Trump: The Supremes Leader

Latest rulings, plus our usual cartoons and two new political tunes from Margo Price.

Yes, it’s still free to subscribe to this nearly daily newsletter! Greg Mitchell is the author of fourteen books and director of five films for PBS since 2022. In a previous life, he was a longtime editor at the legendary Crawdaddy. His latest film “Woody Guthrie and The Ghost of Tom Joad” is now streaming everywhere via PBS.

Lucian Truscott IV on Trump’s fiasco on the mall:

The problem is, to use an old New York turn of phrase, Donald Trump doesn’t know from fun. He turned what should have been a jamboree of American schmaltz and glee into a sad sack of self-glorification that like everything he touches, turned to shit.

Ann Telnaes: “Justices Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett rule presidents have the power to fire independent government regulators “overturning 90 years of court precedent curbing executive power.”

Lisa Graves, head of Court Accountability, on that latest SCOTUS ruling:

And this attack on what they call the administrative state is really an attack on expertise. It’s an attack on the ability of agencies to do the job Congress has entrusted them to do, which is to faithfully implement those laws in defense and in pursuit of the public interests of the American people. So you now have this convergence between a president who is so determined to take cash, in many ways, out of other people’s pockets, including the pockets of the taxpayers, in order to advance himself, to aggrandize himself. And this has come to a head at a time when the court has the majority. So this captured court has the majority it needs to accomplish its long-term ideological agenda.

And what a lot of people don’t realize is that when you look at the Supreme Court, this nine-member court, and the six members in the Republican-appointed majority, five of those six members were executive branch attorneys. They were people who cut their teeth for years in advancing presidential power, in trying to expand presidential power. And they’ve acted, I think, with a real arrogance toward congressional power, hostility toward congressional power, and with a bias toward their own long-standing agenda as lawyers, as Republican lawyers in this cause. And they’re moving forward even at a time when we have a president at the helm who is abusing his power almost on a daily basis in terms of asserting extraordinary king-like powers to do almost anything he wants.

Music Picks

Margo Price dropped two cuts from her upcoming (political) album today. First, “Oval Room”:

And the Woody song she’s been doing live for many months, “Deportee,” the song of the year (even truncated, as here), now with Joan Baez, opening with “Thank you, Woody”:

From Tunes to Toons

Ohman:

Anderson:

Bramhall:

Wuerker:

Goris:

Bramhall again:

Brodner:

Royaards:

Photo Finish

Last week, up the stairs to 2nd floor of Dylan Center in Tulsa.

Greg Mitchell’s latest film “Woody Guthrie and The Ghost of Tom Joad,” is now streaming everywhere via PBS.