J.D. VANCE PROBABLY HATES YOU MORE THAN TRUMP DOES

Donald Trump has chosen J.D. Vance as his running mate. At a moment when Republicans say they're seeking "national unity," I want to remind you that J.D. Vance hates many, many people and is proud to say so. Vance is not like Donald Trump, whose expressions of hatred are sometimes just theater. It's clear that Vance is an angry, nasty person whose contempt for the people he doesn't like is bone deep.

Remember his 2022 Senate campaign, when he called Vice President Harris and others "childless cat ladies"?

Vance ... for a solid week in July kept using the term “childless” in an effort to insult his foes on the left.

“We’re effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too,” Vance told Tucker Carlson at the time.

As examples of childless cat ladies, Vance pointed to Vice President Kamala Harris (who has stepchildren); progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), the youngest woman in Congress; and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who announced a month later he and his husband had adopted infant twins.

The reference to Buttigieg is a cat lady is also homophobic, though Vance has also used the term to refer to heterosexually married economist and commentator Paul Krugman:

Paul Krugman is one of many weird cat ladies who have too much power in our country. We should change this. https://t.co/uylzHsm6WT

— J.D. Vance (@JDVance1) July 25, 2021

Of course, Vance thinks all Democrats are "scumbags," as he told us when he accepted Marjorie Taylor Greene's endorsement in his Senate race:

Honored to have Marjorie’s endorsement. We’re going to win this thing and take the country back from the scumbags. https://t.co/tKFWOvRvq3

— J.D. Vance (@JDVance1) January 25, 2022

In a 2021 speech to the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life, Vance implied that he wants to have a shooting war with liberals:

It may not be as bad as it was in the 1860s, but we’re all going through a fiery trial. The people in this room are the people who are going to be at the vanguard of the conservative movement that actually fights back against our enemies instead of just taking it. Because if our enemies are using guns and bazookas, we damn well better fight back with more than wet noodles. We need to use the same means if we’re actually going to win this fight. And I’m not in this to lose, I’m in this to win.

Am I misreading what Vance said? All I can tell you is that if President Biden's post-debate statement that "It’s time to put Trump in a bullseye" is being taken as a literal call for violence, then this Vance speech should be read the same way.

Vance also thought the tragic shooting on the set of the film Rust was hilarious. The day after the shooting, at a time when Jack Dorsey was still the CEO of Twitter, Vance thought it would be delightful for Trump to be back on the site so he could make tasteless jokes about the death, because Vance is a Republican, and Republicans hate Alec Baldwin, who's a Democrat:

Dear @jack let Trump back on. We need Alec Baldwin tweets.

— J.D. Vance (@JDVance1) October 22, 2021

And let's not forget Vance's assertion in 2021 that even domestic abuse victims shouldn't be able to get no-fault divorces:

The Ohio Republican Senate nominee, talking to Pacifica Christian High School in Southern California ... gave an extended answer that claimed that people now “shift spouses like they change their underwear,” and that it had done long-term damage to a generation of children.

“This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that like, ‘well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term,’” Vance said.

“And maybe it worked out for the moms and dads, though I’m skeptical. But it really didn’t work out for the kids of those marriages,” Vance continued. “And that’s what I think all of us should be honest about, is we’ve run this experiment in real time. And what we have is a lot of very, very real family dysfunction that’s making our kids unhappy.”

Yes, Vance believes it's not good for the children of abused spouses if the abuse victims exit the marriages.

Now that Trump has chosen Vance, I expect Democrats to focus on the mean tweets Vance posted about Trump before he became a Trump fan. I don't see the point -- politcians (and non-politicians) change their minds about people all the time. Kamala Harris said harsh things about Joe Biden during the 2020 campaign. George H.W. Bush attacked Ronald Reagan's economic ideas in the 1980 campaign. I think it's more important for voters to know how much contempt Vance has for everyone who disagrees with him or does things he doesn't like. I have no kids, so he hates me. Maybe he hates you too.

THE DEATH OF AMERICA IS STEADY ROT

News I'm sure you know already:

A federal judge dismissed in its entirety the classified documents case against former President Donald J. Trump on Monday, ruling that the appointment of the special counsel, Jack Smith, had violated the Constitution.

In a stunning ruling, the judge, Aileen M. Cannon, found that because Mr. Smith had not been named to the post of special counsel by the president or confirmed by the Senate, his appointment was in violation of the appointments clause of the Constitution.

The ruling by Judge Cannon, who was put on the bench by Mr. Trump, flew in the face of previous court decisions reaching back to the Watergate era that upheld the legality of the ways in which independent prosecutors have been named.

We think we'll lose democracy and the rule of law suddenly if Donald Trump becomes president again. We think the edifice will be destroyed like the Twin Towers on 9/11: the planes hit the buildings, and without hours they collapsed in on themselves.

But our system is like a house that's rotting room by room. The foundation has cracks. There are termites. The roof leaks. One room after another has become uninhabitable.

We've lost the federal courts. The would-be murderers of America already have the federal bench they need to sustain the horrible America they want. A second Trump presidency won't really worsen the federal bench -- it will only fix it in place in its current form for several more decades. I'm 65, and I'll never live to see a federal bench that isn't an extremist Republican legislature in robes.

Through gerrymandering, we lost democracy in many state legislatures years ago. In states like North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Texas, liberals and moderates add up to more than 45% of the electorate and have exactly none of the legislative power, because of gerrymandering. This happened long before Trump and there were no "Death of Democracy" front-page headlines.

If Trump wins in November, he and the thugs of Project 2025 might take a wrecking ball to what's left of the house. But already several rooms are closed off. It's unsafe to live in them. And even if Trump loses, or wins and doesn't follow through with the worst ideas his backers have proposed, many rooms in the house will continue to rot.

FIRST THOUGHTS ON THE SHOOTING (updated)

Every rank-and-file Republican voter believes this was an assassination attempt ordered by President Biden. Trump will soon start pouring gasoline on the flames by stating this as if it's fact.

— Steve M. (@stevemnomoremister.bsky.social) Jul 13, 2024 at 8:31 PM

Trump will now say that if he's elected, he'll have Biden investigated for trying to have him murdered. I hope this will seem paranoid to at least some swing voters.

— Steve M. (@stevemnomoremister.bsky.social) Jul 13, 2024 at 8:35 PM

*****

UPDATE: Here we go. Trump-endorsed congressman from Georgia:

Also, this fucking guy:

Today is not just some isolated incident.

The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs.

That rhetoric led directly to President Trump's attempted assassination.

— J.D. Vance (@JDVance1) July 14, 2024

They're not even waiting for Trump to pour the gasoline on the fire. They're doing it themselves. They're writing his future material for him.

I don't think this will resonate with anyone but the superfans. But it's ugly, and idiot mainstream reporters will probably ask Biden if he thinks he bears any responsibility for the shooting.

PROJECT 2025: THE GASLIGHTING IS WELL UNDERWAY

Hi -- I'm traveling tomorrow, and I may be on a somewhat lighter blogging schedule for the next two weeks. I'll try to weigh in on President Biden's Lester Holt interview and the Republican convention, but I may not manage my usual daily posting schedule. Or I might! Who knows?

For now, I want to point out that it's clear Republicans are worried about the possible impact of Project 2025 on the November election because right-wing meme creators are working extremely hard to portray anyone who warns about Project 2025 as a paranoid crank. Here are some of the memes that are circulating, courtesy of posts at Reddit's r/forwardsfromgrandma:

A couple more, though I'm sorry that the person who posted these put an X through them:

Brakey, a Maine state senator and self-proclaimned "Renegade Statesman" and "Liberty Populist," has more:

CONFIRMED: Project 2025 has a plan to submerge humans into underground vaults to conduct psychological experiments on those who survive total atomic annihilation in the upcoming nuclear war between the U.S., Russia, and China.

— Sen. Eric Brakey 🌲🦔 (@SenatorBrakey) July 13, 2024

CONFIRMED: Project 2025 includes a plan for the vampire Angelus to open the Hellmouth under Sunnydale, California and unleash a hell on earth for all eternity.

— Sen. Eric Brakey 🌲🦔 (@SenatorBrakey) July 13, 2024

If they feel the need to push back this hard, the attention critics have directed to Project 2025 must be having some impact. On the other hand, Bret Stephens, in his most recent column, assures us that Trump just isn't the kind of guy on whose watch Project 2025 could be implemented:

I have excluded from this essay some of the parade of horribles that Trump’s critics on the left expect from a second term, from anxieties about the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” scheme (which Trump has distanced himself from) to terror about the end of democracy itself. Those are fears I don’t share because, like many conservatives, I don’t think Trump is strong or smart enough to blow down the pillars of American institutional life.... I think those pillars will hold....

That plus the widely cited piece from The Dispatch ("Viral Claims About Project 2025 Are Mostly False") makes me wonder whether "Nothing to see here, move on" will become the standard elite-media message about Project 2025 -- which would be exactly the same message these meme makers are spreading.

FEAR THE ALL-POWERFUL LEFT!

The fever dreams of the propaganda-addled crazies at the Heritage Foundation are hilarious:

Barbra Streisand kidnapped by Hamas. Antifa-BLM protesters taking over a migrant detention facility. The FBI arresting Donald Trump two days after winning the election.

These were among the far-fetched scenarios imagined by a simulation of threats to the 2024 election showcased Thursday by the right-wing Heritage Foundation....

“As things stand right now, there’s a zero percent chance of a free and fair election,” said Mike Howell, executive director of Heritage’s Oversight Project.

Everyone knows these guys are nuts -- but what about serious, sober-sided Bret Stephens of the New York Times opinion section? Surely he wouldn't entertain any scenarios as nutty as these!

Actually, he would:

Imagine the following scenario: Trump is in the White House and decides to make good on his signature promise of mass deportation of migrants. Federal agents are deployed to towns and cities to do the job, but many of them flatly refuse to participate in what feels to them like a modern-day re-enactment of the Fugitive Slave Act. They are joined by Democratic mayors and hundreds of thousands of Americans who are willing to form human chains around homes and neighborhoods to keep the agents out. But Trump doesn’t back down, and governors in red states call out the National Guard to break through the protests. Many are hurt, some are killed, and riots ensue.

That’s the incendiary America we are likely to get again in a second Trump term, whether the match is lit by deportations, another incident of police brutality or something else. The right-wing fantasy of somehow shutting down the left won’t be met quietly.

Right-wingers really believe we take direct action at the drop of a hat, and are always ready to riot. It's as if even the brainier right-wingers have a Fox News B-roll clip of a Black Bloc knucklehead smashing the windows of a police car on auto-repeat in their heads.

Here's a partial list of things over the past decade that didn't lead to left-wing riots, or even to significant left-liberal protests:

* The blockade of Merrick Garland's Supreme Court appointment.
* Donald Trump's election (the protests didn't happen until the inauguration)
* Family separation
* Trump's response to Charlottesville
* The "Stop the Steal" campaign and January 6
* The Dobbs decision
* The banning of abortion in multiple states
* The busing of migrants to blue cities
* The revelations of profound corruption and ideological extremism at the Supreme Court
* Attacks on drag shows
* Attacks on librarians
* Attacks on trans care

And the list goes on. Even other high-profile police brutality incidents haven't sparked widespread demonstrations, much less riots. Apart from the war in Gaza, nothing has inspired a great deal of protest.

I wish Americans would take to the streets the way, say, Israelis have to protest Benjamin Netanyahu's attempt to neuter Israel's Supreme Court, or to protest his self-serving indifference to the plight of the hostages. U.S. unrest in 2020 was an anomaly.

Would we really put our bodies on the line for migrants? Remember, only a few of us tried to block evictions in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. I didn't. Did you?

The Stephens column is headlined "Republicans Will Regret a Second Trump Term." He also predicts Republican regret because he expects Democrats to do well downballot, which will lead to divided government (no tax cuts! no right-wing ideologues on the federal bench!) and lots of "executive actions of dubious legality." Actually, Democrats probably can't win more than 50 Senate seats, given the certainty of a GOP pickup in West Virginia, and that combined with a GOP vice president would give Republicans control of the Senate, which means every judicial pick will be rubber-stamped. But we can't expect New York Times op-ed columnists to understand the basic rules of American government, can we?

What Stephens argues is that Trump will be bad because Democrats and angry liberals/leftists will be empowered. So we're the problem, really. And it's all because we're so tirelessly activist at a grassroots level and make it so difficult for Republicans to govern when we have even the slightest amount of power in Washington. I don't believe this, but I really want to live in the fantasyland where it's true.

ARE BIDEN'S POLL NUMBERS IMPERVIOUS TO BAD NEWS, LIKE TRUMP'S?

For months, I've been arguing that bad news for Donald Trump -- civil judgments against him, a felony conviction -- might not have an impact on the presidential race. I haven't been sure why that would be the case. Is it because Trump's trials haven't been televised? Is it because he hasn't been tried on the most serious charges against him? Is it because of pro-Trump media bias? Or is it because swing voters already think Trump is a criminal, and factored that into their candidate choice long ago? Some have decided it's a dealbreaker, but some clearly haven't. Whatever the reason, nothing that happened to Trump in court over the past year seems to have changed the race.

I'm starting to believe that Joe Biden's age is having the same impact -- or lack of impact -- on swing voters' candidate choices:

The race for the presidency remains statistically tied despite President Biden’s dismal debate performance two weeks ago, a new national NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll finds.

Biden actually gained a point since last month’s survey, which was taken before the debate. In this poll, he leads Trump 50% to 48% in a head-to-head matchup. But Biden slips when third-party options are introduced, with Trump holding the slightest advantage with 43% to 42%.

Those numbers, though, do not represent statistically significant differences, as the margin of error in the survey is +/- 3.1 percentage points, meaning results could be 3 points higher or lower.

Last week we had Biden gaining slightly in a Bloomberg/Morning Consult tracking poll of battleground states. This week, an Emerson College poll had Biden and Trump at 50% each in a head-to-head matchup when leaners were asked to make a choice. It seems as if swing voters either aren't paying attention to Biden's public appearances or haven't seen Biden do anything in recent weeks that surprises them.

FiveThirtyEight's polling average has barely moved since the debate:

The stagnancy of the race isn't great -- Biden was expected to win the 2020 popular vote by 7 points in 2020; then he won by only 4 points and barely scored a victory in the Electoral College. I've been arguing that he needs a big poll lead in order to win the Electoral College this year. (This year, he might need much more decisive victories in swing states, because Trumpified election officials could refuse to certify results that favor him.)

But Biden's argument is that pollsters have underestimated Democrats in post-Dobbs elections, that the Democratic base now consists of more reliable voters than the Republican base, and that opponents of right-wing extremism have recently beaten the polls in countries such as France and Iran.

I'm not sure he's right -- but I'm also not sure any other candidate would improve on his numbers. I think an alternate candidate would have room to grow, but would also be subject to fresh-sounding attacks that might penetrate the consciousness of swing voters.

There's no widely loved candidate waiting in the wings. Harris could spend Biden's accumulated money and might now be receiving a renewed amount of goodwill. Other candidates might please wealthy donors and well-connected podcasters more than the rank-and-file. Advocates of an open process think it will feel democratic and inclusive and will inspire voters, but ordinary primaries often leave many voters disgruntled. I don't think a repeat of the punishing 2016 primaries is inevitable, but that year is a reminder that voters don't always emerge from primaries agreeing that the process was inspiring and fair.

I say coalesce around either Biden or Harris and move on. I've been pessimistic about Biden's chances for months, but I don't think he's any less likely to win than he was before June 27.

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL: TRUMP IS BAD -- BUT THE REPUBLICAN PARTY IS AWESOME!

The New York Times has just published a long editorial under the headline "Donald Trump Is Not Fit to Lead." The editorial is clearly the ed board's way of issuing this response to critics who've objected to the paper's endless discussion of Joe Biden's age: "There, we denounced Trump too -- are you satisfied now?" Henceforth, the ed board will tell these critics that it already checked that box, even as it continues its relentless criticism of Biden (and shifts its focus to attacking Biden's replacement, if there is one).

The ed board called for Biden to leave the race less than 24 hours after the June 27 debate; notably, this editorial doesn't say that Trump should step aside or be replaced as his party's nominee. That's defensible -- obviously, Trump isn't going anywhere, while Biden might be persuaded to step aside. But the ed board could have made the recommendation anyway, in the interests of parity.

But what's really striking about the editorial -- although it's not surprising at all, given the tone of mainstream media coverage since the Reagan era -- is the fact that its message is "Republicans have an awesome party, and it's really a shame that that Trump fellow came along to ruin it." Many Republicans are trotted out as examples of the party's awesomeness, though, notably -- although the editorial never notes it -- all are dead or estranged from the GOP.

According to the Times ed board, the Republican Party has long been a force for good:

For more than two decades, large majorities of Americans have said they are dissatisfied with the direction of the country, and the post-Covid era of stubborn inflation, high interest rates, social division and political stagnation has left many voters even more frustrated and despondent.

The Republican Party once pursued electoral power in service to solutions for such problems, to building “the shining city on a hill,” as Ronald Reagan liked to say. Its vision of the United States — embodied in principled public servants like George H.W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney — was rooted in the values of freedom, sacrifice, individual responsibility and the common good. The party’s conception of those values was reflected in its longstanding conservative policy agenda....

This is odd because later, in a section titled "The Rule of Law," we're told:

As divided as America is, people across the political spectrum generally recoil from rigged rules, favoritism, self-dealing and abuse of power.

And yet a Supreme Court controlled by Republican appointees has declared all of these things legal. And then we're told:

So much in the past two decades has tested these norms in our society — the invasion of Iraq under false pretenses, the failures that led to the 2008 financial crisis and the recession that followed, the pandemic and all the fractures and inequities that it revealed.

All of these things happened under Republican presidents, and only the pandemic happened under the president this editorial describes as uniquely dangerous. Yet according to the ed board, the GOP should still be seen as a party of values, vision, and responsible stewardship.

Over and over again, the editorial praises Republicans:

Republican presidents and presidential candidates have used their leadership at critical moments to set a tone for society to live up to. Mr. Reagan faced down totalitarianism in the 1980s, appointed the first woman to the Supreme Court and worked with Democrats on bipartisan tax and immigration reforms. George H.W. Bush signed the Americans With Disabilities Act and decisively defended an ally, Kuwait, against Iraqi aggression. George W. Bush, for all his failures after Sept. 11, did not stoke hate against or demonize Muslims or Islam.

As a candidate during the 2008 race, Mr. McCain spoke out when his fellow conservatives spread lies about his opponent, Barack Obama. Mr. Romney was willing to sacrifice his standing and influence in the party he once represented as a presidential nominee, by boldly calling out Mr. Trump’s failings and voting for his removal from office.

... When Mr. Trump wanted an end to Obamacare, a single Republican senator, Mr. McCain, saved it, preserving health care for millions of Americans. Mr. Trump demanded that James Comey, his F.B.I. director, pledge loyalty to him and end an investigation into a political ally; Mr. Comey refused.

... As Mr. Comey, a longtime Republican, wrote in a 2019 guest essay for Times Opinion, “Accomplished people lacking inner strength can’t resist the compromises necessary to survive Mr. Trump and that adds up to something they will never recover from.” Very few who serve under him can avoid this fate “because Mr. Trump eats your soul in small bites,” Mr. Comey wrote.

... During the 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump’s petty attacks on his opponents and their families led many Republicans to conclude that he lacked such character. Other Republicans, including those who supported the former president’s policies in office, say they can no longer in good conscience back him for the presidency. “It’s a job that requires the kind of character he just doesn’t have,” Paul Ryan, a former Republican House speaker, said of Mr. Trump in May.

... Bill Barr, whom Mr. Trump appointed as attorney general, said of him, “He will always put his own interest and gratifying his own ego ahead of everything else, including the country’s interest.” ...

Mike Pence, Mr. Trump’s vice president, has disavowed him. No other vice president in modern American history has done this. “I believe that anyone who puts themselves over the Constitution should never be president of the United States,” Mr. Pence has said. “And anyone who asked someone else to put them over the Constitution should never be president of the United States again.”

Not a single Democrat is cited in this editorial. I understand that that's the point -- the ed board members, if you asked them about this, would say, "We're making the point that even Trump's fellow Republicans know he's unfit" (though no Republican in good standing dares to say that). But this is also a sign that the Times ed board agrees with the Republican Party's decades-long campaign to "other" Democrats. Our politcal culture accepts the GOP's assertion that Democrats aren't really Americans -- that's why special counsels are always Republican, whether the investigated person is a Republican or a Democrat. (Everyone who's investigated needs to be investigated by a member of the "normal" party.) That's also why we're already hearing calls for a "unity ticket" if President Biden steps aside:

If Biden withdraws, how about a ticket of Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney to show this election is about our democracy? Country over party.

— Andrew Weissmann (weissmann11 on Threads)🌻 (@AWeissmann_) July 5, 2024

(On one of the most important issues to Democrats, I'll remind you that Liz Cheney had a 0% rating from NARAL in her last House term, and a 93% rating from the National Right to Life Committee. Yet she should be the running mate of one of the party's most forceful champions of reproductive rights because the alternative is a ticket with two Democrats.)

To sum up, the Times ed board rejects the notion that any Democrat can be a moral witness respected by all decent people (does no Democrat fit that bill? Barack Obama? Jimmy Carter?) while arguing that the Republican Party was a moral force for good until the Trump era, Abu Ghraib and the Lehman collapse notwithstanding. This thesis ignores the GOP forces that were poisoning our politics long before Trump entered politics: Fox News; religious, political, and conspiratorial talk radio; the Federalist Society; the Koch network. There are toxic figures who'll continue poisoning American politics for decades even if Trump dies tomorrow: Christopher Rufo, Chaya Raichik, Elon Musk, Charlie Kirk, Ben Shapiro, Joe Rogan, and many others. Independently of Trump, Republicans in red and purple states are drastically curtailing reproductive health care, terrorizing teachers and librarians, Christianizing public schools, demonizing trans people, kidnapping border crossers, banning mask-wearing even as COVID persists and bird flu looms, overriding local ordinances that raise minimum wages and regulate guns, and so on. This isn't Trumpism -- it's mainstream Republicanism. The party has been headed this way for many years.

So let's not give the Times ed board too much credit for this editorial. The paper still doesn't really understand the danger America is in.

DEAR DEMOCRATS: YOU KNOW PEOPLE CAN HEAR YOU, RIGHT? (updated)

Headline at The New York Times right now:

On Capitol Hill, Democrats Panic About Biden but Do Nothing

Perfect. That's the Democratic Party in a nutshell.

It's been thirteen days since the June 27 debate. On each of those thirteen days, the top news story in America -- not just in the monomaniacal New York Times, but everywhere -- has been "Christ, That Joe Biden Is Really, Really Old. He Can't Possibly Win. He Has to Step Aside. Has He Done It Yet?" Other stories, including stories that could have been very damaging to Donald Trump, were fully or partly buried. And still Democrats can't muscle Biden out, persuade him to leave the race, or stop talking about it and get behind him.

The latest: George Clooney has written an op-ed asking Biden to quit the race -- no, really. What possible good can this do? Biden is the least starstruck Democratic president since Jimmy Carter. He doesn't care what George Clooney thinks. But this will be yet another highly visible expression of no confidence in Biden. Even if voters never read the op-ed (which is in The New York Times, naturally), they'll learn about it, because Clooney is a movie star. (I know that Clooney isn't a Democratic officeholder or official, but he hobnobs with prominent Democrats. Couldn't one of them have talked him out of trying to publish this? Maybe that Obama guy?)

I think Democrats believe it's okay for this to play out in public for two weeks -- two weeks of bad headlines for the man who now seems certain to be the nominee -- because of a fundamental misunderstanding of politics that hurts them in other areas as well. They think this is fine because they think voters pay attention to politics only in the last couple of months before an election. That's the reason most Democrats don't bother with messaging unless it's election season, while Republicans engage in messaging every day of every year. Democrats are right to conclude that many people tune out politics unless an election is imminent, but Republicans know that they can get messages across, even to people outside their base, if they work hard enough, or if the mainstream media picks up on what they're saying. They've been working the "Biden is old" angle since before the 2020 election. They didn't stop after Election Day 2020 or Inauguration Day 2021. The Republican National Committee just kept posting "Biden is old" videos on social media. And lo and behold, while Democrats were napping, that idea took root.

And now a new idea has taken root: Biden is so old and decrepit that even Democrats admit it to one another. It's taken root because, even though it's not quite Labor Day and many Americans are avoiding political news, incessant discussions of this subject by Democrats that have been leaked to the press by Democrats have made Biden's age such a huge story that even people who don't care much about politics can't avoid it.

Politico reports:

SO WHAT HAPPENED? Put simply, Biden’s allies appeared to have outmaneuvered his skeptics. Many Hill Democrats, well-apprised sources told us, were expecting dozens of lawmakers — especially vulnerable swing-district frontliners — to come out of the woodwork and force their leaders to confront the president or his campaign.

So all that very public hand-wringing, which began on the night of the debate (CNN, MSNBC, and other news organizations reported on Democratic dismay in their post-debate broadcasts), happened without clear evidence that a massive groundswell would follow? The Democrats who trashed Biden in conversations with their favorite cable reporters that night should have shut up and waited to go public until they'd built a sizable movement behind the scenes. If they couldn't do that, they should have shut up permanently.

*****

UPDATE, THURSDAY: Politico tells us that George Clooney ran that op-ed by Barack Obama -- who never raised an objection:

While Obama did not encourage or advise Clooney to say what he said, he also didn’t object to it, we’re told from people familiar with their exchange. The lack of pushback is an eye-popping revelation given that the former president was one of the first big voices defending Biden following his abysmal debate performance (while many of his former aides have been some of the incumbent’s biggest critics).

From the Politico piece, it appears that Obama and Nancy Pelosi have strong doubts about Biden but believe it's fine if this drags on for another few days (or a week or ...). But it needs to stop.

THE PRESS DOESN'T HAVE A "BIAS TOWARD COHERENCE" -- IT HAS A BIAS TOWARD REPUBLICANS

Tom Nichols has a theory as to why the press seems more concerned with President Biden's age than Donald Trump's troubling pronouncements:

This is not “bias” in the political sense. It is, as Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg put it, a bias toward coherence, the inability to accept—and say—that one of the presidential campaigns is completely bonkers. “Trump overwhelms us with nonsense,” Jeff notes, and so, when confronted with Trump’s obvious mental instability, we work backwards: “Trump sounds nuts, but he can’t be nuts, because he’s the presumptive nominee for president of a major party, and no major party would nominate someone who is nuts.”

The result of this bias is that the press too often continues to present what should be appalling, even horrifying information as if it is just part of the normal give-and-take of a political campaign: Trump goes to Las Vegas and rants about sharks, and the press, likely trying to appear unbiased, instead pulls out a dull nugget about Trump’s mention of not taxing tips. Trump vows to destroy the American civil service, and the headlines talk about his “plans to increase presidential power.”

Why? Because it is not in the American journalistic tradition to say: Today in Las Vegas, one of the two major candidates said things so rabidly toxic and incoherent that they raised doubts about his sanity.

I don't see why we should question Trump's sanity when he "vows to destroy the American civil service" -- that sounds like a power grab by a would-be authoritarian who's very much in command of his senses. The shark rant was much nuttier, although it's a roundabout way for Trump to say something he wrongly but sanely believes, as do millions of other consumers of mainstream right-wing propaganda: that all forms of non-fossil-fuel energy (in this case, battery-powered boats) are both dangerous and ridiculous.

But even if you believe that Trump's brain is full of failing neurons rather than right-wing disinformation, it's hard to believe that the media has a categorical bias toward portraying major-party candidates as coherent. If that were the case, we wouldn't have had months of stories in the media questioning the mental fitness of Joe Biden.

What we have instead is a bias toward normalizing Republicans, a process that's usually accompanied by an "othering" of Democrats. This has been going on for decades: Walter Mondale was a gloomy wimp, Michael Dukakis was an effete Ivy League weirdo, Al Gore was a prissy egghead, Hillary Clinton was a cackling ballbuster. Their opponents were Real Americans, fond of country music, pickup trucks, and plain-spoken common sense. Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden fought against this narrative and won some victories, but the idea that Republicans are normal and Democrats are peculiar is ingrained in our politics, and allows Republicans to embrace genuinely extreme policies -- on guns, abortion, climate change, taxation, regulation, torture, and many other issues -- while Democrats are the ones branded as out-of-step extremists. It doesn't help that Democrats regularly praise at least some Republicans (a favor that's never returned), or that Democrats regularly proclaim that some fellow party members really are ideologically beyond the pale, something Republicans know will lead to instant banishment if it's attempted in their party.

It's because we're accustomed to all this that our political culture struggles to define Trump as a mentally ill person or (more accurately, I think) as a dangerous radical. But we're used to marginalizing Democrats. In Biden's case, we're marginalizing him based on perceived mental fitness, but we nearly always do this to Democrats in some way or another, unless, like Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, they're very good at fighting back.

IS THE BATTLE OVER THE DEMOCRATIC NOMINATION A CLASS WAR?

Whatever you think of the Dump Biden movement, it clearly isn't capable of pressuring the president to leave the race. Biden isn't budging:

President Biden issued defiant responses on Monday to high-ranking lawmakers calling for him to step aside, challenging Democrats to run against him and telling congressional Democrats in a letter that he was “firmly committed to staying in the race.”

Calling into “Morning Joe” on MSNBC, Mr. Biden said he didn’t care about any of the “big names” urging him to drop out of the race, his voice rising considerably as he spoke.

“If any of these guys don’t think I should run, run against me,” he said. “Go ahead, announce for president. Challenge me at the convention.”

Less than an hour earlier, Mr. Biden’s campaign released a letter to congressional Democrats in which he wrote that he was “firmly committed to staying in the race.”

Meanwhile, some of the would-be dumpers have blinked:

Senate Democrats won't meet Monday to discuss their support for President Biden continuing his re-election bid, despite an effort by Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) to organize such a meeting, Axios has learned.

I saw merit in the idea of replacing Biden with Vice President Harris -- for an electorate full of double haters, it would have been a sign that one major party was acknowledging voter dissatisfaction. But it's clear now that no one in the party can change Biden's mind, so it's time to stop discussing this and rally around him.

It's striking that his poll numbers have dropped only slightly since the debate -- he trailed Trump in FiveThirtyEight's poll average by 0.2 on debate day, and trails by 2.2 now. FiveThirtyEight's forecast has Biden winning in 49 simulations out of 100. And Morning Consult's polling shows Biden gaining ground in swing states.

Is this a battle between elites and non-elites? Politico's Jonathan Martin thinks so:

... [Biden is] counting on the support of African American Democrats and his union allies as his last line of defense. It’s a playbook Biden has turned to in the past, portraying his detractors as mostly elite white liberals who are out of step with the more diverse and working-class grassroots of the party. That’s what propelled his nomination after a string of setbacks in 2020.

... Biden and his lieutenants are clearly counting on the result being the same in 2024 as it has been in every one of their modern races: The donor class may have their preference, but it’s older Black women in church pews who will decide the nominee, thank you very much.

“The people Joe Biden fights for — middle-class labor union members, Blacks, Latinos — they know he fights for them and they’re going to stay in the fight for him,” Anita Dunn, Biden’s longtime adviser, told me Sunday.

Cedric Richmond, the former New Orleans congressperson who’s a co-chair of Biden’s campaign, was even more to the point.

“I think it’s interesting that not one African American member [of Congress] has called on the president to step down,” Richmond said, before warning white lawmakers that they “risk alienating some of their base” by abandoning Biden.

“I wouldn’t be rushing to do that if I was from Virginia,” Richmond said, hurling a brushback at Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), who is reportedly plotting with Democratic senators to urge Biden to drop out of the race.

On the other side are these folks:

... a pair of well-connected Democrats is offering an optimistic plan that would involve the president stepping down as the nominee and the party announcing a “blitz primary” process ahead of the August convention.

The proposal is the work of Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown University law professor who served in the Obama and Clinton administrations and as a volunteer policy adviser to the Biden campaign in 2020, and Ted Dintersmith, a venture capitalist and education philanthropist who has donated to various Democratic campaigns.

Dintersmith does give to many Democrats, including some fairly progressive ones (Sheldon Whitehouse, Beto O'Rourke, even Jamaal Bowman in 2022). But as Open Secrets reported in 2019, he's this kind of Democrat:

Ted Dintersmith ... maxed out to two Democratic presidential hopefuls at the same time: entrepreneur Andrew Yang and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg. In April, Dintersmith promoted a Boston-area breakfast fundraiser with Buttigieg on his LinkedIn page.

Obviously, this is just a subset of the Dump Biden movement -- many, perhaps most, would-be dumpers would prefer to rally around Harris. The "blitz primary" idea seems particularly elitist, and could very well lead to a nominee who pleases upscale voters and disappoints the rest of the party, especially if big money from folks like Ted Dintersmith is involved.

When people ask about Donald Trump's baffling popularity, one frequent answer is that voters look at him and think, "He fights." I wonder whether Biden's refusal to step aside is being seen by some Democratic voters as a "He fights" moment. That might explain the polls that show only slight slippage, or even an improvement, in Biden's standing.

I think this battle is effectively over. I just hope that Biden's renewed fighting spirit doesn't dissipate once his would-be dumpers have retreated. I hope he stays invigorated, and pivots to fighting Trump with the spirit he's showing in fighting his intraparty doubters.

TRUMP CRITICS' TOP MESSAGES CONTRADICT EACH OTHER

Speculation about President Biden's mental fitness is dominating our political conversation so thoroughly that I can't blame Trump critics for wanting to "whatabout" it by bringing up the mental glitches of Donald Trump. However, I'm not sure "Trump is losing his marbles" is as powerful a message as many people believe it is.

Weighing in this weekend is the editorial board of The Philadelphia Inquirer (non-paywalled link here):

... little attention has been paid to Trump’s incoherent debate performance because he is often incoherent. Trump told more than 30 lies in 90 minutes during the debate like it was another day at the office.

In discussing abortion, he falsely claimed Democrats want to execute babies in the ninth month of pregnancy....

But lying doesn't indicate incipient dementia. Many people with very sharp minds lie repeatedly. If you can lie in a way that works to your advantage and get away with it, that's a sign that you know what you're doing, not a sign that you don't.

The Inquirer editorial points out that during the debate Trump said, “we had H2O, we had the best numbers ever.” But that's probably just Trump mixing up CO₂ and H₂O. (Carbon dioxide emissions in America were at a forty-year low in 2020, but Trump deserves no credit for that -- millions of Americans who'd previously driven to work were working for home, a phenomenon that temporarily lowered carbon emssions worldwide that year.)

The Inquirer editorial cites Trump's recent speech riff about sharks and the alleged dangers of electrocution from batteries in boats. Yes, that was weird. But if you don't understand how boat batteries work -- or choose not to because you hate renewable energy, and motivated reasoning leads you to conclude that the batteries must pose an electrocution risk -- then you might believe a submerged boat battery is as dangerous as a group of sharks. (And if you had as many adoring fans as Trump does, you might think all your after-dinner speech riffs are extremely witty and clever.)

But when Trump critics suggest that he's the one who's really suffering from dementia, they contradict the main anti-Trump message, which is that he's a highly motivated authoritarian with criminal tendencies who intends to destroy democracy in a second term while using the government to advance his own interests and the interests of other very dangerous extremists. Can he really be a potential American Putin and a doddering old man whose brain is turning to mush?

It's true that Republicans talk this way about Biden, who, in their telling, is both the corrupt, well-remunerated capo of the "Biden crime family" and an Alzheimer's-riddled shell of his former self. Republicans also used to talk this way about Barack Obama, who was described as both a mental lightweight who couldn't utter a coherent sentence without a Teleprompter and the all-powerful leader of a Muslim-socialist conspiracy to destroy America. But these contradictory arguments never made sense to anyone but the faithful. Lately, Republicans appear to have chosen a lane in each case: Obama is a fiendish anti-American and Biden has lost his marbles.

I still believe that most of Trump's verbal glitches can be explained by ignorance -- an ignorance that's dangerous for America. Trump knows nothing about the risks of fossil fuels and wants to terminate all programs that encourage the use of renewables. Trump doesn't understand the importance of government checks and balances to the survival of a democratic America, so he wants absolute power. He doesn't understand the relationship between global alliances and the security of America, so he wants to break free from those alliances. And so on. He just wants what he wants, and he's allied with radicals who hate the American experiment and prefer a totalitarian theocracy. The danger isn't a mush-brained Trump -- it's a Trump who's ignorant but has the presence of mind to pursue his goals.

America might survive a Trump administration in which the president doesn't know what he's doing. THe risk of a second Trump presidency is that he actually will know what he's doing.

YOU COME AT THE KING, YOU BEST NOT DITHER

Today will be the ninth full day since President Biden's poor performance in the June 27 debate, and it won't be the last day in the Democrats' candidacy crisis. This might not be the worst possible situation for the Democrats to be in, but it's close.

Democratic members of the House will have discussions tomorrow:

Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, has scheduled a virtual meeting on Sunday with senior House Democrats to discuss President Biden’s candidacy and the path forward, according to a senior official familiar with the plan.

The session, which is to include the ranking members of congressional committees who make up the top echelons of the party in the House, comes at a time of profound worry among Democrats on Capitol Hill about Mr. Biden’s poor performance at last week’s presidential debate. House Democrats have not met as a group since, even as concerns have mounted about Mr. Biden’s viability as a candidate....

Democratic senators will hold talks ... who the hell knows when:

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) has approached Senate Democrats to organize a discussion on Joe Biden’s path forward as the party’s presidential nominee, according to a source familiar.

The chamber has been on a two-week recess, and Monday will be senators’ first time in town since the president’s shaky debate performance against former President Donald Trump....

Another source familiar said no firm plans have been set yet for the discussion.

Biden is dug in:

President Biden, in a defiant television interview Friday, emphatically rejected calls to withdraw from the presidential race — saying only “the Lord Almighty” could make him change his mind....

Even as his tone was defiant, Biden at times mumbled his words and gave answers that could be difficult to follow.

The interview aired several hours after Biden addressed a boisterous rally in Madison, where the crowd chanted, “Go, Joe, Go!” and Biden referred to his debate performance. “Ever since then, there’s been a lot of speculation,” Biden said. “'What’s Joe going to do? Is he going to stay in the race? Is he going to drop out?' Well, here’s my answer: I am running, and I’m going to win again!”

Before Biden's Madison speech and interview with George Stephanopoulos, I thought the momentum was shifting to a graceful exit and a Kamala Harris candidacy. But now it's clear that it would take a lot more pressure on Biden to persuade him to leave, if he can be persuaded at all -- and the Democrats who want him to leave still seem to think it's okay if the pressure builds gradually.

Biden might stay in the race and remain a competent candidate the rest of the way. He thinks that will be enough for him to win, and I'm sure most of you agree, but I don't see it. I think he could have survived a bad debate. I don't think he can survive two or more weeks of this -- bad headlines in the media, dozens of leaks from pro-withdrawal Democrats and donors, article after article about his "lapses" in meetings and private gatherings.

My advice to Democratic insiders: Work fast. Either persuade Biden to step aside in the next couple of days or shut up about this forever. Go ride-or-die with him and talk about anything but this. There were "dump Trump" discussions in the GOP after the Access Hollywood tape was leaked, but they didn't go on this long. Because you let this become a two-week story, every Biden gaffe from now until November will be seen in the context of what you said on background to reporters. If you think Biden's campaign is doomed, you should have pulled the fire alarm and readied an intervention much more quickly than this. Gradual isn't working.

I DON'T THINK REPUBLICANS ARE READY TO GO FULL FASH YET

Should President Biden end his presidentrial campaign n favor of Vice President Harris? I'm not sure, but I don't think Democrats should be afraid to make the switch, as John Pfaff seems to believe:

Heritage is apparently already planning the legal fight to keep any possible Biden replacement off the ballot in battleground states. One win in one key state court, and the election is literally over. The replacement idea was always terrible, now it's clearly fatally toxic.

— John Pfaff (@johnpfaff.bsky.social) Jul 5, 2024 at 10:05 AM

Pfaff is alluding to this Rolling Stone story:

With Democrats increasingly unsure that Biden should remain the party’s nominee, the conservative Heritage Foundation is pledging to try to block the Democratic Party from replacing Biden on the ticket in key swing states.

In a June 21 memo, the Heritage Foundation astutely predicted that Democrats might wish to force out Biden “if he freezes at [the] debate.” Noting that “the mechanisms for replacing him on ballots vary by state,” the memo says: “There is the potential for pre-election litigation in some states that would make the process difficult and perhaps unsuccessful.”

But even a commentator who has learned not to underestimate the Republican war on both democracy and Democrats doubts that Heritage can succeed:

“I don’t put any credence into it,” Rick Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project At UCLA’s Law School, wrote on Wednesday. “Joe Biden is not the party’s nominee now, and states generally point to the major party’s nominee as the one whose name is on the ballot.”

Also:

Edward Foley, who directs the election law program at the Ohio State University, tells Rolling Stone: “As long as we are talking about Biden dropping out before the convention, I can’t see any legal obstacle to the Democrats choosing any other alternative nominee that they wish, whether [Vice President Kamala] Harris or someone else. State law puts on the ballot whomever the party chooses as its nominee at its convention.”

Craig Holman, a governmental ethics lobbyist at Public Citizen, says that “the Heritage Foundation is trying to create a quagmire where none really exists.” He adds, “They’re just trying to muck up the process. I have no doubt they will file lawsuits if this does indeed happen, but I would expect the lawsuits to be very promptly dismissed.”

I'm usually a worst-case-scenario guy, but I agree with Hasen, Foley, and Holman -- this won't work and they're just trying to muck up the process. It's not only that Democrats have the clear legal right to choose their nominee however they see fit. It's that Republicans don't seem ready to go fully fascist yet -- they want to, but they don't have their ducks lined up.

Think back to the spring. The states of Alabama and Ohio were threatening to keep Biden off the ballot because their ballot deadlines occurred before the dates of the Democratic convention. Both states have Republican governors and solidly Republican legislatures. If the GOP really felt ready to reduce the Democratic Party to second-class status, workarounds wouldn't have been found. But a bill was signed into law in Alabama that resolved the problem, and then the same thing happened in Ohio. While the Ohio bill was pending, Democrats decided to hold a virtual presidential roll call prior to the convention that would meet Ohio's original deadline.

So it's all good. I think the same thing would happen if Demnocrats made a swap before the convention (and before the states' ballot deadlines). Republicans would waste Democrats' time and force the party to spend some money on lawyers, but Democrats would win the fight -- yes, even in the right-wing federal courts. We wouldn't have the spectacle of one major party keeping the other party's candidate off the ballot.

Republicans probably will try to wield power this way in a second Trump term, or in their next presidency if Trump loses, but they're not ready now. They probably fear that efforts to remove Democrats from ballots would lead to public outrage, at a time when they're out of power in D.C. and can't militarize the response to any protests at the federal level. (I find it hard to believe that the young lefties who do most of the protesting in America would demonstrate on behalf of Harris -- surely you remember the chants of "Kamala Is a Cop" -- but the GOP probably doesn't understand that.) Maybe they remeber the suburban moms of the original anti-Trump Resistance movement. Do they want to incur trhe wrath of those voters by keeping a woman -- a woman who's clearly angry at the hated Dobbs decision -- off the ballot? As long as we're still having elections, I doubt they'll take that chance.

Republicans are positioning themselves to rule as authoritarians soon, but for now they seem to want the public to think that they're coloring within the lines. Even the most radical Supreme Court (and lower court) decisions of recent years are framed, however implausibly, as consistent with the Constitution. The Republicans on the court still want the public to believe nothing's really changed. Republicans aren't ready to say, "We rule. Resistance is futile." That moment could arrive in January, but we're not there yet.

WHAT "BLOODLESS IF THE LEFT ALLOWS IT TO BE" MEANS

On a podcast Tuesday, the president of the Heritage Foundation said his movement is prepared to shed the blood of its enemies:

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts made the comments Tuesday on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast....

Democrats are “apoplectic right now” because the right is winning, Roberts told former U.S. Rep. Dave Brat, one of the podcast’s guest hosts as Bannon is serving a four-month prison term. “And so I come full circle on this response and just want to encourage you with some substance that we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

Joyce Vance wonders what Roberts means by that:

Is Roberts threatening people who speak out with violence? What if they protest? What if they vote?

... he seems shockingly unconcerned with abandoning the peaceful transfer of power and ignoring the will of the voters, because that’s what he’s talking about. He’s talking about using violence if the majority of American voters don’t agree with his vision for our country. He’s endorsing another January 6, a bloodletting if liberals won’t cave into his view of how the country should be run. If the left won’t “allow” him to have his way, he’s going to make us give in. That’s the man behind Project 2025.

Roberts would be fine with a second January 6, as long as this one succeeds, but I don't think that's primarily what he's referring to. I think he expects Donald Trump to win the election legitimately and to follow the Project 2025 blueprint as president. That's when he expects the "Look what leftists made us do" moment.

Rank-and-file Republicans believe that left-wing protesters burned several cities to the ground in 2020 -- Minneapolis, New York, Portland. They believe this because clips of violence and (more often) property damage in those cities were cued up and looped endlessly on Fox News that year, and often since. Residents of those cities know that some bad thing happened during the George Floyd protests, but the cities are very much intact. Only small portions were affected by the mayhem.

But Roberts knows that Trump is itching to send troops to suppress left-wing demonstrations. Roberts also knows that it only takes a little bit of violence to seemingly justify violent repression, if you greatly exaggerate how violent demonstrators are. That's what Roberts wants. He wants some violence -- it doesn't have to be much -- to justify an American Tiananmen or new Kent State, or several Kent States. (Presumably he knows that the majority of respondents to a Gallup poll conducted just after the Kent State massacre approved of the deadly National Guard response.)

Like Trump and like many other right-wingers, Roberts wants to use physical violence on liberals and the left, and wants to be able to say he and his allies were justified in doing so. This is a fantasy about acting violently with impunity because you have absolute dictatorial power and a fantasy about being acclaimed by the public as a hero and protector. Roberts and his allies are sick, twisted people. This is what they want.

HERE'S WHAT WOULD REALLY HAPPEN IF BIDEN RESIGNED

I'm not sure whether President Biden should stay on the ticket or step aside. I don't see much evidence that he's suffering large numbers of defections -- in the latest CNN poll, the gap between Biden and Donald Trump is exactly the same as it was in April, and a CBS poll shows only a small and possibly temporary slippage for Biden. Biden needs to gain ground and hasn't found a way to do that, so that could be a reason to switch. But no other candidate seems likely to electrify the public -- except perhaps Michelle Obama, who won't run.

If Biden does drop out, nominating anyone other than Kamala Harris could mean leaving a massive amount of money on the table, as David Dayen recently explained:

The Biden for President campaign committee controls candidate contributions for the 2024 election. It has received $220 million up through May 31; we know that in the four days from last Thursday’s debate through Monday, the campaign committee raised another $33 million. As of May 31, the committee had $91.5 million in cash on hand.

If Biden, as candidate, wanted to contribute money from this account to another candidate for the presidency, he’s limited to $2,000 per election. If Biden withdraws, he could convert this campaign committee to a political action committee. In that case he could direct $3,300 to another candidate. These numbers, it must be said, are significantly smaller than what’s in the account....

The only way these complications are nullified is if Vice President Harris is the nominee. Harris and Biden share this campaign committee, as the federal campaign finance laws allow for one fund when the president and vice president run on the same ticket. So if Harris succeeded Biden, she would control all the funds in the campaign committee and could use them in the election campaign.

If Biden does step aside, he should do so in favor of Harris.

But some pundits, such as Daniel Drezner, think Biden should step aside and resign the presidency. Drezner's reasons include this:

The move would put Harris at Trump’s level and eliminate experience as a Trump argument during the campaign.

But this is America. We don't vote on experience. The less experienced candidate was elected president in 1976, 1992, 2000, 2008, and 2016.

Emptywheel says this is a terrible idea, and she's right, but I'm not sure she adequately conveys why it's a terrible idea. She writes:

It turns out with a House packed with rabid supporters of Trump and led by a better-spoken but equally rabid supporter of this fascist project, having a Vice President is an important failsafe for democracy.

That’s true for two reasons. First, remember what happened on January 6, 2021? Big mob, chants of “hang the VP,” tweets encouraging the mob to do so? The VP may not have a big portfolio on most days. But she does on the day that, recent history warns us, is a fragile moment of our democracy. Certainly, it’s possible Democrats could convince Republicans to let Patty Murray do that job, as Chuck Grassley was prepared to do back in 2021.

But the bigger problem is the target you would put on Kamala Harris’ back if she became a President, running for re-election, without a Vice President as her designated successor. Trump has already made it clear he plans to return to power by any means necessary. Trump has already spent years frothing up his followers to a frenzy that could (and has) tipped into violence with little notice. Indeed, more than a handful of Trump’s supporters have embraced violence, some after getting riled up on Truth Social, others after little more than an incendiary Fox News rant.

The Secret Service did a piss poor job of protecting Kamala Harris on January 6. Let’s not tempt fate or Trump’s rabid brown shirts to make Mike Johnson President.

In a sane America, Harris would have a vice president if she replaced Biden as president. Section 2 of the 25th Amendment not only gives Harris the right to pick a VP, it suggests that she would be required to pick one:

Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.

But there's the problem. The House has a Republican majority, and the people who make up that majority will inevitably reject anyone Harris chooses, though only after a sustained campaign of character assassination and kangaroo-court hearings, probably chaired by Jim Jordan in full pitbull-on-bath-salts mode. This process will be designed to waste Harris's time just as she's trying to cold-start a campaign, and make her look like a failure who can't even win a vote in Congress.

The 25th Amendment was ratified in 1967. Two presidents have chosen VPs this way: Richard Nixon chose Gerald Ford after Spiro Agnew's resignation, then Ford chose Nelson Rockefeller after Nixon resigned. Ford was nominated on October 12, 1973, and approved on November 27; the votes were bipartisan (92-3 in the Senate and 387-35 in the House). Rockefeller's choice was more contentious:

Rockefeller underwent extended hearings before Congress, suffering embarrassment when it was revealed he made massive gifts to senior aides, such as Henry Kissinger, and used his personal fortune to finance a scurrilous biography of political opponent Arthur Goldberg.... He had also taken debatable deductions on his federal income taxes, and ultimately agreed to pay nearly one million dollars to settle the issue, but no illegalities were uncovered, and he was confirmed.... a minority bloc [of conservative Republicans] (including Barry Goldwater, Jesse Helms and Trent Lott) voted against him.... Many conservative groups campaigned against Rockefeller's nomination, including the National Right to Life Committee, the American Conservative Union, and others.

Rockefeller won a 90-7 vote in the Senate and a 287-128 vote in the House, but it took Ford four months to get him approved. (This year's presidential election is in four months.) The process of seeking approval for Harris VP nominee would be much, much rougher.

If Harris has no vice president, would Republicans allow someone else to sub in for the VP on January 6, 2025? In 2021, Democrats probably would have, but there's no way Republicans will do so next January.

Therefore, Democrats need Harris to remain as VP. Biden absolutely should not resign.

*****

Harris, of course, can pick a running mate without congressional approval. That person, however, would have no power to participate in January 6 if Harris wins. (The VP-elect won't be sworn in until January 20.)

If Harris is the nominee, I'm worried that we're going to hear the usual pundit blather about a "unity ticket." The commentariat will try to portray Biden's low approval ratings as a sign that voters are rejecting Democrats, or at least mainstream Democrats. They'll make ridiculous proposals for Harris's #2: Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney, Jamie Dimon, Joe Manchin.

If Harris is the nominee, that message should be met with scorn and ridicule. Mainstream Democrats have been doing very well in off-year elections -- and as Nate Silver notes, mainstream Democrats are outpolling Biden right now:

There are five presidential swing states that also have highly competitive Senate races this year: Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.... In those states, there have been 47 nonpartisan surveys conducted since Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump emerged as their parties’ clear nominees in March....

None of the 47 polls — not a single one of them — showed the Democratic candidate trailing in the Senate race, though two showed a tie. In contrast, Mr. Biden led in only seven of the surveys, was tied with Mr. Trump in two and trailed in the other 38.

Silver offers this as a reason for Biden to withdraw from the race -- but I'm offering it as a reason why Harris (or any other Democrat who might take over if Biden steps aside) should pick a real Democrat as a running mate.

The Democratic message is popular. There's no reason for Democrats to field a "unity ticket." But many pundits will propose that if Biden withdraws. They may hate the actually existing Democratic Party, but the public doesn't.

I THINK REPUBLICANS ARE WORRIED ABOUT THIS IMMUNITY RULING -- WITH GOOD REASON (updated)

The Speaker of the House thinks the public needs reassurance:

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) on Monday shrugged off Democrats’ concern over the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling, calling their fears of future presidential criminality “madness.”

“Look, there’s all sorts of hyperbole tonight…and just this, fantastical, these hypotheticals they’ve made up [that] future presidents are going to turn into assassins and all the rest,” Johnson said Monday in an interview on Fox News. “It’s madness.”

“Listen, remember this. The president and vice president are the only two officers in our constitutional system that are elected by all the people, no one who is elected to that office going to be prone to this kind of crazy criminal activity,” Johnson added.

Speaker Mike Johnson on Fox News: "The president and VP are the only two offices in our constitutional system that are elected by all the people. No one who is elected to that office is going to be prone to this kind of crazy criminal activity." pic.twitter.com/jxb3yWBJz0

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 2, 2024

We know that the authoritarian plotters who hope to work in a second Trump administration are thrilled by yesterday's ruling:

“It’s like Christmas,” a conservative attorney close to Trump tells Rolling Stone on Monday afternoon....

Plans are already in motion to use this new, historic court decision as a legal shield to help a potential second Trump administration implement his extreme policy agenda with less concern for rules and laws, sources with knowledge of the matter say.

But does Speaker Johnson represent a faction of Republicans who are concerned that the ruling will worry middle-of-the-road voters, specifically the ones who aren't big Trump fans but have been leaning toward Trump because they want change? Johnson knows that most voters don't like Trump and see him as a person who doesn't play by the rules. Does Johnson think he needs to say "Nothing to see here, move along" because those voters might be uncomfortable handing unlimited power to Trump?

Johnson knows that the Dobbs decision has helped Democrats win elections. I hope he's right to worry that this ruling could help President Biden and other Democrats in November. Is it possible that this is the Democrats' "They're coming for you" moment?

right. the president could order troops to suppress protesters using live fire and the supreme court would extend that absolute immunity

— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie.bsky.social) Jul 1, 2024 at 5:07 PM

Most Americans aren't political, but some apolitical suburban moderates might have attended a George Floyd rally in 2020, or might have a kid who attends Gaza demonstrations. Do they want a Tiananmen Square on America soil?

Do they want Trump legally cleared to commit the kinds of crimes they know or suspect he's committed? Financial crimes? Sex crimes? Bribery?

Last night on social media, I posted this:

A one-sentence constitutional amendment: "The president of the United States is not a monarch, and is subject to the rule of law like any citizen." It couldn't pass soon, but it's reasonable, and advocating for it would make opponents - i.e., all Republicans - seem unreasonable.

— Steve M. (@stevemnomoremister.bsky.social) Jul 1, 2024 at 8:31 PM

(I went with "monarch" rather than "king" because I don't want a future President Marjorie Taylor Greene -- come on, you know it's possible -- to wield the power that the Supreme Court just gave Trump.)

A Democratic backbencher in the House had the same idea:

Rep. Joe Morelle (D-N.Y.) said Monday he will introduce a constitutional amendment to reverse the Supreme Court ruling issued Monday, which largely shields former presidents from criminal prosecution for actions in office.

“I will introduce a constitutional amendment to reverse SCOTUS’ harmful decision and ensure that no president is above the law. This amendment will do what SCOTUS failed to do—prioritize our democracy,” Morelle wrote on the social platform X.

Can this pass? Of course not. It can't possibly get a two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress. (It would also need to be ratified by 38 state legislatures.)

But ratification isn't the point. The point is to write an amendment that's extremely even-handed and 100% consistent with American norms, and then say to Republicans (who will oppose it as a bloc), "Every time a Democratic president does something you don't like, you call him a dictator. So why don't you support this? All it says is that any president, Republican, Democratic, or otherwise, is subject to the rule of law. How could you possibly object to that? Why did we fight the British if you think we should have a king?"

Democrats should be putting Republicans on the defensive on this issue. The president started the process with his speech last night. The next step should be hearings and a floor vote on a constitutional amendment to nullify this decision. Every Democrat should vote for the amendment. And then every Democrat should run on it.

*****

UPDATE: The ACLU is also calling for a constitutional amendment.

A president who knows they can commit crimes with impunity is dangerous.

Tell Congress: We need a constitutional amendment reestablishing criminal accountability for the president NOW.https://t.co/7FqxdUH7TK

— ACLU (@ACLU) July 2, 2024