Doom Report (Week 85: Expanding Our Judicial Horizons)

This week, there’s been quite a bit of talk about Supreme Court reform.  Jamelle Bouie’s Takes™ has an excellent overview of court expansion in particular, and a “breaking” episode (read: shorter) from Strict Scrutiny that gives you slightly more detail from Leah Litman.  The big news here is that Jim Clyburn, one of the top-ranking and longest-serving Democrats in the House of Representatives, has indicated that he’s open to Court expansion.  And this is a big deal because a lot of major figures in the party—especially the traditionalists—have been resistant to expansion even when they’re willing to entertain other reforms.  So Clyburn represents a major sea change: he may be a traditionalist, but he’s also a Black man from South Carolina born in the 40s.  He knows intimately what the Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act means for Americans in general, and Black Americans in the South in particular.

For even more on Court reform, try this week’s full Strict Scrutiny episode, featuring Kate and Leah.  It kicks off with a great breakdown of the latest buttfuckery from the Supremes, and how it fucks over everybody (for instance, the suits brought by the torture victims at Abu Ghraib may be overturned because of recent Supreme Court cases), then there’s an interview with Roy Cooper about how the Court is screwing him over in his North Carolina Senate race, and finally Steve Vladeck talks to Leah about docket reform: not as sexy as expansion, but still a necessary reform to stop this runaway Court.

Finally, there’s another shorter, breaking news Strict Scrutiny segment about the Supremes allowing Trump to carry on with the wildly illegal ballroom, featuring Leah and Melissa.  Fun legal times.

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Other things you need to know this week:

• On Friday’s “Kinzinger Report”, our favorite non-MAGA conservative covers Trump’s ridiculous arch (build first, ask for permission later), Fox “News”‘s firing of Maria Bartiromo, the regime’s firing of the federal prosecutor who wanted to hold an ICE officer accountable, and more.

• On Monday’s What a Day, Jane Coaston interviews our second favorite non-MAGA conservative, Tim Miller.  They talk about Trump’s oil wars, Pete Hegseth’s desperate need for attention, and the deportation of rightwing nutjob Milo Yiannopoulos on the word of even rightwinger nutjob Laura Loomer.

• On a shorter episode of Runaway Country this week, Alex Wagner and Jim Acosta talk about Trump selling off bits of Yosemite.

• Regular readers will recall that I love it when W. Kamau Bell shows up on the Coffee Klatch.  This week, a new host configuration: Heather is off this week, leaving Robert Reich to sit with Bell and producer Michael Lahanas-Calderón.  They talk about Trump continuing to duck the Epstein files, billionaires breaking the rules, and the young Haitian immigrant who took his own life this week because of ICE harassment.  A longer video, but worth your time.
• And, if you want more detail about that young Haitian immigrant, give Jamelle Bouie 6 minutes of your time.  Warning: it’s heartbreaking.
• Side note: the story of Pierre Damas Bel is eerily similar to that of Jason Arday over in the UK.  For people who think that racism is an annoyance, a frustration, something that should be condemned but must be tolerated, they’re just wrong: these are stories that demonstrate that racism can kill ... and not in an old-timey, once-upon-a-time-the-KKK-was-bad sort of way.  Today, right now: people are dying.  If you want to hear some of the trivially disproven lies that racist media outlets used to hound Arday, here’s a 9-minute video from Owen Jones that will make you as angry as you ought to be.

• More Perfect Union had a great video this week with a very nuanced discussion of AI with many GenZ young adults, and also Bernie Sanders.  A fascinating conversation.

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This week, there’s been a lot of talk about how Trump is holding onto his campaign funds rather than using them to help his Republican colleagues in the midterms.  Of course, Trump’s been very busy: he’s been spending his time making videogames and talking shit about the candidates he’s supposed to be supporting.

Meanwhile, Trump’s “midterm convention” is running into trouble: specifically, most of the candidates don’t want to attend.  Probably this is partially because no sane Republican candidate wants to be associated with the historically unpopular president, but a big part of it is likely the 5-figure fees he’s trying to charge the candidates.  In order words, he’s not just trying to hoard what he has: he’s trying to grift more.

But the amusing thing is that anyone is surprised by this.  Way back in week 11, I pointed you at this link to an excerpt from Michael Lewis’ book The Fifth Risk, wherein he tells the story of Trump’s first ascension to the White House.  Short version: he found out that Chris Christie was paying people on the transition team and he described it as “stealing my fucking money.”  And, when Christie and Steve Bannon explained that federal law said you have to pay the workers on the transition team, Trump’s answer was simple: shut down the transition.  This is why Trump has zero clue about how to run the government: he never learned, because he was too cheap to pay for it.  And this is the guy Republicans expect to spend money to help them win the midterms?  Good luck with that.

So there’s a very real possibility that one or more—maybe even many—Republicans will lose their races in the midterms because Trump is a greedy bastard.  And I can’t imagine a more delicious irony than that.