I believe the most linked thing on the Intertubes today is this piece by Richard Hasen,
“Jack Smith’s Big New Jan. 6 Brief Is a Major Indictment of the Supreme Court” at Slate. It begins,
It’s rare to simultaneously feel red-hot anger and wistfulness, especially when merely reading a document. But those are exactly the emotions that washed over me when I read the redacted version of special counsel Jack Smith’s brief reciting in detail the evidence against Donald Trump for attempting to subvert the 2020 election. The anger is at the Supreme Court for depriving the American people of the chance for a full public airing of Donald Trump’s attempt to use fraud and trickery to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential victory before voters consider whether to put Trump back in office beginning January 2025. The wistfulness comes with the recognition that there is about an even chance that this will be the last evidence produced by the federal government of this nefarious plot. If Donald Trump wins election next month, the end of this prosecution is certain and the risks of future election subversion heightened.
And then, after a concise review of the many times Trump could have been stopped and at least disqualified from running again, Hasen concludes,
The New York Times recently reported on the internal Supreme Court deliberations, and they paint Chief Justice John Roberts, author of the Trump immunity decision, as having turned from a justice known for seeking common ground and minimalist outcomes to one set out to protect the office of the presidency at all costs. The opinion was so focused on the risks to the vigorousness of the activities of future presidents that could come from the threat of future prosecutions that it was willing to ignore the current threat to democracy today from Trump’s actions in 2020, not to mention his continued insistence that he won the last election.
Right now it appears to be a toss-up whether Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris will win office in the November election. If Trump wins, he will have his attorney general fire Smith and shut down this prosecution. If he keeps his promises, he even may seek to investigate and prosecute Smith, Harris, Biden, and others. There is a risk of authoritarianism down the line.
The fact that no jury may pass on the deadly serious allegations in Smith’s complaint will do more than simply let Trump and others off the hooks for their potential crimes. It will make future criminal activity related to American elections much more likely. And it all could have been avoided if McConnell, Garland, and especially the Supreme Court had done the right thing.
Hat tip to Scott Lemieux of Lawyers, Guns and Money for referring to the immunity decision as “the Dred Scott of the 21st century.”
There’s another good analysis of Where We Are by Kavid Kurtz at TPM, The Jan. 6 Case Against Donald Trump Is Part Of America’s Founding Story.
The case laid out by Smith broadly follows the already-familiar contours of the conspiracy to overturn the results of an election Trump lost. It’s a narrative we know because we saw most of it with our own eyes. What we couldn’t see directly was pieced together by the House Jan. 6 committee and journalists working tirelessly to document the conspiracy’s many disparate elements and to identify the vast cast of characters that ended the United States’ streak of peaceful transitions of power.
There remains great civic value in repeating that story for ourselves and for future generations so that it becomes woven into our collective memory like the Boston Tea Party or the firing on Fort Sumter or the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.
The Jan. 6 debacle is a part of the nation’s founding story, even though it comes nearly 250 years later, because the same principles that animated its creation were under sustained attack, the same threats that the constitutional system was specifically designed to protect against were on full display, and the reactionary forces of chaos and destruction that always linger just over the horizon advanced to within minutes and feet of prevailing over democracy and the rule of law.
Heather Cox Richardson’s October 2 letter is also worth reading. The danger is palpable, yet so many of us do not see it. And may I say I’d like to personally look up every undecided voter in the U.S. and smack them in the head? Pull your heads out of your asses, people.
And I don’t doubt Philip Bump at WaPo is right when he writes that No amount of evidence will convince Republicans of Trump’s 2020 guilt. This is just willful blindness and tribal loyalty.
Update: Here are two more links. Marcy Wheeler, John Roberts’ Sordid Legacy: 14 Pages of Mean Tweets; and Josh Kovensky at TPM, The Striking Details That Jack Smith Used To Tighten His January 6 Case Against Trump.
There are hopeful signs. Yes, the polls are tight, but I keep reading that the Republicans are worried about their ground operations. One of Trump’s decisions this year was to dismantle the RNC’s ground operations so that GOTV efforts could be outsourced to groups like Turning Point. Then the Guardian reported last week that Trump’s ground operation is now largely being run by Elon Musk, or at least a group funded by Elon Musk. Now Republicans have been worried because they’re not seeing much GOTV activity. With such a tight election, it’s going to be all about getting people to the polls. (Of course, Trump says he’s got enough votes already.)
Josh Marshall, today:
The thing you hear again and again about canvassing and ground operations is that you cannot just overwhelm it with money. Money is obviously critical. But you need a lot of institutional experience and time to make it work. …Canvassing and field operating takes time and institutional experience.
TPM Reader BP in Maine notes this article in The Bangor Daily News which reports that Elon Musk’s America PAC is hiring canvassers in Maine now — as in, a little more than a month before Election Day. On September 23rd, Bloomberg News reported hiring in New York, California and Michigan. (In the first two, that’s going to be for House races rather than the presidential.) I don’t want to rule out the possibility that this is additional hiring in Maine for the final push. But it doesn’t sound like it. Other reports noted that Musk’s group recently fired the firm they’d hired for field work in Nevada and were looking for a new firm. Again, this all seems quite late in the game to be in the hiring stage. But I stress again that we’re possibly getting an incomplete view.
Another tidbit comes from this article from a couple weeks ago which notes that Turning Point Action, which was supposed to be an anchor of the Trump campaign’s outside group strategy, ramped its efforts back to focusing on Arizona and Wisconsin and didn’t have the resources to be operating in Michigan, Nevada, Georgia and other swing states.
From what I’ve read, the Democrats have tons more money and have had their field offices open and fully operational, and canvassers out and about, for quite some time already. Republicans are putting more efforts into preparing legal challenges to the vote if Trump loses. And, of course, if all else fails, start some riots.
