With the First Presidential Debate Thursday Night, I Don’t Expect Trump Immunity Decision Until Friday at the Earliest

Supreme Court

The Supreme Court has over a dozen cases left to decide. The next date for announcing opinions is Wednesday. The Court has not yet announced whether there will be opinions on Thursday or Friday of this week (I suspect on both days). It is also quite possible, given that almost all the remaining opinions are major ones, for some opinions to be released early next week, taking us into July (that happens occasionally at the Court).

The Court really slow walked the Trump immunity, case, all but making the completion of a trial before the election in D.C. on 2020 election subversion charges impossible. Given the delay, I don’t think any of the Justices think that it will make a difference if the opinion (if ready) comes out this Wednesday compared to next Monday in terms of timing for a trial.

But it would be huge to the debate if the day before or the day of the debate the Supreme Court announced some principles of Trump immunity. Whatever the Court does (and I expect they will recognize at least some immunity from some official acts in some circumstances), it could be spun as a Trump win or loss.

Chief Justice Roberts likely would not want the Court injected so much into the Presidential debate. That suggests nothing before Friday at the earliest.

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“Wisconsin judge to weigh letting people with disabilities vote electronically from home in November”

election administration, voting technology

AP:

A Wisconsin judge on Monday is expected to consider whether to allow people with disabilities to vote electronically from home in the swing state this fall.

Disability Rights Wisconsin, the League of Women Voters and four disabled people filed a lawsuit in April demanding disabled people be allowed to cast absentee ballots electronically from home.

They asked Dane County Circuit Judge Everett Mitchell to issue a temporary injunction before the lawsuit is resolved granting the accommodation in the state’s Aug. 13 primary and November presidential election. Mitchell scheduled a Monday hearing on the injunction.

Questions over who can cast absentee ballots and where they can do it have become a political flashpoint in Wisconsin, where four of the past six presidential elections have been decided by less than a percentage point….

They also point out that military and overseas voters are permitted to cast absentee ballots electronically in Wisconsin elections. People with disabilities must be afforded the same opportunity under the Americans with Disabilities Act and the federal Rehabilitation Act, which prohibits all organizations that receive financial assistance from discriminating on the basis of disability, they argue.

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“Clippers Cut a Wide Swath Making Political Campaign Videos Go Viral”

cheap speech

NYT:

When Andrew Lawrence begins his night shift, he powers on his monitor to sift through Fox News’ evening programming.

He and his small team at Media Matters for America, the liberal nonprofit media watchdog group, spend hours each day glued to their screens, scanning cable shows, livestreams and congressional hearings for political moments they can clip, post on social media and call out as absurd.

“We watch Fox News so you don’t have to,” Mr. Lawrence said.

The slog seems to be paying off. His video posts are often viewed millions of times.

Clipping political gaffes was once more of a pastime for amateur political obsessives. Now, professionals have stepped in and supercharged the political discourse, flooding platforms like X and TikTok with cuttingly captioned video snippets, often publishing edited clips within minutes or even seconds.

Despite concerns that the most-watched clips often omit crucial context, sometimes by design, clippers have amassed tens of millions of views, forcing candidates to pay attention — and to watch their words.

More so than ever before, clipping has been embraced by both official Democratic and Republican campaign committees that have exploited the reach of real-time clips and even outdone their independent predecessors.

Gone is the heyday of the tracker, a political operative who would tail candidates at stump events big and small, camcorder in hand, hoping to catch gaffes on tape. Today, the ubiquity of livestreaming and video recording has transformed any rallygoer with a smartphone into a wellspring of videos clippers can turn into potential viral sensations. With so much of a campaign being captured on video and then quickly spotlighted in microscopic, mocking detail, the smallest personality foible, momentary lapse or passing awkwardness can spell a public-relations nightmare for a candidate.

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“Disappointment and ‘depression’: Biden’s biggest fundraisers watch their advantage vanish”

campaign finance, campaigns

Politico:

Joe Biden’s campaign planned to bury Donald Trump in an avalanche of cash.

Instead, his allies are bracing for a slugfest without the benefit of a fatter wallet, as financial reports showed Trump outraising Biden in back-to-back months, hauling in huge sums after his 34 felony convictions and erasing Biden’s longstanding financial edge.

Democrats in recent days largely downplayed Trump’s new financial lead in the same way Trump’s allies had when Biden was running ahead in the money race — saying the president would have enough money to compete.

But privately, several Democratic strategists and donors were reeling.

“There was the strategy of raising all this money on the front end so we could have this huge edge,” said one Biden bundler, granted anonymity to speak candidly. “The whole point of it was to come out with a sizable cash advantage and, you know, we’re now even and it’s June. … I have no other word for it other than ‘depression’ among Biden supporters.”

Another major Biden bundler, also granted anonymity, called the development “disappointing, but not surprising.”

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