raised “essential questions” about the office. And his questions ignored a well-trod tradition in America as well as the statutory landscape.

We’ve had special counsels and special prosecutors since at least the time of President Ulysses Grant after the Civil War. That is for a simple reason: We need a system to police high-level executive branch wrongdoing, and the system can’t be run by the president and his appointees alone.

Chris Geidner of LawDork says that many of the roads as it pertains to what Judge Aileen Cannon does on the law lead, ultimately, back to Chief Justice John Roberts.

Cannon freely rejected past decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court — a little case called U.S. v. Nixon — and U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in which the courts approved acts of independent (or “special”) prosecutors because those courts did not think through the matter as thoroughly as she did “in Chambers at Fort Pierce, Florida, this 15th day of July 2024.”

At the same time, she repeatedly declined to decide several matters because the issues were “muddled” or because “the Court admits of uncertainty in this regard.” When Cannon is discussing the limited tenure of Smith’s appointment in considering whether he is a principal officer (who would need to be nominated and approved by the Senate) or inferior officer (who would not), we get this: “The disposition of these factors is unclear, but they remain in the amalgam of considerations in Supreme Court caselaw.” No, you don’t need to understand what that means. It means nothing.

Dig down a step deeper, however, and the reason for this is clear: Cannon ignores other courts when she thinks there is any possible argument for Trump’s claims, and she waffles to indecision when the weak arguments of Trump and friends are not necessary for her ruling.

And that comes back to Roberts: Where there is no settled law, there is no law.

Heather Digby Parton of Salon points out that Saturday’s attempted assassination of the former president does not fit some aspects of the contemporary American ritual of gun violence.

Donald Trump is a demagogue and there is no one in political life who is more rhetorically violent than he is. With all the talk of lowering the temperature, nobody's mentioned the fact that the most incendiary rhetoric about the event came from Donald Trump himself when he raised his fist and pumped it angrily yelling "fight" repeatedly to his crowd as he was led off the stage. I understand that he was probably in shock but that moment became instantly iconic and it was anything but calm and statesmanlike.

What did Trump mean by that? Was it just another opportunity to look tough, like his glowering expression in his mug shot? Was he hamming it up for the cameras? Or was he once again exhorting his followers to "fight" like they did on January 6? With all the lugubrious handwringing over Biden and the Democrats saying Trump is a threat to democracy, nobody seems to care that his instinct in that horrible moment was to incite more violence. [...]

Saturday's event was the first such act of gun violence in many years that didn't follow the usual ritual of initial horror and wall-to-wall coverage before we quickly move on to the next one. This incident has inspired a totally different narrative. Few are talking about the fact that this was a 20-year-old kid who got a hold of a semi-automatic weapon, apparently owned by his father. Nobody is saying this is a problem of mental health, not easy access to guns. It's a rush to talk about politics and yet we have no evidence, as of yet, that this was a partisan political act at all.

Jon Allsop of Columbia Journalism Review says that for the news media to be blamed for a presidential assassination attempt is nothing new, though the present time is probably unique.

If this sort of reaction seemed telling of a uniquely dark American moment, the reality is, as ever, less exceptional. As far back as 1901, various observers fingered inflammatory newspaper writing as complicit in the assassination of President William McKinley; striking a slightly different note, some Democrats turned on Republicans in the wake of the JFK assassination, as Politico’s Jonathan Martin noted over the weekend. Our social media age undoubtedly eased and accelerated the sharing of recriminations and other forms of invective—not to mention false accusations and conspiracy theories—but the shooting and immediate reaction had very recent echoes, too, just not in America. As I reported in May, some allies of Robert Fico, the press-bashing prime minister of Slovakia, accused elements of the media of having blood on their hands after a gunman tried to assassinate him earlier this year (rhetoric that has since apparently morphed into a legislative clampdown on the press). Last week, Fico, who was seriously injured, returned to his duties and apologized to the “progressive liberal media and opposition” for having survived. Over the weekend, he weighed in on the Trump shooting. “It’s a carbon copy of the script,” he wrote. “Trump’s political opponents are trying to shut him down. When they fail, they incite the public until some poor guy takes up arms.”

Still, the accusations of media complicity in the Trump shooting have perhaps come at a uniquely difficult moment for the mainstream American press, which has been dealing not only with years of media-bashing on the part of Trump and his allies (as well as occasional physical violence) but also, as I wrote recently, widespread financial decline and a palpable (and understandable) sense of disorientation in the face of this toxic political moment. While not at all equivalent to the worst of Trump’s anti-media rhetoric, many allies and supporters of President Biden have recently been sharply critical of parts of the press, too, over their coverage of his age. At an event on Friday, Biden said that “the press” has been “hammering me” while giving Trump a “free pass,” and many of those present booed—a disconcerting sight, even if Biden urged them to stop and described reporters present as “good guys and women.”

Isaac Arnsdorf, Josh Dawsey, and Marianne LeVine of The Washington Post report on the factors that lead Trump to choose Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) to be his running mate as Vice President.

The decision was not purely personal, though the president’s eldest son was a key champion of Vance. Part of Trump’s calculation, according to a person who talked to him, was that he believed the Ohio senator could help win the neighboring states of Pennsylvania and Michigan, which are widely expected to tip the electoral college in November. He also thought Vance was articulate in defending him on TV, this person said — a trait that Trump frequently values, especially for a running mate. Vance allies promoted his ability to appear on right-wing media programs as well as CNN or “Meet the Press.”

“What Trump cares most about is someone who can go on TV and be a fierce surrogate,” said Marc Short, the longtime chief of staff to former vice president Mike Pence.

Even as Vance emerged as the front-runner for Trump’s nod, the former president’s campaign kept his choice secret until Monday’s dramatic reveal. The other finalists, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), weren’t informed of Trump’s decision until midday, according to people familiar with those conversations, who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. A Trump adviser, not the candidate himself, called Burgum and Rubio, according to people familiar with the matter. Vance was told by Trump just 20 minutes before he announced his choice on social media.

John Cassidy of The New Yorker looks at how Trump’s economic platform would affect America if Trump were elected.

Amid all the media coverage of Joe Biden, Trump’s economic platform hasn’t attracted the level of scrutiny that it deserves. In the business community, which would be greatly affected, there seems to be an assumption, based on the experience from 2017 to 2020, that things would work out fine. But a victorious Trump would be inheriting a very different economy than the one he inherited in January of 2017. Back then, interest rates and inflation were low; the unemployment rate was 4.8 per cent; and the budget deficit was 3.1 per cent of G.D.P. Today, interest rates are high, especially for consumer loans and credit-card balances. The labor market is at full employment, and studies suggest that a good deal of recent job growth has depended on immigrants. Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office is projecting the 2024 budget deficit at seven per cent of G.D.P., more than double the level it was at eight years ago. If you put all these things together, there is much less room for damaging policies of the sort associated with Trumponomics.

In a study released last month, Moody’s Analytics, a sister company of the big credit-ratings agency, used its proprietary statistical model of the economy to examine four different policy scenarios tied to election outcomes, ranging from a Trump victory in the Presidential race twinned with a Republican sweep of Congress, to a Biden victory coupled with a Democratic sweep. In the scenario of a Trump win and G.O.P. sweep, Moody’s analysis assumed that Trump would be able to enact virtually his entire economic program next year, including universal tariffs and mass deportations. [...]

In theory, Congress or the courts could rein in some of Trump’s harmful policies. One of Moody’s scenarios examined an electoral outcome in which Trump returns to the White House, but Capitol Hill remains divided. The analysis assumed that, in this environment, a new Trump Administration would raise tariffs by five per cent instead of ten per cent, be somewhat less aggressive in deporting migrants, and be unable to extend the 2017 tax cuts for the rich. Based on these assumptions, the Moody’s model predicted that inflation would remain stuck at three per cent next year, and the Fed would keep interest rates elevated for longer. Consequently, G.D.P. growth would slow to about one per cent, and the unemployment rate would rise to 4.7 per cent. In other words, the Trump economy would stagnate, but the slowdown wouldn’t meet the technical definition of a recession.

Mike Stobbe of the Associated Press reports about the death of former public health official Peter Buxtun, the whistleblower of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment.

Buxtun died May 18 of Alzheimer’s disease in Rocklin, California, according to his attorney, Minna Fernan. [...]

In the mid-1960s, Buxtun was a federal public health employee working in San Francisco when he overheard a co-worker talking about the study. The research wasn’t exactly a secret — about a dozen medical journal articles about it had been published in the previous 20 years. But hardly anyone had raised any concerns about how the experiment was being conducted. [...]

...After learning more about the study, he raised ethical concerns in a 1966 letter to officials at the CDC. In 1967, he was summoned to a meeting in Atlanta, where he was chewed out by agency officials for what they deemed to be impertinence. Repeatedly, agency leaders rejected his complaints and his call for the men in Tuskegee to be treated. [...]

He left the U.S. Public Health Service and attended law school, but the study ate at him. In 1972, he provided documents about the research to Edith Lederer, an AP reporter he had met in San Francisco. Lederer passed the documents to AP investigative reporter Jean Heller, telling her colleague, “I think there might be something here.”

Finally today, Gal Beckerman of The Atlantic writes about the eccentric significance of the lives of sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer and exercise guru Richard Simmons. Both passed July 12, 2024.

Dr. Ruth and Richard Simmons were as brightly colorful as my Saturday-morning cartoons or my bowl of Trix. But looking back at them now as caricatures risks obscuring the subtle revolutions they helped bring about. Dr. Ruth pushed intimate conversations about sex into the open, discussing orgasms and premature ejaculation with Johnny Carson. Simmons took exercise and loving your body from the reserve of the chiseled and gave them to anyone unafraid to twist their hips with him along to the strains of “Great Balls of Fire.”

At the core of their celebrity was a total lack of self-consciousness. They broke taboos, not by judging society for its hang-ups, but by being game to say or do anything—even becoming the butt of the joke themselves. Did they know we were often laughing at them? Probably. But that seemed to be the point; that’s how they broke through. [...]

Today our eccentrics—by which I mean those who push at the boundaries of the acceptable—are more likely to provoke for the sake of provoking, not to expand possibilities but usually out of petty resentment; they are most often trolls. In shorter supply are public figures who act earnestly and gleefully, who use their idiosyncrasies and status as odd outsiders to bring joy to others. Dr. Ruth and Richard Simmons had this quality. They were so kooky, so free in their passions and their readiness to be ridiculous in the face of self-seriousness, that they made the rest of us do what’s usually so hard: drop our guard.

Try to have the best possible day everyone!