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      Immunity ruling likely to gut parts of criminal prosecution against Trump

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      The US supreme court’s decision on Monday to confer broad immunity to former presidents is likely to eviscerate numerous parts of the criminal prosecution against Donald Trump over his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.The court remanded the case back to the presiding US district judge Tanya Chutkan to apply a three-part test to decide which actions were protected – but Chief Justice John Roberts pre-emptively made clear that some were definitively out.On some of the closer calls, Roberts also gave suggestions on behalf of the majority conservative opinion, which could bear on Chutkan when she eventually weighs each allegation line by line and decides whether it can be introduced in any future trial.Most crucially for the special counsel, Jack Smith, his prosecutors will not be able to introduce as evidence any acts deemed to be official and struck from the case, even as contextual information for jurors to show Trump’s intent.Trump is accused of overseeing a sprawling effort to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election, including two counts of conspiring to obstruct the certification of the election results, conspiring to defraud the government, and conspiring to disenfranchise voters.The alleged illegal conduct came in five categories: Trump pressuring US justice department officials to open sham investigations into election fraud, Trump pressing his vice-president to return him to the White House, Trump trying to obstruct Congress from certifying the election, Trump giving a speech that led rioters to storm the US Capitol building, and Trump’s plot to recruit fake electors .Roberts undercut at least three of the five alleged categories in the opinion.Trump’s interactions with justice department officials, including his threats to fire the then attorney general Jeffrey Rosen and the then acting deputy attorney general Richard Donoghue, were absolutely immune because overseeing the department was a core function, Roberts found.As for Trump’s interactions with Pence, including pressuring him to reject electoral votes for Joe Biden in Congress on January 6, were presumptively immune because presidential discussions about vice-presidential responsibility were part of the job.The remaining allegations, about Trump’s other attempts to obstruct Congress’s certification, Trump’s speech that led rioters to storm the US Capitol building, and his efforts to organize fake slates of electors in part by spreading false claims, were left up to Chutkan.View image in fullscreenBut even then, Roberts weighed in on a key conspiracy charge against Trump: obstruction of an official proceeding before Congress.In the first footnote in the majority opinion, Roberts instructed Chutkan to apply the supreme court’s determination in a previous, related ruling about the applicability of the obstruction statute when prosecuting January 6-related crimes.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe ruling in Fischer v United States, handed down last week, held that the obstruction statute could only be used to prosecute crimes that impaired the integrity or the availability of documents.The footnote appeared to be a clear warning to Chutkan that she could not use Trump calling up Republican members of Congress on January 6 and pressuring them to continue delaying the certification of the election results after the Capitol riot temporarily halted proceedings.After all is said and done, prosecutors may be left with only Trump’s plot to recruit fake electors – which is in many ways a circumstantial case about the extent of his personal knowledge – Trump’s speech on January 6, and some private conversations.The biggest blow to prosecutors may be the inability to present any of the official acts at trial, but the reasoning for it was not revolutionary.In many ways, the new rule set by the supreme court that precluded evidence cannot be brought at trial, mirrored how federal courts apply other privilege protections, such as the so-called speech and debate clause that makes acts by members of Congress done in an official capacity immune from prosecution.Under the speech and debate clause, protected communications do not come into contextual evidence because they are litigated out during the criminal investigation stage on a line-by-line basis. They are never even presented to a grand jury when it considers indicting a defendant. More

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      Sotomayor says immunity ruling makes a president ‘king above the law’

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      In a stark dissent from the conservative-majority US supreme court’s opinion granting Donald Trump some immunity from criminal prosecution, the liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor said the decision was a “mockery” that makes a president a “king above the law”.The court ruled Monday that Trump cannot be prosecuted for “official acts” he took while president, setting up tests for which of the federal criminal charges over his attempt to subvert the 2020 election are considered official and sending the case back to a lower court to decide.“Today’s decision to grant former Presidents criminal immunity reshapes the institution of the Presidency,” Sotomayor wrote in dissent. “It makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law.”Sotomayor, writing in a scathing tone, said the court would effectively allow presidents to commit clear crimes without punishment, an expansion of presidential powers that puts democracy at risk. She and fellow liberal justice Ketanji Brown Jackson lay out hypothetical ways the court’s ruling could create crises in the US.“The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution,” Sotomayor wrote.“Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.“Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today.“Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done. The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”Until now, presidents have operated under the assumption that their actions were not immune from criminal prosecution if they used their office, and the trappings of their office, to commit crimes, she writes. But going forward, presidents won’t be so concerned.“With fear for our democracy, I dissent,” she concluded.Jackson wrote a separate dissent, though noted that she “agree[s] with every word of her powerful dissent,” and wanted to lay out the “theoretical nuts and bolts of what, exactly, the majority has done today to alter the paradigm of accountability for Presidents of the United States”.The ruling changes the balance of power among the three branches of government and gets rid of the ability to deter presidents from abusing their power, “to the detriment of us all”, Jackson wrote. The “practical consequences” of the majority decision “are a five-alarm fire that threatens to consume democratic self-governance and the normal operations of our Government”.In a footnote in her dissent, Jackson games out the “oddity” of deciding whether a president is immune from prosecution based on the character of a president’s powers.“While the President may have the authority to decide to remove the Attorney General, for example, the question here is whether the President has the option to remove the Attorney General by, say, poisoning him to death,” Jackson wrote. “Put another way, the issue here is not whether the President has exclusive removal power, but whether a generally applicable criminal law prohibiting murder can restrict how the President exercises that authority.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhile the majority opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, claims it hems in presidential immunity in some ways, Sotomayor takes that idea to task. The majority opinion is an “embrace of the most far-reaching view of Presidential immunity on offer”. No one has claimed that purely private acts would be immune from prosecution, she writes, making their exclusion an “unremarkable proposition”.The court effectively expanded what is considered an official act in a way that will capture events beyond a presidential’s core duties and ensnare unofficial acts, she claims. And a prohibition on bringing up these official acts during a prosecution of unofficial acts “deprives these prosecutions of any teeth”.She lays out an example: “For instance, the majority struggles with classifying whether a President’s speech is in his capacity as President (official act) or as a candidate (unofficial act). Imagine a President states in an official speech that he intends to stop a political rival from passing legislation that he opposes, no matter what it takes to do so (official act). He then hires a private hitman to murder that political rival (unofficial act). Under the majority’s rule, the murder indictment could include no allegation of the President’s public admission of premeditated intent to support the mens rea of murder. That is a strange result, to say the least.”The majority wrote that immunity is necessary because it allows the nation’s top elected official to execute his duties “fearlessly and fairly” and take “bold and unhesitating action” without the threat of looming prosecution. But, Sotomayor hits back, it’s more dangerous for a president to feel empowered to break the law.“I am deeply troubled by the idea, inherent in the majority’s opinion, that our Nation loses something valuable when the President is forced to operate within the confines of federal criminal law.”The testy dissent was replete with digs at the conservative-dominated court, which, aided by justices Trump appointed when he was in office, now counts just three liberal justices and has moved the country further to the right in recent years as a result.Sotomayor directs readers to “feel free to skip over those pages of the majority’s opinion” about one area in the conservatives’ arguments. She said the majority “invents an atextual, ahistorical, and unjustifiable immunity that puts the President above the law”. The conservatives relied on “little more than its own misguided wisdom”, she wrote. She added that “it seems history matters to this Court only when it is convenient.”“In sum, the majority today endorses an expansive vision of Presidential immunity that was never recognized by the Founders, any sitting President, the Executive Branch, or even President Trump’s lawyers, until now. Settled understandings of the Constitution are of little use to the majority in this case, and so it ignores them,” she wrote. More

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      in US Politics

      Republicans hail Trump immunity ruling as Democrats warn ‘we will not have a democracy’

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      While Republicans applauded the supreme court’s decision to grant Donald Trump immunity for official acts undertaken as president, Democratic leaders expressed outrage over a ruling that legal experts warn could undermine the foundations of US democracy.The court’s six conservative justices ruled that presidents have “absolute immunity” for official acts but no immunity from unofficial acts. The distinction could hamper the federal case against Trump over his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, and makes it even less likely that the case will go to trial before election day in November.Trump celebrated the ruling as a “big win for our constitution and democracy” – a view echoed by the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson.“Today’s ruling by the court is a victory for former President Trump and all future presidents, and another defeat for President Biden’s weaponized Department of Justice and Jack Smith,” Johnson said.“As President Trump has repeatedly said, the American people, not President Biden’s bureaucrats, will decide the November 5 election.”Jim Jordan, the Republican chair of the House judiciary committee, weighed in as well. “Hyper-partisan prosecutors like Jack Smith cannot weaponize the rule of law to go after the administration’s chief political rival, and we hope that the left will stop its attacks on President Trump and uphold democratic norms,” Jordan said.Democrats, meanwhile, condemned the decision as a disgrace, describing it as an attack on the separation of powers and a black mark on the supreme court’s reputation.“This is a sad day for America and a sad day for our democracy,” said Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate majority leader.“This disgraceful decision by the Maga supreme court – which is comprised of three justices appointed by Mr Trump himself – enables the former president to weaken our democracy by breaking the law. This decision undermines the credibility of the supreme court, and suggests that political influence trumps all in our courts today.”Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic leader, said the ruling “sets a dangerous precedent for the future of our nation”, adding: “The Framers of the constitution envisioned a democracy governed by the rule of law and the consent of the American people. They did not intend for our nation to be ruled by a king or monarch who could act with absolute impunity.”Legal experts voiced similar concerns about the ruling’s implications, highlighting liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor’s warning that the decision could enable a future president to claim immunity for blatantly illegal acts such as ordering the assassination of a political rival or organizing a military coup to stay in power.“Scotus’s immunity decision will in time rank as among the court’s worst decisions in its many year history,” Claire Finkelstein, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said. “Any US president can now violate the law to remain in power as long as he cloaks it in the trappings of his office.”Joyce Alene, a law professor at the University of Alabama, concluded: “It’s up to American voters. We held Trump accountable at the polls in 2020 [and] must do it again in 2024. Because the supreme court won’t.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJoe Biden’s campaign team agreed that the ruling only heightened the stakes of the presidential race, and they urged voters to reject Trump in November to avoid a repeat of the violence seen on 6 January 2021.On a Biden campaign press call, the congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, a Texas Democrat, said the ruling underscored how Trump’s re-election would endanger Americans’ fundamental freedoms.“We’re talking about reproductive freedom, freedom to access the ballot box, freedom to love who you want, freedom of press, freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom to live the life you want to live,” Crockett said. “We can’t underestimate Donald Trump’s threat or his dark vision for our future.”Harry Dunn, a former US Capitol police officer who working during the January 6 insurrection, told reporters that the ruling amplified Trump’s status as “the single greatest threat to our democracy”.“We don’t need nine supreme court justices to tell me that Donald Trump was responsible for January 6,” Dunn said. “I was there. Those people that attacked us, they attacked us in his name on his orders.”Congressman Dan Goldman, a Democrat from New York who previously served as lead majority counsel in Trump’s first impeachment inquiry, went even further by framing Trump’s re-election as “far and away the biggest threat since the civil war”.Goldman said: “If Joe Biden is not elected in November, we will not have a democracy that we have known for 250 years.” More

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      in Elections

      US supreme court weakens statute cited by January 6 prosecutors

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      Conservative bloc
      Alito – Majority
      Barrett – Minority
      Gorsuch – Majority
      Kavanaugh – Majority
      Roberts – Majority
      Thomas – Majority
      Liberal bloc
      Jackson – Majority
      Kagan – Minority
      Sotomayor – Minority
      The US supreme court has narrowed the statute that prosecutors have relied in the cases over hundreds of rioters who took part in the January 6 Capitol attack for obstruction of an official proceeding – in a ruling with profound implications for hundreds of other participants on that day in 2021.The 6-3 ruling in the case of Fischer v United States could also affect the federal criminal case against Donald Trump, who is charged with similar offences in special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the assault. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson joined the conservative justices in the case, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing the majority opinion. Conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote a dissenting opinion joined by Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.More details soon… More

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      The abortion ruling hides conservative justices’ partisan agenda | Moira Donegan

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      The supreme court is a messy institution. It’s six conservative justices are mired in infighting over both the pace of their shared ideological project of remaking American law and life according to rightwing preferences, and over their preferred methodological course for doing so. Their squabbling is not helped by the fact that two of them, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, keep embarrassing the court with gauche public scandals, which draw attention to the court’s legitimacy crises like a vulgar flag waving above One First Street. For their part, the liberals are exhausted, impotent, and at times apparently publicly despairing. Their dissents have sometimes taken on tones of exasperation and peeved sarcasm, as if they’re turning to the country and asking: “Can you believe this?” Their most senior member, Sonia Sotomayor, recently told an interviewer that over the past several terms, since the court’s conservative supermajority was sealed under the Trump administration, she has sometimes gone into her chambers after the announcement of major decisions and wept. She says she anticipates having to do so again: in one recent dissent, she warned ominously about the future of gay marriage rights.The court’s partisans like to point out that it controls neither the military nor the federal budget; the court’s legitimacy, they say, comes merely from the fact that people believe it to be legitimate. But increasingly, many of them don’t. The court’s approval rating remains at record lows, and the justices’ conduct over the past several years has punctured the mystique of scholarly seriousness that the institution once pretended to. They don’t seem like wise legal scholars, carefully and dispassionately deliberating the merits of competing interests and claims. Instead, they seem more like a bunch of bumbling partisan hacks – perhaps just more cynical and less clever than the average Republican operatives stuffed into suits throughout DC.The court did not appear particularly competent, for instance, when on Wednesday, a draft opinion in Moyle v United States, was briefly uploaded to the court’s web page. The case concerns Idaho, which has one of the most extreme and sadistic anti-choice legal regimes in the nation, and asks whether states’ attempts to ban abortions even in cases of medical emergencies can be preempted by Emtala, a federal law regulating emergency rooms. After it was uploaded, the opinion was quickly taken down; in a statement, a supreme court spokesperson said that the opinion had been uploaded briefly by mistake. By then, Bloomberg news had already obtained the full text of the draft, and it was published soon thereafter.This makes the third time in recent memory that an opinion in a high-profile supreme court case was leaked before its official release. The first was when Justice Alito reportedly told a conservative movement activist friend of his upcoming decision in 2014’s Burwell v Hobby Lobby, a case that struck down the Affordable Care Act’s contraception coverage mandate for religious employers; the second was when the draft of Alito’s majority opinion in Dobbs was leaked to Politico almost two full months before it was ultimately issued by the court. All three of these leaks have been in cases pertaining to women’s reproductive rights.But if the court is bumbling in their functioning, embarrassing in their public personas, and obviously fractious in their internal relations, then the leaked order in Moyle also shows that the conservative majority can be quite calculating in their political strategy. In the draft decision, issued per curium (that is, unsigned), the court dismisses the case as improvidently granted, and sends it back down to the lower courts. They include the restoration of a lower court order that had allowed emergency abortions to continue in Idaho hospitals while the case proceeds. For now, that means that women experiencing failing pregnancies in Idaho will still be able to get the care they need to preserve their health, their fertility and their lives; hopefully, emergency room doctors there will feel safe enough to actually perform the procedures, and patients will no longer have to be air lifted out of state to receive the routine care that will stabilize them. That’s what’s most important for the American public: that for the time being, lives will not be needlessly lost in service to the anti-choice agenda.But to the court’s conservative majority, what seems to be most important is pushing the abortion issue – and an inevitable ruling that eventually will allow states to ban emergency abortions – past the November election. The decision in Moyle was transparently a compromise between the court’s three liberals, who wanted to preserve women’s lives, and the three more pragmatic conservatives – John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – who wanted to preserve Donald Trump’s electoral chances. These conservatives know that a ruling saying that states can allow women to bleed out, suffer septic infections, have seizures from eclampsia, lose the function of their uterus, and ultimately die – out of deference to preserving what by then are already doomed, futile pregnancies – would hurt Republican candidates in this November’s elections. That doesn’t mean they don’t want to issue such a murderous ruling; it means that they want to do so at a more politically convenient moment.So three of the court’s conservatives are acting like Republican political strategists, working to conceal their own legal agenda in order to minimize harm to their preferred party in an election year. That would be bad enough. But not all of the court’s conservatives can exercise even this degree of cynical, self-interested restraint. Although the order was issued per curium, Alito dissented, arguing that the state ban on emergency abortions should be enforceable under federal law; he was joined by Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. Some of his reasoning was echoed by Barrett, whose concurrence, studded with handwringing concerns as to whether Emtala sufficiently protected the conscience rights of anti-abortion doctors and whether it could preempt a state criminal law, read like a road map for anti-choice lawyers seeking to re-argue the issue at a later, more politically amenable time. (Another sign of the court’s dysfunction – how often opinions are now accompanied by a flurry of dissents and concurrences, with each of the justices seemingly very eager to publicly distinguish their own thinking from that of their colleagues.)Together, their writings made it clear that though the court’s conservatives are split – sometimes fiercely and peevishly so – over how fast to proceed, they agree over their ultimate goal: one day, probably sooner than we think, this case will come back, and the supreme court will allow states to ban emergency abortions. What follows will be blood on their hands. More

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      Most Americans have no idea how anti-worker the US supreme court has become | Steven Greenhouse

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      Under Chief Justice John Roberts, the supreme court has been supremely pro-corporate – one study even called the Roberts court “the most pro-business court in history”. Not only have many justices been groomed and vetted by the business-backed Federalist Society, but Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have taken lavish favors from billionaire corporate titans. Thomas has even spoken at two Koch network fundraising “donor summits”, gatherings of rightwing, ultra-wealthy business barons.While the court is decidedly pro-corporate, most Americans probably don’t know just how anti-worker and anti-union it really is. The justices have often shown a stunning callousness toward workers, and that means a callousness toward average Americans. One of the most egregious examples was a 2014 ruling – with an opinion written by Thomas – that held that Amazon, which holds workers up to 25 minutes after the ends of their shifts waiting to be screened to ensure they didn’t steal anything, doesn’t have to pay them for that time.Or take this month’s decision in which the court ruled in favor of Starbucks by making it harder for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to win rapid reinstatement of workers who are illegally fired for supporting a union. In that case, Starbucks fired five of the six baristas who were heading an effort to unionize a Memphis Starbucks. After NLRB officials found that the workers had been fired unlawfully for backing a union, a federal judge agreed to the NLRB’s request to issue an injunction to quickly reinstate them. Many labor relations experts say it’s important for the NLRB to be able to win quick reinstatement after companies fire workers who lead unionization drives, as Starbucks has repeatedly done, because those firings often terrify co-workers and cause union drives to collapse.Writing the court’s majority opinion, Thomas ignored all that, oblivious to the injustices and suffering that many workers face when they exercise their right to form a union. Thomas said that federal judges, when issuing such injunctions, should follow a more exacting four-part test, rather than the worker-friendly two-part test the NLRB favored. Thomas’s opinion also ignored some glaring facts: the union has accused Starbucks of firing 150 pro-union baristas, and the NLRB has accused Starbucks of an astoundingly high number of violations of the law – 436 – in its efforts to block unionization.In contrast to Thomas, Ketanji Brown Jackson, in a partial concurrence and partial dissent, acknowledged the injustices and delays that pro-union workers often face. She wrote that “Congress, in enacting the National Labor Relations Act, recognized that delay in vindicating labor rights ‘during the “notoriously glacial” course of NLRB proceedings’ can lead to their defeat”. Jackson noted that the litigation over reinstating the Memphis baristas had dragged on for two years. (It was dismaying that Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor signed Thomas’s soulless, unsympathetic majority opinion rather than Jackson’s.)A 2022 study found that of the 57 justices who have sat on the court over the past century, the six justices with the most pro-business voting records are the six members of today’s 6-3, rightwing super-majority, all appointed by Republican presidents: Thomas, Alito, Roberts, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. The study found that Donald Trump’s three appointees – Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett – were the three most pro-business justices of the 57 evaluated. (That study also found that the court’s Democratic appointees at the time – Kagan, Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer – were among the top 20 pro-business justices.)All this is a far cry from when some justices were true champions of workers. Arthur Goldberg had been the general counsel of the United Steelworkers and served as secretary of labor under John F Kennedy. Justice William J Brennan Jr, whose father was a union official, was famous for going to bat for workers. As a lawyer, Louis Brandeis filed famous, detailed supreme court briefs in cases that sought to uphold pro-worker laws.In sharp contrast, today’s conservative judges seem to almost reflexively rule against workers and unions. They seem to view workers and unions as unwelcome nuisances that are seeking to make life difficult for corporations as they pursue their noble mission of maximizing their profits and share prices.Take the court’s 5-4 Epic Systems ruling of 2018. Gorsuch’s majority opinion blessed corporations’ efforts to prohibit workers from filing class-action lawsuits. It instead let employers require employees to pursue their grievances through individual, closed-door arbitrations, which greatly favor employers, according to various studies. Because lawyers are far less willing to take individual worker cases than class actions, Epic Systems gutted workers’ ability to vindicate their rights against sexual harassment, racial discrimination and wage theft.In her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called the majority opinion “egregiously wrong”. She also said the ruling would result in “huge under-enforcement of federal and state statutes designed to advance the wellbeing of vulnerable workers”. Ginsburg added that it’s difficult and potentially perilous to pursue small claims individually. “By joining hands in litigation,” she wrote, “workers can spread the costs of litigation and reduce the risk of employer retaliation.”Another case that showed shocking insensitivity toward workers’ concerns was the 2007 Lilly Ledbetter case. Ledbetter was a supervisor at a Goodyear tire plant in Alabama, where for years she earned substantially less than the 16 men at the same management level. That pay discrimination was hidden from her, and she learned of it only after more than 15 years on the job. Alito wrote the court’s inflexible, unsympathetic 5-4 majority opinion, ruling that her case should be thrown out because she had failed to file her complaint within 180 days after her pay was set, as the law called for.Ginsburg angrily dissented, writing that the ruling “is totally at odds with the robust protection against workplace discrimination Congress intended Title VII to secure”. Ginsburg added that Alito’s majority opinion “does not comprehend, or is indifferent to, the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination”.There have been some recent anti-union cases. Last year, in Glacier Northwest, the court made it easier for corporations to sue unions for any financial damage they suffer when workers go on strike – a ruling that could discourage workers from using their most powerful form of leverage. In 2021, in the Cedar Point Nursery case, the court put property rights far above worker rights and union rights when it overturned part of a California law, inspired by Cesar Chavez, that granted union organizers a right to go on farm owners’ property to speak with farm workers.By far the most important anti-union decision in recent years was Janus v. AFSCME, a 5-4 ruling, written by Alito, in which the court held that requiring government employees to pay fees to their union violated their first amendment rights. That ruling allowed any federal, state or local government employees to opt out of paying union fees – and was immediately seen as a blow that would weaken unions and their treasuries. Ten minutes after the court issued that decision, then president Trump tweeted: “Big loss for the coffers of the Democrats!”The Janus case was underwritten by rightwing foundations and billionaire corporate powerhouses, including Richard Uihlein and the Koch Brothers. (Remember, Clarence Thomas attended their “donor summits”.)The supreme court’s approval ratings have fallen to a record low. Many Americans think the court is corrupt and has lost its way – its justices take all-expenses-paid vacations with billionaires, fail to disclose gifts, ignore blatant conflicts of interest, and one justice’s home hung an upside-down flag apparently showing sympathy for Trump’s “Stop the Steal” movement.One easy step the court can take to begin an effort to regain respect and popularity would be to be stop ruling so often in favor of multibillion corporations and instead side with workers, eg typical Americans – and with labor unions, institutions that fight to improve the lives of average Americans. It just might help, and would further the cause of justice, if the court were to show that it cares more about embattled workers than about billionaires and faceless corporations.
      Steven Greenhouse, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, is an American labor and workplace journalist and writer More

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      Biden and Trump arrive in Atlanta to face off in first 2024 election debate – live

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      A private plane carrying Donald Trump has touched down in Atlanta ahead of tonight’s debate.The former president’s plane was greeted by a group of his supporters on the tarmac.It could be the moment when a rematch that few seem to want finally comes to life: like two ageing prizefighters, Joe Biden and Donald Trump will enter the arena of political bloodsport on Thursday evening to resume a verbal sparring bout that will revive memories of the ugly exchanges when the two debated face to face four years ago.A CNN studio in Atlanta will host the first presidential debate of the campaign between the same two candidates who contested the last election, which Biden won.With more than four months to go until polling day in November, it is the earliest in any US presidential campaign that a debate between the two main candidates has ever been staged.While some see the timing as premature, it could provide a chance to open up a contest that has become overshadowed by, among other things, Trump’s recent felony conviction, as well as assorted other legal travails that see him facing 54 criminal charges for trying to overturn the last election and for retaining classified documents.Both candidates are deeply unpopular: Trump because his opponents see him as an aspiring dictator who threatens democracy, Biden because, at 81 (although just three years older than his Republican opponent), he is viewed – even among many Democrats – as too old for another term as president.Knife-edge polls indicate a race essentially tied, with a national polling average for May and June showing the candidates at 46% each.Polls in seven key battleground states – Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina – give Trump a narrow advantage, though usually within the margin of error.NBC News’ Sahil Kapur writes that the debate hall is right next to the Kappa Sigma fraternity house at Georgia Tech, which is currently hosting a party under a sign that reads “Make America DRUNK Again”.A private plane carrying Donald Trump has touched down in Atlanta ahead of tonight’s debate.The former president’s plane was greeted by a group of his supporters on the tarmac.It is not clear if Melania Trump, the former first lady, will join her husband at tonight’s debate.Melania Trump’s office did not return a request for comment about whether she would be in Atlanta during the presidential debate, according the New York Times.The former first lady has largely been absent from the campaign trail this year, and she notably did not attend Trump’s criminal hush money trial in New York.Donald Trump Jr, Trump’s eldest child, will not attend the debate due to a family commitment involving his oldest daughter, according to NBC News, citing a source.Trump’s second son, Eric Trump, is not expected to be in Atlanta for the debate, but Eric’s wife, Lara Trump, will attend in her official capacity as Republican National Committee (RNC) chair, NBC reports.Jill Biden, the first lady, will be in Atlanta for tonight’s debate, according to the Biden campaign.Jill Biden is expected to be the only Biden family member in attendance, according to the New York Times.She is expected to watch the debate from a separate hold room on the debate campus.After the debate, Biden and his wife are scheduled to stop by a nearby Democratic watch party, before flying to Raleigh overnight.Candidates traditionally bring along their family members for support during a debate. Less common: bringing a member of your opponent’s family for support.On Thursday night, Donald Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, will be in the post-debate spin room making the case for Joe Biden.Mary Trump, one of the former president’s harshest critics, has warned that her uncle is a threat to democracy and should not be re-elected.She did not hold back. In a statement, she said:
      I’m in Atlanta tonight to remind everyone who Donald is as a person and how he would rule as a president because the stakes are far too high for us to get this wrong: We cannot afford to allow Donald Trump anywhere near the levers of power again. Donald cannot be trusted and we must recognize that his last administration was simply a warm-up for much worse to come just as January 6th was a dress rehearsal for a man who will stop at nothing to ascend, once again, to this country’s highest office. He is desperate for power and has shown himself both unworthy of wielding it and obsessed with regaining it purely for his own benefit. He must be stopped.
      Joining Mary Trump in the spin-room – a chaotic room where campaign staff and surrogates try to persuade reporters that their candidate won the debate – will be:
      Keisha Lance-Bottoms, former Atlanta mayor and a senior advisor on the Biden-Harris campaign
      Texas congresswoman Jasmine Crockett
      California governor Gavin Newsom
      California congressman Robert Garcia
      Former Louisiana congressman Cedric Richmond
      Georgia senator Raphael Warnock
      Joe Biden and Donald Trump will debate on Thursday for the first time this election cycle and it holds the potential for some history-making moments.Debates can inform voters on both the issues and temperaments of the candidates, potentially swaying an undecided voter toward one candidate’s direction. They can also make for good TV, creating soundbites that resonate for decades to come.From the candidates’ physical appearances to gaffes to planned attacks to off-the-cuff retorts, here are some memorable moments from US presidential debate history.The White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) has released a statement complaining that CNN rejected its request to include a pool reporter inside the studio during tonight’s presidential debate.The WHCA “is deeply concerned that CNN has rejected our repeated requests to include the White House travel pool inside the studio”, a statement by WHCA president and NBC correspondent Kelly O’Donnell reads.The debate, which is being held on a closed set, will not feature an audience. Print pool photographers will be present for the entirety of the debate, while one print pool reporter will be permitted to enter during commercial breaks, according to CNN.The letter says:
      That is not sufficient in our view and diminishes a core principle of presidential coverage. The White House pool has a duty to document, report and witness the president’s events and his movements on behalf of the American people.
      Donald Trump is on his way to Atlanta, where he is scheduled to land in about an hour.Trump aide Margo Martin, in a post to X, shared a video of the former president boarding his plane.Joe Biden has arrived in Atlanta ahead of tonight’s presidential debate, where he was greeted by a crowd of supporters who chanted “four more years” and “let’s go Joe”, according to a pool report.While on Air Force One en route to Georgia, Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House’s press secretary was asked how the president feels about “standing toe to toe with his main adversary tonight”.According to the Washington Post, replied:
      He likes to fight. He likes to fight for the American people.
      US district judge Aileen Cannon, who is presiding over Donald Trump’s classified documents case, has granted a request from the former president’s defense team to hold a hearing to challenge some of the evidence gathered against him.Cannon said she would schedule a hearing to consider whether prosecutors had improperly obtained the cooperation of Trump’s lawyers through an exception to attorney-client privilege.From my colleague Hugo Lowell:But Judge Cannon also denied a defense request for a hearing on a separate claim that FBI officials had submitted false or misleading information to obtain a warrant to search Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate for classified documents.The supreme court’s ruling earlier today to allow Idaho hospitals to provide emergency abortions – for now – has left key questions unanswered and could mean a final decision is delayed to beyond the November elections.A draft decision in the case was briefly posted on the court’s website yesterday and abruptly removed. The final version of the decision published today appeared to closely resemble the draft.Responding to the order, Joe Biden said the ruling ensures that Idaho women can get the care they need while the case continues to play out, adding:
      Doctors should be able to practice medicine. Patients should be able to get the care they need.
      The White House’s press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said:
      No woman should be denied care or wait until she’s near death or forced to flee her home state just to receive the healthcare she needs.
      Merrick Garland, the attorney general, said the justice department will continue pressing its case and using “every available tool to ensure that women in every state have access to that care”. His statement reads:
      Today’s order means that, while we continue to litigate our case, women in Idaho will once again have access to the emergency care guaranteed to them under federal law.
      Donald Trump has appeared to share his talking points for tonight’s debate on his Truth Social platform.The post shows what appears to be a set of recommendations from Andrew Wheeler, Trump’s former Environmental Protection Agency chief.Wheeler, in the post, advises Trump to pledge to reduce carbon emissions and to point out that Joe Biden rejoined the Paris climate accord, and “all that does is send American dollars overseas”.Ammar Moussa, a Biden campaign spokesperson, shared Trump’s talking points on Twitter/X, writing:
      Donald Trump is just posting his debate talking points. Thanks I guess.
      Robert F Kennedy Jr’s angerand frustration at what he describes as his exclusion from the debate despite six qualifying polls and confirmed ballot access in five states – with Democratic legal challenges to his inclusion in five more, including one in New Jersey under the state’s “sore loser law” – comes as Democrats accuse him of being a political stooge for Republicans.Biden supporters worry Kennedy’s famous name and his history of environmental advocacy could sway voters from the left.His family members are largely against his candidacy, which they have made clear in public statements and by visiting the Biden White House en masse on St Patrick’s Day in March.But Republicans also have not welcomed his quixotic intervention in a tight race that could serve to siphon off vital votes from both candidates.Donald Trump has described him as “far more LIBERAL than anyone running as a Democrat, including West and Stein”, referring to third-party candidates Cornel West and Jill Stein.Robert F Kennedy Jr, the independent US presidential candidate polling at about 8%, won’t be at tonight’s Biden-Trump TV smackdown in Atlanta.But he’s not taking the diss quietly, and has accused debate host CNN of colluding with the major party campaigns to exclude him.In an email statement on Wednesday, the Kennedy campaign claimed that 71% of Americans want to see him on the debate stage, and in an act of counter-programming he plans an alternative “real” debate on Elon’s Musk’s Twitter/X platform at the same time.“The American people want leaders who trust them to make up their own minds,” Kennedy said.
      Instead, our last two presidents are restricting voters from choosing anyone other than themselves. Presidents Biden and Trump have sucked trillions of dollars from the pockets of working people and Americans deserve to hear from the one candidate who can hold them to account. More

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      The US supreme court just basically legalized bribery | Moira Donegan

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      Did you know you could give your local government officials tips when they do things you like? Brett Kavanaugh thinks you can. In fact, if you’re rich enough, says the US supreme court, you can now pay off state and local officials for government acts that fit your policy preferences or advance your interests. You can give them lavish gifts, send them on vacations, or simply cut them checks. You can do all of this so long as the cash, gifts or other “gratuities” are provided after the service, and not before it – and so long as a plausible deniability of the meaning and intent of these “gratuities” is maintained.That was the ruling authored by Kavanaugh in Snyder v United States, a 6-3 opinion issued on Wednesday, in which the supreme court dealt the latest blow to federal anti-corruption law. In the case, which was divided along ideological lines, the court held that “gratuities” – that is, post-facto gifts and payments – are not technically “bribes”, and therefore not illegal. Bribes are only issued before the desired official act, you see, and their meaning is explicit; a more vague, less vulgarly transactional culture of “gratitude” for official acts, expressed in gifts and payments of great value, is supposed to be something very different. The court has thereby continued its long effort to legalize official corruption, using the flimsiest of pretexts to rob federal anti-corruption statutes of all meaning.The case concerns James Snyder, who in 2013 was serving as the mayor of small-town Portage, Indiana. Late that year, the city of Portage awarded a contract to Great Lakes Peterbilt, a trucking company, and bought five tow trucks from them; a few weeks later, Snyder asked for and accepted a check for $13,000 from the company. Snyder was found guilty of corruption and sentenced to 21 months in federal prison. He argued that the kickback was not illegal because it came after he awarded a contract to the company that ultimately paid him off, not before.Absurdly the US supreme court agreed, classifying such payments as mere tokens of appreciation and claiming they are not illegal when they are not the product of an explicit agreement meant to influence official acts in exchange for money.In so doing, the court has narrowed the scope of anti-corruption law for state and local officials to apply to only those exchanges of money, goods and official favor in which an explicit quid pro quo arrangement can be proved. As in Cargill – the court’s recent decision legalizing bump stocks, wherein the court declared that the gun accessories do not render semiautomatic rifles into machine guns based on a lengthy technical explanation of the meaning of a “trigger function” – the court in Snyder has made an extended, belabored foray into a definitional distinction between “bribes” and “gratuities”.But the glaring reality remains that this is largely a distinction without a difference. As Ketanji Brown Jackson noted in her dissent, this is an interpretation which no reasonable reading of the statute can support. In a dissent whose tone seemed exasperated, almost sarcastic, she called the majority opinion “absurd and atextual”, saying it “elevates nonexistent federalism concerns over the plain texts of this statute and is a quintessential case of the tail wagging the dog”. The “bribery” versus “gratuity” distinction, she said, allows officials to accept rewards for official acts in ways that are “functionally indistinguishable from taking a bribe”.The court’s narrow vision of corruption – one in which only explicit, whispered deals in shadowy, smoke-filled back rooms count as “corruption”, and all other forms of influence and exchange are something other than the genuine article – also fundamentally misunderstands how influence-peddling works. In his controlling opinion, Kavanaugh emphasizes that in order to be an illegal bribe, a gift or payment must be accompanied by “a corrupt state of mind” on behalf of the official or benefactor. But corruption, influence-peddling, and unfair and undue methods of persuasion are more subtle and complicated than this in practice.For an example, we need look no further than the conservative justices of the supreme court itself, who have become notorious, in recent years, for accepting lavish gifts and chummy intimacy from rightwing billionaires. According to investigative reporting by ProPublica, Clarence Thomas has accepted vacations, real estate purchases, tuition for his young relatives, and seemingly innumerable private jet trips from the billionaire Harlan Crow, as well as financing for an RV from another wealthy patron, Anthony Welters. Thomas has argued that these gifts and favors are merely the “personal hospitality” of “close personal friends”.ProPublica also reports that Samuel Alito, who flies insurrectionist flags outside his Virginia mansion and New Jersey beach house, has accepted the hospitality of the Republican mega-donor Paul Singer; the billionaire took Alito along on his private jet to a fishing resort in Alaska, where the justice stayed, played and reportedly drank $1,000 wine on the billionaire’s dime. (Alito has disputed aspects of ProPublica’s characterization.)There is no reporting to indicate that the justices received this expansive and expensive generosity in direct compensation for their extremely conservative jurisprudence, even though the judges’ legal writings have furthered the billionaire’s material interests and social preferences. It seems reasonable, to me, to infer that the gifts, as frequent and valuable as they are, are not the product of explicit agreements to exchange things of value for specific official acts.If anything, I think that these relationships do not seem corrupt to the men who take part in them; that they see their relationships with billionaires, and their receipt of these billionaires’ largesse, as innocent and proper expressions of affection between friends and ideological fellow travelers. Clarence Thomas may be able to feel something, in the dark depths of his soul, that we might recognize as akin to love, and he may indeed feel that love for Harlan Crow.But this “love”, or whatever it is, does not mean that what is happening between these men is not corruption, and it does not mean that the law has nothing to say about it. Connections like these are cultivated with both the intention and the effect of rewarding and encouraging conservative outcomes; an explicit quid pro quo comes to seem vulgar and unnecessary in their midst, in which social reinforcement and personal loyalty do the work that a more explicit bribe would otherwise accomplish.Adding money – or, in the court’s parlance, “gratuities” – to these arrangements only makes this more obvious. It is not a coincidence that the court has chosen to legalize for state and local officials exactly the sort of corruption that they partake of so conspicuously themselves.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More