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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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      in US Politics

      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

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      Supreme court says Idaho abortion ruling ‘inadvertently’ published online – as it happened

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      The supreme court has acknowledged to Bloomberg Law that the ruling in a case over whether hospitals in Idaho can be required to carry out abortions in emergencies was published by accident.The court’s public information officer Patricia McCabe told the outlet: “The Court’s Publications Unit inadvertently and briefly uploaded a document to the Court’s website. The Court’s opinion in Moyle v. United States and Idaho v. United States will be issued in due course.”Bloomberg Law goes on to report that the ruling is 6-3 in favor of the Biden administration, with conservative justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito dissenting. However, the ruling is structured to allow litigation over the issue to continue, and not resolve the broader question of whether the federal government can require emergency abortions be performed in states where the procedure is banned:
      The high court decision “will prevent Idaho from enforcing its abortion ban when the termination of a pregnancy is needed to prevent serious harms to a woman’s health,” Justice Elena Kagan said in a concurring opinion.
      Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote separately to say that she wouldn’t have dismissed the case, according to the copy that was briefly online.
      “Today’s decision is not a victory for pregnant patients in Idaho. It is delay,” she wrote. “While this court dawdles and the country waits, pregnant people experiencing emergency medical conditions remain in a precarious position, as their doctors are kept in the dark about what the law requires.”
      The posted decision indicates the court won’t resolve broader questions about the intersection of state abortion bans and a federal law designed to ensure hospitals treat patients who arrive in need of emergency care.
      The case is the supreme court’s first look at a state abortion ban since the conservative majority overturned Roe v Wade in 2022. The court on 13 June preserved full access to the widely used abortion pill mifepristone, saying anti-abortion doctors and organizations lacked legal standing to press a lawsuit.
      The supreme court turned down an attempt by Republican-led states to block the Biden administration’s coordination with social media companies on fighting disinformation, one of only two decisions the conservative-dominated panel released today. They still have yet to rule on cases concerning Donald Trump’s prosecution for trying to overturn the 2020 election and the scope of federal government regulations, but will issue more opinions on Thursday and Friday. But perhaps an even bigger story than what the court actually decided is what it inadvertently decided. Bloomberg Law noticed that the court had accidentally posted its opinion in a closely watched case pitting Idaho against the Biden administration, and a 6-3 majority was going to require the Republican-led state to allow emergency abortions – at least for now.Here’s what else happened today:
      House Republicans convened a little-known congressional body to intervene on behalf of top Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s attempts to stay out of jail.
      The supreme court once again overturned the ultra-conservative fifth circuit court of appeals, in its ruling over social media disinformation. Here’s why that’s significant.
      Trump claims he can get detained US journalist Evan Gershkovich out of jail in Russia, if he wins the November election. The Wall Street Journal reporter’s trial began behind closed doors today.
      Encounters at the southern border dropped by 40% after Joe Biden imposed restrictions that will temporarily restrict access to asylum seekers, the homeland security department said.
      Progressives are not pleased after congressman Jamaal Bowman lost his Democratic primary yesterday, and are training their ire on the influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac).
      A group of Black campaign surrogates for Donald Trump met at a barbershop in Atlanta’s Buckhead neighborhood Wednesday, ahead of the head-to-head between Trump and Joe Biden here tomorrow.Trump made a phone appearance to tout his accomplishments for the Black community while in office and his proposal to end taxation on tips.“Let the people earn what they earn,” Trump said, adding that he was aware he was talking to people in a barbershop who do tipped service work. “And it has been so popular beyond anything.”Both Trump and Biden are blitzing metro Atlanta with events leading up to the debate. Rocky’s Barber Shop, a Black-owned business in Atlanta’s more affluent neighborhood, hosted conservative Black leaders from metro Atlanta. Shelley Winter, a conservative talk show host here, asked Trump if he thought that CNN debate moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash would treat him fairly.“Well, I think it would be good for them if they did,” Trump replied. “I think probably not,” he added, expressing lingering ire about Tapper cutting off his televised victory speech after winning the primaries.
      So they cover the whole primary, but they don’t cover my victory speech. So am I going to get it fair? Probably not, but it would be very good for CNN. They’re having a lot of ratings problems.
      Two potential choices for vice president who did not need a haircut found themselves at the shop anyway Wednesday: congressman Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) and former housing and urban development secretary Dr. Ben Carson.“I just want to encourage you to continue to speak out because the attacks on you have been absolutely ridiculous,” Carson said. “We’re praying that God will give you the strength to bear it because you’re standing in there for all of us.”Donalds said we would see if he was Trump’s vice presidential pick. Does he want to be vice president? “Of course!” he replied.Trump said on Saturday that he had already made up his mind about who he would choose to be vice president, and that his choice would be present in Atlanta for the debate.The number of encounters at the south-west border was down 40% in the three weeks since Joe Biden announced new rules restricting asylum, the Department of Homeland Security announced on Wednesday.According to a DHS fact sheet, the average daily arrests over a seven-day period has fallen to under 2,400 encounters per day, the lowest level of encounters since January 2021. It is still not low enough to lift the order. Asylum processing resumes when encounters fall to an average of 1,500 encounters across a seven-day period.“It’s a remarkable feat that our personnel have accomplished in just such a short period of time,” DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in an interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe Wednesday. “Congress failed to act. The president has acted.”But he said congressional action was needed to send more resources to border patrol and that without legislation the order could be lifted or reversed by the courts or a future administration.Last week, CBP said encounters fell by 25%, meaning illegal border crossings dropped significantly since then.Encounters were already on a downward trend before Biden’s asylum order, due in part to a crackdown on northward migration by Mexican officials. Seasonal patterns also affect crossings.Opponents have sued the administration to block the order.Cori Bush, the Democratic congresswoman of Missouri and another prominent member of the progressive “Squad”, has issued a statement calling Jamaal Bowman her “brother-in-service” and attacking Aipac’s role in his primary defeat last night.Bowman is the “true representation of transformational leadership and brings … the power of everyday people from our communities to Congress each and every day,” Bush wrote.
      AIPAC and their allies—backed by far-right Donald Trump megadonors—poured a tidal wave of cash into this primary race showing us just how desperate these billionaire extremists are in their attempts to buy our democracy, promote their own gain, and silence the voices of progress and justice. There should be no question about the need to get Big Money out of politics.
      A recent poll shows Bush at risk of losing in her own primary contest for Missouri’s 1st congressional district, one point behind challenger Wesley Bell. The pollster, The Mellman Group, said:
      Bush is still seen favorably, but assessments of her and her performance are moving in a negative direction, while Bell’s image is improving, leaving him with an underlying image advantage. With some six weeks to go and 11% [of voters surveyed] still undecided, this race can go either way, but Bell has achieved a slight advantage.
      Jamaal Bowman’s primary defeat on Tuesday was a “loss for young people and anyone who cares about our continued movement toward justice, peace, and building a multiracial democracy,” Protect Our Power said in a statement.The progressive group blamed “Aipac and the Maga billionaires who recruited and paid for George Latimer’s campaign from start to finish” for the defeat, and vowed “to tell Aipac they have no business creating division in our democracy”.In a separate letter of protest, Jewish Voice for Peace Action (JVP) said it was “saddened” by the results that had unseated a congressman who “has been one of the few members of Congress committed to defending Palestinian human rights”.“Today is a sad day for American democracy,” said JVP’s political director, Beth Miller. She added:
      To protect progressive candidates moving forward it is essential that Democrats reject Aipac.
      Progressive groups are calling on House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries to reject the endorsement and donations from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) in the wake of congressman Jamaal Bowman‘s primary loss in New York.The United Democracy Project, a super Pac affiliated with Aipac, dumped nearly $15m into Bowman’s district as part of its successful effort to elevate George Latimer to the Democratic nomination.A coalition of progressive groups, outraged over Aipac’s involvement in the race, sent a letter to Jeffries today demanding that he reconsider his association with the group and denounce its tactics.“AIPAC turned the NY16 race into the most expensive Democratic primary in history, waging anunacceptable assault on our democracy, our communities, and our shared future. We call on you to take action to address this threat,” the letter reads.
      AIPAC’s interference in Democratic politics poses a grave danger to the vision our organizations fight for every day: a future in which everyone can access a high quality education, comprehensive healthcare, a liveable climate, affordable housing, good jobs for good pay, humane immigration policies, human rights centered foreign policy — and more.
      Latimer defeated Bowman by 17 points yesterday, and he is now heavily favored to win the seat in November, as the Cook Political Report rates the district as solid Democrat.The abortion rights group Reproductive Freedom for All has said it agrees with Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson’s reported reservations in the copy of the opinion briefly posted on the supreme court’s website.“This is not a victory but a delay,” the group said in a statement responding to the court’s reported decision to permit abortions in medical emergencies in Idaho.
      The abortion bans that are putting people’s lives on the line in the first place will continue to remain on the books. We’re grateful that the Biden administration is fighting to preserve the shreds of access possible in states where anti-abortion extremists are doing everything in their power to block people from the care they need, even under the most dire of circumstances.
      The group said it will not forget that Donald Trump and the Maga Republicans are responsible for those bans, adding:
      Our rights are on the line, and we must send President Biden back to the White House to restore the federal right to abortion and end these bans once and for all.
      The copy of the opinion suggesting that the supreme court may rule to permit abortions in medical emergencies in Idaho may not be final and could be changed.According to the copy obtained by Bloomberg, a majority of justices will reportedly dismiss the case as “improvidently granted”, meaning the supreme court should not have accepted the case.The ruling would reinstate a lower court’s order that had allowed Idaho hospitals to perform abortions in cases where a woman’s health may be endangered, according to the outlet.Currently, the state’s law only allows abortions when a woman’s “life” is in danger. Idaho has sought to have abortion exempted from the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (Emtala), a precedent critics said would endanger pregnant people in any state that has abortion restrictions.Although many states allow doctors to perform an emergency abortion when a woman’s life or health is at risk, effectively mirroring Emtala, Idaho only allowed doctors to intervene when a woman was on the brink of death, a much higher bar for intervention. The Biden administration sued Idaho to enforce the law.The Emtala law, signed by abortion opponent Ronald Reagan, sought to protect pregnant women in active labor in particular. Until its passage, hospitals often transferred or “dumped” women who could not pay when they suffered an emergency on public hospitals, even when in advanced stages of labor.Emtala had endured a series of attacks, including by some hospital administrators who viewed it as an “unfunded mandate”. Although the federal government required hospitals to treat sick patients, it never provided money to care for indigent patients.Bernie Sanders has joined those blaming the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) for congressman Jamaal Bowman’s primary loss in New York last night.Bowman, whose criticism of Israel’s war on Gaza made him a target for pro-Israel lobbying groups, was defeated by George Latimer, a pro-Israel centrist, after Aipac and an affiliated group spent almost $15m to defeat him.Sanders, in a statement today, said it was an “outrage and an insult to democracy that we maintain a corrupt campaign finance system which allows billionaire-funded super PACs to buy elections.” He added:
      AIPAC and other super PACs spent over $23 million to defeat Bowman. He spent $3 million. That is a spending gap which is virtually impossible to overcome.
      It is not a coincidence that with our corrupt campaign finance system we also have a rigged economy that allows the very rich to get much richer while many working people are falling further behind. Big Money buys politicians who will do their bidding, and the results are clear.
      The Congressional Pro-Choice Caucus has responded to the news that the supreme court may be poised to allow abortions in medical emergencies in Idaho.“We are all watching,” the caucus posted to X, adding:
      With lives hanging in the balance, we hope this indicates a step forward for patients’ access to emergency abortion care.
      Now, it is up to #SCOTUS to confirm that this is true and they will indeed protect that right and uphold federal law.
      Alexis McGill Johnson, the head of Planned Parenthood, the country’s largest abortion provider, writes that any decision that falls short of guaranteeing patients’ access to abortion care in emergencies would be “catastrophic”. More

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      ‘A healthcare crisis’: Harris takes aim at Trump on anniversary of Roe’s fall

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      Joe Biden and Kamala Harris marked the second anniversary of the US supreme court ruling that overturned Roe v Wade with forceful campaign statements that laid the blame squarely on Donald Trump for ending the national right to abortion.In a video released on Monday, Biden pledged to restore the right to an abortion and “protect American freedom” if he is re-elected.The video, along with a campaign event headlined by the vice-president, came two years to the day since the court’s decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization reversed nearly half a century of guaranteed federal abortion rights, and reflect the centrality of abortion in Biden’s presidential campaign.In College Park, Maryland, Harris took the stage to chants of “four more years”. In her remarks, Harris laid out what she said were the stakes for abortion access if Trump is re-elected.“Understand as much harm as he has already caused, a second Trump term would be even worse,” she said. “His friends in the United States Congress are trying to pass a national ban that would outlaw abortion in every single state – in states like New York and California, and even right here in Maryland.”Nodding to her background as a prosecutor, Harris called Trump’s attack on women’s reproductive rights “premeditated” and said he has “not denied, much less shown remorse, for his actions”.“In the case of the stealing of reproductive freedom from the women of America, Donald Trump is guilty,” she said.Harris called Republicans who have passed state-level bans Trump’s “accomplices” and warned that he would go even further by curtailing access to contraception and IVF.Pointing to the statistic that one in three American women live in a state with abortion restrictions, she said: “Today our daughters know fewer rights than their grandmothers. This is a healthcare crisis, and we all know who to blame: Donald Trump.”Kate Cox, the Texas woman who was denied an abortion under the state’s near-total ban last year despite a fatal fetal anomaly, introduced Harris in Maryland.“My state chose to drive me out of my home, my community, away from my children and my doctors, rather than to let me access care,” she said. “I will never again miss an opportunity to vote. I will cast my ballot in every election like my life depends on it.”Cox ultimately left Texas to receive care. Growing emotional from the stage on Monday, she shared that she is pregnant again, expecting a child in January. The crowd erupted in applause. “I hope that by then, when we welcome our baby into the world, we will have a world led by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris,” she said.“You are a hero of this movement,” Harris told Cox.In Biden’s video, the president, too, placed the responsibility for reversing abortion rights on Trump, quoting him boasting about the decision and taking credit for putting three conservative justices on the court.“Here’s what Donald Trump says about your freedom: ‘After 50 years of failure, with nobody coming even close, I was able to kill Roe v Wade,’” Biden says, quoting a Trump statement last year.“Two years ago, the supreme court justices that Trump handpicked helped overturn Roe v Wade,” Biden continues. “Decades of progress shattered just because the last guy got four years in the White House.”“We’re up against extremism. Send me back to the White House and I’ll fight like hell to restore Roe v Wade and protect American freedom.”The offensive comes amid polling evidence that with consistently weak approval ratings for Biden, concerns over reproductive rights represent Democrats’ best hope of retaining the White House in November.Since Roe v Wade was overthrown in 2022, ballot measures in several states – including ones that tend to vote Republican – have upheld or enshrined abortion rights locally, signalling that the issue has popular resonance particularly among female voters.On Friday, a group of Montana abortion rights supporters became the latest to announce that they had secured enough signatures to hold a November ballot measure asking voters to enshrine the right to abortion in the state constitution. Although that measure has not yet been confirmed by state officials, voters in roughly a dozen states are expected to weigh in directly on abortion rights this year, including in battleground states such as Nevada and Arizona.Democrats are hoping that these measures will boost turnout in their favor.Several groups – including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Reproductive Rights and Reproductive Freedom for All – announced on Monday a $100m Abortion Access Now campaign across several states.Since Roe fell, Biden has frequently promised to “codify” Roe’s protections into law. Although his administration has issued executive orders aimed at boosting access to reproductive healthcare, including contraception, as well as defended abortion access in two supreme court cases this year, Biden cannot re-establish a federal right to abortion without congressional support. Congress has repeatedly failed to pass the Women’s Health Protection Act, a bill that blocks states from totally banning abortion before fetal viability, or the point at which a fetus can survive outside the womb.In a call with reporters on Monday, White House officials declined to reveal any plans for future abortion-related executive actions. Jennifer Klein, assistant to the president and director of the Gender Policy Council, also acknowledged that, if the supreme court rules against the Biden administration in a highly anticipated case over emergency abortions, “our options on emergency medical care are likely to be limited”.Trump has sought to backpedal on his stance in recent months, telling congressional Republicans in a meeting on Capitol Hill this month that the matter should be left to the states and warning them against pursuing a national ban. More