There's certainly things in my personal life that I should be writing about, but it's politics that has me in a mood. Due mainly to two things:
First, the
July 1 SCOTUS ruling in Trump v. US held that Presidents have sweeping immunity from criminal prosecution for their official acts. I was expecting some sort of hair-splitting decision on that one, but the ruling goes much further than I expected. Finding that Presidents have
some sort of immunity from being prosecuted for how they exercise their core powers was expected. There are lots of cases where criminal immunity applies to how an official makes decisions within their discretion. For example, a judge can't be prosecuted for making an incorrect ruling or deciding on the wrong basis. Neither can a juror. Some state governors have that sort of criminal immunity written into their state constitutions (in a way that the federal Constitution, notably, does not).
But finding that such conduct is immune from being
examined in prosecution of private crimes was not at all expected, and is wildly without basis in Constitutional text or precedent. To go back to the example of a judge or juror, neither can be prosecuted for making the wrong decision or deciding on the wrong basis. But either can be prosecuted for agreeing to use their power as their part in a criminal conspiracy, or for soliciting or accepting bribes. To give a more specific example, Rod Blagojevich was convicted in 2011 for attempting to sell Barack Obama's vacated Senate seat in 2008. Blagojevich definitely had the power to make that appointment and could not have been criminally prosecuted for appointing the wrong person or choosing an appointee for bad or stupid reasons. But he was held liable for soliciting bribes. (Up to the point where his sentence was commuted by Trump in 2020.)
The key element of crimes of corruption is usually
unofficial (it's not an office-holder's
job to solicit bribes), but deeply related to official conduct. It seems unreasonably difficult to prosecute someone for bribery, for example, while excluding evidence about the thing that they were bribed to do. The ruling makes it almost impossible to prosecute the President for their role in a criminal conspiracy, as long as their role involves corrupt use of their core powers (ordering the Justice Department to stop investigations or start baseless investigations, firing executive department employees who get in the way of the scheme, pardoning their co-conspirators (or themselves) for other Federal crimes). However, one could certainly construct scenarios where the solicitation and reception of bribes is
also effectively accomplished by official action. International diplomacy, for example.
It seems to me that the DC and Georgia cases against Trump are likely to be shot, though that depends on the inevitable Supreme Court appeals later down the line that actually get to the question of what counts as an official act or not and what's able to override the "presumptive immunity" applied to the "outer perimeter" of Presidential duties. I'd guess it will end up with anything the President communicates to the Justice Department, politicians, or the general public, directly or indirectly, being immune. So no liability for the attempt to just toss state elections wholesale, as many as it takes, until the nominal election result is altered and the US is thrust into its worst constitutional crisis since the Civil War.
The classified documents case is less clear. It's not the job of the President to just walk off the job with boxes and boxes of classified documents. And the criminal charges are largely about stuff he did when he was not President (when he was given a zillion opportunities to sweep the whole thing under the rug and chose to lie and obstruct instead for at best completely petty personal reasons). Unfortunately, that case is before a judge who is willing to embrace absurdities for Trump's sake, and you could make absurd arguments like "you can't introduce evidence about which documents are classified, since declassifying documents is an official act; Trump says it's fine so you can't look into it, case dismissed".
The New York fraud conviction is delayed pre-sentencing, but maybe not shot. It's going to be hard for even this Supreme Court to argue that signing checks on behalf of Trump Org is part of Trump's job as President. But the decision definitely moves things towards the atextual world where the Supreme Court just rules whatever whenever and you can't predict what they'll rule on the basis of existing (broadly-construed) law (or, in that scenario, what the rest of the government will do as a result). So who knows.
Second, Biden had a bad debate and now the press is out for blood, taking his every verbal stumble as evidence of incapacity. This is a level of scrutiny Trump doesn't get because his voters don't seem to care, so there's no drama-driven incentive to even mention anything bad about Trump. I'd stand by a claim that Trump's physical and mental health is worse on relevant objective measures than Biden's. Trump is incontinent not only physically but mentally and morally. Trump never took the job seriously, half the "adults in the room" in his own previous cabinet think he's a dangerous maniac, and he's overtly planning to have an administration without that sort of person if he gets a second time around.
Democrats (certainly the too-online crowd) responded to the resulting media fusillade with wild pessimism about Biden's electoral prospects (polling averages have Biden trailing Trump by ~2% in the national popular vote, polling-based models seem to give Biden a 30-50% chance of winning, but this gets characterized as "Biden can't win") and wild optimism about the likely impact of emergency measures (some other candidates are polling marginally better, but there has to be some huge potential downsides to ejecting the incumbent President from the ticket post-primary). Harris is the obvious replacement, she's already on the ticket and standing in for the President if/when he's unable is the primary job she was elected for! But people who think Harris would make a good Biden replacement
later already have that. If Harris should do more on the campaign trail, she can already do that. The people who think Harris is a necessary Biden replacement
now are just going to throw her under the bus for not ejecting him sooner. Or whatever else. The idea of invoking the 25th is even more absurd. (Hey,
didn't I go over this before?) It's for dealing with a President who is
incapacitated, not situations like "the President is old" or "the debate went badly". It seems to me like the anti-Biden faction is hammering on the self-destruct button on the basis of thinking there's a better chance in the life pods. No way that can go wrong.