On this day in 1863 the Battle of Gettysburg had entered its third day. In places called the Peach Orchard, the Wheatfield, and Devil’s Den, troops engaged in some of the most brutal fighting of the war. It was on this day that Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain ordered a legendary bayonet charge, and his men of the 20th Maine swept the Confederates off Little Round Top, saving the Union’s flank. And on this day the seige of Vicksburg, Mississippi was on its 45th day. Two days later, on July 4, Confederate Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton would surrender to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, giving the Union complete control of the Mississippi River. Upon receiving this news, President Abraham Lincoln famously said, “The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea.” Although the war continued for nine more months, those July days in 1863 were a turning point.

So, the nation has been in tight places before. But I almost envy the fellows of the 20th Maine, out of ammunition after holding off repeated charges by Confederates from Texas and Alabama commanded by Gen. John Bell Hood. The bayonet charge was a do-or-die move. But it was something they could do, and they did it.

What are we supposed to do, now?

My days of marching in demonstrations are over, unless I can get access to a wheelchair and someone to push it. While I am making ends meet of late I don’t have any extra money to donate to campaigns. I tried watching Rachel Maddow for a while last night and bailed after about 20 minutes. We’re not going from bad to worse, but from bad to planetary doom.

Everything is now scrambled. The sentencing for Trump’s 34 felony convictions will probably be postponed. The judge and lawyers need to sort out if and where Trump’s newly bestowed immunity applies.

Although the Manhattan case does not center on Mr. Trump’s presidency or official acts — but rather on his personal activity during the 2016 campaign — his lawyers argued on Monday that prosecutors had built their case partly on evidence from his time in the White House. And under the Supreme Court’s new ruling, prosecutors not only cannot charge a president for any official acts, but also cannot cite evidence involving official acts to bolster other accusations.

I can’t think of anything pertaining to the New York convictions that comes anywhere close to an “official act” of the President. This just makes absolutely no sense. But we’ll see how it works out.

The one dim ray of hope I saw this morning involves the J6 prosecution. Alan Feuer writes for the New York Times:

The Supreme Court’s decision on Monday about executive immunity makes it all but certain that former President Donald J. Trump will not stand trial on charges of seeking to overturn the last election before voters decide whether to send him back to the White House in the next one.

But the ruling also opened the door for prosecutors to detail much of their evidence against Mr. Trump in front of a federal judge — and the public — at an expansive fact-finding hearing, perhaps before Election Day.

This hearing is to be held in the Federal District Court in Washington in front of the Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, and I do have hope that Judge Chutkan will want to get this done asap.

Otherwise, we’re screwed.

Stuff to read:

The John Roberts Guide To Doing A Coup And Not Getting Caught

The Supreme Court Took A Sledgehammer To American Democracy

The Supreme Court’s disastrous Trump immunity decision, explained

A Five-Alarm Fire for Democracy

SCOTUS: Actually, Presidents Are Kings

What to know about presidential immunity after the Supreme Court ruling

Trump v. United States

Held: Under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power entitles a former President to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority. And he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts. There is no immunity for unofficial acts. Pp. 5–43.

(a) This case is the first criminal prosecution in our Nation’s history of a former President for actions taken during his Presidency. Determining whether and under what circumstances such a prosecution may proceed requires careful assessment of the scope of Presidential power under the Constitution. The nature of that power requires that a former President have some immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts during his tenure in office. At least with respect to the President’s exercise of his core constitutional powers, this immunity must be absolute. As for his remaining official actions, he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity. Pp. 5–15.

Of course, Trump will seize on this and declare he had absolute immunity for everything he did in office. The bit of nuance about “unofficial acts” is not going to register.

Update: Josh Marshall on the debate and its aftermath. No paywall. I’m in about the same place that he is.

I’m still here. In the past couple of days I’ve gone from feeling that maybe it’s not that bad to thinking, yeah, it is. We’re screwed. Still (I tell myself) a lot can happen between now and November.

Per Joyce Vance, tomorrow should be the last day the Supreme Court is in session. This means if we’re going to get a decision on Trump’s immunity in this session, it ought to be tomrorow. And then the justices go on vacation.

SCOTUS dropped a bunch of crap on us last week, but the biggest load was the Chevron decision.

The Supreme Court fundamentally altered the way that our federal government functions on Friday, transferring an almost unimaginable amount of power from the executive branch to the federal judiciary. By a 6–3 vote, the conservative supermajority overruled Chevron v. NRDC, wiping out four decades of precedent that required unelected judges to defer to the expert judgment of federal agencies. The ruling is extraordinary in every way—a massive aggrandizement of judicial power based solely on the majority’s own irritation with existing limits on its authority. After Friday, virtually every decision an agency makes will be subject to a free-floating veto by federal judges with zero expertise or accountability to the people. All at once, SCOTUS has undermined Congress’ ability to enact effective legislation capable of addressing evolving problems and sabotaged the executive branch’s ability to apply those laws to the facts on the ground. It is one of the most far-reaching and disruptive rulings in the history of the court.

This is going to severely hobble the federal government from functioning at all. Something has to be done about the Court.

I admit I am demoralized and frightened. Until now I was reasonably certain Trump will lose, even if in a tight election. After last night, I believe the odds he will win shot up considerably. And I need to get my head out of politics for a few hours, but do please carry on in the comments.

I’ll comment here during the debate as the spirit moves. Please, please, please add your impressions of the debate to the comments.

Well, we’re beginning. President Biden’s voice sounds a bit raspy.

Trump’s lies are not being corrected, and I’ve already decided I can’t watch this. But please comment if you can stand to watch it.

This is not going well. I’m seeing comments on Facebook saying that Biden just lost the election. Well, good night. I’ll read about it in the morning. Do feel free to comment.

About the debate tonight — I’ll be here and have an open thread for comments, so if you want to hang out with me you are very welcome. Part of me is dreading it, though. Chris Hayes was playing highlights of the first 2020 debate the other night and I had to turn it off. Too much.  This time with mics turned off Trump shouldn’t be able to talk over everybody through the whole. bleeping. debate, but he may start shouting, knowing him. Trump is being advised to not be a “raging asshole” this time, but whether he can discipline himself is another matter.

I just reviewed what I wrote about the first 2020 debate. I couldn’t watch it then, either. I turned it off and followed a live blog of it instead. Here’s my longer post from a day later.  And I had forgotten about the cows. From a transcript:

1:18:31 TRUMP

You wanna rip down buildings and rebuild the buildings — where airplanes are out of business. Where there are two car systems or where they want to take out the cows. 

Well, we still have cows, at least in Missouri. I haven’t seen any since I’ve been in New York, but I have to assume the cows are still there.

Anyway … about the Supreme Court. Bleep. The Supreme Court rules that state officials can engage in a little corruption, as a treat. Some of those fellas do like their treats. See also It Sure Looks Like KBJ Is Throwing Yacht Shade at Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas by Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern at Slate. I understand Justice Jackson’s dissent is worth reading all the way through. So here’s the decision; the dissent starts on page 23.

There’s a lot more to complain about. I’m betting they are holding on to the fleetingly revealed Idaho abortion decision  and possibly the Trump immunity decision until tomorrow, to take attention away from whatever mess Trump makes of the debates. It appears with Idaho they’re planning to kick the can down the road so that they don’t have to decide anything before the election. Another anti-abortion ruling before the election might hurt Trump’s chances, you know.  Priorities.

Update: It appears we did get the Idaho abortion decision today after all but managed to not resolve anything. The issue at hand was whether federal law that requires hospitals to at least stabilize emergency patients (rather than denying them care if they don’t have insurance) could be used to force Idaho hospitals to perform abortions to save the lives of women. The Court dismissed Idaho’s appeal of a lower court ruling that allows doctors to perform emergency abortions, meaning the lower court ruling is back in effect, for now. But the litigation will continue, and this law may end up back in the Supreme Court in a future time. NBC:

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who objected to the court failing to decide the case, read her dissenting opinion from the bench, a step justices generally only take when they are particularly disgruntled with the outcome.

“There is simply no good reason not to resolve this conflict now,” she wrote.

Conservative Justice Samuel Alito agreed on that point in a dissenting opinion joined by Justice Clarence Thomas and, mostly, Justice Neil Gorsuch.

Alito indicated he would rule against the Biden administration, which argues that federal law requires abortions when a woman is suffering from various health complications that are not necessarily immediately life-threatening, notwithstanding Idaho’s strict ban.

“Here, no one who has any respect for statutory language can plausibly say that the government’s interpretation is unambiguously correct,” he wrote.

Yeah, let’s worry about the statutory language while women are going into sepsis. Priorities. See also Why Idaho’s hospitals are having pregnant patients airlifted out of state.

In another genius move, the Court blocked an EPA plan for reducing smokestack emissions

Here’s a short note about the Bowman-Latimer race in southern Westchester County, NY. This is the infamous most expensive House primary race in history. As most of you know I’m living in Westchester now, but not in that district. From where I sit, I don’t know that Latimer’s defeat of Bowman is the bellwhether some commentary is making it out to be.

Bowman was profoundly shaken after a trip to Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank in 2021. Bowman’s criticisms of Israel after October 7 got the attention of AIPAC, which spent more than $14 million on the race. Bowman’s opponent, George Latimer, is a long-time Westchester County Democratic politician who has held several county and state offices. Voters know his name and are comfortable with him. I suspect he might have won the race even without AIPAC’s money. I expect him to win the general election.

The campaign AIPAC funded was not about Israel. Many of the television ads against Bowman listed all the times Bowman voted against some legislation supported by President Biden. Bowman, on the other hand, made AIPAC the focus of his campaign against Latimer. Voters possibly didn’t care that much about AIPAC’s campaign spending. But my point is that I don’t know that yesterday’s outcome is really telling us anything about public support or opposition to Israel’s war in Gaza, or about “the Squad,” the group of House progressives that counted Bowman as a member.

The district is mostly in southern Westchester and partly in The Bronx. There’s a lot of old inherited money in Westchester, but the southern part especially also has a lot of working-class people and mostly Latino immigrants. The district is less than 40 percent white and nearly 30 percent Latino. Josh Marshall’s analysis, which is worth reading, says “I wrote Monday that many observers missed a key element of this race. Jamaal Bowman wasn’t getting run out of Congress by a flood of pro-Israel money. He was getting run out of office because he’d gotten critically out of sync with his district.”  That seems about right.

On the same day that Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry signed the new “Ten Commandments” bill into law — the one that requires a particular verson of the Ten Commandments be posted prominently in all classrooms in Louisiana — a Texas megachurch pastor and one time spritual adviser to Donald Trump resigned over sexual abuse allegations. Well, they aren’t really just allegations, since the pastor admitted to what happened.. When he was a young pastor in his 20s he repeatedly molested a 12-year-old girl. And if she was his only victim he’d be very unusual, but she’s the only one who has come forward that I know of.

Regarding the Ten Commandments law, the state representative who sponsored the Louisiana bill said that having the commandments posted would allow students to “look up and see what God says is right and what he says is wrong.” Maybe the Texas pastor should have posted them in his office.

I have said before, and I’ll say again, that this obsession with putting the Ten Commandments in everybody’s face has nothing whatsoever to do with good behavior. The 10 Cs are the Christian Right’s tribal totem. They are posted to proclaim that right-wing Christians are the dominant tribe.

The Louisiana law is nearly identical to a Kentucky law that was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court back in 1980. The current court might very well overturn the earlier decision. In which case most public schools in the South and in much of the Midwest will immediately turn into Jesus Camp. In most cases it won’t even be subtle.

I learned that Gov. Landy also signed a bill that allows public schools to hire or appoint volunteer chaplains to provide “support, services, and programs for students,” whatever that means. I found a copy of the bill online but can’t say if it’s exactly what was signed. This version of the bill doesn’t explicitly way they have to be Christian chaplains. But neither does it say they have to have any sort of training or credentials. The lawmakers did think to prohibit registered sex offenders from being school chaplains, but otherwise, whatever. I can see every relgious nutjob and not-yet-convicted pedophile in Louisiana lining up to be a volunteer chaplain. This coujld get very messy. And what happens if, say, a Rabbi or a monk from one of Louisiana’s Buddhist temples offers to volunteer as a chaplain?

On to politics … everybody is panicked. I see in Politico that Biden’s biggest fundraisers are depressed and disappointed because Trump is on a fundraising blitz and has erased a large part of Biden’s war chest advantage. But at the same time, “across the country, the mood of Republicans has dimmed, according to nearly a dozen Republican operatives, county chairs and current and former GOP officials,” also says Politico. Some polling numbers have been moving in Biden’s favor since the conviction. Yes, let’s all just panic.

Worth reading — I Know What America’s Leading C.E.O.s Really Think of Donald Trump by Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, who is the president of the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute.

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

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

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

They aren’t entirely happy with President Biden, either, but think Bicen is “tolerable.” Trump has them scared.

A reminder that Trump is not normal. Trump taunted Jewish employees with jokes about Nazi ovens: Ex-Trump Org VP.

Happy Juneteenth. Here is a history-nerd reminder that chattel slavery hadn’t completely ended in the U.S. on the first “Juneteenth” in 1865. Slavery remained legal in Delaware and Kentucky until the 13th Amendment went into effect in December 1865. But we’ve got enough holidays in December already.

On to the news: Matt Gaetz must really be in trouble.

After he was ousted as House Speaker last year, Kevin McCarthy claimed that Representative Matt Gaetz led the effort to depose him as revenge for a House Ethics Committee investigation into the Florida congressman. For his part, Gaetz has insisted that his motivations for giving McCarthy the boot were purely based on policy concerns. But if he was hoping the end of McCarthy would mean an end to the investigation, he was apparently sorely mistaken!

In a statement released on Tuesday, the ethics panel—which is notably controlled by Republicans—said that it has not only continued its investigation into Gaetz, but it has expanded the probe.

That other House Republicans would do this to Gaetz in an election year seems remarkable to me. Maybe he’s such an insufferable jerk they can’t stand him, either. Or maybe they’re trying to get ahead of something really awful that’s bound to come out sooner or later. This is from the Committee’s statement:

… Based on its review to date, the Committee has determined that certain of the allegations merit continued review.  During the course of its investigation, the Committee has also identified additional allegations that merit review.

Accordingly, the Committee is reviewing allegations pursuant to Committee Rules 14(a)(3) and 18(a) that Representative Gaetz may have:  engaged in sexual misconduct and illicit drug use, accepted improper gifts, dispensed special privileges and favors to individuals with whom he had a personal relationship, and sought to obstruct government investigations of his conduct.  The Committee will take no further action at this time on the allegations that he may have shared inappropriate images or videos on the House floor, misused state identification records, converted campaign funds to personal use, and/or accepted a bribe or improper gratuity. 

The most recent word on Gaetz is from ABC News: Witness tells House Ethics Committee that Matt Gaetz paid her for sex: Sources.

Yesterday was primary day in Virginia. The House VA-05 Republican primary was between two horrible men. Incumbent Rep. Bob Good is chair of the House Freedom Caucus and in most respects is as MAGA as they come, but for one thing: He endorsed Ron DeSantis back when DeSantis still looked viable as a presidential candidate. So Trump ordered Good to be primaried. The primary challenger is state Sen. John J. McGuire III. Josh Marshall calls McGuire a “Trump fanboy stooge.” Trump endorsed McGuire and looked to a McGuire victory as revenge against Good. And apparently all signs pointed to a McGuire win. But as of noon EST Wednesday, the race is too close to call.

Josh Marshall: “This is nonstop popcorn. Two election denying freaks in a too close to call race in which the true may not be known for some time. Karma.” It also perhaps says something about the value of Trump’s endorsement, even among Republicans.

Speaking of Trump, now he’s saying that business executives should be fired from their jobs if they don’t support him for POTUS.

Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday said that business executives and shareholder representatives should “be 100% behind” him or face termination.

“Business Executives and Shareholder Representatives should be 100% behind Donald Trump! Anybody that’s not should be FIRED for incompetence!,” the former president wrote in a post on his social media website, Truth Social.

His post referred to an article from The Wall Street Journal on Monday comparing corporate tax rates between the Biden and Trump administrations. In another post, Trump quoted the article as saying, “Corporations won tax cuts during Trump’s first term, and they would benefit if he wins again.”

Of course, Trump also said the stock market would crash if Biden were elected in 2020. It, um, didn’t.

The business execs might also consider that Trump’s stupid plan to replace income taxes with tariffs would kill the economy.

There’s a new book called Apprentice in Wonderland about how Trump’s time on The Apprentice not only made him POTUS but also colors his worldview to this day. The author, Ramin Setoodeh, interviewed Trump six times at length about his Apprentice years. The first interviews were in 2021 and continued over several months. Setoodeh is saying now that Trump has “severe memory issues.”

I’ve said earlier that I’m not sure Trump always understands questions he is asked or what planet he’s on at least part of the time. He’s still bragging about the cognitive test he took in 2018 and allegedly aced. He seems to think this was some kind of intellgence test, when of course it was just a screening test for dementia. One wonders if he would “ace” it now.

Here’s a startling bit of data. “In one survey of Christian attitudes, for example, 43 percent of evangelicals said they did not believe in the divinity of Christ.” Um, huh?

This is from Trump has changed what it means to be evangelical by Shadi Hamid in the Washington Post. The link in the quote goes to a page that compares current evangelical beliefs with basic Christian beliefs. This site claims that 43 percent of evangelicals recently agreed with the statement “Jesus was a great teacher, but he was not God.” I agree with that statement, of course, but I’m not a Christian.

I’ve complained a lot in recent years that the Christian nationalist movement seems largely populated by people with little understanding of Christianity. I grew up in a hotbed of ol’ time religion. Just about everyone in the Ozarks was some kind of Evangelical, mostly Southern Baptists, or some kind of Pentacostal. But back in the day if you talked to these folks they had a reasonable grasp of Christian theology as their churhes interpreted it. These days the loudmouth politicized Christians I see on television seem to not know the Beatitudes from Beetlejuice.

Note also that the white and black evangelical churches live on different planets. What’s being said here is about the white churches.

Last year I read Tim Alberta’s book The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism. I wrote about it a bit in this post.

Evangelical Christianity in the U.S. has long had its freak show elements — think snake handling — but they used to be tucked away in rural America. But now the freak show is televised, and getting freakier. Alberta went around the country reporting on churches large and small, and part of the story he tells is that evangelical church-goers are leaving “traditional” Christianity and flocking to churches that offer a heavily politicized Christianity that conflates Christianity with America and Jesus with Trump. Or else they want one with big entertainment value.

One very poignant story he tells is about a pracher who had built a hugely successful megachurch near Kansas City. And then at some point he “found Jesus” and realized what he was offering was spiritual junk food. He began to preach sermons that were based on actual Christian theology, and his parishoners deserted him. Now he gets a handful of people to show up for service in his huge, empty church, when he used to get thousands.

Alberta’s main point was that politics was pulling white evangelicalism away from Jesus’ teachings. But this was the first I’d heard that so many had abandoned the doctrine of Trinity. Part of what seems to be happening is that there are people who have never been particularly religious but who now identify as “evangelicals” because they are Trump supporters. They are “claiming the label as a badge of partisan identity,” Shadi Hamid wrote.

In other news:  Politico has a news story about a Democratic party “power broker” in New Jersey who has been indicted by the state AG for racketeering. I have no particular insight into this situation except that it doesn’t surprise me. I’ve lived a large part of my adult life in New Jersey and New York but never clearly understood how politics “works” in either state.  The NY and NJ state governments are not as utterly useless as the state government of Missouri. (They should just fire everybody in Jeffereson City and hire a troop of Girl Scouts to run Missouri; the girls would do a better job, or at least be less annoying.) But there are nagging problems in both states (affordable housing, anyone?) that go on for years and years and never get addressed. It’s been pretty clear that old patterns of cronyism and corruption get in the way of good government. Maybe Trenton will be cleaned up a little, anyway.