“Dead Skunk in The Middle of The Road” – Page 24

I Know What America’s Leading C.E.O.s Really Think of Donald Trump

The New York Times – Guest Opinion

I Know What America’s Leading C.E.O.s Really Think of Donald Trump

By Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld – June 23, 2024

Dr. Sonnenfeld is the president of the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute.

Recent headlines suggest that our nation’s business leaders are embracing the presidential candidate Donald Trump. His campaign would have you believe that our nation’s top chief executives are returning to support Mr. Trump for president, touting declarations of support from some prominent financiers like Steve Schwarzman and David Sacks.

That is far from the truth. They didn’t flock to him before, and they certainly aren’t flocking to him now. Mr. Trump continues to suffer from the lowest level of corporate support in the history of the Republican Party.

I know this because I work with roughly 1,000 chief executives a year, running a school for them, which I started 35 years ago, and I speak with business leaders almost every day. Our surveys show that 60 to 70 percent of them are registered Republicans.

The reality is that the top corporate leaders working today, like many Americans, aren’t entirely comfortable with either Mr. Trump or President Biden. But they largely like — or at least can tolerate — one of them. They truly fear the other.

If you want the most telling data point on corporate America’s lack of enthusiasm for Mr. Trump, look where they are investing their money. Not a single Fortune 100 chief executive has donated to the candidate so far this year, which indicates a major break from overwhelming business and executive support for Republican presidential candidates dating back over a century, to the days of Taft and stretching through Coolidge and the Bushes, all of whom had dozens of major company heads donating to their campaigns.

Mr. Trump secured the White House partly by tapping into the anticorporate, populist messaging of Bernie Sanders, who was then a candidate, a move that Mr. Trump discussed with me when I met him in 2015. The strategy might have won voters but did little to enhance Mr. Trump’s image with the business community. And while a number of chief executives tried to work with Mr. Trump as they would with any incumbent president and many celebrated his move to cut the corporate tax rate, wariness persisted.

Several chief executives resented Mr. Trump’s personal attacks on businesses through divide-and-conquer tactics, meddling and pitting competitors against each other publicly. Scores of them rushed to distance themselves from Mr. Trump’s more provocative stances, resigning en masse from his business advisory councils in 2017 after he equated antiracism activists with white supremacists. Dozens of them openly called for Mr. Trump’s impeachment in 2021 after the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Big business’s relationship and likelihood of future support for Mr. Biden is complicated. The president has also adopted populist stances toward business, though he has chafed at pressure from progressives to be even more combative. Nevertheless, chief executives commonly rail at what they view as excessively restrictive antitrust enforcement and misguided attacks on corporate greed.

But there are pluses in the Biden column as well: investments in infrastructure to rebuild highways and bridges, which will help reduce supply chain disruptions; government support for domestic chip making and electric vehicle production; record corporate profits and exuberant financial markets burying fears of a widely anticipated recession; the successful transformation of the United States into the world’s largest oil and natural gas producer.

And their legitimate misgivings about Mr. Biden are overwhelmed by worries about Mr. Trump, version 2024. Mr. Trump’s primary conduits to the business community in his first term — more-reasonable voices like those of Jared Kushner, Dina Powell and Steven Mnuchin — are gone, replaced by MAGA extremists and junior varsity opportunists.

The MAGA die-hard voices that have Mr. Trump’s ear often have more in common with the far left than with the traditional Republican Party. Mr. Trump and his team are doubling down on some of his most anti-business instincts, including proposing draconian 10 percent tariffs on all imports; unorthodox monetary and fiscal policies, including stripping the Federal Reserve Board of its independence; possibly putting in place yield curve control to force interest rates lower; and devaluing the dollar — all of which would drive inflation much higher. These Trump positions have more in common with Karl Marx than Adam Smith.

With two or three prominent exceptions, most business voices now hanging around the hoop would normally be in the minor leagues of Republican business supporters. The party must long for the days of President Dwight Eisenhower, when there were so many business leaders in support and fully 60 percent of his cabinet were chief executives.

As such, it was hardly surprising that just as when Mr. Trump faced a chilly reaction from hundreds of top executives when he spoke at my Yale Chief Executive summit in 2005, he appeared to face a similarly frigid reception when he spoke to the Business Roundtable this month, with no noticeable applause at any point during his “remarkably meandering” remarks, according to CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin, and with Mr. Trump assuming a subdued, if not hostile, posture. Chief executives are not protectionist, isolationist or xenophobic, and they believe in investing where there is the rule of law, not the law of rulers.

That there are more Fortune 100 chief executives based in the smallest state in the nation, Rhode Island — and there’s exactly one Fortune 100 chief executive who is based there — than currently support Mr. Trump tells you how truly isolated the Republican presidential candidate is from the halls of big business.

Putin Has Tainted Russian Greatness

The New York Times – Opinion

Putin Has Tainted Russian Greatness

By Serge Schemann – June 20, 2024

Crowds of people pack the Red Square in Moscow. One person waves a huge flag with Vladimir Putin’s face on it. — Credit…Maxim Shipenkov/EPA, via Shutterstock

Serge Schmemann is a member of the editorial board and the author of a book about Russia, “Echoes of a Native Land.”Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Russia? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

Many years ago, in the 1980s, I went to Brighton Beach, then in its heyday as a district of newly arrived Soviet Jews, to celebrate the first year (there would not be many more) of the lively local Russian-language weekly, The New American. It was a grand event, rich in humor and tinged with nostalgia. I asked a middle-aged partygoer for his thoughts on his lost homeland, and his reply has stayed with me: “I hate Russia, for forcing me to leave her.”

It was an apt summary of what waves of émigrés from Russia and the Soviet Union since the early 20th century have felt: a sorrowful sense of loss for a motherland — what Russians call “toska po rodine” — coupled with resentment at the autocratic powers that forced them out. My grandparents were among the “White” Russians who fled the Revolution and moved to Paris in the 1920s. A second wave of emigrants left in World War II. The third, Soviet Jews, started leaving in the 1970s. Vladimir Putin has now created another wave of people fleeing Russia, and many of them may still believe, as my forebears did, that they will one day return to the homeland.

Most probably will not.

It’s hard to say precisely where Russian exiles stand, politically or in their sense of attachment to Russia. The waves of emigrants differ widely one from another, and in the United States, they have not behaved like immigrants from Italy, China or Poland who formed hyphenated-American communities and organizations that have persisted over generations. Russian immigrants to America have, by comparison, melded quickly into the general population. Brighton Beach is one of the few places with any Russian flavor in the United States.

Still, the prevailing attitude I’ve encountered among Russian émigrés is the love-hate expressed by my interlocutor in Brighton Beach. It’s the love of an extraordinary culture, a deep attachment to the expanse of steppes and taiga, along with contempt for the chronic misrule, adventurism, imperial illusions and corruption of the leaders.

At least, that was the attitude before Feb. 24, 2022, when Mr. Putin ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Now, I more often encounter, and feel, a new attitude: shame.Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.

The émigrés I grew up with, and those I came to know in America and as a reporter in Israel, rarely felt troubled by the sins of their motherland. Why would they? There were no politics in the usual sense in the Russia they came from, no sense among the vast majority of the population that they had any say in what their self-perpetuating leaders did for them or to them from behind the Kremlin ramparts. The Gulag was not their doing; their Russia was the culture, the scramble for scarce goods, the anecdotes told around vodka in steamy kitchens, the shashlik by a lazy river. Most Russians concentrated on protecting their lives from “them,” as people in the Soviet Union would refer to the leadership and its secret police, a finger pointed to the ceiling, and to survive. Or leave.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine — so cruel, so pointless, so devastating — has changed all this, at least for those not mesmerized by Mr. Putin’s recidivist claptrap. It’s hard not to feel shame at the evidence of Russians killing and raping people who did them no wrong, people who share so much of their history and culture.

And it has become difficult to feel pride in all the things that Russians can genuinely boast about — the great books, the Bolshoi, the hockey stars, the spirituality — when Mr. Putin is dispatching waves of boys to kill and die for his false version of Russia’s manifest destiny and his personal grievances against the West.

This is not necessarily a logical reaction. Tolstoy or Tchaikovsky are not to blame for Mariupol. And most Russians are not directly complicit in Mr. Putin’s malice. But Mr. Putin rose to power pledging to restore greatness to Russia, and the key to that is the desire among ordinary Russians to feel, again, a sense of belonging to a globally respected power. Russians may have been too caught up in Mr. Putin’s chimera to recognize that the seizure of Crimea or the incursions into Donetsk and Luhansk were a precursor of much worse.

When the Russian tanks began their grim parade toward Kyiv on Feb. 24, 2022, Russians, too, were in shock. “We, the Russians living inside and outside of the country, will have to bear the shame of this situation for years to come,” wrote Anastasia Piatakhina Giré, a psychotherapist in Paris, shortly after the invasion. She grew up in the Soviet Union, and many of her patients are displaced Russians. “We can do very little to turn down the volume of this feeling, no matter how many Ukrainian flags we display on our social media feeds or either publicly or privately in our daily lives.”

A year later, another expatriate, Anastasia Edel, the author of “Russia: Putin’s Playground: Empire, Revolution and the New Tsar,” wrote a syndicated column about trying to come to grips with the shame and confusion: “As someone who was shaped by Russian and Soviet literature, I have been made to feel like an unwilling partner to Russian crimes. That is why, since last February, I have abandoned any pretense of being a cultural envoy. I have been an envoy of nothing — just another immigrant who came to America in search of a better life.”

That is the tragic irony of Mr. Putin’s war. His attempt to “restore Russian greatness” through violence and hatred has tainted Russia’s real greatness for years to come, just as his attempt to quash Ukrainian nationhood has steeled its foundations. We know from the Germans’ postwar history that restoring a battered national identity is a project of decades, maybe more.

In the end, Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky will survive, as did Goethe and Bach, and Ukraine will be rebuilt and incorporated more closely in the West. But for Russians and those of us who identify even a little bit as Russian, something elemental has been destroyed, and a lot of painful soul-searching lies ahead.

How the US supreme court could be a key election issue: ‘They’ve grown too powerful’

The Guardian

How the US supreme court could be a key election issue: ‘They’ve grown too powerful’

David Smith in Washington – June 15, 2024

<span>Activists call for the passage of a binding code of ethics for Supreme Court justices in front of the supreme court in Washington DC on 30 October 2023.</span><span>Photograph: Shawn Thew/EPA-EFE</span> — Activists call for the passage of a binding code of ethics for Supreme Court justices in front of the supreme court in Washington DC on 30 October 2023.Photograph: Shawn Thew/EPA-EFE

“Look at me, look at me,” said Martha-Ann Alito. “I’m German, from Germany. My heritage is German. You come after me, I’m gonna give it back to you.”

It was a bizarre outburst from the wife of a justice on America’s highest court. Secretly recorded by a liberal activist, Martha-Ann Alito complained about a neighbour’s gay pride flag and expressed a desire to fly a Sacred Heart of Jesus flag in protest.

This, along with audio clips of Justice Samuel Alito himself and a stream of ethics violations, have deepened public concerns that the supreme court is playing by its own rules. The Democratic representative Jamie Raskin has described a “national clamour over this crisis of legitimacy” at the court.

A poll last month for the progressive advocacy organisation Stand Up America suggests that the supreme court will now play a crucial role in voters’ choices in the 2024 election. Nearly three in four voters said the selection and confirmation of justices will be an important consideration for them in voting for both president and senator in November.

Reed Galen, a co-founder of the Lincoln Project, a pro-democracy group, said: “The idea that these guys act as if they are kings ruling from above, to me, should absolutely be an issue. It was always Republicans who said we hate unelected judges legislating from the bench and we hate judicial activism. That’s all this stuff is.”

Public trust in the court is at an all-time low amid concerns over bias and corruption. Alito has rejected demands that he recuse himself from a case considering presidential immunity after flags similar to those carried by 6 January 2021 rioters flew over his homes in Virginia and New Jersey. Justice Clarence Thomas has ignored calls to step aside because of the role his wife, Ginni, played in supporting efforts to overturn Donald Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in 2020.

Ethical standards have been under scrutiny following revelations that some justices failed to report luxury trips, including on private jets, and property deals. Last week Thomas, who has come under criticism for failing to disclose gifts from the businessman and Republican donor Harlan Crow, revised his 2019 form to acknowledge he accepted “food and lodging” at a Bali hotel and at a California club.

These controversies have been compounded by historic and hugely divisive decisions. The fall of Roe v Wade, ending the nationwide right to abortion after half a century, was seen by many Democrats as a gamechanger in terms of people making a connection between the court and their everyday lives.

Even though debate among members of Congress would lead you to believe that court reform is a polarising issue, it really isn’t
Maggie Jo Buchanan, managing director of Demand Justice

There are further signs of the debate moving beyond the Washington bubble. Last week, the editorial board of the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper argued that, since the court’s own ethics code proved toothless, Congress should enact legislation that holds supreme court justices to higher ethical standards. The paper called for the local senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, who is chair of the Senate judiciary committee, to hold a hearing on the issue.

Maggie Jo Buchanan, managing director of the pressure group Demand Justice, said: “It’s important to keep in mind that, even though debate among members of Congress would lead you to believe that court reform is a polarising issue, it really isn’t. For years we have seen broad bipartisan support for basic supreme court reforms such as ethics.

“A broad bipartisan consensus exists that they’ve grown too powerful, that they have too much power over laws and regulations. That’s shared among nearly three-fourths of Americans, including 80% of independents, so the demand is there and this isn’t something where it’s Democrats versus Republicans in the sense of real people. The American people want change and want to check the judiciary.”

Congressional Democrats have introduced various bills including one to create an independent ethics office and internal investigations counsel within the supreme court. Broader progressive ideas include expanding the number of seats on the court or limiting the justices to 18-year terms rather than lifetime appointments.

But such efforts have been repeatedly thwarted by Republicans, who over decades impressed on their base the importance of the court, ultimately leading to a 6-3 conservative majority including three Trump appointees.

This week Senate Republicans blocked the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act, legislation that would require the court to adopt a binding code of conduct for all justices, establish procedures to investigate complaints of judicial misconduct and adopt rules to disclose gifts, travel and income received by them that are at least as rigorous as congressional disclosure rules.

In response, Christina Harvey, executive director of Stand Up America, said its “nearly 2 million members are fired up and ready to continue advocating for supreme court reform – in Congress and at the ballot box”.

But Galen of the Lincoln Project worries that Democrats lack the necessary aggression to capitalise on the issue. “[Senate majority leader Chuck] Schumer and Durbin are not change agents. They consider themselves institutionalists and they continue to call themselves that. They’re in a place where they can’t possibly conceive of something like that. Democrats are just afraid of their own shadow.”

That principle might apply to the US president himself. The 81-year-old, who served in the Senate for 36 years, is reluctant to call out justices by name or call for sweeping reforms of the court, although he is making its decision to end the constitutional right to abortion a centrepiece of his campaign.

Ed Fallone, an associate law professor at Marquette University Law School said: “I don’t know that Joe Biden is the politician to try and benefit from this issue. Biden has always presented himself as an institutionalist and more of a centrist than many segments of the Democratic party.

“There’s a real risk here for Biden because, if he does try to get political advantage from the public’s growing concern about the supreme court, it seems to conflict with his message that we should all respect the court system and the judicial system and the Trump prosecutions and the various legal problems of former Trump advisers. It seems difficult to reconcile telling the public to respect the judicial system with also embracing the idea that the very top of the system is flawed and needs reform.”

Fallone added: “You will see other Democrats seize on this issue and start to push it, in particular those who are are going to try to energise the left side of the base, maybe not necessarily for this election, but maybe anticipating Biden might lose and starting already to look ahead to the following election.”

Other argue that, competing for voter attention with the cost of living, immigration and other issues, the supreme court will ultimately fade into background noise.

Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center think-tank in Washington DC, said: “The middle of the country, the independents and the swing voters do not care about the supreme court, and I don’t think any effort by Democrats or the media bringing up these things about Alito or Thomas is going to register or motivate those people. It motivates partisans. It doesn’t motivate swing voters on either side.”

SOTUS takes another swipe at our Democratic Administrative State, while handing the NRA another weapon of mass destruction: Supreme Court strikes down Trump-era ban on bump stocks, gun accessories used in 2017 Vegas massacre

Associated Press

Supreme Court strikes down Trump-era ban on bump stocks, gun accessories used in 2017 Vegas massacre

Lindsay Whitehurst – June 14, 2024

FILE – A bump stock is displayed in Harrisonburg, Va., on March 15, 2019. The Supreme Court has struck down a Trump-era ban on bump stocks, a gun accessory that allows semi-automatic weapons to fire rapidly like machine guns. (AP Photo/Steve Helber, File)

The Supreme Court building is seen on Thursday, June 13, 2024, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Friday struck down a Trump-era ban on bump stocks, a gun accessory that allows semiautomatic weapons to fire rapidly like machine guns and was used in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

The high court’s conservative majority found that the Trump administration did not follow federal law when it reversed course and banned bump stocks after a gunman in Las Vegas attacked a country music festival with assault rifles in 2017. The gunman fired more than 1,000 rounds in the crowd in 11 minutes, leaving 60 people dead and injuring hundreds more.

The 6-3 majority opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas said a semiautomatic rifle with a bump stock is not an illegal machine gun because it doesn’t make the weapon fire more than one shot with a single pull of the trigger.

“A bump stock merely reduces the amount of time that elapses between separate functions of the trigger,” Thomas wrote in an opinion that contained multiple drawings of guns’ firing mechanisms.

He was joined by fellow conservatives John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Alito wrote a short separate opinion to stress that Congress can change the law to equate bump stocks with machine guns.

In a dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed to the Las Vegas gunman. “In murdering so many people so quickly, he did not rely on a quick trigger finger. Instead, he relied on bump stocks,” she said, reading a summary of her dissent aloud in the courtroom.

Sotomayor said that it’s “deeply regrettable” Congress has to act but that she hopes it does.

The ruling came after a Texas gun shop owner challenged the ban, arguing the Justice Department wrongly classified the accessories as illegal machine guns.

The Biden administration said that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives made the right choice for the gun accessories, which can allow weapons to fire at a rate of hundreds of rounds a minute.

It marked the latest gun case to come before the high court. A conservative supermajority handed down a landmark decision expanding gun rights in 2022 and is weighing another gun case challenging a federal law intended to keep guns away from people under domestic violence restraining orders.

The arguments in the bump stock case, though, were more about whether the ATF had overstepped its authority than the Second Amendment.

Justices from the court’s liberal wing suggested it was “common sense” that anything capable of unleashing a “torrent of bullets” was a machine gun under federal law. Conservative justices, though, raised questions about why Congress had not acted to ban bump stocks, as well as the effects of the ATF changing its mind a decade after declaring the accessories legal.

The high court took up the case after a split among lower courts over bump stocks, which were invented in the early 2000s. Under Republican President George W. Bush and Democrat Barack Obama, the ATF decided that bump stocks didn’t transform semiautomatic weapons into machine guns. The agency reversed those decisions at Trump’s urging after the shooting in Las Vegas and another mass shooting at a Parkland, Florida, high school that left 17 dead.

Bump stocks are accessories that replace a rifle’s stock, the part that rests against the shoulder. They harness the gun’s recoil energy so that the trigger bumps against the shooter’s stationary finger, allowing the gun to fire at a rate comparable to a traditional machine gun. Fifteen states and the District of Columbia have their own bans on bump stocks.

The plaintiff, Texas gun shop owner and military veteran Michael Cargill, was represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a group funded by conservative donors like the Koch network. His attorneys acknowledged that bump stocks allow for rapid fire but argued that they are different because the shooter has to put in more effort to keep the gun firing.

Government lawyers countered the effort required from the shooter is small and doesn’t make a legal difference. The Justice Department said the ATF changed its mind on bump stocks after doing a more in-depth examination spurred by the Las Vegas shooting and came to the right conclusion.

There were about 520,000 bump stocks in circulation when the ban went into effect in 2019, requiring people to either surrender or destroy them, at a combined estimated loss of $100 million, the plaintiffs said in court documents.

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Follow the AP’s coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court at https://apnews.com/hub/us-supreme-court.

Supreme Court Overturns Ban On Gun-Enhancing Bump Stock Devices

HuffPost

Supreme Court Overturns Ban On Gun-Enhancing Bump Stock Devices

Roque Planas – June 14, 2024

The Supreme Court Fridayoverturned a federal agency’s rule banning bump stocks, the devices used in some of America’s deadliest mass killings carried out by lone shooters.

Plaintiff Michael Cargill, an Austin, Texas, gun store owner, did not claim that the Second Amendment protected his right to own a bump stock. The case focused narrowly on the administrative process by which the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) banned bump stocks, which harness a firearm’s recoil to achieve rates of firing that approach those of automatic weapons.

An employee of a gun store in Raleigh, North Carolina, demonstrates how a bump stock works on Feb. 1, 2013. The gun accessory makes semiautomatic weapons fire faster. Allen Breed/Associated Press

But the ruling in Garland v. Cargill deals a heavy blow to gun reformers, who viewed a ban on bump stocks as a commonsense response to the massacre at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival in Las Vegas on Oct. 1, 2017, when a single shooter fired more than 1,000 rounds into a concert crowd, killing 60 people and injuring 850 more.

After the shooting, a broad consensus formed that bump stocks, a small segment of the overall firearms industry, should be banned.

Congress, however, did not move swiftly to ban bump stocks in the aftermath of the Las Vegas shooting. Instead, then-President Donald Trump directed the ATF to restrict the devices.

The bureau issued a rule in 2018 reclassifying bump stocks as machine guns, making them illegal for civilians to own under federal law.

Clarence Thomas took additional undisclosed trips paid for by GOP megadonor, Senate committee says

NBC News

Clarence Thomas took additional undisclosed trips paid for by GOP megadonor, Senate committee says

Zoë Richards and Lawrence Hurley – June 13, 2024

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was given additional undisclosed trips by a GOP megadonor that were not included in his financial disclosure forms, according to documents the Senate Judiciary Committee released Thursday.

Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., who chairs the Judiciary Committee, released records about gifts of private jet travel provided by Thomas’ billionaire friend, Harlan Crow, that included plane trips in 2017, 2019 and 2021.

“As a result of our investigation and subpoena authorization, we are providing the American public greater clarity on the extent of ethical lapses by Supreme Court justices and the need for ethics reform,” Durbin s aid in a s tatement.

The documents were released a day after Republicans blocked Democrats’ attempt to pass Supreme Court ethics legislation that the committee advanced nearly a year ago.

In a statement Thursday, Crow’s office said he had reached an agreement with the Judiciary Committee to provide information dating back seven years.

“Despite his serious and continued concerns about the legality and necessity of the inquiry, Mr. Crow engaged in good faith with the Committee,” his office said. “As a condition of this agreement, the Committee agreed to end its probe with respect to Mr. Crow.”

A spokesperson for Durbin told NBC News in a statement that the committee “reached an agreement with Mr. Crow for information and materials that was sufficient for compliance with the Committee’s request and subpoena authorization.”

An attorney for Thomas defended his disclosure practices.

“The information that Harlan Crow provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee fell under the ‘personal hospitality exemption’ and was not required to be disclosed by Justice Thomas,” attorney Elliot S. Berke said in a statement Thursday, adding that the Judicial Conference — the administrative office of the U.S. courts — “changed this provision last year, and Justice Thomas has fully complied with the new disclosure requirement.”

Thomas last week acknowledged a pair of trips in 2019 with Crow in his annual financial disclosure report that correspond to trips ProPublica reported last year.

The response from Berke echoed Thomas’ statement last year that referred to the undisclosed travel as “personal hospitality from close personal friends,” not business.

Democrats on the Judiciary Committee cited a statute Thursday detailing financial disclosure requirements for federal personnel, which says that “food, lodging, or entertainment received as personal hospitality of an individual need not be reported,” while contending that the law requires disclosing travel given as gifts. They said they planned to release a report on their investigation of Supreme Court ethics this summer.

A Supreme Court spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday about the travel records the committee released.

Let’s Talk About Trump’s Gibberish

The Atlantic

Let’s Talk About Trump’s Gibberish

What the former president’s shark tirade says about American politics and media

By Tom Nichols – June 12, 2024

Wearing a red MAGA hat and a blue suit with a flag lapel pin, Trump speaks into a microphone at his recent rally in Las Vegas. — Eric Thayer / The Washington Post / Getty

Perhaps the greatest trick Donald Trump ever pulled was convincing millions of people—and the American media—to treat his lapses into fantasies and gibberish as a normal, meaningful form of oratory. But Trump is not a normal person, and his speeches are not normal political events.

For too long, Trump has gotten away with pretending that his emotional issues are just part of some offbeat New York charm or an expression of his enthusiasm for public performance. But Trump is obviously unfit—and something is profoundly wrong with a political environment in which he can now say almost anything, no matter how weird, and his comments will get a couple of days of coverage and then a shrug, as if to say: Another day, another Trump rant about sharks.

Wait, what?

Yes, sharks. In Las Vegas on Sunday, Trump went off-script—I have to assume that no competent speechwriter would have drafted this—and riffed on the important question of how to electrocute a shark while one attacks. He had been talking, he claims, to someone about electric boats: “I say, ‘What would happen if the boat sank from its weight and you’re in the boat, and you have this tremendously powerful battery, and the battery’s now underwater, and there’s a shark that’s approximately 10 yards over there?’”

Read: Trump rants about sharks and everyone just pretends it’s normal

As usual, Trump noted how much he impressed his interlocutor with his very smart hypothetical: “And he said, ‘Nobody ever asks this question,’ and it must be because of MIT, my relationship to MIT. Very smart.” (MIT? Trump’s uncle taught there and retired over a half century ago, when Trump was in his 20s, and died in 1985. Trump often implies that his uncle passed on MIT’s brainpower by genetic osmosis or something.)

This ramble went on for a bit longer, until Trump made it clear that given his choice, he’d rather be zapped instead of eaten: “But you know what I’d do if there was a shark or you get electrocuted? I’ll take electrocution every single time. I’m not getting near the shark. So we’re going to end that, we’re going to end it for boats, we’re going to end it for trucks.”

Hopefully, this puts to rest any pressing questions among Americans about the presumptive Republican nominee’s feelings on electric vehicles and their relationship to at least two gruesome ways to die.

Sure, it seems funny—Haha! Uncle Don is telling that crazy shark story again!—until we remember that this man wants to return to a position where he would hold America’s secrets, be responsible for the execution of our laws, and preside as the commander in chief of the most powerful military in the world. A moment that seems like oddball humor should, in fact, terrify any American voter, because this behavior in anyone else would be an instant disqualification for any political office, let alone the presidency. (Actually, a delusional, rambling felon known to have owned weapons would likely fail a security check for even a visit to the Oval Office.)

Nor was the Vegas monologue the first time: Trump for years has fallen off one verbal cliff after another, with barely a ripple in the national consciousness. I am not a psychiatrist, and I am not diagnosing Trump with anything. I am, however, a man who has lived on this Earth for more than 60 years, and I know someone who has serious emotional problems when I see them played out in front of me, over and over. The 45th president is a disturbed person. He cannot be trusted with any position of responsibility—and especially not with a nuclear arsenal of more than 1,500 weapons. One wrong move could lead to global incineration.

Why hasn’t there been more sustained and serious attention paid to Trump’s emotional state?

First, Trump’s target audience is used to him. Watch the silence that descends over the crowds at such moments; when Trump wanders off into the recesses of his own mind, they chit-chat or check their phones or look around, waiting for him to come back and offer them an applause line. For them, it’s all just part of the show.

George T. Conway III: Unfit for office

Second, Trump’s staff tries to put just enough policy fiber into Trump’s nutty verbal soufflés that they can always sell a talking point later, as if his off-ramps from reality are merely tiny bumps in otherwise sensible speeches. Trump himself occasionally seems surprised when these policy nuggets pop up in a speech; when reading the teleprompter, he sometimes adds comments such as “so true, so true,” perhaps because he’s encountering someone else’s words for the first time and agreeing with them. Thus, they will later claim that questions about sharks or long-dead uncles are just bad-faith distractions from substance. (These are the same Republicans who claim that every verbal stumble from Joe Biden indicates full-blown dementia.)

Third, and perhaps most concerning in terms of public discussion, many people in the media have fallen under the spell of the Jedi hand-waves from Trump and his people that none of this is as disturbing and weird as it sounds. The refs have been worked: A significant segment of the media—and even the Democratic Party—has bought into a Republican narrative that asking whether Trump is mentally unstable is somehow biased and elitist, the kind of thing that could only occur to Beltway mandarins who don’t understand how the candidate talks to normal people.

Such objections are mendacious nonsense and represent a massive double standard. As Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post wrote today: “It is irresponsible to obsess over President Biden’s tendency to mangle a couple of words in a speech while Donald Trump is out there sounding detached from reality.” Biden’s mush-mouthed moments fall well within the range of normal gaffes. Had he or any other American politician said anything even remotely like one of Trump’s bizarre digressions, we’d be flooded with front-page stories about it. Pundits would be solemnly calling for a Much Needed National Conversation about the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.

It is long past time for anyone who isn’t in the Trump base to admit, and to keep talking about, something that has been obvious for years: Donald Trump is unstable. Some of these problems were evident when he first ran, and we now know from revelations by many of his former staff that his problems processing information and staying tethered to reality are not part of some hammy act.

Worse, the people who once managed Trump’s cognitive and emotional issues are gone, never to return. A second Trump White House will be staffed with the bottom of the barrel—the opportunists and hangers-on willing to work for a reprehensible man. His Oval Office will be empty of responsible and experienced public servants if the day comes when someone has to explain to him why war might be about to erupt on the Korean peninsula or why the Russian or Chinese nuclear forces have gone on alert, and he starts talking about frying sharks with boat batteries.

The 45th president is deeply unwell. It is long past time for Americans, including those in public life, to recognize his inability to serve as the 47th.

Merrick Garland held in contempt of US Congress

BBC News

Merrick Garland held in contempt of US Congress

Sam Cabral – BBC News, Washington – June 12, 2024

Merrick Garland testifies to the US House Judiciary Committee on 4 June — [Getty Images]

The US House of Representatives voted on Wednesday to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress.

The Republican-controlled chamber passed its resolution by a 216-207 vote, with only one Republican siding with the united Democratic opposition.

Mr Garland refused to turn over interview tapes from a justice department probe of President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents.

Reacting to the contempt vote, he said House Republicans had “turned a serious congressional authority into a partisan weapon”.

“Today’s vote disregards the constitutional separation of powers, the Justice Department’s need to protect its investigations, and the substantial amount of information we have provided to the Committees,” he wrote in a statement.

America’s top law enforcement officer now becomes only the third attorney general in US history, and fourth sitting cabinet member overall, to be held in contempt of Congress.

The contempt resolution recommends that the justice department make a decision on whether or not to criminally prosecute Mr Garland.

Under federal law, contempt is a misdemeanour charge punishable by up to one year in jail and a $100,000 (£78,000) fine. Steve Bannon, an ally of former President Donald Trump, faces four months behind bars over a contempt citation, while former Trump aide Peter Navarro is already serving time on his own charge.

But Wednesday’s vote functions as a partisan exercise given that a justice department prosecutor would almost certainly not pursue criminal charges against the head of their own agency.

Attorneys General William Barr and Eric Holder, who respectively served the preceding Republican and Democratic administrations, also were held in contempt of Congress along partisan lines. Neither faced criminal charges.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, however, described the vote as “a significant step in maintaining the integrity of our oversight processes and responsibilities”.

Moderate Ohio lawmaker David Joyce was the lone Republican to oppose the resolution, as did all 206 Democrats present for the vote.

“As a former prosecutor, I cannot in good conscience support a resolution that would further politicize our judicial system to score political points,” he said in a statement.

The push to hold Mr Garland in contempt follows a year-long inquiry by Special Counsel Robert Hur into Mr Biden’s retention of classified documents after he served as vice-president.

Mr Biden was vice-president from 2009-17 in Barack Obama’s administration.

In a lengthy report released in February, Mr Hur concluded that no criminal charges were warranted, though Mr Biden appeared to have “willfully” retained classified materials as a private citizen.

The Garland-appointed prosecutor noted he believed prosecutors would struggle to secure a conviction against Mr Biden, as jurors likely would view him as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”.

That characterisation came after the president sat for five hours of interviews, spanning two days last October, with Mr Hur’s team.

He said that Mr Biden was unable to recall certain details relevant to the investigation, as well as milestones in his own life such as the years of his vice-presidency and when his oldest son, Beau, died from cancer.

The report’s release sparked a political firestorm, highlighting for critics one of the president’s biggest weaknesses – voter concerns about his age and lucidity – in the midst of his bid for re-election.

Lawyers for Mr Biden disputed descriptions of the interview, accusing Mr Hur of using “highly prejudicial language to describe a commonplace occurrence among witnesses: a lack of recall of years-old events”.

In March, Mr Garland provided congressional Republicans with a full transcript of the interview – but he has resisted their subpoenas demanding audio recordings of the conversation.

On his advice, the president last month invoked “executive privilege” to block congressional Republicans from accessing tapes of the interview. The legal doctrine grants presidents the right to withhold executive branch information from the other two branches of government.

Mr Garland argued that turning them over could “chill cooperation with the department in future investigations”.

In testimony before Congress last week, he slammed Republicans’ contempt measure as “only the most recent in a long line of attacks” on his agency’s work.

Republicans claim the Biden administration has “weaponised” the justice department against its political opponents – largely a reference to the criminal prosecutions of former President Donald Trump.

This is despite the fact Mr Garland’s justice department has also prosecuted Mr Biden’s son, Hunter, and two sitting Democratic members of Congress.

In a Washington Post opinion piece on Tuesday, the attorney general wrote that “the Justice Department is under attack like never before”.

He cited a rise in “conspiracy theories, falsehoods, violence and threats of violence” towards department officials by Republican critics”.

“The short-term political benefits of those tactics will never make up for the long-term cost to our country,” he said.

CNN Host Literally Shows Receipts While Brutally Fact Checking GOP Rep

Daily Beast

CNN Host Literally Shows Receipts While Brutally Fact Checking GOP Rep

William Vaillancourt – June 12, 2024

CNN anchor Boris Sanchez came prepared Wednesday during an interview with Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-WI), fact-checking several false claims relating to the impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden and at one point holding up a blown-up copy of a check that the congressman was referencing to try to make his case.

On CNN News Central, Tiffany called for Biden to be held “accountable,” even as House Republicans have struggled to name any specific illicit actions worthy of impeaching the Democratic president.

When Sanchez asked what specific charges he would like to see brought, Tiffany referenced Hunter Biden’s overseas business dealings, but declined to mention that the time period he cited came after the elder Biden was vice president—and when he did not hold government office at all.

Tiffany insisted that Biden “has a check in the amount of $40,000 that has his name on it.”

“You’ve got another $200,000 check that came from Jim and Sarah Biden to him,” he said, as Sanchez held up a copy of that very check from 2018.

“Sir, I have that check right here,” Sanchez said, noting the year. “And it actually says that this was a reimbursement. This was a loan repayment from his brother.”

Tiffany then shifted gears.

“So, you can make the case that the Bidens did not do this while Joe Biden was vice president, but I think it’s contrary to record,” he asserted, despite having just been shown the date on the check.

Tiffany then claimed incorrectly that when Biden was vice president, he “called off the prosecutor in Ukraine in regards to the Burisma investigation”—a reference to the Ukrainian energy company that his son Hunter was once a board member on.

That wasn’t true, as Sanchez noted.

“Oh, sir, that has been debunked,” he said. “That prosecutor was unanimously disliked by both Republicans and Democrats. And even EU officials said that he was corrupt and they wanted him out.”

Rachel Maddow Shows Donald Trump’s Shift From ‘Incoherent’ To ‘Pornographically Violent’

HuffPost

Rachel Maddow Shows Donald Trump’s Shift From ‘Incoherent’ To ‘Pornographically Violent’

Lee Moran – June 12, 2024

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Tuesday slammed Donald Trump, saying the former president is now “really, really, frequently incoherent.”

“And when he’s not incoherent, he’s speaking in terms that are pornographically violent when he is trying to rile up his audience,” Maddow told network colleague Nicolle Wallace on the latter’s “Deadline: White House” show.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Vbf7oH3of5M%3Frel%3D0

The presumptive GOP presidential nominee “speaks in ways that I think would be shocking to a lot of the public if people could stand to listen to him for longer than they do and if news organizations could responsibly broadcast him more than we do, but we responsibly often can’t because of the lies and threats that he’s floating,” Maddow noted.

Talking about Trump’s ramblings on sharks and electrocution during a campaign rally in Las Vegas last weekend, Maddow said he’ll now double down on them and Republicans will fall in line.

It’s “hilarious as it is scary,” she said.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=QnxsO8rFLxc%3Frel%3D0%26start%3D600