Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Legacy

[Brexiter]

We begin today with David A. Graham of The Atlantic discussing what I think will be considered the ultimate legacy of both Mitch McConnell and the shoe salesman: the federal courts.

McConnell’s exit marks Trump’s conquest of the Senate, the one element of the GOP that still offered even a little resistance to the former president. Trump has all but clinched the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. The Republican National Committee may soon be controlled by one of his top campaign aides and his daughter-in-law. The speaker of the House rose to prominence trying to find legal means to overturn Trump’s 2020 defeat. Governors who once criticized him, such as Larry Hogan and Chris Sununu, have left or will soon leave office.

In recent weeks, McConnell has demonstrated his distance from Trump and shown that his grasp on the Senate, though slipping, remains formidable. Even as the more MAGA-dominated parts of the party rejected any suggestion of a border bill, McConnell threw his weight behind a compromise. Trump took that round, forcing McConnell to pull support for the bill. But McConnell then worked to get a package of aid for Israel and Ukraine through the Senate, despite Trump’s opposition. The House, however, seems likely to smother that. Soon McConnell won’t be around either.

McConnell and Trump always had an uneasy relationship. McConnell was an exemplar of the old Republican Party—committed to business-friendly and socially conservative policies. He never particularly liked Trump, but they found ways to work together. Trump even appointed McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, as secretary of transportation. The greatest achievements of McConnell’s leadership and Trump’s presidency were the same: the installation of a six-judge conservative majority on the Supreme Court and an influx of conservative judges on lower federal courts.

Ian Millhiser of Vox writes about the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to take up the case involving the shoe salesman’s claims of presidential immunity.

This order is a colossal victory for Trump, and could potentially allow him to evade criminal responsibility for his attempts to overthrow the 2020 election altogether. Trump’s goal is to delay his trials until after Election Day. Should he prevail in that election, he can then order the Justice Department to drop all federal charges against him.

Trump was able to secure such an order from the justices by exploiting the fact that the federal judiciary ordinarily does not allow two different courts to have jurisdiction over the same case at the same time. So, when a party to a lawsuit or criminal proceeding appeals a trial court’s decision, the trial court often loses authority over that case until the appeal is resolved.

The ostensible reason for the Court’s order putting the trial on ice is that the Court needs that time to consider a weak appeal challenging a ruling by Judge Tanya Chutkan, the judge presiding over his DC criminal trial.

According to Trump, the Constitution forbids any prosecution of a former president for any “official acts” he engaged in while in office. The implications of this argument are astounding, and Trump’s lawyers haven’t exactly tried to hide them. During one court hearing, the former president’s lawyer told a judge that Trump could not be prosecuted even if he had ordered “SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival,” unless Trump were also impeached and convicted by the Senate.

It’s hard to imagine the Supreme Court signing onto this argument, which has already been rejected by two other courts.

Kate Riga of Talking Points Memo covers SCOTUS oral arguments in Garland v. Cargill, the case that will decide the legality of so-called “bump stocks.”

The liberal justices cut through the endless discussion of whether the operation of the bump stock — essentially moving a part of the gun back and forth quickly after the shooter initially pulls the trigger — versus a traditional machine gun — with which the shooter usually holds down the trigger — qualifies under the text of the law as shooting “automatically” “by a single function of the trigger.”

“I view myself as a good textualist,” Justice Elena Kagan said. “But textualism is not inconsistent with common sense.”

“What the statute comprehends is a weapon that fires a multitude of shots with a single human action, whether it’s a continuous pressure on a conventional machine gun, holding the trigger, or a continuous pressure on one of these devices on the barrel,” she added. “I can’t understand how anybody could think that those two things should be treated differently.” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson kept up a similar line in her questioning, pointing out that Congress meant to ban weapons that unleash hundreds of bullets in seconds, not only ones that operate in the exact way an M16 does.

Yona T.R. Golding of Columbia Journalism Review looks at five of the SCOTUS cases involving social media.

In October, the court heard the first two social media cases of the term, both about whether public officials should be able to block constituents online. One case was brought by a man in Port Huron, Michigan, who was unhappy with the information about the pandemic that his local city manager had posted on Facebook. He left responses from multiple accounts. The city manager deleted the comments and blocked the man, who then sued.

The second case involved two parents in Southern California who used social media to express their displeasure with members of their school district’s board of trustees; at one point, according to court documents, one of them left the same comment on 42 of one official’s Facebook posts and 226 of her tweets. The officials blocked them. They, too, sued.

The court’s decision in the case will center on whether the officials used the accounts in their capacity as representatives of the government (for “state action”) or purely for personal reasons.

[...]


The last case also concerns the use of content moderation as a mode of censorship. The attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri brought the case, arguing that various officials from the Biden administration violated the First Amendment when they compelled executives at various social media companies to remove misleading content related to COVID-19 and the 2020 election from their platforms. In the past, government officials have communicated with social media companies over the removal of certain kinds of content: material relating to child sexual abuse or terrorism, or stemming from foreign operatives. The attorneys general argue that the administration leveraged this access to muzzle dissenting voices.

In a story (including the excerpt below) that includes descriptions of extreme violence, Masha Gessen of The New Yorker looks over the contemporary history of the practice of self-immolation.

Self-immolation is not a new form of political protest, but it is by no means a common one. Dozens of Buddhist monks have committed self-immolation, to protest the suppression of Buddhist leaders in Vietnam in the middle of the last century and, more recently, to draw attention to Chinese rule over Tibet, and the exile of the Dalai Lama. In the nineteen-sixties, dozens of people in the United States and Asia died after setting themselves on fire to protest the war in Vietnam. Then the practice spread to the Soviet bloc. It began when hope died. In 1968, students in Warsaw and Prague protested, much like students elsewhere in the West that year. In Czechoslovakia, the leadership of the Communist Party instituted liberal reforms, relaxing censorship and promising to build a “socialism with a human face.” It was known as the Prague Spring. But, in August, Warsaw Pact troops, commanded by Moscow, entered Czechoslovakia. The country’s leadership was placed under arrest and airlifted to Moscow. The Prague Spring was crushed. In September, Ryszard Siwiec, a fifty-nine-year-old Polish war veteran, set himself on fire during a harvest festival, insuring that his protest against his country’s complicity in the invasion was witnessed by thousands of people. A more widely remembered act of self-immolation was committed several months later by a twenty-year-old Czech student named Jan Palach, who ran down a street in Prague after setting himself on fire.

Under conditions of democracy, people act politically because they think that their actions can lead to change. They cannot effect change alone, and change is never immediate, but their experience tells them that change is possible and that it is brought about by the actions of citizens. When people do not believe that change is possible, most do not act. Authoritarian regimes rely on a passive citizenry. Totalitarian regimes mobilize their subjects to imitate political action, but in a way that never brings about change. The vast majority comply. But a small minority can’t stand it. Dissidents are people who would rather pay the psychic cost of becoming outcasts because what Václav Havel called “living within the lie” is even worse. Within this minority, there seems to be an even smaller group of people who find their individual helplessness so unbearable that they are willing to do something as desperate as self-immolate. Jan Palach’s protest suicide was followed by several more in Czechoslovakia, then in Lithuania and Ukraine. In the past few years, self-immolation has reëmerged as a form of protest in Putin’s Russia.

What does it mean for an American to self-immolate? Since the Vietnam War, Americans have died by this form of suicide to draw attention to climate change, as the lawyer and conservationist David Buckel did, in Brooklyn in 2018, and the climate activist Wynn Bruce did, on Earth Day, 2022, on the steps of the Supreme Court. Like all of us, these men lived in a world that knows about the catastrophic threat of climate change, pays lip service to the need to protect the human population of the planet, yet fails to act. “Many who drive their own lives to help others often realize that they do not change what causes the need for their help,” Buckel wrote in an e-mail that he sent to several media outlets before setting himself on fire in Prospect Park. Buckel had been a lifelong activist, a lawyer who had helped to advance L.G.B.T. rights. But, on the issue of climate, despite being surrounded with like-minded people and being able to act with them, he felt helpless.

I want to thank Gessen for writing a nuanced article about this difficult subject on which I disagree with the opinions of most of my social media mutuals on nearly every level. A good part of that disagreement is fueled by the fact that most of Christianity teaches that suicide and blaspheming the Holy Ghost are the two sins that can not be forgiven. And I think that much of contemporary psychology isn’t much better on this subject.

Reading about these incidents happening in cultures across the globe, reading about incidents that happened going back to antiquity, allows me to take a more complex view of the subject than a simple “suicide is a selfish act,” or dismissing the act of a person who self-immolates as simply “a person must have been mentally ill.”

As with most things, it’s complicated.

We can all help prevent suicide. The 988 Lifeline provides 24/7, free and confidential support for people in distress, prevention and crisis resources for you or your loved ones, and best practices for professionals in the United States.

Kimberly Atkins Stohr of The Boston Globe zeroes in on frequent complaints about The New York Times’ political coverage, and advocates for the return of ombudspeople.

Ombudspeople, also known as public editors, are staff members at news organizations who are tasked with being a liaison between the newsroom and the public. They hear complaints, evaluate the organization’s coverage, and report out the findings. They make sure that journalists don’t live in silos, but they also help the public better understand the values of good journalism and dogged reporting.

Such a position is not a panacea for restoring the public trust, but it’s a good start. And though outside media critics abound, they do not serve the same purpose. After all, they have their own clicks to garner.

“That is a problem with media criticism in general: A lot of hot takes, not all that much reporting,” said Dan Kennedy, a Northeastern University professor and media critic. “With an ombudsperson or public editor, they are going to do the reporting. They are going to do the research. That is valuable.”

And it can help journalists be more self-aware while not placing the burden of public criticism on individual reporters, who are usually not in a position to make the sort of organization-wide changes that are often necessary to restore public confidence.

Finally today, Nicholas Florko of STATnews wonders why Medicare does not deliver healthy food to seniors.​

Some twelve percent of traditional Medicare beneficiaries have heart failure. Roughly a quarter have diabetes. There’s early evidence suggesting that both conditions — and a slew of others — could be better managed with pre-made healthy meals.

So why doesn’t Medicare try out delivering food to sick seniors?


The experiment would fit with the Biden administration’s larger push toward integrating so-called “food is medicine” interventions into traditional health care. Skeptics of the idea note that there’s still very little clinical research integrating food into medicine. But proponents say the early evidence shows the idea could both improve health care outcomes and save the healthcare system money overall. One study estimated that providing healthy prepared meals — commonly known as medically-tailored meals — in Medicare could save the program $3.4 billion in just one year.

“The beauty of medically-tailored meals is that they’re actually cost saving,” said Alissa Wassung, the executive director of the Food Is Medicine Coalition. “As a benefit, it is valuable not only to the humans who receive it, but also to our health care system.”

Have the best possible day, everyone!