Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: First Draft

Abbreviated Pundit Roundup is a long-running series published every morning that collects essential political discussion and analysis around the internet.

We begin today with the former associate White House counsel to President Ronald Reagan, Alan Charles Raul, writing for The Hill that if the notion of “presidential immunity” was not invoked for the Iran-contra affair, then it should not be invoked now.

After listening to two and half hours of oral argument in the Donald Trump immunity case, it is perfectly clear what the Supreme Court should decide: namely, as little as possible.  […]

In what’s known as the Iran-Contra affair, conduct involving unmistakable official foreign policy powers of the president was subjected to intense criminal scrutiny; that affair actually concerned selling arms to Iran in exchange for American hostages as part of a presidentially authorized covert action as well as funding the Nicaraguan Contras to carry out a key element of President Reagan’s anti-Marxist foreign policy agenda.  

Invoking presidential immunity was off the table in Iran-Contra — both in the public mind and in the White House. Success for White House lawyers was ending up with a client who was neither impeached nor indicted — which is how it turned out. In contrast, it notably did not work out well for prior, politically motivated president who invoked presidential immunity to avoid producing tape recordings from the Oval Office: Nixon in Watergate. He failed in the Supreme Court, where the justices famously rejected his claim to an “absolute, unqualified Presidential privilege of immunity from judicial process under all circumstances.”

So, why should the Supreme Court now engage in minute parsing of various hypothetical circumstances that might or might not warrant plenary or partial presidential immunity?

Now that I think about it, if there were a case for what we now call “presidential immunity”, the Iran-contra scandal would probably check all the boxes.

Mr. Raul’s essay also has a strong whiff of “I wish we had thought of that” to it.

Jay Caspian Kang of The New Yorker writes about what the differing political sides of the student protests do share.

After spending a significant part of the past decade covering protests, I try to resist linear declarations—not to maintain some veneer of journalistic objectivity but because my experience has suggested that protests tend to have many origins at once, and are neither fully righteous nor totally depraved. Beyond the horror and outrage about what is happening in Gaza, what struck me in conversations with young people were the repeated references to the kind of disillusionment that both Sam and Zach described. This has been noticeable even among those who fiercely disagree with them about Israel—more conservative Jewish students, for example, who feel abandoned by their universities and who do not understand why progressives who have stood up for other persecuted groups don’t stand up for them. It is also noticeable among Palestinian students and their allies, who believe those same institutions have warped their usual standards to silence dissent and provide cover for what they regard as a genocide. Both, in their way, have reached a strange but robust consensus about the hypocrisy of a university that cloaks itself in the history of free speech and the media that covers the protests at their school.

This nonpartisan disillusionment began before October 7th, but it has been deepened by the ways that the government, the media, and other institutions have responded to it. People see one thing on social media and something else on their TVs and in the news; like Sam, many of them conclude that the former is much closer to the truth and that the latter is largely propaganda. A recent CNN poll showed that eighty-one per cent of people below the age of thirty-five disapproved of Biden’s handling of the war. But what percentage of that eighty-one per cent would ever believe a story they saw on CNN?

If you have time, do not miss Josh Hersh of the Columbia Journalism Review and his ~28-minute conversation with Columbia School of Journalism Dean Jelani Cobb and praise of the coverage of the student protests by the student journalists at the Columbia Daily Spectator.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo provides analysis of new YouGov polling about the student protests.

There are a few questions. But the most relevant are do you support them or not and do you think colleges have been too harsh or not harsh enough in responding to them. On support or not it’s 28% support and 47% oppose among US adults. But that number goes up to 46% among Democrats. 31% of Democrats oppose and 23% aren’t sure. Among independents support drops down to 24%. 72% of Jews oppose them; 75% of Muslims support them. No real surprise in either case. 40% of Americans 18-44 support; over 45 that number drops to 19%. […]

The numbers get more interesting still when you break down Democratic support for the protests. The total number supporting is 46%, quite a lot. But of those 28% say they “somewhat support” and only 17% say “strongly support”. So I think it’s fair to say that most of that support is of the “I see young people speaking out about a war that’s gone on too long and has killed to many people” variety.

What’s just as important is that Democrats need some independents to get elected. So it’s an issue you kind of want to avoid getting into at all unless you’re a Democrat from a very blue district. Just divides your coalition really badly. Which tells you a lot about the White House’s response to date.

Princeton University politics professor Jan-Werner Müller writes for Foreign Policy about the ways in which authoritarian leaders undermine the media and what the media can do about it.

Authoritarian leaders and their aspirants have developed and shared a number of tactics to control or silence individual journalists. One very crude way to do this is to turn to lawsuits. For instance, the far-right Meloni—celebrated by commentators for becoming more moderate in office—successfully sued prominent investigative journalist Roberto Saviano for libel after he criticized her and another far-right leader, Matteo Salvini. The penalty was only around $1,050—and he would only have to pay if he repeated the offense—but the action sent a clear and threatening message to other reporters in Italy.

Leaders also intimidate journalists in more informal but arguably more insidious ways. One common tactic they use is to systematically discredit journalists as biased against their administrations. This leads journalists, under relentless political pressure, to practice what media critic Jay Rosen calls “refuge-seeking” rather than truth-seeking: They try to insulate themselves from charges of partisanship by presenting all perspectives on an issue as valid—what in the United States is known as “bothsidesism.” Under normal circumstances, this is a respectable practice. But as reporters try to counter charges of bias, they give credence to proto-authoritarian, pseudoscientific, or fringe views, including those only kept alive by lobbyists and special interests. (Climate change denial is one example.) […]

The lesson should be clear: Authoritarian leaders weaponize traditional journalistic ethics centered on newsworthiness, balance, and objectivity. In attempting to prove their innocence, journalists end up playing—and usually losing—their game. The proper response should not be to exclude politically dangerous figures from all coverage, but to avoid covering them in a framework of their own choosing. These politicians should not determine an interview’s agenda or setting, and they need to face journalists who ask hard questions, not ones who are satisfied with outrageous quotes that will boost traffic but harm democracy.

Sam Jones of Guardian reports on a Spanish government official decrying the European center-right attempts to work with far-right politicians ahead of the European parliamentary elections.

[Teresa] Ribera said that Europe, already struggling with “traditional, violent, enormously bloody and painful wars in both Ukraine and Gaza”, also faced threats from those who use energy, food, disinformation and social media manipulation as the tools of modern warfare.

At a time of such global upheaval and uncertainty, she added, centre-right politicians must resist the urge to ape the far right or to enter into alliances with it.

“I think it’s been shown that it’s a huge error – and historically always has been – to think that looking for common territory with the far right is a way to pacify the far right,” she said. “That never works. The French know that very well; I think the republican principle of a cordon sanitaire against things that aren’t tolerable is still the best answer.”

Ribera said she had been deeply troubled by the moderate right’s increasing embrace of the far right and its tactics and language. Although the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, recently criticised some on the far right for being “Putin’s proxies”, she refused to rule out working with the hardline European Conservatives and Reformists Group, which includes Spain’s far-right Vox party, Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party and Poland’s Law and Justice party.

Yeah, we know what David Cameron plus Nigel Farage equals.

Finally today, Mark Landler of The New York Times describes what “Tory fatigue” looks like.

This past week’s local elections, in which the Conservatives lost about 40 percent of the 985 seats they were defending, were merely the latest signpost on what analysts say is a road to thumping defeat in a general election. National polls show the Labour Party leading the Conservatives by more than 20 percentage points, a stubborn gap that the prime minister has been unable to close.

The drumbeat of bad news is casting fresh scrutiny on Mr. Sunak’s leadership and the future of his party, which has been in power for 14 years but faces what could be a long stretch in the political wilderness.

For now, Mr. Sunak appears to have quieted talks that a cabal of Conservative lawmakers would try to oust him before the vote, which is expected in the autumn. The local results, while bad, were not as catastrophic as they could have been, averting a full-fledged panic among his colleagues. Having cycled through three prime ministers since the last election, the Tories are also running out of alternative leaders.

Embattled as he is, Mr. Sunak seems likely to limp to the general election as the standard-bearer of an exhausted, divided party.

Have the best possible day everyone!