Some weeks it feels like the line between politics and the law has all but vanished. From Hunter Biden’s plea deal and Donald Trump’s ongoing criminal woes to the brouhaha surrounding gifts accepted by Supreme Court justices and John Durham’s appearance before the House Judiciary Committee to defend his report on the FBI and Russiagate, this is one such week.
For more on the Hunter story, check out my colleague Ben Domenech’s latest. Meanwhile, a fresh row about the Supreme Court bubbled up in an unusual way overnight.
Last week, two reporters at ProPublica asked Samuel Alito to comment on a story alleging the justice improperly failed to disclose a 2008 fishing trip which included a seat on a private flight provided by hedge fund manager Paul Singer and that he should have recused himself from subsequent Supreme Court cases involving entities connected to Singer. On Tuesday evening, before the ProPublica story had been published, Alito’s response appeared as an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal. ProPublica’s article went live soon afterwards.
Others have gone into the merits of the ProPublica story in detail. I’ll just say that it seems to be something of a nothingburger, with Alito following standard practice according to the rules at the time. (New, stricter disclosure rules came into effect a few months ago.)
What is clear, and has been clear for some time now, is that a concerted effort is underway to chip away at the legitimacy of the Supreme Court now that it has a clear conservative majority. As we argued in a recent Spectator editorial, “What we have isn’t a crisis of legitimacy so much as a campaign of delegitimization.” The goal of undermining the court is to undermine their decisions. And doing so is a necessary part of the increasingly mainstream argument that, whether on student debt, affirmative action or abortion, their decisions should simply be ignored.
Alito’s decision to publish a prebuttal in the Wall Street Journal, rather than reply to ProPublica and move on, suggests the justices don’t think they are getting a fair hearing — and feel the need to push back more vociferously than they might have done in the past.
Meanwhile, a poll by Qunnipiac published today registers the lowest approval rating for the Supreme Court (30-59) since they first asked the question. In other words, it looks like the attacks on the court are working.
On our radar
BIDEN ROLLS OUT THE RED CARPET FOR MODI Joe Biden will host Indian prime minister Narendra Modi at the White House tomorrow. US-India relations are at the heart of a tension in Biden’s foreign policy: on the one hand, the administration wants to draw a clear (and overly black-and-white) line between democracies and autocracies; on the other, it wants to build a broad anti-China and anti-Russia coalition. This visit is the latest example of Biden patching things up with possible allies, regardless of their flaws.
IS KAMALA HARRIS THE NEW TINA TURNER? The vice president has written for Rolling Stone on what the late, great Tina Turner means to her. Cockburn has read the tribute so you don’t have to.
KJP: ‘I AM A HISTORIC FIGURE’ White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in an interview with the Grio this week: “This is a historic administration, I’m a historic figure, and I certainly walk in history every day.”
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Biden called Xi a dictator. He’s right
Just as a stopped clock shows the correct time twice a day, so president Joe Biden, amid the plethora of gaffes that regularly issues from his lips, occasionally utters the plain and unvarnished truth. So it was at a Democratic fundraiser in California Tuesday when Biden called China’s president Xi Jinping “a dictator.” Explaining why he gave the order to shoot down a Chinese spy balloon that entered US airspace in February, the president said that Xi had been “embarrassed” because the balloon had been blown off course and “he didn’t know it was there.”
US diplomats, like secretary of state Antony Blinken (who has just inconclusively met Xi in Beijing), may have winced when they heard Biden’s unscripted candid comment. But, for the rest of us, the president’s frank remark — like the child who called out the Emperor’s lack of clothes — was a refreshingly honest observation.
For the Chinese leader is indeed a dictator and a particularly ruthless one at that who is bent on establishing Chinese world domination and hegemony. The Chinese Communist Party which he leads holds a monopoly of power over its citizens. It exercises this in ways that are repugnant to anyone living in Western liberal democracies and enjoying freedom of thought and expression.
Ordinary Chinese people are permitted to savor the fruits of China’s state capitalism — so long as they accept the state’s control of their lives and docilely decline to question Xi’s increasingly arbitrary rule. The CCP decides on such basic freedoms as the number of children they are permitted to have (a policy which only came to an end in 2016), where they can live and what they can watch on TV or the internet.
Anyone who dares to question CCP rule risks a long spell in prison. The persecution of the racial and religious minority Uighur Muslim community has reached levels condemned by international bodies as genocide. Uighurs who cling to their faith and customs face incarceration, re-education, and sterilization in camps reminiscent of the Soviet Gulag in Stalin’s heyday.
Biden is right: Xi Jinping is an old man in a hurry and a dictator presenting a very real threat to his own people and the rest of the world too.
–Nigel Jones
Mace changes her tune on Trump
Politico notes that South Carolina congresswoman Nancy Mace has softened her stance on Donald Trump. Having said his “entire legacy was wiped out” on January 6, 2021, and been the target of numerous jabs from the former president, Mace has come to Trump’s defense since his recent indictment and now won’t rule out endorsing him in the 2024 presidential primary. Quite the about turn.
It’s an intriguing development for a few reasons. First, Mace is a close ally of the two declared presidential candidates from the Palmetto State: Nikki Haley and Tim Scott. Haley campaigned for Mace in a tight Republican primary last year. Scott, meanwhile, attends the same church as Mace. Complicating the picture further: Mace’s former consultant Chris LaCivita now works for Trump as a senior advisor. “I’ve got this love triangle,” Mace said of the situation in an interview with Politico.
Second, there are important areas where Trump and Mace aren’t as far apart as you might think. On abortion, Mace is perhaps the loudest voice in Washington imploring her party to soften their stance, or, as she put it recently, “not be assholes to women.” Trump too has worried about the electoral consequences of his party’s messaging on the subject. Beyond abortion, it’s not hard to imagine the candidates not named Trump competing to be seen as the most ideologically sound option, leaving the former president looking like a more appealing option to moderates like Mace.
Missing from the Politico report, however, are words like “vice president” or “running mate.” There’s gossip among South Carolina politicos that Mace is on the Trump campaign’s shortlist. And there’s some logic to it: she’d be a candidate with a genuinely compelling backstory, she is a prominent lawmaker on TV, including non-Fox channels, and she has plenty of appeal to exactly the sort of independents who would decide the race.
–OW
From the site
Bethany Mandel: Why civics test scores are falling in America’s schools
Teresa Mull: Maine’s lobstermen are a dying breed
Ben Domenech: On Fox, Trump admits: this terrible idea was his own
Poll watch
PRESIDENT BIDEN JOB APPROVAL
Approve 42.1% | Disapprove 54.0% | Net Approval -11.9
(RCP average)
REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL PRIMARY
Trump 47% | DeSantis 26% | Pence 9% | Haley 5% | Scott 4% Christie 3%
(CNN)
Best of the rest
Donna St. George, Washington Post: National test scores plunge, with still no sign of recovery
Christina Lu, Foreign Policy: Have Mandarin immersion schools lost their luster?
Niall Ferguson, Bloomberg: America still leads the world, but its allies are uneasy
Corby Kummer, Air Mail: The bookman goeth
Douglas Belkin, Wall Street Journal: The man behind the Supreme Court case seeking to end affirmative action
Freddie DeBoer, Substack: Are social justice politics serious, or not?
