Legitimate Person? 🌻 🌻 🌻

Supreme Surprise: Yesterday the Supreme Court actually did something both surprising and good. By a vote of 6 to 3 in the case of Moore v Harper, the Court rejected the independent state legislature theory, debunking the argument that state legislatures can set election rules with little oversight from state courts.  The opinion was written by Chief Justice John Roberts and supported by liberals Kagan, Sotomayor and Jackson and conservatives Barrett and Kavanaugh although Kavanaugh wrote his own concurring opinion.  The specific question in front of the Court was whether the North Carolina Supreme Court had the power to strike down the Republican dominated state legislature’s extremely partisan gerrymandered congressional map for violating the North Carolina Constitution.  Relying on the now debunked “independent state legislature theory” Republican state legislators argued they could and that state courts could not stop them from gerrymandering or setting any other rules related to elections.  Initially the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled against the Republican legislators but then after an election that changed the make-up of the State Supreme Court, tilting it ruby red, the newly constituted State Supreme Court went with a do over, changing its opinion, giving the legislators final say.  Notably Trump’s kraken legal team, led by John Eastman who is now facing a disciplinary hearing in California over his legal shenanigans, had invoked the independent state legislature theory to argue that state legislators, particularly those in swingy states like Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Georgia could override the results of the 2020 election to throw out Biden’s victory over Trump, a strategy that some in Republican leadership hoped to employ again in 2024.  Many thought that as a result of the North Carolina Supreme Court’s final “do over” ruling, SCOTUS would punt, something that Justice Clarence Thomas whose wife Ginni is all in on allowing state legislatures to void inconvenient vote results says they should have done so the fact that SCOTUS stepped up to issue an opinion was almost as surprising as the opinion they issued.  Chief Justice Roberts who authored the Shelby County v Holder opinion that dismantled large parts of the Voting Rights Acts may or may not be having a come to Jesus moment and  may be trying for a bit of a mulligan but whatever his motivations, the Moore ruling combined with recent rulings against racial gerrymandering in Alabama and Louisiana will make it more difficult for Republicans to manipulate the outcomes of future elections and may even make it more likely that Democrats, who are likely to pick up a few seats in states like Alabama and Louisiana and a few other states that are now “fixing” their gerrymandered districts, will retake the House. As to that House, things there continue to go downhill.  Fearful of losing his Speaker perch Kevin McCarthy is now supporting efforts by his wackadoodle caucus to expunge Trump’s two impeachments.  Kevin is also trying to expunge from Trump’s memory the comment he made yesterday about Trump maybe not being the best Republican candidate for 2024. The way things are going Kevin could end up banished to Belarus, sharing a condo or maybe a cell with the Wagner Group’s Yevgeny Prigozhin.    

Lordy, There are Tapes:  Well,  we knew from the text of his indictment that Special Counsel Jack Smith had at least one tape of Trump implicating himself but now via post-Licht CNN we’ve all heard it and yes Trump really did implicate himself.  The tape in question involves a conversation that Trump had at his Bedminster, New Jersey club with former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’ ghost writers.  While ordering Cokes for everyone, Trump is heard casually referencing Iran war plans prepared for him by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milly to “prove” that it was the warmongering Milly rather than he who wanted to bomb Iran into smithereens. On the call, the sounds of some giggling while he shares, or in legal parlance disseminates, the war plans can be heard.  The current charges against Trump do not include dissemination of top-secret documents possibly because the actual disseminating took place in New Jersey rather than in Florida so Trump’s lawyers could try to exclude the tape but should they try, Special Counsel Jack could one up them by indicting Trump in New Jersey so jurors, to the extent the case ever moves that far forward, will likely hear the tape and learn about the war plan sharing.  As to those Iran war plans, it’s not clear whether Jack’s team actually has them because they aren’t referred to in the list of documents included with the indictment though some have pointed out that even if Jack has them, he might not want to share them with a jury or anyone else because after all they are super-secret war plans. For his part Trump insists his conversation with the ghost writers was perfect, that he was only pretending to share war plans as an act of “bravado” and that all he was waving in the air were plans for his next real estate project, maybe that lucrative “conflict of interest” one in Oman. He also insists that he’s a “legitimate person,” and apparently a large percentage of Republicans agree because he keeps rising in GOP polls and they would never vote for someone illegitimate.  Right?  And to be fair, Republicans aren’t the only ones attracted to crazy.  RFK Jr whose campaign manager Dennis Kucinich can’t name a single vaccine that he supports, is polling in the double digits among Democrats even though his positions on most issues mirror those of Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson. That’s the RFK Jr who recently posted a video of himself on Musk’s Twitter shirtless doing pushups to prove his fitness for the presidency. Maybe he’s gearing up to fight the winner of the cage battle between Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, to the extent that ever happens.  Getting back to Trump and his legal woes,  Judge Aileen Cannon has issued a few rulings that could affect scheduling and the sharing of witness names, but legal guru Andrew Weissmann of Mueller era fame says don’t worry, despite concerns over Cannon’s jurisprudence her recent rulings aren’t out of line. Worth noting one delay has to do with Trump co-conspirator Nauta who still can’t find a Florida attorney willing to represent him. Anyone out there interested?  Also, because with Trump and his legal woes there’s always an also, things continue to percolate on the January 6^th front where the focus appears to have moved to the fake delegate drama raising hopes that Special Jack could be getting ready to leapfrog Fulton County’s Fani Willis who still plans to announce her indictments sometime in early August.

Red Alert:  Former Texas Congressman Will Hurd is running for President.  Hurd, a former CIA clandestine operator and occasional Trump critic, who is considered a moderate by Republican standards, is another one who stands little to no chance of winning the presidential nomination but to paraphrase Tina Turner, what’s winning got to do with it? Though he hasn’t announced. Florida Senator/former Governor Rick Scott’s name is also being bandied about. There are suggestions that Scott, best known for his company’s Medicaid and Medicare fraud, the ones that resulted in 14 felony convictions and the payment of $1.7 billion in fines back when he was in the private sector, may be doing Trump a favor by helping him knock off that other Floridian, current Governor Ron DeSantis whose culture war edicts aren’t faring well in the courts.