Alan Feuer and Glenn Thrush: Cassidy Hutchinson’s Testimony Highlights Legal Risks for Trump

John Cassidy: Political Lessons for Democrats in a Post-Roe America

Republicans claim to have discovered hitherto undiscovered rights residing in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, including the right to carry guns for self-defense.

Having claimed that the Constitution prevents New York and other states from forcing people to get a special license to carry a firearm, the Court, the very next day, turned around and said the Constitution also implies that the decision on how to regulate decisions to end pregnancies should be left to the states. Evidently, consistency really is the hobgoblin of small minds—the heirs to Scalia and Robert Bork don’t bother themselves with it.

Another lesson from the past few days is that brazenness and ruthlessness pay off, or, as Mitch McConnell might put it, “There are no absolute rules of conduct, either in peace or war. Everything depends on circumstances.” Actually, this quotation comes from Leon Trotsky’s autobiography, but he and McConnell aren’t so far apart. In the past few decades, the G.O.P. has turned into a party of permanent counter-revolution, and its leaders wage this campaign with a wanton disregard for established rules and norms that the old Bolshevik would have admired. https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/political-lessons-for-democrats-in-a-post-roe-america

Jeff Greenfield: What Happens if the GOP Tries to Leave Trump Behind

It’s not exactly a thunderous roar, more like a stage whisper, running through the ranks of what we used to think of as mainstream Republicans: “Maybe he doesn’t have to be our nominee in 2024.”

They grasp, if not at straws, then at green shoots springing up in one place after another. In Georgia, virtually all of Donald Trump’s favorites lost their nomination fights. A new poll out of New Hampshire shows Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis running a couple of points ahead of Trump among GOP voters; last October, by comparison, Trump had a 25-point margin. The revelations from the Jan. 6 Committee, while apparently changing few Republican minds, has painted a picture of presidential misconduct so blatant that nearly six in 10 Americans believe he should be charged with criminal conduct. (Pro Tip: A presidential candidate under criminal indictment is in a suboptimal situation). More and more Republicans, while not confronting Trump directly, speak in Aesopian terms about not fighting past battles, about looking to the future, about nominating someone with vaguely humanoid hair (OK, not that last one just yet).

But if Republicans are thinking optimistically about a 2024 campaign without Trump as their nominee, they are also in the grip of an illusion — one which demonstrates a striking lack of understanding about who Trump is.

A Trump who is denied the nomination — which, by his account, must have been the product of horrible, disgusting cheating the likes of which nobody has ever seen — is a Trump with the inclination and the resources to run an independent campaign for president. And he’ll have enough true believers to doom whoever the GOP nominee is. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/06/24/desantis-trump-2024-00041790

Jia Tolentino: We’re Not Going Back to the Time Before Roe. We’re Going Somewhere Worse

Half a century ago, the anti-abortion movement was dominated by progressive, antiwar, pro-welfare Catholics. Today, the movement is conservative, evangelical, and absolutely single-minded, populated overwhelmingly by people who, although they may embrace foster care, adoption, and various forms of private ministry, show no interest in pushing for public, structural support for human life once it’s left the womb. The scholar Mary Ziegler recently noted that today’s anti-abortion advocates see the “strategies of earlier decades as apologetic, cowardly, and counterproductive.” During the past four years, eleven states have passed abortion bans that contain no exceptions for rape or incest, a previously unthinkable extreme.

In Texas, already, children aged nine, ten, and eleven, who don’t yet understand what sex and abuse are, face forced pregnancy and childbirth after being raped. Women sitting in emergency rooms in the midst of miscarriages are being denied treatment for sepsis because their fetuses’ hearts haven’t yet stopped. People you’ll never hear of will spend the rest of their lives trying and failing, agonizingly, in this punitive country, to provide stability for a first or fifth child they knew they weren’t equipped to care for.

In the face of all this, there has been so much squeamishness even in the pro-choice camp—a tone that casts abortion as an unfortunate necessity; an approach to messaging which values choice but devalues abortion care itself, which emphasizes reproductive rights rather than reproductive justice. That approach has landed us here. We are not going back to the pre-Roe era, and we should not want to go back to the era that succeeded it, which was less bitter than the present but was never good enough. We should demand more, and we will have to. We will need to be full-throated and unconditional about abortion as a necessary precondition to justice and equal rights if we want even a chance of someday getting somewhere better. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/07/04/we-are-not-going-back-to-the-time-before-roe-we-are-going-somewhere-worse

Dave Haller: Nixon tried to rig an election, too. But unlike Trump, at least he tried to hide it

Watergate’s 50th anniversary has prompted an intense debate over who more threatened American democracy: Nixon, or Donald Trump? Reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who broke some (but not all) of the Watergate story, think it’s Trump: “the first seditious president in our history,” they write.

Others say we shouldn’t forget Nixon’s crookedness, or the crimes of those around him. It’s a close call. Better, perhaps, to think of Trump and Nixon as two sides of the same coin: Both embraced illegal behavior to win, and to stay in office. Where they differed is their approach to lawlessness. While Nixon tried to hide it, Trump advertised it.

There he is, pressuring state legislators to break the law and certify him. Now he’s calling Vice President Mike Pence a vulgarity for refusing to stop the Electoral College count in Congress. Somewhere, Nixon is smiling. Trump revels in his law-breaking — indeed, some believe that’s the source of his remaining appeal to some voters. “When the president does it, that means it is not illegal,” Nixon later told interviewer David Frost, a proposition that shocked the nation but Trump seems to have adopted as true. “You’ve got to fight like hell,” Trump told the Jan. 6 rioters. And they did. https://www.kansascity.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/dave-helling/article262798313.html

Lucian K. Truscott IV: They folded up the Constitution and shoved it where the sun does not shine

With its Siamese-twin decisions on Thursday and Friday, the Supreme Court didn’t just turn back the clock or flip through the pages of the calendar looking for a new decade — or century — to love. Calling themselves textualists and originalists, they simply put the Constitution through a search engine and told it to look for some key words: Abortion? Uh-huh, not there. Gay sex? Not in 1791 or 1868! Same-sex marriage? Are you kidding?

But guns? Well, the founders spelled it “arms,” but we know exactly what they had in mind! The right to walk around with your guns on your hip or slung over your shoulder because you need ‘em for self-defense!

It’s tempting to say that the justices handed down these two decisions because they could, but what they did and how they did it is even worse: Just a month after 19 elementary school children and their two teachers were shot dead with a semiautomatic military weapon of war, they mumbled about life and provided for the mechanics of death and set forth the new outlines of an obscene legal regimen.

What the six so-called conservatives are relying on these days are two words not found in the Constitution: history and tradition. Both are suddenly seen as absolutely necessary in determining whether certain rights deserve to be preserved. The decisions are rife with phrases like, “We then canvassed the historical record, and found yet further confirmation,” and you know what the “historical record” confirmed, don’t you? Exactly what the majority wanted it to. It turns out that in order for a constitutional right to be enjoyed by American citizens, it must be old, and the older the better. If a right existed in the 18th and 19th centuries, well, this court is fine with it. But if that right wasn’t enjoyed by the citizens of, say, 1816 — like the right to privacy, under which various other so-called modern rights exist, such as the right to purchase and use contraceptives, the right to have sex in the manner you choose, and the right to marry a person of your own sex — then those rights simply don’t exist.

The majority leaves out the inconvenient truth that abortions, legal or otherwise, have been performed since the beginning of history as we know it, and the ownership of guns and other weapons of death and destruction have been restricted by class, income, social standing and political power for just as long.

It took the Civil War to end slavery. All it took to return to enslaving women by forcing them to bear an unwanted child and go through the pain and sometimes life-threatening act of giving birth was the six signatures of the Republican majority. For the likes of Thomas and Alito and the rest of them, if it was good enough for the founders, it’s good enough for us.

Oh, by the way: here’s another word that’s not in the wonderful founding document we call the Constitution: Woman. https://luciantruscott.substack.com/p/they-folded-up-the-constitution-and

Rick Hasen: No One Is Above the Law, and That Starts With Donald Trump

In a 2019 ruling requiring the former White House counsel Don McGahn to testify at a congressional hearing about former President Donald Trump’s alleged abuses of power, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson declared that “presidents are not kings.” If we take that admonition from our next Supreme Court justice seriously and look at the evidence amassed so far by the House select committee on the Jan. 6 attack, we can — and in fact must — conclude that the prosecution of Mr. Trump is not only permissible but required for the sake of American democracy.

This week’s hearings showed us that Mr. Trump acted as if he thought he was a king, not a president subject to the same rules as the rest of us. The hearings featured extraordinary testimony about the relentless pressure to subvert the 2020 election that the former president and his allies brought against at least 31 state and local officials in states he lost, like Michigan, Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania. He or his allies twisted the arm of everyone from top personnel at the U.S. Department of Justice to lower-level election workers.

The evidence and the testimony offered demonstrate why Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Justice Department should convene a grand jury now, if it hasn’t already, to consider indicting Mr. Trump for crimes related to his attempt to overturn the results of the election, before he declares his candidacy for president in 2024, perhaps as early as this summer. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/24/opinion/trump-jan-6-prosecution.html

Robin Abcarian: Banning abortion is the first step. Brace yourselves for the end of many hard-fought rights

Michael Hiltzik: America is in the grip of a right-wing minority

The options for restoring abortion rights at the federal legislative level, where things must happen to “codify Roe,” as the principle is labeled, are limited but real. One is to build on the Women’s Health Protection Act, which has been passed by the House but blocked in the Senate. The measure would prevent states from imposing excessive restrictions on abortion providers to interfere with women’s reproductive health choices.

A reworked bill could set acceptable limits on abortions, say by restricting them to the first trimester of pregnancy, but also protect providers acting to safeguard the health of the mother and to ensure abortion rights in cases of rape or incest. The measure could also prohibit states from penalizing women who seek abortions outside the state or those who help them do so.

The chief obstacle to such a law is politics. Passing it in the Senate would probably require ending the filibuster — now may be the time.

It’s conceivable that the Supreme Court could invalidate the new law, but that would be a more radical step than the current court majority has been willing to take even in the abortion and gun rights cases because it would mean reinterpreting the Constitution’s commerce clause, which gives Congress the exclusive authority to regulate interstate commerce.

Though this court has lurched far to the right, this might be a bridge too far — especially if its public legitimacy continues to crumble. After all, it was the threat of a deterioration in its public reputation that prompted the 1930s court to reverse itself in its approach to liberal reforms to stave off FDR’s court-packing scheme.

Can the Supreme Court continue to turn the clock back? In the short term, the damage has been done. In the longer term, it is standing in front of a powerful tide.

“The long arc of American history has bent more steeply towards gender equality in the past few decades,” wrote 154 economists in a friend-of-the-court brief in the abortion case. The trendline has been broken at the moment, but not forever. https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-06-27/the-abortion-ruling-shows-that-america-is-in-the-grip-of-a-right-wing-minority

David Frum: Roe Is the New Prohibition

The culture war raged most hotly from the ’70s to the next century’s ’20s. It polarized American society, dividing men from women, rural from urban, religious from secular, Anglo-Americans from more recent immigrant groups. At length, but only after a titanic constitutional struggle, the rural and religious side of the culture imposed its will on the urban and secular side. A decisive victory had been won, or so it seemed.

The culture war I’m talking about is the culture war over alcohol prohibition. From the end of Reconstruction to the First World War, probably more state and local elections turned on that one issue than on any other. The long struggle seemingly culminated in 1919, with the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment and enactment by Congress of the National Prohibition Act, or the Volstead Act (as it became known). The amendment and the act together outlawed the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages in the United States and all its subject territories. Many urban and secular Americans experienced those events with the same feeling of doom as pro-choice Americans may feel today after the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. https://www.pacesconnection.com/blog/roe-is-the-new-prohibition-theatlantic-com