Quite good at mangling the text

Hunter of Daily Kos asks an important question I’ve been wondering about. The FBI searched Mar-a-Lago for documents and found lots, including lots of classified stuff. Because of that haul the nasty guy has been indicted on federal Espionage Act charges. So why hasn’t a search been done at his Bedminster golf club, Trump Tower in New York, and whatever other properties he owns? Hunter reviews what the nasty guy said and done. Hunter says that’s good reason to believe there are documents at least at Bedminster. There are also documents various government agencies say are still missing. Also, the nasty guy’s team isn’t willing to provide a signature stating there are no documents there. So why no search?

The very worst explanation is also the most likely one. A recent story from The Washington Post described a culture of near-cowardice inside the Justice Department that left Trump's role in attempting an overthrow of our elected government largely uninvestigated for over a year. ... The short of it is that the Justice Department bent over backwards to avoid investigating Trump's role in either case until Trump was caught doing something so all-encompassingly stupid that there was no way to not prosecute him.

Not so bad explanations include the FBI has bugged Bedminster so know what’s going on, or there is a cooperative rat in the nasty guy organization.

But all of those are still very weak reasons for not searching a location in which you already know your Espionage Act-indicted perp has stashed classified documents in the past. Not conducting the search has been a massive hole in the investigation since the day the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago and found what they expected to find, and there hasn't been a single truly plausible explanation for why investigators aren't covering that gap.

Rep. Lauren Boebert filed motions of impeachment against Biden. She did it in such a way that the House must vote on it within the next few days. Yeah, the reason is bogus, of course it is. Laura Clawson of Kos reported that McCarthy is quite annoyed with Boebert. But it isn’t because he doesn’t want to impeach Biden. It’s because right now is bad timing and he wants articles of impeachment with a bit more plausible meat on their bones. Clawson then reviews various House members who are “investigating” Biden. They all say impeachment is not their goal, though if the data leads in that direction... Translation: Impeachment is their goal. And if it falls in an election year, all the better.

But an impeachment could very well backfire on Republicans. They’ll be going into it, after all, with scant evidence and screamingly obvious partisan motivations. And unless they conduct impeachment hearings with a much higher level of professionalism than they’ve shown to this point, it’s going to be a clown show that reveals again and again that this is about revenge against Democrats for impeaching Donald Trump and about undermining the Biden presidency after Republicans failed to overturn the 2020 elections.

In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Frank Bruni of the New York Times:

The Chris Christie of the current moment is magnificent. I don’t mean magnificent as in, “He’s going to win the Republican presidential nomination.” I don’t mean I am rooting for a Christie presidency and regard him as the country’s possible salvation. But what he’s doing in this Republican primary contest is very, very important. It also couldn’t be more emotionally gratifying to behold. He’s telling the unvarnished truth about Trump, and he’s the only candidate doing that. A former prosecutor, he’s artfully, aggressively and comprehensively making the case against Trump, knocking down all the rationalizations Trump has mustered and all the diversions he has contrived since his 37-count federal indictment.

Rick Hasen of Election Law Blog studied the op-ed Justice Alito wrote in the Wall Street Journal. Textualism is the idea a justice can study a text, such as the constitution, and that is supposedly a neutral method of interpretation. This and originalism was Antonin Scalia’s thing. If Alito is a textualist, and in recent years he’s purported to be one, he is quite good at mangling the text. And always his opinions, textual or mangled, serve is socially conservative values. Hasen then reviews how much Alito mangles the rules for when to disclose gifts. Clay Jones tweeted a cartoon showing two elephants. One says, “I keep hoping to catch Biden taking bribes...” The scene pulls back to show at the end of their fishing lines are Thomas and Alito. The other one says, “Yeah... But we should probably throw these back.”