We begin today’s roundup with Joseph Schatz and Ben White at POLITICO on the shock vote in favor of a Brexit:
British voters didn’t just shock the world and the financial markets by voting to leave the European Union hours ago: They also ignored President Barack Obama, handed Hillary Clinton a potential economic burden and injected new energy into the populist currents roiling politics on both sides of the Atlantic. [...]
But make no mistake: A Brexit represents nothing less than the partial splintering of the world’s largest political union and trading bloc — an $18 trillion economy. Many fear that other European countries will now hold their own exit referendums, leading to a chain reaction that will reverberate across the Atlantic. The Brexit vote could also break apart the UK, scramble transatlantic political unity amid growing tensions with Russia, and complicate U.S. trade ties.
It could even hit the U.S. economy, warned Harvard professor and former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers.
“The economy is more fragile to a negative shock than at anytime since the second World War,” Summers told POLITICO. “Always before when had a downturn there was room for monetary policy action to counteract that. Today there is essentially no such room.”
Peter Weber at The Week:
Donald Trump landed in Scotland on Friday to take care of some golf business, and immediately upon landing, he offered his endorsement of the UK vote to leave the European Union...
Scotland actually voted against the Brexit, 62 percent to 38 percent, and the referendum results increase the chance that Scottish voters will eventually choose the EU over the UK.
More from Weber, who explains why the Brexit result should worry anti-Trump Americans:
America has its own big decision coming up, and if you are a supporter of Trump, Britain's decisive vote to leave the EU is glad tidings, a ray of sunshine after a few weeks of soupy London fog. If you don't want Donald Trump to be president, the Brexit vote is a wake-up call.
The first lesson Brexit has for anti-Trump America is that there's a potential majority out there that is angry, scared, and more than willing to jump into the abyss. Sober analysts and economists warned Britons repeatedly that pulling out of the EU would be an economic and security debacle. "They heard the warnings, listened to experts of every kind tell them that Brexit meant disaster, watched the prime minister as he urged them not to take a terrible risk," says Matthew d'Ancona at The Guardian. "And their answer was: get stuffed."
Changing topics, CNN is taking a lot of heat for hiring former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who has a nondisclosure agreement with the Trump campaign which likely contains a non-disparagement clause. Here’s Lloyd Grove at The Daily Beast:
Talk about shock and awe—and, in this case, a heaping helping of exasperation and eye-rolling.
In a presidential campaign cycle that has been full of surprises, CNN President Jeff Zucker has outdone himself by hiring as an on-air analyst Donald Trump’s recently fired campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski—a man who has periodically shoved and bullied reporters at campaign events, including a CNN journalist, and has regularly displayed a thoroughgoing contempt for the news media’s role in the democratic process. [...]
It’s a predictable irony that around the same time that reports of Lewandowski’s new source of income were surfacing—his compensation a rumored $500,000, according to industry gossip—the presumptive Republican nominee was tweeting out a bitter complaint about CNN’s journalism and linking to the Trump-friendly Breitbart News story taking issue with CNN’s fact-checking of the candidate’s Wednesday policy speech attacking his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.
Turning now to policy, there’s a lot of analysis on the major SCOTUS decisions yesterday on affirmative action and immigration. First up, The New York Times:
With a maddening 4-to-4 nondecision announced Thursday, the Supreme Court failed to decide the fate of President Obama’s 2014 executive actions on immigration. The program remains blocked — and there is no realistic way to resuscitate it before Mr. Obama leaves office.
And so four million to five million people who might have been spared deportation remain stranded, vulnerable to arrest and unable to work legally. The impasse that made Mr. Obama’s program necessary — the absolute refusal by congressional Republicans to reform an unjust system — persists.
And here’s The Washington Post’s take:
What makes the outcome so depressing for the country, and such a standard-bearer for failed governance, is that as a policy matter, it shouldn’t be hard at all. Immigrants have been and continue to be, on balance, an overwhelmingly positive force for the nation’s social and economic health. It would be in their interest and the nation’s to regularize the status of workers and families who, as a practical matter, are not going away. There was a time when politicians of both parties understood this and actually came close to legislating a solution. But loss of nerve and an impulse to torpedo compromise in search of maximal political advantage put a solution out of reach, and here we are: Millions of people remain condemned to live in the shadows, and the U.S. economy cannot take advantage of the talents and energies of all the nation’s inhabitants.
And, on a final note, Here’s Jeffrey Toobin’s analysis on the Court’s affirmative action decision:
The practical significance of the Court’s decision is difficult to overstate. The Fisher case has been pending for eight years and was argued twice before the Court. Through all this time, the future of affirmative action has been an open and unresolved question. Kennedy has now put the issue to rest for the foreseeable future. This is a great gift to university-admissions officers, who can act with some confidence that they may consider race as one among many factors, but, more importantly, it’s a gift to their institutions. American universities, and the country, will be better off for today’s decision.