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The 2024 election will be a referendum on Joe Biden, but it’s also a referendum on a regime. This is how both sides see it. Liberal democracy itself is at stake according to progressives. For Trump supporters, the question at issue is legitimacy of the Deep State. These are different names for the same thing: a leadership caste and its ideology of government. In practice, liberal democracy means a democracy in which liberals never lose power.
Greenwich, Connecticut, is a town of 63,000 people just twenty-eight miles away from New York City. It’s a wealthy community with a median household income of $127,123 and the average home value over $1.2 million.Greenwich, Connecticut, is a town of 63,000 people just twenty-eight miles away from New York City. It’s a wealthy community with a median house- hold income of $127,123 and the average home value over $1.2 million. The well-manicured lawns and eight-car garages may be caricatures of country club Republicanism, but don’t be fooled. Democratic financier Ned Lamont launched his political career here en route to becoming governor. In 2020, Joe Biden received 61 percent of the vote — the formerly reliable GOP town has gone fully blue in the past two presidential cycles.
The Colorado Supreme Court issued a ruling Tuesday night that barred Donald Trump from appearing on the primary ballot in the 2024 election, a shock move that even NBC News described as a “political gift” to the former president. In a 4-3 decision, the court ruled that Trump engaged in an insurrection and is thus disqualified for running for office under the Fourteenth Amendment. The Fourteenth Amendment contains a clause that states anyone who takes an oath “as an officer of the United States” and engages in “insurrection or rebellion” cannot hold civil or military office in the US. The section was written with the intention of barring Confederate leaders from returning to public office.
You don’t have to be a Trump supporter (I am not) to be deeply troubled by Colorado court decision to keep Donald Trump off the primary ballot. Let me count the ways. First, the reason Trump is being excluded is new, untested, and profoundly controversial in its application here. Basically, the court is saying Trump cannot appear on the primary ballot because of a subsection of the Fourteenth Amendment meant to exclude Confederate officials who waged a civil war against the United States. Using that provision to exclude Trump is utterly novel. Its unprecedented use here invites the conclusion that it is being wielded as a political sledgehammer by Trump’s opponents and that some of those opponents wear judicial robes.
Few politicians have managed to surprise the country the way Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman has in the past few months. Fetterman proclaimed on the campaign trail, while running against Republican Mehmet Oz, that he is not just a Democrat, but a “proud progressive”. The junior senator, though, insisted in an NBC News interview on Friday that he is not a progressive and that voters shouldn’t be surprised when he breaks from the party line. Indeed, he has recently taken several high-profile policy positions that suggest an independent streak that brings him closer to Senate colleagues Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin than the left-wing “Squad”.
The stakes were high this week as Congress’s dairy big cow-culation to allow whole milk back in cafeterias loomed. When push came to shove, Republicans and Democrats set aside their beef to allow kids the freedom to drink as they please. The broadly bipartisan bill, the Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act, passed the House by a 330-99 vote — reversing Michelle Obama’s crazy push to ban whole milk from school lunches. “I am udderly in favor of whole milk,” Nebraska congressman Don Bacon told me, milking this vote for all it’s worth.
Welcome to Thunderdome, where on this week’s podcast we discussed why this seems to be the moment that Democrats publicly turned on Hunter Biden. There have already been statements from multiple Capitol Hill Democrats indicating that they believed Hunter’s activities had risen to the level of illegal and unethical activity — even from partisans like Jerry Nadler and Jamie Raskin. But the comment from Chris Murphy, viewed not just as a partisan but as a close White House ally on multiple fronts, that Hunter is “worthy of prosecution” in reaction to the latest California indictment has to be read as a message to Joe Biden: your re-election may well depend on what you do, or don’t do, about your son’s obvious crimes.
Article II, Section Four, of the Constitution provides that “The President, Vice President, and all civil Officers of the United States shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Other sections give the House of Representatives the sole power of impeachment and the Senate the power to try impeachments and to convict with a two-thirds vote of senators present. But impeachment has been very rarely used in this country. Indeed the House has voted to impeach a federal official only twenty-one times in the 234 years the Constitution has been in effect. No official has ever been accused of treason and only three of bribery, all federal judges.
As House Republicans prepared to launch a formal impeachment inquiry of President Joe Biden, his son showed up to Congress, defied a duly issued congressional subpoena and effectively gave Republicans the middle finger. Blocks from where Hunter Biden held an obstinate press conference with his Secret Service detail in tow, the House Republicans hosted a media row to lay out the case for why they backed today’s impeachment inquiry vote, which received near unanimous support. Representative Tom Emmer, the House’s number three Republican, told me that the younger Biden “made the case for us this morning. Hunter Biden is not above the law.
Former president Donald Trump’s support among voters in Iowa now tops 50 percent, according to a new poll from the Des Moines Register and NBC News. It’s the widest lead Trump has enjoyed in the first state to vote as part of the Republican primary process. Fifty-one percent of likely Republican caucus goers said Trump is their first choice, a gain of eight points since the last poll published in October. That puts him up more than thirty points over his nearest challenger.Aside from this being an obvious victory for Trump, who enjoys a likely insurmountable lead, the poll is also very bad news for former UN ambassador Nikki Haley.
A leading Republican candidate hoping to be selected for the special election to fill George Santos’s seat is currently settling a class-action lawsuit in California for unpaid wages — at least the second lawsuit for wage violations brought against his company in recent years. Mike Sapraicone, the owner of international security company Squad Security, was accused by two men of violating wage and other laws, according to a 2022 lawsuit. The lawsuit, not previously reported, is the latest revelation to emerge about Long Island’s Sapraicone, amid national scrutiny over how well candidates will be vetted by the Nassau GOP in the district, on the heels of Santos’s year-long scandal and criminal allegations.
Hunter Biden is in trouble... again. The question is how big?This week’s indictment from Special Counsel David Weiss is the latest in a seemingly never-ending saga of legal problems facing the “smartest guy” President Joe Biden knows. The charges, which center on tax evasion, include multiple felonies. The fifty-six-page indictment, at times, reads like a smut novel. The first son is alleged to have tried to pass off the following as business expenses: hotel rooms he turned into crack dens, strippers and a $10,000 membership to a sex club that he claimed was a “golf club membership.”Weiss has been the target of ire from many on the right, but this week’s indictment received praise from some unlikely corners.
For decades the American left has attempted to build a winning political coalition by convincing as many factions as possible that they have somehow been victimized by a white power structure — more particularly, by an American and European white male power structure. The goal has been to provide the Democratic Party with a large base of aggrieved voters while simultaneously giving its traditional allies in the media, academia and government a persuasive social justice (or more recently “anti-colonial”) narrative. But ever since Joe Biden’s inauguration as America’s forty-sixth president, when his promise to be the country’s conciliator quickly disappeared behind a sharp left turn, progressivism’s self-defeating internal contradictions have become increasingly apparent.
Welcome to Thunderdome, where last night’s debate in Tuscaloosa had some interesting aspects we’ll get to momentarily — but first, consider what this week looked like from the perspective of the front-runner for the nomination and, according to some, for the presidency. Donald Trump did a town hall with Sean Hannity — which got significantly less viewership than Ron DeSantis versus Gavin Newsom — where he managed to bolster Joe Biden’s central case against his candidacy. In Washington, Jack Smith dropped a new indication of the direction he plans to take with his case against Trump, including evidence of “encouragement of violence.
Sometimes the true power of someone new to politics is that they don't arrive in Washington with any of the preconceived notions about the possible. In a political moment that is decidedly post-norms, that's what made Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville's stance against an array of foes, including many on his own side of the aisle, so impressive. Tuberville came to Washington as a cipher. He was a Republican, certainly, and a conservative endorsed by Donald Trump by dint of the failure of Jeff Sessions's brief tenure as attorney general. But it was convenient to think of him as a former football coach who viewed being one of the hundred members of the United States Senate as a step down from the task of raising up some of the most talented athletes in the nation.
President Joe Biden said the quiet part out loud Tuesday, telling donors at a campaign event that he might not be running for re-election if former president Donald Trump were not in the 2024 race. It’s just bad optics for any presidential candidate, let alone a highly unpopular one, to admit that they aren’t super excited about what they’re doing. Senator Rand Paul had a similar moment on the 2016 trail when he was asked if he was still running for president. His response? “I don’t know; I wouldn’t be doing this dumbass live streaming if I weren’t.” Hilarious, but doesn’t exactly strike confidence in the voting base.
As former president Donald Trump seems to be cruising to the GOP nomination — a NewsNation poll has him ahead fifty points over his nearest rivals — his critics in the media and on the left are trotting out a familiar attack. Over the past two weeks, the headlines have been inescapable: Trump is a nasty authoritarian who wants to dismantle America’s democratic political system. This shouldn’t be all that surprising, since we heard similar cries ahead of his election 2016, namely over his support for a “Muslim ban” (a national security travel ban that included countries that are majority Muslim) and for mass deportations of illegal aliens.As the Iowa caucuses creep closer, the revamped, breathless accusations have increased in number and fervor.
Many commentators (including yours truly) have pointed out that America is divided more now than it has been since the late 1850s and the run up to the Civil War. But as usual, I may have understated the case. That, anyway, is what Vivek Ramaswamy would say. In a remarkable, just-published interview with Tom Klingenstein, Ramaswamy several time insists that we are not in a pre-war situation. It’s worse than that. “We are,” he insists, “absolutely in a war with the fate of the country at stake.” Hyperbolic? I don’t think so. The war, he acknowledges, could and likely will get worse. But we can already see the troops deployed and the battle lines drawn.
The House of Representatives kicked out its only Jew-ish member today, sending George Santos into the pages of history as one of only a handful of House members to be booted from the body. Former congressman Santos had an eventful second wedding anniversary yesterday, as he held a feisty, fiery press conference to proclaim his innocence — but declined to ask any of his colleagues to defend him against the latest charges. This third attempt at expulsion proved to be the charm for Santos’s foes, who rode the wave of an almost-comedic House Ethics report that alleged Santos spent donor dollars on everything from OnlyFans subscriptions (which he somewhat denied) to Botox (which he basically confirmed).
As I write this, a federal judge is considering whether Amtrak should be allowed to seize Washington DC’s Union Station, which is something like a combined urban mall and rail hub. In court, Amtrak has argued that it’s entitled to take Union Station and claims its expertise in transportation management makes it better equipped to operate the station. The US Constitution protects the rights of property owners in all sorts of ways, but it doesn’t protect property owners against eminent domain — the phrase for having your property taken for public use in exchange for fair compensation.