This is The Morning Press, a Brain Iron dot com production. Here’s eleven minutes or so of news for today, Monday, March 4, 2024.
The US Supreme Court ruled Monday that former president Donald Trump will remain on Colorado’s presidential primary ballot, overturning the Colorado Supreme Court decision that declared Trump ineligible under Section 3—the insurrection clause—of the 14th Amendment. The ruling was unanimous, with all nine justices agreeing that Colorado, along with all the other states, lacks the authority to declare a federal office-seeker ineligible. As Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson wrote in a concurrence, “The Reconstruction Amendments “were specifically designed as an expansion of federal power and an intrusion on state sovereignty.” (…) Section 3 marked the first time the Constitution placed substantive limits on a State’s authority to choose its own officials. Given that context, it would defy logic for Section 3 to give States new powers to determine who may hold the Presidency.” Though they concurred in the judgment, the Court’s three liberals, and Justice Barrett, who wrote separately, further believe that the majority went too far in its claim that Congress must take legislative action to enforce Section 3. Again, from the concurrence: “The majority resolves much more than the case before us. Although federal enforcement of Section 3 is in no way at issue, the majority announces novel rules for how that enforcement must operate. It reaches out to decide Section
3 questions not before us, and to foreclose future efforts to disqualify a Presidential candidate under that provision. In a sensitive case crying out for judicial restraint, it abandons that course.” The majority issues the key line of the decision, and one that should invalidate all further efforts to bar Trump from ballots at the state level under the 14th Amendment, as has happened in Maine and Illinois, and will likely halt challenges in several other states still making their way through the courts: “For the reasons given, responsibility for enforcing Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates rests with Congress and not the States.”
A brief editorial aside: This unanimous decision by the Court is a relief. It is plainly the case that states cannot be permitted to decide, one by one, that a person is an insurrectionist ineligible to hold federal office, and that such a decision must be made instead by a federal authority. All nine justices agree: the 14th Amendment was a check on state power, a claiming of authority by the federal government, not intended as the reverse. The majority takes things a step further, insisting that Congressional legislative action would be required to bar a candidate under the 14th Amendment, while the three liberals would prefer that the Court not attempt to “use this case to define the limits of federal enforcement of [Section 3 of the 14th Amendment].” I am persuaded that the majority is saying more than is strictly necessary here, and it would have been to my preference that they had narrowed their decision so as to avoid the appearance of disagreement at all. As Justice Barrett writes in her own concurrence, “The Court has settled a politically charged issue in the volatile season of a Presidential election. Particularly in this circumstance, writings on the Court should turn the national temperature down, not up. For present purposes, our differences are far less important than our unanimity: All nine Justices agree on the outcome of this case. That is the message Americans should take home.” Instead, the majority, in attempting to define precisely how Section 3 must be enforced, all but demands a response from the liberals, who correctly feel compelled to note the perceived overreach. It’s not a huge deal, but it does point to the limits of the Court’s willingness to say as little as possible in order to speak with one authoritative voice, and probably signals that the presidential immunity question on which they will hear arguments in April and decide this summer, is going to be similarly muddled by unnecessary disagreement about ancillary questions. I still have hopes for another 9-0 ruling on Trump’s immunity claims, but almost certainly with some rather fraught and argumentative concurrences. There will be anti-Trump partisans who try to make this whole thing out to be some sort of illegitimate miscarriage of justice, but this was always a bad way to try to take him out, and one that spoke right to the heart of his and his supporters’ victimization and persecution narratives. I’ll take the unanimity of the Supremes over the outrage of the oped pages any day.
In briefer political news, Nikki Haley on Sunday won the Republican primary in Washington D.C., denying Trump a sweep of every contest, at least, even as the victory was derided by the Trump campaign as indicative of the only support she enjoys—namely, the support of “lobbyists and DC insiders that want to protect the failed status quo.”
Trump won the Idaho, Michigan, and Missouri caucuses on Saturday, collecting a total of 134 delegates to Haley’s four in those three states. The North Dakota caucus is taking place today, and fifteen states vote tomorrow—including California, Texas, and Virginia—in Super Tuesday contests that will likely see Trump pile up an overwhelming share of the available delegates.
And the estate of Sinead O’Connor has asked the Trump campaign to refrain from using the late singer’s songs at campaign events, after her hit “Nothing Compares 2 U” was played before his CPAC speech last weekend. The estate issued a statement that said, “It is no exaggeration to say that Sinéad would have been disgusted, hurt, and insulted to have her work misrepresented in this way by someone who she herself referred to as a 'biblical devil'. (...) As the guardians of her legacy, we demand that Donald Trump, and his associates desist from using her music immediately.”
A brief editorial aside: Trump’s inevitable march to the nomination is continuing as expected, with Haley’s ongoing presence, and even her win in DC, only serving to highlight his dominance. The bulk of the contests on Tuesday award their delegates in winner-take-all fashion, meaning that Trump will only need to secure just over 50% of the votes to pile up big numbers. This is by design—the GOP favors an early consensus from the base rather than a drawn-out process that might allow candidates to seem viable into the spring. Combine that with today’s Supreme Court decision and the New York Times / Siena poll over the weekend that showed Trump with a five point lead over President Biden if the election were held today, and you’ve got some rather strong tailwinds for Trump’s electoral prospects. The poll further claims that 47% of Americans strongly disapprove of Biden’s handling of his job, a new high. All this, while senior Biden campaign officials are telling the New Yorker that they believe they will win the election by focusing almost exclusively on Donald Trump as a “threat to democracy” and the election as a fight for the “soul of the nation.” It makes sense that the Biden campaign would lean into these abstractions, rather than point to their record, because seemingly no matter what they say, people seem to continue to believe that their economic circumstances and prospects were better before Biden took office. The problem with this line of thinking is that the only truly rabidly motivated constituency in the 2024 electorate is already the anti-Trump vote, and it’s not clear to me that there are any voters to be gained by fanning those flames. I still don’t see a path to the presidency for Trump—how could we possibly decide to do this to ourselves again—but if one exists for Biden, I think it has to include an affirmative message about his own record and a vision of the next four years that contains more substance than merely holding Trump at bay. The average potential swayable voter will simply not be moved to Biden’s side out of some desire to protect democracy. I think there is limited purchase for the idea that voting in someone—even an authoritarian—is anything but democracy in action. As for Sinead O’Connor’s music at Trump rallies, it continues to be a source of immense amusement, the pop-cultural waters Trump swims in. Of course he’s using that haunting and beautiful love song as a way to jokingly refer to himself, as a bizarre signal of his audience’s unflagging adoration for him and what they believe he represents. The idea that the lived artistic output of the artist is in complete contradictory opposition to everything Trump stands for is as obviously true as it is completely besides the point, and is the price of doing art in public, for public consumption—to be ingested and digested and expelled out the back end in only the basest manner, as only the lowest common denominator can. As I have written before, once the art gets into the public, the artist doesn’t get to dictate the totality of its meaning. It is both high and low, yours and theirs. Respect for Sinead’s artistic integrity dictates precisely the sort of statement her estate issued, and total disrespect for anything like a claim of “artistic integrity” is probably in some ways essential to Trump’s appeal. What are you gonna do? For now, I guess we can all continue to evince astonishment and offense at the very fact of Trump’s prominence, and simply hope that abstract moral injury carries the day, as the Biden campaign seems to hope it will. I’m not so sure.
Now, here’s a look at the weather.
Apologies for no Morning Press Thursday or Friday last week, as I was feeling under the weather, so to speak, and could not properly focus the mind. The Wednesday episode was also rather heavy, with an extended commentary on the uselessness of self-immolation as political protest, and I felt temporarily incapable of following that up, because that was a good and difficult essay. The only thing to do when confronted with the fact that one is not going to meet one’s own expectations about quality, in my experience, is to go in the exact opposite direction—which is my way of setting up the following brief response to a nonsense TikTok trend.
The Washington Post reports that some viral videos on TikTok are convincing flyers to buckle their feet inside their airplane seat seatbelt, in order to have a more comfortable flight. The headline is as follows: “TikTok’s seat belt hack for airplane sleep is a recipe for disaster —
Don’t buckle your feet in a seat belt, no matter what TikTok tells you.” Apparently, people are bending their knees up to their chests, and then buckling the seat belt across their ankles, rather than their hips and laps, and this is making them more comfortable and relaxed. This qualifies as a trend, I suppose, because the various videos have been viewed a sufficient number of times to warrant a concerned article about them in the Post, which of course only amplifies their reach, but whatever. Obviously, the headline does all the work—one should not wear the seat belt in a way that it was not intended to be worn, because it’s probably dangerous, and against various rules and regulations, and very obviously stupid. But the Post, like every other journalistic outlet, is pathologically obsessed with consulting with THE EXPERTS. Thus, in the seventh sentence of the story, we are treated to the “experts say” line, which in this case goes like this: “Experts say the “hack” can put travelers in danger. In addition to the potential for severe cramping, wearing your seat belt incorrectly means you may be less mobile in the event of an emergency. You could also be thrown from your seat in the event of severe turbulence — a risk that’s increasingly common.” At least they restrained themselves from the further parenthetical aside—we were spared the “experts say, severe turbulence is increasingly common because of climate change,” though they did link to a piece that makes that precise claim.
But, thank god the author of this piece consulted with the relevant authorities on how improper seat-belt wearing is bad! If not, we would be left to rely on the assurances of the writer herself that it is dangerous and stupid to strap your feet into the seat belt, instead of your gut. But for this expert, specifically trained in the mysterious and impenetrable seat belt arts, the public might still be in danger.
This is probably not a very big deal, obviously, but I think it’s possible that an overreliance on so-called expertise has a cumulative effect of making actual experts seem extraneous and unnecessary and kinda fake. When journalists have to appeal to the authority of the expert class to get you to wear your airplane seat belt properly, or to eat your fresh vegetables, or to go for a walk after dinner, it just comes off as a bunch of nagging and haranguing about things you already know. Save the experts for the questions that expertise actually informs, and only when it actually matters—nuclear proliferation, or vaccine efficacy, or international diplomatic relations. “Experts say” loses all of its power when it’s deployed to insist that two and two make four, and makes it less likely that the experts will be heeded when their input is needed most.
That’s the weather from here—how’s it look out your window?
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The Morning Press is eleven minutes or so of the news of the day, and is a production of the BrainIron dot com multinational media empire. Please direct comments and complaints to brainironpodcast@gmail.com, or visit the website at www.brainiron.com. For a transcript of today’s episode and links to the stories referenced, find The Morning Press at brainiron.substack.com. To support this and the other podcasting and blogging endeavors of the good website Brain Iron dot com, please consider becoming a paid subscriber at brainiron.substack.com. Have a wonderful day.
The Morning Press for Monday, March 4, 2024