We begin today’s roundup with John Cassidy’s analysis at The New Yorker on the possible 2024 GOP presidential field:
[S]ince Trump still has many, many supporters in the grass roots of the G.O.P., the only way for non-maga Republicans to consign him to history is for them to unite against him, perhaps subordinating their individual interests and ambitions. As the event in Las Vegas demonstrated, that’s a tricky proposition—especially with Trump already running.
In theory, the 2024 primaries could serve as a moment when the Party would line up behind someone other than Trump. But the 2016 primary had the opposite effect: a scrambled field of more than a dozen candidates helped Trump to steamroller everyone else. Will that happen again? Quite possibly. One of the keys to Trump’s victory in 2016 was that many states used a winner-takes-all system, or something roughly equivalent, which enabled Trump to rack up delegates in the early states with a plurality of the vote. In South Carolina, he received all fifty delegates despite getting just 32.5 per cent of the vote. Marco Rubio, who attracted 22.5 per cent, got no delegates.
Speaking of possible presidential contenders, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis will have to contend with tough questions about his mismanagement of funds for his migrant flight stunt. Here is the Miami Herald editorial board:
[E]ven if you agree with the governor gleefully using people as pawns — and we certainly don’t — there’s now the matter of $1.4 million in taxpayer money that remains unaccounted for after those September flights. The DeSantis administration paid more than $1.56 million to a politically connected contractor for a program to fly the migrants to northeastern states as part of his political stunt — but the two migrant flights in September only cost a total of about $153,000, according to public records obtained by the Miami Herald.
Paul Krugman at The New York Times advises Democrats on how to handle a House GOP majority that refuses to govern:
So for the next two years we can expect Republican leaders, such as they are, to wreak as much havoc as they can, both to appease their party’s most extreme elements and to undermine what might otherwise look like successful governance by the Biden administration.
Unfortunately, Republicans will in fact have major opportunities to wreak havoc — unless Democrats use the next few weeks, during which they will retain control of Congress, to forestall them. Two issues in particular stand out: the debt limit and aid to Ukraine.
Isaac Chotiner at The New Yorker takes a deep dive into election reform with elections expert Rick Hasen:
I was hoping to divide this conversation into how you’re thinking about threats to democracy in 2024, and how you’re thinking about them more broadly. What’s your thought about the former after the midterms?
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that we dodged a bullet, but I would say that I am somewhat less concerned than I was two weeks ago. I was most worried about governors and secretaries of state who were election deniers. Either they’re lying, in which case they can’t be trusted to fairly report election results, or they’ve been duped, in which case they’re not smart enough to be running or certifying elections. The fact that those folks lost in all the places that matter is a big deal.
There are more than four states where election skeptics won secretaries-of-state races. That’s worrisome, and it shows a lack of commitment to the rule of law, but those states are not going to be swing states. Furthermore, at least the Michigan legislature, and probably the Pennsylvania legislature, are no longer in a position where Donald Trump could try to manipulate them into putting in a second fake slate of electors.
Meanwhile, Jamelle Bouie takes on corruption at the Supreme Court:
The most striking detail in the recent investigation by The New York Times into another potential Supreme Court breach is not the evidence that Justice Samuel Alito or his wife may have leaked information to conservative friends in 2014 about the outcome of Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, which extended “religious liberty” to the actions of family-owned corporations.
No, the most striking detail is the extent to which a number of Republican justices, Alito included, appear to have been the targets of a sophisticated and well-funded influence operation designed to notch as many legal and constitutional victories for moneyed and conservative interests as the justices were willing to give.
On a final note, on the subject of the horrific. massacre at Club Q, Michelle Goldberg highlights the rising hate toward the LGBTQ community,
The massacre this past weekend at Club Q, an L.G.B.T.Q. club in Colorado Springs, was at once shocking and entirely predictable, like terrorist attacks on synagogues and abortion clinics. [...]
All over the country, Drag Queen Story Hours have been targetedby Proud Boys and other demonstrators, some heavily armed. In August, the Republican congresswoman Lauren Boebert tweeted a photo of a flier for a Drag Queen Story Hour at a Colorado public library with the words, “Sending a message to all the drag queens out there: stay away from the children in Colorado’s Third District!” The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh described drag events involving kids as a “cancer,” and wrote that “just like cancer, stopping it is not a gentle or a painless process.”
It’s been clear for some time that there are people willing to act on such ideas. Just last month, a man in a red baseball cap firebombed a Tulsa doughnut shop that had hosted a drag event. According to The Tulsa World, the vandal “left a note on a neighboring business that contained Bible verses and hateful rhetoric.”