Bickering

Yes. I know: Mr. Biden is old, is prone to gaffes, walks stiffly and had a disastrous debate with Mr. Trump. But this I also know: A presidential election is not an entertainment contest. It does not begin or end with a 90-minute debate. Enough! Mr. Biden may not be the ideal candidate, but he will be the candidate and should be the candidate. And with an effective campaign that speaks to the needs of working families, he will not only defeat Mr. Trump but beat him badly. It’s time for Democrats to stop the bickering and nit-picking.

- Senator Bernie Sanders "Joe Biden for President"

This week's featured posts are "Just Don't Do It", about the temptation to commit political violence, and "Don't Ignore the Republican Platform".

This week everybody was talking about the Trump shooting

I assume you already know that somebody shot at Trump during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on Saturday. They hit his ear, but did him no lasting damage. The shooter was killed and so was one other person; two were critically injured. The shooter has been identified, and everybody is wondering how he established a position so close to the stage. Officials aren't speculating about his motives yet, so I won't either. Sometimes assassins have coherent political agendas, but sometimes what they do only makes sense in their own inner worlds. Wait and see.

There is a fairly standard statement that any responsible leader needs to make in this situation, and Joe Biden made it:

I have been briefed on the shooting at Donald Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania. I’m grateful to hear that he’s safe and doing well. I’m praying for him and his family and for all those who were at the rally, as we await further information. Jill and I are grateful to the Secret Service for getting him to safety. There’s no place for this kind of violence in America. We must unite as one nation to condemn it.

This sentiment has been echoed by Kamala Harris, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, and all sorts of other Democratic leaders -- including Nancy Pelosi, who put aside the way Trump and Don Jr. responded when an attacker looking to take her hostage instead seriously injured her husband.

As one whose family has been the victim of political violence, I know firsthand that political violence of any kind has no place in our society. I thank God that former President Trump is safe. As we learn more details about this horrifying incident, let us pray that all those in attendance at the former President’s rally today are unharmed.

I've decided not to speculate about the shooter, his motives, or the possible effects on the presidential campaign. For the most part, I find myself agreeing with Jay Kuo, especially his expectation that Trump and his cult will "overplay their hand". There's already an attempt to cash in.

One possible result of the shooting is pressure on Democrats to tone down their attacks on Trump, which I would hate to see. I understand why President Biden said in his televised address:

The political rhetoric in this country has gotten very heated. It’s time to cool it down. And we all have a responsibility to do that.

But of course we know what will happen: Trump will continue his violent rhetoric, and the media will call Biden a hypocrite any time he criticizes Trump, no matter how justified that criticism is. Rick Perlstein posted:

A predictable effect of the Trump shooting that the Republicans have worked the refs by saying that this is what happens when you say their candidate means to end democracy. This plays to agenda-setting elite political journalists'' cult of consensus--for their immediate response was to cluck about "politicized" responses, when the only politicized response were from Republicans (Democrats who went on the record also responded with consensus cliches).

Republicans thus are already succeeding in neutralizing the perceived legitimacy of Democrats continuing to make the true argument that the Republican candidate does mean to end democracy.

Nobody is addressing the elephant in the room, which is the temptation almost everybody feels to get violent, if only in fantasy. That's what one featured post is about.

and Democrats were still arguing about Biden's candidacy

Whatever you believed last week, this week proved you right. Biden kept a busy schedule, did a lot of the things his critics said he needed to do, and did them well but not perfectly. He hosted the NATO summit, held an hour-long press conference afterwards, and had enthusiastic rallies, including a fiery speech in Michigan in which he both went on offense against Trump and laid out his vision for a second term. Last night he addressed the nation about the Trump shooting. (This morning I can't find any articles about what he said, so he must have done fine.)

If you support Biden, you noted that his press conference (on foreign policy, mostly) displayed a depth of understanding we have never seen in a Trump press conference. He not only answered the questions directly, with detail and nuance, but recognized the individual reporters and made reference to their fields of expertise. If you want him out of the race, you noted that he sometimes said one word when he meant another ("Vice President Trump"), spoke in his characteristic interrupting-himself style, and wasn't particularly charismatic. It was all too little too late.

There are polls to support both points of view. 85% of Americans told an ABC poll that he's too old to be president and 65% want him to step aside. But the same poll found showed Biden within 1% of Trump, and a Marist poll has Biden up by 2%, belying the often-repeated claim that Biden "can't win", or that he needs some drastically different strategy that he still hasn't announced. 538's prediction model (which includes "fundamental" factors I don't fully understand in addition to polling) has Biden as a slight favorite.

Prominent Democrats continued to pick sides. AOC and Bernie Sanders are all in for Biden, but the number of congressional Democrats expressing doubts about his candidacy (or even outright calling for him to quit the race) is over a dozen now. Nancy Pelosi made an enigmatic statement about supporting whatever decision Biden makes, as if his announced resolve to stay in the race wasn't his final answer.

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Whichever side of this argument you're on, you're probably annoyed that Trump doesn't get similar scrutiny. He never holds unscripted press conferences, only does interviews with friendly journalists who won't fact-check him or ask difficult follow-ups, hasn't released his medical records, and makes constant verbal blunders that the media calls no attention to. His bizarre rambling at public rallies is covered as Trump-being-Trump rather than medically significant symptoms.

If Trump did hold the kind of press conference Biden held Thursday, we know what we'd see, because we saw it so many times when he was president: Before long a reporter would ask him about something he didn't know, and he would respond with a word salad containing numerous falsehoods. Any follow-up question would trigger Trump to call the reporter "a disgrace" working for "the fake news media". Headlines and sound bytes from the conference would be all about Trump sparring with reporters rather than anything we learned from his answers.

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More and more I feel like the media is covering itself rather than external events. Thursday, NYT analyst Peter Baker sort-of covered Biden's NATO press conference, but never actually got to the content of Biden's words, focusing instead on "every momentary flub, every verbal miscue" which "even if quickly corrected, now takes on outsize importance" because

The reality is that every public appearance between now and November will be scrutinized for evidence of infirmity.

Scrutinized by who? Well, by Peter Baker, for one. He's not reporting on events, he's announcing his intentions.

Similarly, I can't count all the headlines that have described Biden as "defiant" when he says he won't drop out of the race. But who is he defying, exactly? Mostly the very same pundits who now tag him as "defiant".

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The NYT (where else?) provides Daniel Schlozman a platform to explain how the Democratic Convention can do whatever it wants, independent of what happened in the primaries. He notes that the Biden delegates are "pledged, not bound".

I realize that in the shadow of Project 2025, the long-term consequences of a bad precedent may seem small. But this kind of hair-splitting can't help but devalue the primaries going forward. Progressives should consider how this could come back to bite them.

Imagine that in 2028 or 2032, AOC pulls off some early primary upsets, gets momentum, and by summer is headed to the convention with a majority of delegates pledged-but-not-bound to support her. Unfortunately, polls show her losing to some MAGA successor like J.D. Vance or Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has been making hay by tarring AOC with the "socialist" and "radical Marxist" labels. Meanwhile, some Democratic centrist who didn't even run in the primaries -- let's say Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, who the Republicans haven't bothered to smear yet -- has better numbers. The Biden 2024 precedent would open the possibility of pushing AOC out, in spite of what the primary voters wanted.

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In my opinion, the dumbest idea around is to remove Biden via the 25th Amendment, as was proposed in The New Yorker by Jeannie Suk Gersen. Of course she'd prefer that Biden resign voluntarily -- not just step down as nominee, but leave the presidency immediately.

But if Biden resists either an outright resignation or a break for the rest of his term under the Twenty-fifth Amendment, then it would be time to look to Section Four of the Amendment, which covers removing the President involuntarily. The Vice-President and a majority of the Cabinet can declare that Biden “is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” whereupon Harris would become the acting President.

Aside from the objection that this will never happen, there are two very good reasons why it shouldn't. First, the 25th Amendment isn't about the president polling badly, or worries about his abilities four years from now. It requires the VP and the cabinet to affirm that right now Biden is "unable to discharge the duties of his office". The example that everybody was talking about when the amendment was passed in 1967 was Woodrow Wilson's stroke, after which his wife Edith secretly ran the country.

Is there any evidence that Biden is incapacitated in the way the Amendment envisions? We just saw Biden host a NATO summit, which seemed to all outward appearances to go well; the alliance is united and taking decisive action to aid Ukraine. Inflation was actually negative in June. The economy continues to create jobs, and even as the unemployment rate ticks upwards to 4.1%, it remains remarkably low for this point in the interest-rate cycle. The stock market is at an all-time high. Biden has successfully negotiated with an insane Republican majority in the House, and has managed to keep the government open without giving up the gains he made (bipartisan infrastructure, the anti-climate-change provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act ...) when he had a Democratic House majority.

So independent of any policy disagreement (on issues like the border, say, if you're conservative, or Gaza if you're liberal) where's the evidence that the US is being mismanaged because Biden is unable to discharge his duties? You and I were never appointed to any office by Biden and owe him nothing, but could you sign a declaration to Congress affirming that he's incapable at this very moment? I couldn't. Using the 25th Amendment this way would set a terrible precedent.

But there's an even more serious problem, which is that once Harris is sworn in, there's no VP. So if anything happens to Harris Mike Johnson becomes president.

I know, I know: the Amendment makes provision for that:

Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.

So Harris can nominate Gavin Newsom or Beshear or some other White guy who could maintain the ticket's racial and gender balance. But then we're back to that insane Republican House majority, which would love to see Mike Johnson become president. Even if a handful of Republicans were willing to cross party lines, what if Johnson just adjourned the House without voting on the VP nomination?

So in the meantime, and probably until January, Johnson is next in line to be president. It would be an open invitation for some Christian nationalist nutjob to kill Harris. And if you think things like that don't happen any more, take a look at Donald Trump's ear.

and the Republican convention

It started yesterday in Milwaukee. I try to avoid speculation on this blog, but I've been expecting for months that this convention isn't going to help them. Most of the country discounts what a freak show the MAGA Republican Party has become, and I expect the Marjorie Taylor Greenes and Matt Gaetzes to be out in such force that the country can't ignore them. Most Americans haven't watched a complete Trump speech in four years, and I expect them to be surprised.

See the point made above about Trump overplaying his post-assassination-attempt hand.

Pundits are settling on J. D. Vance as Trump's VP, which fits the model I laid out some while ago. Trump's VP has to have

• no moral code, so that his conscience won't keep him from doing whatever Trump asks (like Mike Pence's did)
• no independent following, so that he never outshines Trump (as Marjorie Taylor Greene might among the true MAGA faithful)
• no prominence prior to Trump, so that he owes Trump everything (which eliminates Marco Rubio).

but I've been re-reading a book

Three of them, actually: Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, which is practically a time-trip to the late 1600s and early 1700s. Why is that worth mentioning here? Among many other things, Stephenson draws a strikingly simple line that divides Whigs from Tories: Tories believe that wealth comes from land, and Whigs believe that wealth comes from commerce.

Once you understand that, you see that generations later it was also the difference between two seminal American founders -- Jefferson and Hamilton. In Jefferson's ideal country, every family owned its own small farm. If you look at things that way, merchants and bankers -- Hamilton's people -- seem like parasites.

The Hamilton/Jefferson argument is still with us, though you have to look at everything sideways to see it: If you think wealth comes from land (and the modern assets comparable to land, like brands, intellectual property or anything else you might charge rents or royalties for), government has no natural role in the economy. (It can't create land, after all.) But if you think wealth comes from commerce, government can increase national wealth by building up the infrastructure of commerce: transportation systems, communication systems, education systems, and so on.

So if you dimly remember something in your high school US History class about Andrew Jackson fighting the Bank of the United States, that's what it was about: Does a reliable banking system play a role in generating wealth, or does it just suck money away from the common people? And if you run into somebody who thinks government can only "redistribute" wealth that it has no role in producing, channeling it from "makers" to "takers", you're hearing the latest round in an argument that is more than 300 years old.

and you also might be interested in ...

This morning, Judge Cannon dismissed the classified documents case against President Trump, the most open-and-shut of the cases against him. She wrote a 93-page opinion, which I haven't looked at yet. Marcy Wheeler is reading it, and the Lawfare blog will have a podcast on it this afternoon.

Based on nothing but intuition, I think this is a good thing, because it opens the possibility that her decision will get reversed and the case can be assigned to a judge who isn't in Trump's pocket.

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When the Supreme Court's Loper decision came down two weeks ago, redefining the relationship between federal agencies and the courts, it was a little hard to describe what exactly it would mean in people's lives. Fortunately, the Public Notice blog has an article listing the cases that are already being affected.

Taken together, it’s evident that any moves the administration makes to tilt the playing field even slightly in favor of workers are designed to fail once they reach a conservative federal judge. And thanks to right-wing judge shopping, plaintiffs are often able to get their case in front of an anti-regulation judge they know will be favorable to their challenges.

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Friday, Maine Senator Susan Collins told reporters she won't vote for Donald Trump.

Now imagine what a media storm there would be if Maine's other senator, Angus King, announced that he wouldn't vote for Biden. The event and the hypothetical event sound nearly the same, but clearly I'm missing something.

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Rudy Giuliani's attempt to use bankruptcy to get out of his $150 million defamation judgment isn't going to work. Citing his lack of "financial transparency", a New York judge dismissed his bankruptcy case. Next stop: asset seizure.

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Scientists announced a breakthrough in research on pancreatic cancer, which has the lowest survival rate of any common cancer.

and let's close with something visual

I love photo contests, and BigPicture has a great one. The photo below is called "Ghosts of the North", and I was sure it must violate the rules by superimposing one image on another. But in fact it just has a long time exposure. The wolf was there long enough to register, but not long enough to look solid.