Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: It's Election Day across the pond

Abbreviated Pundit Roundup is a long-running series published every morning that collects essential political discussion and analysis around the internet.

We begin with Pippa Crerar of The Guardian speculating on how Labour leader Keir Starmer would govern if, as expected, the Labour Party wins huge majorities in Thursday’s elections in the United Kingdom.

Putting the champagne on ice is not the Labour leader’s style. “It’s definitely not his thing,” says one shadow cabinet minister. “If he’s even tempted to have a drink on election night, it would be somebody handing him a bottle of beer.”

If the polls are accurate, just hours later he will be on his way back from Buckingham Palace to Downing Street, where he will address the nation from outside the famous black door of No 10. [...]

His focus on simply doing what works is also likely to be at the heart of his Labour administration if the party takes power this week. Taken in isolation, some measures may not seem particularly ambitious, even a little dull. But his team insist they will be the building blocks that create something substantial.

“He will govern in the way in which he’s run the Labour party,” says one shadow cabinet minister. “He’s no-drama Starmer. He’s very methodical and analytical. He just gets on with things, he wants to fix problems.”

Tanya Gold of POLITICO Europe examines the reasons that British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was destined for failure.

Sunak was the good Tory who would unite the right after the Truss calamity, and handsome too. He was, at 42, the youngest prime minister in two centuries… [...]

His politics are boiler-plate Thatcherite economics, the vague promise of AI, and pro-Brexit patriotism, which is meaningless if you have no wider vision. Beyond that, he has no answers to Britain’s woes. If he inherited a ruin — which will be his post-election narrative — he has done nothing to rebuild it. The shine of Sunak was only ever his not being someone else: Johnson or Truss.

He has the appearance of propriety — beautiful suits! — but negligible political gifts. He didn’t denounce Johnson and Truss, and he returned David Cameron to the front bench as foreign secretary, stymying the only strategy that might have worked in this election: change. (It handed John Major victory in 1992 after the increasingly unpopular Thatcher was knifed).

By refusing to fight the radical right, Sunak emboldened it. He doesn’t understand how public services work, he can’t delegate responsibility, he appears out of touch because he is. His wife claimed non-domicile tax status which allowed her to avoid paying U.K. taxes, even as he raised taxes for others. He announced the end of the HS2 high speed-rail project, the flagship policy to renew Northern England, while in the northern English city of Manchester. His policy to deport illegal migrants to Rwanda is both cruel and ineffective, and that is a fair measure of a leadership which has alienated everyone.

Not the Aretha shade, chile!

Jason Cowley of New Statesman does a profile of (probable) incoming foreign secretary David Lammy.

Lammy has been rethinking his politics. Working on Tribes unlocked new possibilities for him. If you read the book and his most recent essays and comment pieces on foreign policy, or spend time talking to him or his advisers, as I have in recent months, you get a sense of a politician trying hard to understand the world as it is today, not as it was when Tony Blair heralded the start of a new liberal progressive global order in 1997, or as many on the left would wish it to be. He is not an idealist but nor is he a tragic realist. He locates himself in an older Labour tradition of Clement Attlee, Winston Churchill’s deputy in the wartime coalition, and Ernest Bevin: clear-eyed, practical, pragmatic social democrats whose foreign policy was rooted in patriotism and the economic and social interests of the British people. The Attlee government commissioned Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent and was instrumental in the creation of Nato. [...]

As we spoke in Tottenham, Lammy expressed particular concern about Britain’s relationship with the Global South and at how neglectful, even disrespectful, the Conservative government had been towards the leadership of states such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. “I came into this job as shadow foreign secretary on the tail-end of the pandemic, with a powerful sense from the Global South that Britain has abandoned them and the West has abandoned them.” [...]

As shadow foreign secretary Lammy has made 17 visits to and engaged with 61 governments from the Global South since June 2022. Having made 56 international trips, he is, aides claim, “the most travelled shadow foreign secretary in history”, and yet shadow foreign secretary was a role he was unsure he wanted when Keir Starmer asked him about it in autumn 2021. “I needed time to think about it because I’d not been canvassing for it,” he told me in Washington. “I have young children and there would be a lot of travelling. But Keir said, ‘Look, you’ve just got these incredible networks of contacts and friends across the world. I need you in this role.’”

Motoko Rich of The New York Times writes about concerns that America’s allies have with the presidential immunity ruling handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court.

“If the U.S. president is free from the restrictions of criminal law, if he has that level of criminal immunity, the other leaders of the allied nations cannot trust the U.S.,” said Keigo Komamura, a professor of law at Keio University in Tokyo. “We cannot maintain a stable national security relationship.” [...]

Though some give limited immunity to leaders while in office, Japan, South Korea, Australia and Great Britain — among the United States’ closest allies in the world — offer nothing like the sweeping protections the Supreme Court appears to have granted in its ruling this week.

The court’s decision to give the president immunity from criminal prosecution for official conduct — which was itself vaguely defined by the court — was “out of line with global norms,” said Rosalind Dixon, a professor of law at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. “I think that what is occurring in the United States in terms of the court’s ruling and the presidential election should be of grave concern to all of America’s allies.”

Quinta Jureic and Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare write that the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling is especially reckless with Donald Trump being poised to retake power.

The notion that there is some form of presidential immunity for some official acts—or at least some constitutional limit on Congress’s authority to criminalize the conduct of presidential acts—is not horrible in and of itself. Whether one calls this a limitation on Congress’s legislative authority or calls it a presidential “immunity” is a largely semantic distinction, though it’s a semantic distinction with an important procedural consequence. If we think of this protection for presidential action as merely a constitutional limitation on congressional power, it doesn’t convey an interlocutory appeal to a former president charged with a crime, whereas if we call it an immunity, these issues have to be resolved pretrial.

Had the Court merely contended that there is some irreducible core of presidential conduct that Congress cannot regulate, this likely would have been an uncontroversial decision, perhaps garnering unanimity as even the dissenters seem to concede it. Moreover, it would not either have gravely encumbered the prosecution or handed Trump a loaded weapon should he return to office.

But the Court went a lot further. [...]

The bottom line is that the Court has created a profoundly muddled test that provides woefully insufficient guidance for lower courts—and for Judge Tanya Chutkan’s court in particular. In doing so, the majority also extinguishes whatever vestige of deterrence might have remained for presidents considering using their office as a shield for criminality. The standards set out in this opinion are so vague that an enterprising defendant could contort them in all kinds of ways, particularly given the limitations on inquiry into motive and available evidence. It’s hard to imagine that a president would, in light of this, be much discouraged by the ever-dimmer prospect of criminal liability.

Timothy Noah of The New Republic points out how the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo could, specifically, prevent OSHA from enforcing heat standards and could, generally, tank the economy.

Since Congress never ordered OSHA, when it created the agency in 1970, specifically to write a standard protecting workers from extreme heat—the word “heat” appears nowhere in the statute—business groups will argue that the standard flunks the Loper Bright test. The standard’s defenders will answer in court that OSHA’s founding statute requires it “to set mandatory occupational safety and health standards” and that these should be “reasonably necessary or appropriate.” But who decides what’s “necessary or appropriate”? Before last week, OSHA (mostly) did. Under Loper Bright, a regulation-hating judge can. Let the states decide this, the judge may say, and strike down the standard. Spoiler alert: Red states are already barring local governments from protecting workers from excessive heat.

The heat-injury standard illustrates how Loper Bright may strengthen business’s hand in defeating rules it deems economically harmful (i.e., pretty much all of them). But in weakening the administrative state, Loper Bright will cause much greater economic harm because an economy can’t be strong if it operates without sufficient regulatory guardrails. If, for example, there are no rules to prevent employers from killing workers by exposing them to excessive heat, those employers who address the problem responsibly will be placed at a competitive disadvantage. An economy that requires 40 workers per year to die from heat exposure is not (at least in that respect) strong. It is recognizably backward and weak.

Michael Macagnone of Roll Call reviews, in part, the U.S. Supreme Court docket for next term.

The Supreme Court announced Tuesday it will decide disputes over online access to pornography in Texas, Food and Drug Administration approval of e-cigarettes and a federal sentencing law, adding to the issues it will tackle in the next term that starts in October.

The Texas case, Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, comes from challengers backed by the American Civil Liberties Union and other free speech groups to a state law which requires pornography websites to verify a user’s age before allowing them to access content “harmful to minors.”

The groups said the law places too many burdens on adults’ ability to access adult content to be constitutional, which includes exposing their personal information over the internet. [...]

The court also agreed to decide a dispute over FDA approval of a new e-cigarette product, FDA v. Wages and White Lion Investments. The Biden administration has asked the justices to overturn a 5th Circuit decision which would allow the flavored e-cigarette on the market.

You can find additional cases that the Supreme Court will take up next term at Amy Howe’s post at SCOTUSblog.

Chauncey Devega of Salon does not see a need for Trump to debate President Joe Biden a second time.

Donald Trump was expertly prepared. His team, as I and others have been warning, are not the amateur-hour pretenders that surrounded him during his first campaign and then administration. These are very serious people as seen with Project 2025, Agenda 47, and their other plans to end American democracy on “day one.” Liberal schadenfreude and mockery – the sugar high and empty calories for too many in the so-called “resistance” and liberals in the news media – will not stop these very dangerous and determined professionals.

Trump used classic propaganda and verbal warfare tactics such as consistently labeling his opponent with negative terms that are highly emotional and visual (Biden and the Democrats are “baby killers” and are encouraging an “invasion” by black and brown criminals and lunatics from Latin and South America who are killing Americans). Trump actually believes his lies are true. This makes Trump a very dangerous opponent for an intelligent and reasonable person like President Biden (or anyone else who believes that “fact” and “truth” matter in politics). Trump would use Steve Bannon’s tactic of flooding the zone with waste and the Russian propaganda technique known as “the firehose of falsehoods” to drown and flummox Biden as he literally could not process the absurdities that were coming out of Trump’s mouth with such confidence and speed. [...]

Donald Trump does not need to debate President Biden a second time. Why risk a defeat or underperforming in a second debate? Trump, given his professional wrestling heel instincts and skills as a master propagandist, can even present such a choice as him being benevolent and merciful. Trump could say something like this: “Biden is clearly very weak and old and frail. He was so confused. I felt very bad for him during the debate. It was really no contest. Sleepy Joe needs to go rest. I love the country and want to make America great again. I don’t want to humiliate Sleepy Joe another time. That would be bad for the country. I am very busy putting together great plans about how to fix all the bad things he did to the American people and this great country when I am inaugurated in January.”

Finally, Fenit Nirappil of The Washington Post notes that a summer uptick in COVID-19 infections is now underway.

Coronavirus infections are likely growing in 44 states and territories as of June 25, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Nationally, coronavirus activity in wastewater remains low but is increasing; it is highest and rising most sharply in the West, according to the CDC. June data may be incomplete because of reporting delays. [...]

Nearly two-thirds of infections are caused by KP variants dubbed FLiRT (named after the locations of their mutations, not anything romantic), according to CDC data as of June 22. A similar variant called LB.1, which has an additional mutation than the FLiRT variants, is on the rise and accounted for 17.5 percent of cases.

They are all descendants of the JN.1 variant, which drove the winter wave and was significantly different from the dominant variant that preceded it.

These new variants don’t mark a significant evolutionary leap or seem to cause more severe disease and death.

Have the best possible Independence Day!