We begin today’s roundup with Eugene Robinson and his analysis of Donald Trump’s increasingly erratic behavior:
President Trump’s incoherence grows to keep pace with his desperation. These days, he makes less sense than ever — a sign that this malignant presidency has entered a new, more dangerous phase.
I can’t be the only one who thinks he sounds less like an elected official than like the leader of some apocalyptic cult. Look at the way he rails against the news media at his revival-style campaign rallies. In Indiana on Thursday night, he seemed obsessed with news stories that had described empty seats and a subdued crowd at a West Virginia rally several days earlier. He claimed those reports were “fake news,” although they were demonstrably true.
At The Atlantic, Garrett Epps takes a look at Bret Kavanaugh and what “settled law” means:
I haven’t been able to find a clear definition of the term, but in 1976, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote, “the Court seldom takes a case merely to reaffirm settled law.”
So maybe there’s a functional definition. “Settled law” means law the Court hasn’t decided to overturn just yet.
[...] Kavanaugh’s tone is not anti-abortion; instead, he talks about the issue as if it were some incomprehensible and extraneous bit of nonsense being imposed on the court and the government by something called “Supreme Court precedent.”
Nan Aron at The Nation provides a translation guide for the hearing:
If He Says: “If confirmed to the Supreme Court, I will uphold precedent.”
It Means: A handy dodge that sounds great, especially in those situations when somebody asks if you think seminal rulings people really care about, such as Brown v. Board of Education, should stand. (In case you missed it, a number of Trump’s lower-court nominees have been refusing to answer that question.) But experience shows it means very little. Justice Neil Gorsuch said the same thing at his confirmation hearing. A few months later, safely ensconced on the Court, he voted to overturn a 40-year-old precedent that protected workers in the public sector.
Paul Krugman dedicates his column to the GOP’s Obamacare repeal efforts:
In the case of health care, however, there’s an even deeper problem: The G.O.P. can’t come up with an alternative to the Affordable Care Act because no such alternative exists. In particular, if you want to preserve protection for people with pre-existing conditions — the health issue that matters most to voters, including half of Republicans — Obamacare is the most conservative policy that can do that. The only other options are things like Medicare for all that would involve moving significantly to the left, not the right.
Catherine Rampell explains the failure of Trump’s trade policy and his bailout of farmers:
The first tranche of Trump’s $12 billion agricultural bailout program begins Tuesday, when farmers and ranchers — a key voting bloc in congressional districts across the country, it’s worth noting — can start applying for subsidies to offset trade-related losses.[...]
Needless to say, none of this jibes with the president’s claims that he favors free markets, hates handouts, despises political favoritism and is tightening the federal budget.
It’s not even consistent with his stated desire to get out from under China’s thumb.
That farmer bailout spending, after all, looks like it will be paid for at least partly through more federal borrowing — including, presumably, from China, which is the largest foreign holder of U.S. Treasurys.
In an important piece, Jasmine Lee at The New York Times analyzes Trump’s impact on the lower courts:
Mr. Trump’s 26 appointments to the appeals courts have raised the overall number of Republican appointees, and if he fills the 13 existing vacancies, the majority of judges on the appellate level will have been appointed by a Republican president.But he has fallen short of “flipping” the balance of appointees on any individual court. He has strengthened the existing conservative majorities on four courts, but eight courts still count a majority of judges who were appointed by Democratic presidents. The 11th Circuit is now an even split.
On a final note,
Ted Koppel reflects on the state of the media:
My journalistic colleagues and I are hurtling down a long, steep highway. There’s no longer any resistance on the brake pedal, and we realize, to our dismay, that we are unable to figure out what replaced the hand brake on this late-model vehicle. There has to be an emergency off-ramp; some media analogue to the gravel or sand-filled inclines designed to rescue runaway 18-wheelers; but for the moment there is none in sight, merely a horrifying sense of acceleration.
There’s only so much mileage to be derived from any metaphor, but one more allusion. There are, among us, the adrenaline junkies, the speed freaks, for whom the thrill of the ride overwhelms all considerations of how the ride will end.