Supreme Court Permits House Democrats to Obtain Trump’s Tax Returns
In a terse order, the Supreme Court rejected the former president’s request that it block the Treasury Department from turning over the files.
The case was assigned to a Trump-appointed judge, Trevor N. McFadden, who took his time in making a ruling.
The case was still pending in 2021, when the Biden administration entered office and the current Congress was seated. Mr. Neal renewed his request and the Justice Department issued a memorandum saying the committee had a legal right to the returns.
In December last year, Judge McFadden moved on the case, ruling that the committee had a legal right to the records. But he blocked the Treasury Department from turning them over until the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit reviewed his decision.
In August, a panel on the Court of Appeals upheld Judge McFadden’s decision, but Mr. Trump asked the full appeals court to reconsider the matter. It rejected that request last month.
Mr. Trump then asked the Supreme Court to intervene, and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. temporarily extended the block.
Delays are only delays.
AJC:
A Georgia Senate runoff poll points to challenges for Walker, Warnock
The poll, commissioned by the AARP, pegged Warnock at 51% and Walker at 47% — within the margin of error of 4.4 percentage points.
Conducted by the bipartisan team of Fabrizio Ward & Impact Research, it’s the first major public poll since the Nov. 8 election ended with neither rival securing the majority vote needed for an outright victory.
…
“Let’s state the obvious: No one knows who is going to come out to vote on Dec. 6,” said John Anzalone, who is perhaps best known as President Joe Biden’s pollster. “But we also learned something about the motivation levels that’s driving people to the polls.”
Note that early voting times are way shorter than the general election in November.
Georgia Democrats:
Early voting runs in every county at minimum from Monday, November 28 through Friday, December 2. Early Voting these days is open at a minimum from 9:00am to 5:00pm and may begin earlier and/or end later at some locations. Some counties will offer Early Voting on additional days before November 28
See also:
• 11Alive: Georgia appellate court allows Saturday voting ahead of U.S. Senate runoff
and this:
Julia of Belluz/NY Times:
Scientists Don’t Agree on What Causes Obesity, but They Know What Doesn’t
The three-day meeting was infused with an implicit understanding of what obesity is not: a personal failing. No presenter argued that humans collectively lost willpower around the 1980s, when obesity rates took off, first in high-income countries, then in much of the rest of the world. Not a single scientist said our genes changed in that short time. Laziness, gluttony and sloth were not referred to as obesity’s helpers. In stark contrast to a prevailing societal view of obesity, which assumes people have full control over their body size, they didn’t blame individuals for their condition, the same way we don’t blame people suffering from the effects of undernutrition, like stunting and wasting.
The researchers instead referred to obesity as a complex, chronic condition, and they were meeting to get to the bottom of why humans have, collectively, grown larger over the past half century. To that end, they shared a range of mechanisms that might explain the global obesity surge. And their theories, however diverse, made one thing obvious: As long as we treat obesity as a personal responsibility issue, its prevalence is unlikely to decline.
Jennifer Rubin/WaPo:
Beware, DeSantis is as much a threat to America as Trump
If you believe Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis would be a less dangerous presidential candidate than former president Donald Trump, take a moment to consider the recent ruling striking down DeSantis’s “Stop WOKE Act.” That opinion — as well as other rulings against his attempts to inhibit dissent — makes clear that DeSantis is just as willing as Trump to embrace the GOP’s authoritarian element and use state power to punish his enemies.
Rachel Bovard/NY Times:
What Makes Trump Different From DeSantis and Other Republicans
Mr. Trump’s appeal has been difficult for many mainstream G.O.P. politicians and pundits to stomach. They’re embarrassed — about Mr. Trump and, in the case of elected officials, about representing people who would vote for him. But the characteristics that Washington Republicans hate — the bombast, the outrageousness — are what makes his base trust him. They love that Mr. Trump points at the system and calls it what it is: corrupt.
The comedian Dave Chappelle recently homed in on this point while hosting “Saturday Night Live.” “I live in Ohio amongst the poor whites,” he said, and went on: “A lot of you don’t understand why Trump was so popular.” People in Ohio “have never seen somebody like him” — an “honest liar,” he said. Mr. Chappelle pointed to Mr. Trump’s comment in a 2016 debate with Hillary Clinton: “He said, ‘I know the system is rigged because I use it.’”
Dylan Byers/Puck:
A Licht in the Attic
In the last 72 hours, at least twenty CNN employees (on-air talent, rank-and-file staff, and more) have called or texted me, many of them unsolicited, to convey that things have never been worse.
When Chris Licht was named chairman and chief executive of CNN, some mere eight months ago, he told employees that his boss, David Zaslav, had given him “one simple directive: to ensure that CNN remains the global leader in NEWS.” The mandate, with its all-caps emphasis on “news,” was actually more nuanced than Licht suggested, and contained within it the seeds of the Zaz-Lichtian thesis for what CNN should be, and what it shouldn’t.
First, the mandate was a repudiation of the anti-Trump grandstanding that had permeated the era of Licht’s predecessor, Jeff Zucker, and that had come to define the network in the eyes of its critics, and even some supporters who found it polarizing, or at least long in the tooth. Under Licht, the new boss suggested, CNN would air news, not outrage—which would hopefully draw back centrists, even if it alienated some power viewers, all in the name of expanding the network’s total addressable market and owning the middle in a market where Fox News had the right and MSNBC the left. Second, it was a declaration of CNN’s intention to focus exclusively on “news,” and not pursue expensive ancillary projects that could just as easily live on HBO Max or Discovery+, or not live at all.