We begin today with Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times looking at why he was particularly disturbed by a question asked by Justice Samuel Alito during SCOTUS oral arguments of the presidential immunity case last week.
I mentioned it in passing in my Friday column, but I was struck — disturbed, really — by one specific point made by Justice Samuel Alito during Thursday’s oral arguments in Trump v. United States.
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“Now,” Alito continued, “if an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly contested election knows that a real possibility after leaving office is not that the president is going to be able to go off into a peaceful retirement but that the president may be criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent, will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?”
The implication of Alito’s question is that presidential immunity for all official acts may be a necessary concession to the possibility of a politically motivated investigation and prosecution: Presidents need to be above the law to raise the odds that they follow the law and leave office without incident.
If this sounds backward, that’s because it is.
President Joe Biden had jokes at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last night.
Eric Lach of The New Yorker writes about the daily and ritual humiliations that criminal defendant Donald Trump goes through in a certain courtroom in lower Manhattan.
The prosecutors have called Trump a cheat, a crook, and a miser, who knew exactly what he was doing when he tried to subvert the rule of law. “The defendant, Donald Trump, orchestrated a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 Presidential election,” Matthew Colangelo, an Assistant District Attorney, said in the government’s opening statement. “Then he covered up that criminal conspiracy by lying in his New York business records over and over and over again.” Trump has had to sit there as the prosecutors have discussed the sexual affairs that the adult-film star Stormy Daniels and the former Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal—both expected to testify in the case—say they had with him in the early two-thousands, when he was already married to his wife, Melania. He’s had to sit there as the prosecutors have detailed the grubby hush-money scheme he concocted to buy Daniels’s and McDougal’s silence before the 2016 election. He’s had to sit there as the recent civil judgments against him have been brought up, including the journalist E. Jean Carroll’s sexual-assault and defamation lawsuitsand the New York State Attorney General’s civil fraud case that resulted in a nearly half-billion-dollar judgment against him. He’s had to sit there as his high-priced lawyers and the judge have debated his perverse relationship with social media, and drilled down into whether, in a legal sense, retweets do or do not equal endorsements. “He is just mad at the world,” a source familiar with Trump’s thinking told CNN’s Dana Bash. […]
Trump is lucky that New York doesn’t allow cameras to be used during court hearings. Aside from courtroom sketches, the only images of him in the courtroom are taken by a handful of photojournalists—“the spray”—who are allowed about thirty seconds every morning to snap a few pictures of him at the defense table. In front of these cameras, Trump gathers himself and juts his chin at a practiced angle. As soon as they’re gone, he visibly slumps in his chair. Coming into or out of the courtroom, he walks without his wife or his kids, flanked by lawyers, Secret Service agents, and aides wearing worried faces. All day long, he endures bemused stares from the journalists in the gallery. A few spaces in the back are reserved for members of the public who have come to gawk. “I have so many quotes from it in my notebook because it was just that funny,” one teen-age spectator told the Post after observing a day of proceedings.
President Biden also spoke about serious matters at last night’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
Amudalat Ajasa of The Washington Post explains the overall difficulty of lead pipe replacement a decade after the Flint Water Crisis.
A decade after a crisis in Flint, Mich., triggered national alarm about the dangers of lead in U.S. drinking water, the White House estimates that more than 9 million lead pipelines still supply homes across the country. In his first year in office, President Biden secured $15 billion through the bipartisan infrastructure law to address the problem. Still, residents across the country are grappling with a patchwork system of replacing those lines — which begins in some places as a partial replacement of lead pipes — sowing confusion and uncertainty about the safety of their everyday tap water.
The cost of drinking contaminated water can last for decades. There is no safe level of exposure to lead, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It can cause developmental delays, difficulty learning and behavioral problems. Even low-level exposure can cause permanent cognitive damage, especially in developing children, and it disproportionately harms Black and low-income families. Recent research found school-age children affected by the crisis in Flint endured significant and lasting academic setbacks. […]
The Environmental Protection Agency has projected that replacing the nearly 10 million lead pipes that supply U.S. homes with drinking water could cost at least $45 billion. The EPA has separately proposed requiring water utilities nationwide to replace all those lead pipes within 10 years.
Aynsley O’Neil of Inside Climate News interviews special assistant to The President Maggie Thomas about the start of the America Climate Corps.
O’NEILL: Looking at the website, there are some programs that sound pretty familiar—AmeriCorps, for one. What kind of jobs are going to be open through that?
THOMAS: The way the American Climate Corps works is that we’re going to leverage a number of implementing partners, which means that we’re working across seven federal agencies to launch this historic initiative. We’re working with local nonprofits, grantees of those federal programs, and state-based Climate Corps as well. There have now been 13 states that have come forward and launched state-based Climate Corps programs that are at varying stages of implementation.
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AmeriCorps is a key partner in the American Climate Corps. They are actually the lead agency; we are establishing an ACC hub at AmeriCorps. And, you know, there are a lot of benefits that come from being in an AmeriCorps position as well, one of which is a Segal Education Award, which means that if you complete your term of service, you can get a little over $7,000 that can be used for student debt or for future education. So there are certainly a lot of benefits that come from AmericaCorps-specific positions.
Noah Weiland The New York Times reports that the Biden Administration has adopted rules that prohibit health care discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
The Affordable Care Act, passed in 2010, established a sweeping set of civil rights protections in the U.S. health system through what is known as Section 1557. It prohibits discrimination against patients based on race, color, national origin, sex, age or disability in “any health program or activity” that receives federal funds, covering a broad swath of the U.S. health system.
In 2016, the Obama administration issued a less expansive version of the rule the Biden administration finalized on Friday, requiring health providers to provide medically appropriate treatment for transgender patients. Officials at the time argued that the Affordable Care Act’s protections against discrimination included gender identity. The Obama rule became tied up in litigation, and the Trump administration declined to enforce it.
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The rule finalized by the Biden administration on Friday states that it preserves religious exemptions and “does not require or mandate the provision of any particular medical service.”
Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes for The Atlantic that he’s OK with free speech— even speech that he’s offended by— but not impromptu speeches in his home.
On April 9, about 60 students came to our home for dinner. Our guests were seated at tables in our backyard. Just as they began eating, I was stunned to see the leader of Law Students for Justice in Palestine—who was among the registered guests—stand up with a microphone that she had brought, go up the steps in the yard, and begin reading a speech about the plight of the Palestinians. My wife and I immediately approached her and asked her to stop speaking and leave the premises. The protester continued. At one point, my wife attempted to take away her microphone. Repeatedly, we said to her: You are a guest in our home. Please leave.
The student insisted that she had free-speech rights. But our home is not a forum for free speech; it is our own property, and the First Amendment—which constrains the government’s power to encroach on speech on public property—does not apply at all to guests in private backyards. The dinner, which was meant to celebrate graduating students, was obviously disrupted. Even if we had held the dinner in the law-school building, no one would have had a constitutional right to disrupt the event. I have taught First Amendment law for 44 years, and as many other experts have confirmed, this is not a close question.
Some attendees sympathetic to the student-group leader recorded a video. An excerpt of it appeared on social media and quickly went viral. Soon newspapers and magazines published stories about it. Some commentators have criticized my wife for trying to get hold of the microphone. Some have said that I just should have let the student speak for as long as she wanted. But in all of the dinners we have held over more than 15 years, not once has anyone attempted to give a speech. We had no reason to change the terms of the dinner to accommodate someone from an organization that put up anti-Semitic images of me.
Finally today, Marcus Becker, Matthais Gebauer, Martin Knobbe, Marina Kormbaki, and Christoph Schult of Der Spiegel look at Germany’s generally inept foreign policy.
Germany, the richest and most populous country in the European Union, can’t simply stand by and watch its neighbors slide into chaos. So, the chancellor travels to Beijing and asks Chinese President Xi Jinping to talk some sense into his friend Vladimir Putin. At the same time, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock and Defense Minister Boris Pistorius are sending letters to countries around the world pleading for weapons to protect Ukraine. Shortly afterwards, Baerbock flies to Israel to stop Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from launching a risky counter-strike on Iran. Meanwhile, her Green Party colleague, Economics Minister Robert Habeck, is traveling to Kyiv on an overnight train, where he is once again pledging German support. And all of this within just a few days.
For years, leading politicians have been talking about the need for Germany to take on more responsibility internationally. But do all these trips, initiatives and talks really achieve anything? Is this an effective foreign policy or is it just action for the sake of action?
If you take a close look at this fast-paced shuttle diplomacy, you get the impression that Germany is hardly being listened to in the world.
But diplomacy isn’t a sport, its results often can’t be measured and quick successes are rare. Those looking for signs of progress have to peer very closely. And listen. Sometimes, it also requires a bit of imagination.
Have the best possible day everyone!
