Hartmann Report

Six Republicans on the Supreme Court just gave Trump - should he become president again - Putin-like powers... They did it. The Supreme Court handed a massive victory to Donald Trump in this so-called “immunity” case, and it will probably take a year or more before there’s even a chance he’ll be held to trial for trying to overthrow the 2020 election and, thus, the government of the United States. As feared, the six Republicans on the Court essentially threw Trump’s sedition case back to the lower court (with caveats) where there will be numerous decisions to make — which are all further appealable, resetting the case so Trump can drag things out for another year or more — about whether the crimes he’s committed are “official” or “private/personal” acts. But that’s not the worst of it. They also turned Trump or any future fascist president into our first American king or führer.

Only Congress can overturn a Supreme Court decision, so holding onto the presidency, House, and Senate this fall represent the only way to quickly deal with this out-of-control rightwing Court... Most extended families have queer relatives, friends, acquaintances, or co-workers. Many are in what our society refers to as a "gay marriage"; often these LGBTQ+ families have children of their own. And now six bigoted Republicans on the Supreme Court are laying the groundwork to take a vicious meat-axe to those families and their futures: the damage will be incalculable. Here's how we know: If she could have raised a rainbow flag over her home to let us know what's going on at the Supreme Court without deadly blowback, I'm guessing Justice Sonya Sotomayor would be doing it right now. Instead, she hoisted a metaphorical flag in her dissent to what, on its face, seems like an altogether unrelated case.

Your vote is the most important part of the American commons. The commons embrace those realms that we all own and jointly administer through our government. They include our air and water; our roads and skyways; the frequency spectrum we use for communication, radio, and television; our public school system; our military, police, and fire departments; the agencies we use to ensure the safety and quality of our food and medications; the systems and laws that keep people playing the game of business within legal boundaries; our jails and prisons; our oceans and public lands; and our social safety net—among other things. In this era of rapid climate change, our atmosphere and oceans, which absorb 95 percent of the extra heat in our atmosphere, are the most critical of our commons, because they have the potential, through destabilization of weather and sea level rise, to destroy civilization and even to render our planet sterile of human life.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — “Freakout at the highest levels” — 50 Lies Trump Told On The Debate Stage: Team Biden Hits Back. — The Supreme Court just blew up the “Chevron deference.” America will never be the same. — Republicans on the Supreme Court hand a victory to January 6th rioters and Trump. — The Christian Nationalist movement to force religion on our children got a big boost this past week when the governor of Oklahoma mandated that the Christian Bible be taught in that state’s public schools. — ADHD Alert: ADHD: The Perception of Time — Wisdom School Alert! Unlock the Secret to Longevity: Can Intermittent Fasting Add Years to Your Life?

This election is too important to indulge one man's desire to hang onto his office. It literally will define the future of democracy as a form of governance both in America and worldwide… Last night, I ghost-wrote this for the editorial board of Raw Story at their request; they made a few changes and expanded it somewhat as you can see on their site. This morning, I would add that Trump told over 30 massive and consequential lies last night, again demonstrating his lack of fitness for the presidency and CNN's inability to honestly moderate a debate. It's doubtful, though, that anybody in the Republican party will be discussing replacing him today. There are massive possible downsides and upsides to replacing President Biden on the ticket at this late date. The upside is that the publicity and national curiosity around the new candidate could swamp Trump and his BS and reinvigorate the campaign. The downside is that the possible infighting, and the possibility of the Democratic Party picking a weak candidate (including the vice president), could produce the opposite effect and hand the election to Trump.

This lawlessness has gone way too far: the Senate needs to intervene and reassert its authority over the Supreme Court. And they need to do it now… With the leaked Idaho emergency abortion ruling yesterday, it appears the Republicans on the Supreme Court are trying to do the same thing they did with the Mifepristone ruling: move the cases to a non-election-year to avoid hurting GOP candidates. Since it only takes four justices to grant cert and commit the Court to hearing a decision, it's obvious that the most fanatic Catholic anti-abortion freaks on the Court, who wanted to ban Mifepristone and shut down emergency abortions in Idaho, opened the Court's door for these cases to be heard this year. However, once the cases were argued, their more rational Republican colleagues convinced them that such decisions this year would doom Trump's chances in the election, so they punted and shot the cases down based on standing (saying the plaintiffs didn't have a right to sue). In other words, they decided not to decide.

So, if you want to see what Republicans have in mind for the rest of America if Trump or another Republican becomes president and they can hold onto Congress, just visit the Old South… Tomorrow is the first Biden-Trump debate and many Americans are wondering how each will articulate their ideas for the future of America. Republicans have a very specific economic vision for the future of our country, although they rarely talk about it in plain language: they want to make the rest of America look and function just like Mississippi. Including the racism: that’s a feature, not a bug. It’s called the “Southern Economic Development Model” (SEDM) and has been at the core of GOP economic strategy ever since the days of Ronald Reagan. While they don’t use those words to describe their plan, and neither did the authors of Project 2025, this model is foundational to conservative economic theory and has been since the days of slavery.

While hate has always been a part of the American landscape, the entrance of Trump onto the American political scene has led to an explosion of hate crimes against racial and religious minorities... She may never be the same. This past weekend, three American citizens were hanging out at their apartment complex swimming pool, a mom and her two children, a little girl, 3, and a boy who was 7 years old. Mom was Muslim, so she wore a modest swimsuit and a hijab. Which infuriated Elizabeth Wolf, a 42-year-old white woman, who, upon arriving at the pool, began loudly berating the young mother, using racial slurs to tell her she wasn't welcome in white America. Wolf then jumped into the pool and grabbed the two children, who were playing in the shallow end, and tried to drown them.

A middle class is not a normal thing, and if a country wants one it must be created by direct government intervention in the marketplace… As we head toward the presidential debate this week, the Republicans' vision for America is becoming clearer by the day. From Trump to Project 2025 to the speeches of multiple Republican senators and members of Congress, you'll frequently hear the phrase "post-constitutional" applied. They refer to a "post-constitutional moment" and a Republican "post-constitutional presidency." But what do they mean by this?

The key to a functioning regulated-capitalist economy is competition; as competition declines, so do innovation, investment, employment, and the wealth of working people. Lacking competition, those people and corporations in the economic top .01% will explode their wealth while everything and everybody else suffers. Since the 1980s, when Reagan began aggressively applying Chicago School neoliberal policies and Robert Bork’s perspective on antitrust, industry after industry, sector after sector, has been interpenetrated and then consumed almost entirely by cancer-like monopolies and oligopolies. Not only have wages and innovation suffered, but the overall economy itself has largely stagnated, relative to the preceding four decades.