Last Monday, April 22, was Earth Day, which found me in Washington DC doing a program at the American Enterprise Institute on environmental progress along with Roger Pielke Jr. If you missed the livestream, the video of the entire event is now up. It’s almost 90 minutes long in total, but my portion of the program is just the first 25 minutes or so.
Special Prosecutor Jack Smith’s case against Donald Trump was argued in the Supreme Court today. The issue is the extent to which ex-presidents are entitled to immunity for acts committed while they were in office. The New York Times covered the arguments with live updates. Here are some excerpts:
Overall, several justices — maybe a majority — apear to have suggested through their questions that presidents should indeed enjoy some level of immunity from criminal prosecution. The questions seem to be how to decide what actions are protected from criminal charges and whether the allegations in Trump’s indictment in particular would qualify for immunity.
Presidents surely should have immunity with regard to some official acts, perhaps all. There is no question about the fact that some presidential acts are immune:
Dreeben says there are some core constitutional functions of a presidency — he cites the pardon power, the power to recognize foreign nations, the power to veto legislation, the power to make appointments — that Congress cannot regulate and so criminal statutes cannot be applied to such actions. Justice Gorsuch declares that is essentially immunity for some official acts.
Smith is persecuting Trump under a fraud conspiracy statute that, as some justices pointed out, is vague:
Justice Alito now joins Justice Kavanaugh in suggesting that the fraud conspiracy statute is very vague and broadly drawn. That is bad news for the indictment brought against Trump by Jack Smith, the special counsel.
The Times reporters are grotesquely biased against not just Trump, but Republicans. For example:
During the George W. Bush administration, memos about post-9/11 surveillance and torture were written by a politically appointed lawyer with idiosyncratically broad views of a president’s supposed power, as commander in chief, to authorize violations of surveillance and torture laws. The Justice Department later withdrew those memos as espousing a false view of the law, but held that officials who had taken action based on those memos could not be charged with crimes.
The “politically appointed lawyer with idiosyncratically broad views of a president’s power” was, I believe, John Yoo. No Democrat could ever be a politically appointed lawyer with idiosyncratic views. And Yoo’s views were not idiosyncratic. I don’t recall that either he or anyone else wrote memos about the president’s “supposed power…to authorize violations of surveillance and torture laws.” The memos I recall addressed the question of what constitutes “torture” within the meaning of federal law, and concluded–correctly, in my opinion–that the interrogation techniques then being used on terrorists were not torture within the meaning of the statute. The “Justice Department”–that is, the Democratic Party Justice Department under Barack Obama–did withdraw those memos, in what I think was a political act. But of course, those lawyers were not “politically appointed” and didn’t have “idiosyncratic views.”
But that was all a digression. Steve no doubt knows more about it.
The Supreme Court justices no doubt care about the future prospect of either 1) lawless presidents or 2) a cycle of meritless prosecution of presidents once they leave office. (And believe me, when Joe Biden leaves office I hope Republicans can find a way to bring multiple criminal prosecutions against him.) But Jack Smith cares only about getting a conviction between now and November, however flimsy his theory may be. That appears doubtful; this is the Times’s summation:
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority appeared ready on Thursday to rule that former presidents have substantial immunity from criminal prosecution, a move that would further delay the criminal case against former President Donald J. Trump on charges that he plotted to subvert the 2020 election.
Such a ruling would most likely send the case back to the trial court to draw distinctions between official and private conduct. Those proceedings could make it hard to conduct the trial before the 2024 election.
Which would defeat the whole point of Smith’s prosecution. Finally, a comic note:
But a ruling in early summer, even if it categorically rejected Mr. Trump’s position, would make it hard to complete his trial before the election. Should Mr. Trump win at the polls, there is every reason to think he would scuttle the prosecution.
Well yes, one would think so!
Right now we are hearing that crime—especially homicide—is falling (just like inflation—heh), suggesting that the runaway crime of recent years was somehow an epiphenomena of Covid. Here’s the chart getting wide circulation:
These data are likely correct, but there is reason to doubt that crime overall is falling, for the simple reason that lots of people have lost confidence in law enforcement and prosecution and no longer report many crimes (especially property crimes) to the police.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal today, John Lott notes the important and growing discrepancy between the official FBI crime statistics derived from police reporting, and crime victim reports, which are conducted separately:
The U.S. has two measures of crime. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reporting program counts the number of crimes reported to police every year. The Bureau of Justice Statistics, in its National Crime Victimization Survey, asks some 240,000 people a year whether they have been victims of a crime. The two measures have diverged since 2020: The FBI has been reporting less crime, while more people say they have been victims.
The divergence is due to several reasons. In 2022, 31% of police departments nationwide, including Los Angeles and New York, didn’t report crime data to the FBI. In addition, in cities from Baltimore to Nashville, Tenn., the FBI is undercounting crimes those jurisdictions reported.
Another reason crimes reported to the police are falling is that arrest rates are plummeting. If victims don’t believe criminals will be caught and punished, they won’t bother reporting them. According to the FBI, if you take the five years preceding Covid-19 (2015-19) and compare them with 2022, the percentage of violent crimes in all cities resulting in an arrest fell from 44% to 35%. Among cities with more than one million people (where violent crime disproportionately occurs), arrest rates over the same period plunged from 44% to 20%.
Sounds a lot like the fishy employment numbers we get from the government every month.
The Atlantic today has posted up an article from George Packer that, as John Podhoretz noted on Twitter, you could have read in Commentary at any point for the last 35 years. The fact that this is appearing in The Atlantic perhaps marks a turning point in established liberal opinion, but will college administrators and trustees take note and do anything about it?
It’s a long piece, but here are a few highlights:
The Campus-Left Occupation That Broke Higher Education
. . . A long, intricate, but essentially unbroken line connects that rejection of the liberal university in 1968 to the orthodoxy on elite campuses today. The students of the ’68 revolt became professors—the German activist Rudi Dutschke called this strategy the “long march through the institutions”—bringing their revisionist thinking back to the universities they’d tried to upend. One leader of the Columbia takeover returned to chair the School of the Arts film program. “The ideas of one generation become the instincts of the next,” D. H. Lawrence wrote. Ideas born in the ’60s, subsequently refined and complicated by critical theory, postcolonial studies, and identity politics, are now so pervasive and unquestioned that they’ve become the instincts of students who are occupying their campuses today. Group identity assigns your place in a hierarchy of oppression. Between oppressor and oppressed, no room exists for complexity or ambiguity. Universal values such as free speech and individual equality only privilege the powerful. Words are violence. There’s nothing to debate.
The post-liberal university is defined by a combination of moneymaking and activism. Perhaps the biggest difference between 1968 and 2024 is that the ideas of a radical vanguard are now the instincts of entire universities—administrators, faculty, students. They’re enshrined in reading lists and codes of conduct and ubiquitous clichés. Last week an editorial in the Daily Spectator, the Columbia student newspaper, highlighted the irony of a university frantically trying to extricate itself from the implications of its own dogmas: “Why is the same university that capitalizes on the legacy of Edward Said and enshrines The Wretched of the Earth into its Core Curriculum so scared to speak about decolonization in practice?” . . .
Elite universities are caught in a trap of their own making, one that has been a long time coming. They’ve trained pro-Palestinian students to believe that, on the oppressor-oppressed axis, Jews are white and therefore dominant, not “marginalized,” while Israel is a settler-colonialist state and therefore illegitimate. They’ve trained pro-Israel students to believe that unwelcome and even offensive speech makes them so unsafe that they should stay away from campus.
My suggestion today on Twitter:
Chaser—feel good story of the day (if it is true):
The saga of how state-run radio (better known as NPR) continues to fester, despite the best attempts of NPR’s new apparatchick, Katherine Maher, to suggest her previous hostile comments about free speech, her “my trutherism,” and her Democratic partisanship are all “taken out of context.” (Understand that for the contemporary left, “context” is everything, so claiming something anyone says is “taken out of context” is not a denial that they meant what they said. You’re just not choosing the “right” context to understand it properly.)
Yesterday the New York Times reported on “Inside the Crisis at NPR,” and it could easily be a premier entry in our currently dormant “Civil War on the Left” series. Lots of fun bits:
NPR’s troubles extend far beyond concerns about its journalism. Internal documents reviewed by The New York Times and interviews with more than two dozen current and former public radio executives show how profoundly the nonprofit is struggling to succeed in the fast-changing media industry. It is grappling with a declining audience and falling revenue — and internal conflict about how to fix it. . .
A yearslong push to diversify NPR’s staff, in part to lure listeners beyond its aging and predominantly white audience, hasn’t generated the listenership boost some executives had hoped for. . .
The organization is now led by Katherine Maher, who started as NPR’s chief executive last month after leading the Wikimedia Foundation, which supports the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Ms. Maher had no professional experience in the news industry.
Sounds like the perfect person for the job!
The best part of the story, though, is the angst over NPR failing the crucial identitarian diversity test. NPR’s listening audience is 75 percent white, and that won’t do. Having state-run Democratic Party media is useless unless it reinforces the previous voting habits of minorities, which are slipping away from Democrats right now.
One 2020 survey, from the Pew Research Center, found that of the people who named NPR as their main source for political and election news, 75 percent were white, more than any other outlet except Fox News. . .
OMG—The Times is comparing NPR to Fox News! That has to hurt. There is no lower blow imaginable.
NPR’s leaders redoubled their efforts to diversify their audience and work force and closely tracked metrics for each. They added podcasts aimed at people of color and younger listeners. They promoted people of color to high-profile reporting and hosting jobs. All of these moves were meant to ensure the nation’s public radio network would remain competitive as the country’s population continued to grow more diverse.
So it came as a disappointment to some people on NPR’s board last fall when they were presented new internal data showing their efforts hadn’t moved the needle much with Black and Hispanic podcast listeners. . .
NPR’s efforts to diversify itself and its audience didn’t always live up to the expectations of the people who worked there. During a round of layoffs last year, NPR cut “Louder Than a Riot,” a hip-hop podcast that examined Black and queer issues. After that decision, the show’s editor, Soraya Shockley, who had previously worked at The Times, grilled Mr. Lansing [NPR’s previous president] during an employee question-and-answer session about why the show had no dedicated budget, pointing out the lack of resources supporting content that furthered diversity, equity and inclusion, or D.E.I.
The angst over this turned into a Maoist struggle session:
Later on the call, after Mr. Lansing urged employees to be more mindful of “civility” in their questions, an NPR employee wrote in an instant-messaging chat accompanying the conversation that the word ‘civility’ is often used as a cudgel against people of color, calling the language choice “racist.”
After the meeting, Shockley filed a human resources complaint against Mr. Lansing, saying his remarks about civility amounted to “dog-whistle racism,” according to a person with knowledge of the exchange. The complaint against Mr. Lansing was referred to an outside law firm, which did not recommend any punitive action.
Yet another lesson in how every revolution sooner or later eats its own.
Chaser—forbid the thought that “diversity” might include diversity of ideological views:
Still, some critics of NPR believe NPR’s “North Star” strategy has failed for a completely different reason: It has not taken ideological diversity into account. Tim Eby, who was the general manager of St. Louis Public Radio until 2020, said in an interview that while it made sense for NPR to seek an audience that looked more like the country, he wasn’t sure its approach was the right one. And its story selection has on occasion left it open to criticism that its focus on race and identity has affected its news judgment. There have been stories, for instance, on how to “decolonize your bookshelf” and “thin privilege.”
You’ll never guess what happened next! Eby was dismissed (on charges that he created a hostile racist environment at the station), and is now suing St. Louis Public Radio for defamation.
Now an Arizona grand jury has handed up a 2020 election-related indictment procured by Arizona’s Democratic attorney general. The indictment includes charges against Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, and others in connection with the scheme Trump was pursuing in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election. Trump is named an unindicted co-conspirator.
The indictment is posted online here. Politico’s story on the indictment deciphers the names redacted from the indictment at present. Politico also identifies defendants whose names are visible in the version of the indictment released by the Arizona attorney general’s office Wednesday evening as the 11 Republicans who posed as the state’s presidential electors. They include former Arizona GOP Chairwoman Kelli Ward, state senators Jake Hoffman and Anthony Kern, and Arizona’s RNC committeeman Tyler Bowyer.
I asked my friend Andrew McCarthy to comment on the indictment. This is what he had to say:
I think it’s revisionist history and tells half a story. In real time, January 2021, nobody believed the cobbling together of Trump electors in contested states was a coup effort. It was a contingency: If Trump had prevailed in any of his unlikely challenges, the Trump electors could be swapped in for the prior Biden elector slates.
I think whatever documents they executed were with that understanding. No one thought those slates would be operative unless Trump prevailed in state court or the state legislature.
I’ve always thought this was a big tell: If the so-called fake electors scheme was a crime, why has Smith not indicted it? It’s mentioned in the Trump indictment, but it’s not charged as a crime, nor have any electors or those coordinating them been indicted for fraud, false statements, or manipulating evidence.
In other words — one more front in the Democrats’ election interference and lawfare campaign .
