POLITICO:

“On Tuesday, the Trump campaign sent a letter to pro-Trump, external organizations asking them to attend an “entirely off-the-record, private,” and “invite-only” meeting with senior campaign officials, according to a copy of the letter obtained by POLITICO. The sit-down, which the letter describes as a “meeting of the political minds,” is aimed at discussing “collaborat[ion]” and “priorities and plans” for the general election. …

“There have long been tight restrictions on how federal campaigns and political committees can coordinate. But a recent Federal Election Commission advisory opinion, dated March 20, relaxed limitations on how they can collaborate on paid door-knocking efforts.

““We will share our macro view of the electorate with you and discuss new opportunities (in light of a recent FEC ruling) for our organizations to collaborate more effectively than we have been able to in the past,” according to the invitation. “We also ask you to come prepared to share any information you legally can about your priorities and plans with us.”

“The letter indicates that Trump campaign officials and outside groups will be treading carefully legally during the meeting. It notes that Republican National Committee chief counsel Charlie Spies and Trump campaign counsel Dave Warrington “will oversee this meeting to ensure legal compliance.”

“Trump officials appear to be placing a premium on the new FEC decision. Last week, Blair spoke before a meeting of the Rockbridge Network, a secretive gathering of conservative donors. During his remarks, Blair alluded to the advisory opinion, which he described as a game-changer, according to two people familiar with the remarks who were granted anonymity to discuss the matter.”

A new Common Ground Democracy essay, drawing upon Rick Pildes’s work, to discuss why it’s wrong to rely solely on a hope for increased civic virtue, among either politicians or voters, to protect democracy from authoritarianism. Instead, institutional reforms of the kind that Rick advocates in his recent Dunwody lecture are necessary to restore a Madisonian equilibrium to America’s political system. As the essay explains, a Madisonian equilibrium exists when the system’s institutions are well-calibrated to the society’s political culture, including its degree of civic virtue. The problem in the United States today is that, although a Madisonian equilibrium of this nature exhibited for several decades after World War II (when partisan polarization was low and civic solidarity high), this equilibrium has been destabilized by various cultural forces including the rise of intense partisan polarization. To remedy this problem, we must endeavor both to reinvigorate civic virtue within our political culture and make institutional adjustments suitable for the amount of civic virtue–and, its enemy, partisan tribalism–prevalent in our present political culture. Rick’s lecture prioritizes the institutional reforms that have the greatest change of being most effective in the near term on this front.

Disturbing development as reported by CNN:

“Georgia’s Coffee County suffered a cyberattack this month that forced the county to sever its connection to the state’s voter registration system as a precautionary measure, three sources familiar with the matter told CNN.

“Investigators believe the incident was a ransomware attack, in which cybercriminals typically lock computer systems and demand a ransom, the sources said.

“The federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) informed the county of the incident on April 15, and federal and county officials are trying to determine who carried out the hack, according to the sources.

“A spokesperson for the office of Georgia’s secretary of state confirmed the cyberattack and the county’s response.

“The voter registration system, known as GARViS, is a relatively new technology that state officials have touted as a way of ensuring millions of Georgian voters are registered accurately. There was no indication that GARViS was infiltrated by the hackers, and Coffee County’s network connection to GARViS was severed as a precautionary move, the sources said.”

The journal PS: Political Science and Politics has published a special issue on the topic of Democracy Backsliding. Papers include The Resilience of Democracy’s Third Wave by Stephen Levitsky and Lucan Way. Other papers concern how to measure democratic backsliding and what we know and don’t know about the topic. It looks like an important collection.

That’s the message of the majority leader in Maine’s House of Representatives. For more, Newsweek has a story. So do several Maine media outlets (available on Google News, although at least one is behind a paywall).

N.Y. Times. Adam quotes Pam Karlan, Mellisa Murray, and Michael Dorf, as well as excerpts from the oral argument. For example:

‘In the real world, Professor Karlan said, “it’s really hard to imagine a ‘stable democratic society,’ to use Justice Alito’s word, where someone who did what Donald Trump is alleged to have done leading up to Jan. 6 faces no criminal consequences for his acts.”

‘Indeed, she said, “if Donald Trump is a harbinger of presidents to come, and from now on presidents refuse to leave office and engage in efforts to undermine the democratic process, we’ve lost our democracy regardless what the Supreme Court decides.”’

The implication of the column is that the Justices were being irresponsible in “averting their eyes from Mr. Trump’s conduct.” My own take is that there is a more charitable interpretation of the Court’s questioning. The question of delineating the scope of potential presidential immunity from criminal prosecution is a serious one, even if in this particular case the rejection of an immunity claim should be straightforward (as I and others have argued). To be sure, it would be theoretically tenable for the Court to categorically reject any doctrine of presidential immunity from criminal prosecution (after the president leaves office) on the ground that, unlike the Speech and Debate Clause that confers a form of legislative immunity, there is no comparable clause in the Constitution conferring an equivalent immunity for the Executive Branch. That textualist argument seems to be part of Jason Willick’s view of how the case should be decided:

“A majority on the Supreme Court seems inclined to think some kind of immunity is necessary to nudge American democracy in the right direction. The best counter would have been that the fate of democracy belongs to the people and their elected representatives, who can destroy it if they are determined to — and that when the Constitution is silent, the Supreme Court should stay out of the way.”

But as Willick himself recognizes, a majority of the Court seems unwilling to reject the idea of presidential immunity completely. Even Michael Dreeben’s self-described “more nuanced” analysis would rule off-limits criminal prosecution of a former president in certain circumstances–and, crucially, provide for interlocutory appeal before trial to litigate the immunity issue (whether or not the word “immunity” is used to describe the doctrine).

Thus, back to Liptak’s concern that the Court “seems likely to say that at least some of Mr. Trump’s conduct was part of his official duties and so subject to some form of immunity.” But the second part of that sentence doesn’t necessarily follow from the first. As I suggested last night, the fact that some of Trump’s allegedly criminal conduct was official and not private in nature does not mean that it must be granted immunity; instead, even under a properly calibrated immunity doctrine, that conduct can–and-should–be deemed to be so objectively unreasonable to lack the benefit of any immunity doctrine the Court might adopt.

Liptak, among many others, fears that the application of the Court’s newly-minted immunity doctrine would entail a remand that prevents a trial occurring before the election. But, again, that’s not necessarily the case if (as the Washington Post and I argue) the Court is willing to declare, as it should, that as a matter of law the allegations in the indictment, even to the extent that they involve official conduct, fall outside the scope of the immunity that is available to presidents who act reasonably.