Maureen Dowd: Real Justice: Justice Jackson

A snarling pack of white male Republicans ripping apart a poised, brainy Black woman at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, using sordid innuendos and baseless claims about race and porn to smear her, as her pained family sits behind her.

It has been 31 years since I watched this scene, disgusted, when Anita Hill was questioned during confirmation hearings for Justice Clarence Thomas. Now Ketanji Brown Jackson has been cast into the same medieval torture chamber on Capitol Hill, with Democrats once more struggling to shield their witness from being mauled.

This time, the male Torquemadas were joined by a female inquisitor, Marsha Blackburn. The Tennessee Republican is all magnolia Southern charm — until she spits venom.

“Can you provide a definition for the word woman?” Blackburn asked Judge Jackson, invoking the controversy over a transgender swimmer from the University of Pennsylvania. Blackburn’s question inspired Tucker Carlson to later hold up a graphic of a woman’s reproductive system, along with a silhouette of a woman so shapely that Roger Ailes would have approved.

What is a woman? Jackson shows that a woman is someone who stays cool in the face of calumny and is headed for the Supreme Court. And that will be justice for Justice Jackson.

A better question might be: What is a senator?

Is it a dolt who cares more about boosting unrealistic presidential ambitions with distorted information than making the Senate, for once, look like a dignified body?

Feral Republicans took an exemplary record and twisted it to make Jackson look like an enabler of pedophiles. Tom Cotton all but accused her of lying, just as Arlen Specter accused Hill of perjury — based on nothing.

Less than a year ago, Lindsey Graham voted to confirm Jackson for the D.C. Court of Appeals, calling her “qualified.” Now he berates her with odd questions and seems to blame her for Brett Kavanaugh’s grilling. If only John McCain could appear to him like Hamlet’s father’s ghost and slap him into shape. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/26/opinion/ketanji-brown-jackson-clarence-thomas.html

Eugene Robinson: Biden’s Putin ad lib wasn’t a gaffe. He was right.

Let me stipulate that, on balance, President Biden probably should not have implied that the United States seeks to oust Russian President Vladimir Putin from office. Let me further stipulate that perhaps a White House sound engineer should cut Biden’s microphone whenever he strays from prepared remarks.

That said, the nine words about Putin that Biden ad-libbed into his speech in Warsaw on Saturday — “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power” — hardly constitute the massive “gaffe” his critics accuse him of committing.

Yes, Biden was overly passionate. Yes, he was insufficiently diplomatic. But was he wrong?

Putin is engaged in an unprovoked campaign of mass murder that borders on genocide. Fought to a standstill by Ukraine’s brave and skillful defense forces, Putin’s army, navy and air force have resorted to targeting defenseless civilians in apartment buildings, shopping centers, theaters and hospitals. The carnage is unspeakable, the devastation gratuitous. If and when the Russians finally enter Mariupol, the port on the Sea of Azov that remains under brutal siege, there literally will be no city left to occupy.

We are witnessing a war crime on a massive scale, and one man is wholly responsible: Putin. He alone decided to attack a sovereign nation and he alone can decide when this obscene slaughter ends.

In Biden’s words, I heard anger, frustration and resolve. But I did not hear — even before the cleanup — any change in U.S. policy toward Putin and Russia. It is not our place to decide who leads the Russian Federation. Nor is it within our power.

In Warsaw, with the “cannot remain” phrase, Biden was giving voice to the victims and refugees of Putin’s war-of-choice. “I was expressing moral outrage that I feel, and I make no apologies for it,” Biden said Monday. His controversial words were not by any standard “horrendous.” Perhaps to a fault, they were human. https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/eugene-robinson/

Ruth Marcus: Forget advise and consent. This is smear and degrade.

The pretense is gone — the pretense that Supreme Court confirmation hearings are about determining nominees’ fitness for office, gleaning a sense of their legal acumen and approach to judging, and gathering the information necessary to exercise a solemn senatorial power.

No longer. Advise and consent has yielded to smear and degrade. The goal is not to illuminate but to tarnish: If a nominee can’t be stopped, at least the other side can inflict some damage on her and the opposition party.

The confirmation hearings just concluded for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson represented the culmination of a sad trajectory. Nominations and hearings have always had a political component; after all, the Framers assigned the confirmation power to a political branch.

But never has a confirmation hearing been less about law and more about partisan point-scoring and presidential campaign-launching.

But with minds made up, substantive probing mostly gave way to posturing — none — was designed to elicit useful information from Jackson. Its goal was to rough her up and underscore GOP talking points.

Hence the microscopic — and out-of-context — focus on what Jackson called “this small subset of my sentences,” in child pornography cases, as if a Justice Jackson would somehow use her power to unleash child predators on the country. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/03/25/ruth-marcus-senate-confirmation-jackson/

David Atkins: Refusing to Prosecute Trump Is a Political Act

It is a sacred tenet of democracy that the judicial and prosecutorial processes must be independent of political pressure. These decisions must be made as objectively as possible.

If the facts warrant prosecuting Donald Trump and anyone in his circle, they should be charged. Prosecuting them would not be political. Failure to prosecute them would be.

Unfortunately, Republican elected officials are lobbing heavy threats at both the DOJ and Democrats, insisting that prosecuting Trump over January 6 (or anything else) would be seen as a political act—and that they would seek revenge. Their anger is particularly directed toward the House January 6 committee, which concluded that there is adequate evidence to implicate Trump and several of his allies in serious crimes.

The House committee and DOJ officials should studiously ignore these threats for several reasons.

First and foremost, democracy cannot thrive if crimes go unpunished because their prosecution would be interpreted as political, especially by the allies of those held accountable. The result of this practice would be devastating escalation: Elected officials would commit bigger and bolder crimes to win and hold power, knowing that their opponents cannot do anything about it whether they succeed or fail.

If the crimes are apparent, then failing to prosecute is a politically motivated act. Democracy cannot function if politicians are free to commit grandiose crimes simply because their political allies might throw a fit if they are held accountable. Reports that the Manhattan district attorney has essentially given up on prosecuting Trump underscores how quickly a criminal case can deflate because of a lack of will. One can only hope that Garland won’t go wobbly and is using the time he’s taking to sharpen his case, not to waver about whether to bring it. https://washingtonmonthly.com/2022/03/23/refusing-to-prosecute-trump-is-a-political-act/

Greg Sargent: Chris Wallace’s stark admission about Tucker Carlson shames Fox News

When Chris Wallace resigned from Fox News last December, media observers correctly diagnosed the move’s real meaning: This stripped away one of the last fig leaves disguising Fox’s increasing role as a propaganda operation on Donald Trump’s behalf.

Now Wallace has shared new details about his reason for leaving Fox, and the revelations sharpen this point considerably. It turns out Wallace quit in part because of Fox host Tucker Carlson’s depiction of the Jan. 6 insurrection attempt as a “false flag” operation, creating a situation Wallace describes as “unsustainable.”

We should be clear on what this means. Wallace seems to have decided he could no longer credibly practice journalism on Fox in part because, increasingly, the only acceptable narrative at Fox about Trump’s effort to overturn U.S. democracy to remain in power illegitimately is one that falsifies it entirely.

Wallace has tried to hold Republicans accountable for feeding Trump’s lies about the election’s outcome, validation that likely helped inspire the Jan. 6 violence, and for helping cover up Trump’s seeming relishing of the violence as a potential tool to carry out his coup.

This is the sort of journalistic conduct that doesn’t have a future home at Fox, apparently: The Republican coverup for Trump must not be scrutinized. That’s what Wallace’s actions seem to suggest, even as Carlson’s propagandizing about Jan. 6 is seen as a smashing ratings success.

What that says about Fox as a journalistic organization is bad enough. What it says about Fox’s low opinion of its audience’s incapacity for exposure to the truth might be even worse.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/03/28/chris-wallace-tucker-carlson-shames-fox-news/

David Remnick: What Is Putin Thinking?

Putin came to power, in 1999, advertised not as a man of ideology but as a figure of rude health and managerial competence. In truth, he was a man of the K.G.B., trained to view the West, particularly the U.S., as his enemy, and to see conspirators everywhere trying to weaken and humiliate Russia. He did not form any committees to devise a national idea; he set up no hotline. He established, over time, a personalist regime built around his patronage and absolute authority. And the national identity he has helped promulgate––illiberal, imperial, resentful of the West––has played an essential role in his brutal invasion of Ukraine.

To create the trappings of this Russian identity, Putin seized on existing strands of reactionary thought. While most observers paid closer attention to the intellectual and political turn to the West in the late nineteen-eighties and nineties, many Russian thinkers, publications, and institutions drew inspiration from far different sources. Newspapers such as Dyen (The Day) and Zavtra (Tomorrow) published screeds about the pernicious influence of American cultural and political power. Various academics celebrated the virtues of “the strong hand,” exemplified by such repressive tsars as Alexander III and Nicholas I and foreign autocrats such as Augusto Pinochet. A crackpot philosopher named Aleksandr Dugin published neo-fascist apocalyptic tomes about the eternal battle between the “sea power” of the West and the “land power” of Eurasia, and found an audience in Russian political, military, and intelligence circles.

Putin, from his first years in office, was obsessed with the restoration of Russian might in the world and the positioning of the security services as the singular institution of domestic control. NATO’s expansion and the bombing of Belgrade, Iraq, and Libya propelled his suspicion of the West and his inward turn. He also recognized the importance of symbols and traditional institutions that could unify ordinary people and help define the particularities of a new Russian exceptionalism. He restored the old Soviet anthem with updated lyrics. He told interviewers and visitors that he was an Orthodox believer and did nothing to dispel rumors that he had taken on a dukhovnik, a spiritual guide, named Tikhon Shevkunov. Father Tikhon, who has appeared in films and runs the Web site Pravoslavie.ru., denied that he had notable influence over Putin (“I am no Cardinal Richelieu!”), but made it plain that he was a conservative nationalist who believed in the “special path” of Russia.

When Putin returned to the Presidency, in 2012, his attention to distinctly conservative values had deepened. He cracked down on dissenters, vilifying them as “traitors,” an American-backed “fifth column.” He occupied Crimea and invaded eastern Ukraine. His vision of Moscow as a center of anti-liberal ideas and Eurasian power intensified. During the pandemic, he rarely met in person with his advisers, yet, according to the political analyst Mikhail Zygar, he spoke for days at his dacha with Yury Kovalchuk, a media baron and the largest shareholder in Rossiya Bank, who shares his messianic vision and sybaritic life style. In recent years, Putin has even succeeded in exporting his particular brand of illiberalism to, among others, the National Front, in France; the British National Party; the Jobbik movement, in Hungary; Golden Dawn, in Greece; and the right wing of the Republican Party. As Donald Trump’s ideologist, Steve Bannon, put it recently, “Ukraine’s not even a country.”

The devastation of Mariupol and other Ukrainian cities suggests that there is little mercy or modesty in Putin’s faith. Early in his reign, according to the journalist Catherine Belton, he went with his confidant, banker, and eventual antagonist Sergei Pugachev to an Orthodox service on Forgiveness Sunday, which is celebrated just before Lent. Pugachev, a believer, told Putin that he should prostrate himself before the priest, as an act of contrition. “Why should I?” Putin is said to have replied. “I am the President of the Russian Federation. Why should I ask for forgiveness?” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/04/04/what-is-putin-thinking-russia-ukraine

Jonathan Chait: The Future of Trumpism

The greatest threat to Donald Trump’s hold on the GOP comes from Ron DeSantis, who may be more MAGA than the MAGA king himself.

In late February, as daily deaths from COVID-19 tallied in the thousands across the country, Florida governor Ron DeSantis announced his latest effort to dismantle his state’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. Private businesses, he insisted, should stop requiring their employees to wear masks at work. Here was a perfectly selected message to build the brand he has established: Ron DeSantis, scourge of public-health bureaucrats, enemy of woke corporations, and friend of the little guy.

Both the form and content of the message reflected careful planning. As DeSantis spoke, he looked like a man who had been mimicking Donald Trump’s speeches in front of the mirror. He performed a series of hand thrusts, in which he drew his thumbs together until they were almost touching, then jerked them apart in quick horizontal motions, as if he were playing an invisible accordion. After five such accordion pulls, he swung his right hand, thumb pointing up, in a semi-circular motion back inward to the center. DeSantis tweeted out the clip, and any MAGA fan watching, even without the sound on, would have grasped the gist just through the eerie physical impersonation.

Republicans have collectively recognized that however much Trump may exasperate them, their president-in-exile will not be purged, nor will the changes he brought to their party be rolled back. He might, however, be co-opted. And if this is to happen, they have settled with remarkable unanimity on DeSantis as the person to do it.

People who do not ingest large amounts of conservative media may have difficulty comprehending the extent of the adulation both the Trumpist and the Trump-skeptical wings of the party have lavished on DeSantis. On a daily basis, the right-wing press churns out stories with headlines like “The Promise of Ron DeSantis,” “Could Gov. Ron DeSantis Be the Favorite GOP Frontrunner for 2024?,” “A Ron DeSantis Master Class in Rope-a-Dope,” “Media Keep Trying — and Failing — to Take Down Florida’s Ron DeSantis,” “Karol Markowicz on What Gov. Ron DeSantis Is Really Like: ‘So Real and Down to Earth,’ ” and on and on. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ron-desantis-trumpism.html

Jonathan Last: What Is Ginni Thomas?

Here is a secret no one in Washington is willing to say out loud: Ginni Thomas is an idiot. The only reason she was texting the president’s chief of staff instead of being the angry cat lady on Facebook is because she married a man who got himself appointed to the Supreme Court.

The Thomases were never a duo of intellectual equals, or a power couple where each member had their own thing going on, and where the merger of the two was like Voltron coming together.

This isn’t James Carville and Mary Matalin. Or Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter. Or Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb. Or any number of other famous couples. Heck, this isn’t even Sonny and Cher.

No. The Thomases are more like Ivanka and Jared: The senior partner in the arrangement held a position of such high importance that their society scrabbled around to find something for the dimmer partner to do in order to make them feel important. In Jared’s case, that has been destroying newspapers, losing money on real estate, and being tasked with brokering peace in the Middle East. https://thetriad.thebulwark.com/p/what-is-ginni-thomas

Benjamin Wittes: Donald Trump, John Eastman and the Silence of the Justice Department

It is no exaggeration to say that the history of the United States has never seen an account of a president’s conduct quite so devastating as the first nine pages of Judge David Carter’s opinion of March 28 in Eastman v. Thompson. The opinion, legally speaking, concerns the Jan. 6 committee’s efforts to secure emails from John Eastman, the law professor who provided President Trump with advice aimed at overturning the 2020 election. But that is not why it will be remembered.

Certainly Watergate produced no document about Richard Nixon comparable to it in its combination of brevity, spare factual simplicity, and total evisceration of its subject’s honor and conduct. Nor did Teapot Dome or the Whiskey Ring scandals produce such material concerning Warren Harding or Ulysses S. Grant. Nothing that Lawrence Walsh had to say about Ronald Reagan or that Kenneth Starr wrote about Bill Clinton, both after years of investigation and exposition at great length, remotely approaches it in power.

Yet at the risk infuriating readers, I want to point out a paradox about the opinion: Despite the power of its narrative, despite its correct statement that Trump likely violated criminal laws, and despite its laying out the contours of those violations clearly and without apparent ambiguity, the opinion will actually not necessitate a Justice Department criminal investigation of the former president.

Before explaining this point, I want to take a moment to appreciate a genuinely historic piece of judicial writing. The opinion’s first section—entitled “A. Facts”—begins on page three of Judge Carter’s opinion and runs through the middle of page 12. In a footnote attached to the word “Facts” in the subhead leading the section, Judge Carter notes in a fashion characteristic of the section’s understatement, “In this discussion, the Court relies solely on facts provided by Dr. Eastman and the Select Committee in their briefing and attached exhibits.”

He is not exaggerating. The section contains no judgments, no legal interpretations, no conclusions. It contains virtually no rhetoric at all. What’s more, the section does not contain a whole lot of new facts. The story of Eastman and Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, the relationship between that effort and Trump’s concurrent plot to decapitate the Justice Department, and ultimately to the insurrectionary activity of January 6, 2021, has dribbled out bit by bit over the months already. And to the extent the current litigation has revealed new material, that mostly emerged in the committee’s briefing and the accompanying exhibits a few weeks ago.

What makes Judge Carter’s account so powerful is that it is linked tightly to record evidence, that it tells the story in an end-to-end fashion crisply and efficiently, and that it thus assembles the evidence into a coherent account of the big picture. I cannot do Judge Carter’s account justice; please do read it. For present purposes, let me just say that it leaves the fair-minded reader in no doubt that the events that took place between Joe Biden’s defeat of Trump at the polls and congressional certification of Biden’s victory on Jan. 6 were an all-out effort by the lame duck president to seize and retain power in unapologetic defiance of the law using extra-constitutional means—up to and including violence directed against a coordinate branch of government.

Such a story requires no denunciation from the judge. His account of it alone constitutes its own denunciation, at least it should to decent citizens of a functioning democracy. https://www.lawfareblog.com/donald-trump-john-eastman-and-silence-justice-department