The News Caravan

Tag: Opinion

  • Opinion | Biden Can Steamroll Republicans on the Debt Ceiling

    Opinion | Biden Can Steamroll Republicans on the Debt Ceiling

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    There are other ideas floating around, but the one thing they all have in common is that they rely on the Federal Reserve’s cooperation and its willingness to continue acting as the government’s “fiscal agent” — essentially its banker, a role established by the Fed’s statute.

    Under one scenario, for instance, if the Treasury Department decided to switch to issuing low face value, high coupon bonds, the Federal Reserve would have to facilitate the creation of such bonds in their book entry system, facilitate their sale and make periodic interest payments on Treasury’s behalf. Alternatively, if the Biden administration decided to declare the debt ceiling unconstitutional, or made other similar maneuvers, the Fed would again have to facilitate auctions of securities and defer to Treasury legal interpretation. In this sense, the platinum coin option is the most straightforward one since it draws on the Federal Reserve’s most basic “fiscal agent” responsibilities — accepting deposits.

    Naturally then, the conversation around unilateral White House options has come to focus on the Federal Reserve and Chair Jerome Powell. When asked in February whether he’d follow Treasury’s direction in issuing payments amid a debt ceiling crisis, Powell dodged, cryptically stating “In terms of our relationship with the Treasury, we are their fiscal agent. And I’m just going to leave it at that.”

    In fact, in a largely overlooked episode from the recent past, Powell already showed he’d be willing to do whatever it takes to avoid the catastrophic consequences of federal default. To truly understand what Powell’s Fed is prepared to do, go back to what he said when he was a Fed governor during 2013’s debt ceiling crisis.

    Despite the Federal Reserve’s uneven record on transparency, it does eventually release transcripts of some of its most critical meetings in the years after they happen. And in an October 2013 conference call, Fed officials discussed a memo with options for how to respond to a government default. On that call, Powell and most of his colleagues reluctantly endorsed buying defaulted Treasury securities — an unprecedented move to maintain financial stability — if a legislative debt ceiling solution did not come in time.

    Here’s the key exchange between Powell and then-Fed Chair Ben Bernanke (options “8 and 9” in the memo are purchases of defaulted Treasury securities and the Fed “swapping” non-defaulted Treasury securities for defaulted Treasury securities):

    Powell’s willingness to purchase defaulted Treasury securities — however “loathsome” he finds it — casts the entire debate over bypassing Congress on the debt ceiling in a new light. No option under discussion is more extreme, from the Federal Reserve’s point of view, than stepping in and buying compromised securities of uncertain underlying value. If Powell will buy Treasury securities in the face of government default, he will almost certainly fulfill the Federal Reserve’s legal responsibilities as a fiscal agent and allow the Treasury Department to avoid government default in the first place.

    In fact, Powell’s comments on disclosure in this meeting are especially revealing in that they signal he won’t be more forthright about what he will do in public until the last minute:

    In short, not only will Powell likely not interfere with any of the White House’s options to make an end run around the debt ceiling, his deflection on how he would respond to the Biden administration is consistent with what he said privately back in 2013.

    The moves up for debate should also be considered less “loathsome” to the Fed because they would involve doing as the Treasury directs, rather than stepping into a charged political environment on its own. Buying defaulted Treasury securities would stem from the Fed’s independent judgment about its own financial stability mandate. In contrast, if the Treasury mints a trillion dollar coin, Powell could accurately tell the press that he did so at Treasury’s order to fulfill the Fed’s legal obligation as the government’s banker.

    No doubt the Fed would experience some political blowback from the right if it went along with a unilateral White House maneuver. But clearly Powell sees the prospect of an actual federal default as far more explosive and worth avoiding at all costs.

    Given that the Federal Reserve is not a real barrier to solving the debt ceiling crisis without Congress, the White House has the freedom to be bolder. Joe Biden and Janet Yellen should threaten to deploy any of the alternative options being proposed, and if Republicans don’t pass a “clean” debt ceiling increase, simply use one of them. The White House doesn’t have to negotiate with hostage takers, so it shouldn’t.

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    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • Opinion | The Clarence Thomas Scandal Is About More Than Corruption

    Opinion | The Clarence Thomas Scandal Is About More Than Corruption

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    As a description of the problem of Clarence Thomas, however, corruption too has its limits. Morally, corruption rotates on the same axis as sincerity — forever testing the purity or impurity, the tainted genealogy, of someone’s beliefs. But money hasn’t paved the way to Thomas’ positions. On the contrary, Thomas’ positions have paved the way for money. A close look at his jurisprudence makes clear that Thomas is openly, proudly committed to helping people like Crow use their wealth to exercise power. That’s not just the problem of Clarence Thomas. It’s the problem of the court and contemporary America.

    In 1987, four years before he joined the Supreme Court, Thomas gave a speech at the Pacific Research Institute, a San Francisco think tank that traces its roots to the economic philosophy of Milton Friedman and is dedicated to “advancing free-market policy solutions.” The target of Thomas’ speech was the midcentury liberal — economists like John Kenneth Galbraith who held money and markets in bad odor and whose attacks on rich businessmen defined the common sense of the New Deal. Thomas’ view of liberalism may seem unrecognizable today, when many Democrats are as enamored of bankers and entrepreneurs as those bankers and entrepreneurs are of themselves. But the midcentury liberal was a different animal. Thomas complained that liberals saw money and economic activity as “venal and dirty,” as a grubby means to a grubbier end. Far nobler, in the liberal view, was the “idealistic professions” of journalism, the academy and the law, where people “make their living by producing words.”

    In Thomas’ speech, we can hear the primal cadence of the original culture war between the right and the left. Long before they reached the battlefields of abortion or trans rights, liberals and conservatives were fighting over the meaning and status of wealth. No mere war of economic positions, this was a civilizational struggle over who in our society deserves the highest form of recognition and respect: the man of money or the man of words? Hewlett-Packard or Hollywood, IBM or the Ivy League, Wall Street or NPR?

    It doesn’t take much to see how this apparent conflict is badly posed: Where, after all, do knowledge workers and bankers get their degrees if not at elite schools? From whom does Harvard, Hollywood or NPR get its funding if not wealthy elites? Even so, conservatives choose their false dichotomies wisely. Not only are these divides culturally resonant; they are also constitutionally salient.

    For liberals of the 1960s and 1970s, when Thomas was coming of age, the most sacred provision of the Constitution was freedom of speech. Like sexual intimacy or gender identity today, words were thought to be an expression of who we are, a disclosure of our deepest sense of self. That’s why liberals sought to surround them with a constitutional fence of rights and protect them from the state.

    Along with a small group of far-sighted conservatives, Thomas realized that if the activity of the businessman and the banker could be redescribed as words, as speech worthy of the First Amendment’s protections, it too could achieve the status of a constitutional right. That activity included everything from advertising to campaign contributions to the language of contracts. Like regulation of speech, any policies and laws regulating those activities could be subject to the highest levels of judicial scrutiny. Under this approach, the constitutional — and civilizational — order of the New Deal could be overturned.

    On the Supreme Court, Thomas has pursued this project with great vigor — and great success. Championing the power of business in the economic sphere, he has helped strike down economic policies that impinge upon what is called “commercial speech.” Championing the power of business in the political sphere, he has taken on campaign finance laws and regulations. He has chipped away at the court’s claim, in the landmark case Buckley v. Valeo, that limitations on campaign contributions are a legitimate means of eliminating “the reality or appearance of corruption in the electoral process.”

    It is here, in the realm of campaigns and corruption, that Thomas has left his most permanent mark on the First Amendment — and a lengthy paper trail leading back to Harlan Crow.

    Money “is a kind of poetry,” wrote Wallace Stevens. Thomas agrees. More than an aid to speech or speech in the metaphorical sense, money is speech. Not only do our donations to campaigns and candidates “generate essential political speech,” Thomas writes in a 2000 dissent, but we also “speak through contributions” to those campaigns and candidates. He’s not wrong. When my wife and I gave money to the campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, we were doing more than aiding their candidacies. We were voicing our political values and advocating our policy preferences, just as we did when we showed up at their rallies and canvassed for them, door to door.

    In today’s world, citizens don’t simply speak into the air as they did in the Greek polis. They speak through mediums designed to amplify their message. Those mediums cost money. To speak on social media, I have to buy a computer and pay for the internet. If you speak at a rally, you’ll need a bullhorn or a sound system. If both of us are going to leaflet a farmer’s market, we’ll need to pay for photocopies, pens, clipboards and the like. Whenever we speak politically, we’re speaking through something, hoping that something will help our words reach more people than they would if we were simply standing in a corner and talking to passersby.

    The same is true of campaigns and candidates. As Thomas writes in a 1996 case, a campaign or candidate is a “go between that facilitates the dissemination” of our beliefs. These are not merely abstract or general beliefs; they are specific beliefs that we expect to “affect government policy.” When we make a political donation, we are exercising our “right to speak through the candidate” with the expectation that our “views on policy and politics are articulated,” and, should the candidate win office, she will attempt to enact those views into law. The candidate is the donor’s mouthpiece.

    Thomas doesn’t pull back from the plutocratic implications of his argument. He approvingly cites a passage from a 1972 treatise on money and politics: “Some views are heard only if interested individuals are willing to support financially the candidate or committee voicing the position. To be widely heard, mass communications may be necessary, and they are costly.” Costly communications require big donations. Big donations mean big donors. “The only effect” that “‘immense aggregations’ of wealth” will have on an election, Thomas writes in yet another case from 2003, is that “they might be used to fund communications to convince voters” and that “corporations … will be able to convince voters of the correctness of their ideas.”

    Influence and access are what all citizens seek. Influence peddling is not a perversion of politics; it is politics. Thomas is neither soft nor shy about that fact. He believes that liberals should stop “casting aspersions on ‘politicians too compliant with the wishes of large contributors’” and accept the materiality of modern speech. Speech needs a substrate, substrates cost money, money entails donors, donors are wealthy. Like the rest of us, they seek to have their beliefs and positions instantiated in the law.

    Thomas’ approach to money in politics obviously focuses on elected officials, not appointed judges, but the throughline is clear.

    Thomas’ positions have been felt across the Supreme Court’s First Amendment rulings. Where businesses used to win First Amendment cases at a much lower rate than individuals, they now win those cases at roughly the same rate as individuals. Where the typical free speech case once involved a student or a protestor, it is now just as likely to involve a corporation or a firm. That is where Clarence Thomas has led us — and left us.

    With the revelations of Thomas’ connections to Harlan Crow, we can take one of two paths. We can focus on the salacious details of Crow’s largesse and Thomas’ long history of gifts from other rich people. (My personal favorite is the $1,200 in tires he got from a businessman in Omaha.) We can talk about getting Thomas investigated or impeached. We can talk about judicial ethics and how they don’t get enforced on the Supreme Court.

    Or we can use the revelations as a teachable moment. For years, progressives have fought a losing battle to strengthen campaign finance laws, claiming that money is not speech. Operating under the delusion that the Roberts Court and Citizens United are solely to blame — when liberal titans William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall co-authored the Buckley decision, which held that campaign expenditures are in fact speech — progressives have sought to reverse the oligarchic turn of American society by getting money out of politics.

    Perhaps, taking a page from Clarence Thomas, we can pursue a different path. If money is speech that secures outsized influence and access for the wealthiest citizens, maybe the problem is not the presence of money in politics but the distribution of money in the economy.

    As radical as that claim may sound today, it has been the heart and soul of democratic argument since the founding of the republic. Noah Webster, of American dictionary fame, claimed in 1790 that “the basis of a democratic and a republican form of government is a fundamental law favoring an equal or rather a general distribution of property.” Without that equal distribution of wealth and power, “liberty expires.”

    If money is speech, the implication for democracy is clear. There can be no democracy in the political sphere unless there is equality in the economic sphere. That is the real lesson of Clarence Thomas.

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    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • Opinion | Can the 19th Century Law That Banned Walt Whitman Also Ban Abortion by Mail?

    Opinion | Can the 19th Century Law That Banned Walt Whitman Also Ban Abortion by Mail?

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    While a federal circuit court panel issued a partial stay until the ruling can be fully appealed, the reasoning on which both the plaintiff and Kacsmaryk partially based their arguments is arguably more eye-popping than the decision itself. Citing the Comstock Act, a sweeping anti-obscenity measure passed by Congress in 1873, Kacsmaryk found that it was patently illegal to access abortifacients by mail.

    While the legal battle over mifepristone has real-world implications for millions of Americans, the decision itself portends a more aggressive agenda that extends well beyond abortion access. In citing the Comstock Act, Kacsmaryk tipped his hand.

    Over 150 years ago, evangelical Protestant leaders, then at the height of their political influence, used state power to impose their personal, religious worldview on the entire country. It worked. But the Comstock Act, while still on the books, has been largely superseded by over a century of jurisprudence. That today’s conservative legal activists want to resurrect it suggests that we are in store for a much broader culture war — one that the right may win in a partisan Supreme Court but will lose in the political arena.

    The Comstock laws (the first was passed in 1873 and companion acts cleared Congress in subsequent years, strengthening the statute) outlawed the interstate mailing of any device or medicine used to terminate a pregnancy, as well as written materials that instructed women and doctors how to terminate pregnancies. It also barred use of the mail to transport “obscene” or “immoral” materials — be it pornography or smutty literature — as well as contraceptive drugs and devices. They even banned personal letters whose content pushed the prevailing bounds of decency. The law explicitly encouraged states to address the same range of materials on an intrastate basis, and indeed, by 1900, 42 states had enacted their own Comstock laws.

    Named for Anthony Comstock, a Civil War veteran who moved to Brooklyn after the war and became involved in citywide anti-vice campaigns, the federal law and its state equivalents represented a major victory on the part of evangelical Christian organizers who, in the 1870s, asserted an active role for religion in the public and political spheres. Concerned by the temptations that young people faced in the country’s burgeoning cities, these activists sought to reimpose Christian values and order in the defense of public health and safety. They also sought to curtail women’s reproductive rights in the service of maintaining a gendered hierarchy that the war and its dislocations had temporarily upended in the prior decade.

    To understand both how and why evangelical Christians imposed their personal religion on the entire country, it’s helpful to take a step back.

    In the decades leading up to the Civil War, America experienced a great religious awakening, as millions of ordinary people flocked to new evangelical churches. The ranks of the clergy swelled. Tract societies and evangelical newspapers became key staples of public culture. Evangelical Christianity also inspired a wave of reform movements that bridged otherwise disparate causes like temperance, public education and abolitionism. But while antebellum churches supported a range of reform movements, they focused for the most part on moral suasion — on filling pews and saving souls, and on convincing sinners to right their own ways — rather than using the political process for coercive measures.

    Until the Civil War.

    The war fundamentally politicized the nation’s evangelical churches, particularly in the North. Evangelical leaders, both lay and clergy, overwhelmingly agreed (in the words of Joseph Medill, editor of the Chicago Tribune and a deeply religious political activist) that the war was fundamentally a “war for Christian civilization.”

    Individual denominations often blurred the line between the sacred and the secular in their own fashions. A Presbyterian synod likened the Confederacy to Satan’s attempted usurpation of the throne of God. At Methodist meetings, flags were often on prominent display and congregants were frequently encouraged to swear mass loyalty oaths. The churches raised money for the war effort, ran recruitment drives, sent thousands of clergymen into the field to serve as chaplains and staffed two government-sanctioned organizations: the Sanitary Commission and the U.S. Christian Commission, which ministered to soldiers’ physical and spiritual needs. They also lent full-throated support to the abolition of slavery and the government’s increasingly punitive approach to fighting a total, rather than limited, war against the Confederacy.

    By 1864, support for the Union quickly evolved into support of the Republican Party.

    Prominent clerics like Henry Ward Beecher, Granville Moody of Ohio and Robert Breckinridge — and hundreds of political clergymen, particularly in the battleground states of the Midwest — stumped for Lincoln and the GOP with impunity. On the eve of the election, Matthew Simpson, a leading Methodist bishop, rallied the faithful at the New York Academy of Music. In a special election version of his famous “war speech” — part sermon, part patriotic exhortation — the bishop waved a bloody battle flag belonging to New York’s 55th Regiment and called on all Christians to vote for “the railsplitter … president” in the upcoming canvass.

    Whereas in the antebellum era, Protestant reformers focused on saving souls and influencing individual behavior from the pulpit, now they actively embraced politics.

    Political Christianity came in different flavors. In the late nineteenth century, liberal Christians involved themselves with gusto in the Social Gospel, a new movement that advocated for safer and cleaner housing, public infrastructure and the right of workers to organize and strike.

    The Social Gospel represented one, but not the only, outgrowth of the political brand of Protestantism that emerged from the 1860s. More socially conservative Christians threw themselves into a broad array of coercive social reform campaigns. Comstock, founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice — an offshoot of the Young Men’s Christian Association — was the most prominent of the conservative leaders. He built a powerful coalition that worked toward criminalizing contraceptive devices, abortion, prostitution and pornography. Frances Willard, a devout Methodist, led the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, an organization devoted to the prohibition of manufacturing or selling alcohol. Unlike the evangelical reform movements of the mid-19th century, the brand of reform championed by religious leaders like Comstock and Willard focused on state intervention — and state power — rather than moral suasion at the individual level. In the same way that today’s conservative culture warriors are going to war with school librarians, teachers and corporate boards, the religious conservatives of Comstock’s day used politics to enforce their private understanding of what was right and righteous. Like their liberal counterparts in the Social Gospel movement, evangelicals concerned with vice and morality had learned during the Civil War to see a natural confluence between church and state.

    Comstock began his anti-vice career as something of a crank, but with the support of New York’s evangelical church establishment — and later, as an official agent of New York state and the federal government — he proved devastatingly successful at imposing his particular understanding of morality on the American public. He was single-handedly responsible for the arrests of almost 100 people and the seizure of 202,214 obscene photographs and drawings, 21,150 pounds of books, 63,819 contraceptive items and abortifacients and innumerable devices designed for sexual pleasure — that is, 19th-century sex toys. He even managed to get a new edition of Walt Whitman’s classic, Leaves of Grass, barred from the mails.

    Armed with state power, conservative evangelicals operated at the peak of their influence. In the coming decades, that influence waned as a rising wave of Jewish and Catholic immigrants made America more pluralistic and modern science challenged longstanding ideas about biblical inerrancy. But it was a testament to the organizing acumen of activists like Comstock that they were as effective as they were.

    Fast forward to 2023, and it’s not at all clear how activist judges like Matthew Kacsmaryk believe they can wind back the clock. The Comstock laws have long been superseded by a statutory and legal privacy revolution — beginning at least with Griswold v Connecticut (1965) — that granted individuals the right to consume pornography, purchase sex toys, use contraception and, in roughly half the states, terminate a pregnancy.

    In a world where telehealth is on the rise and most insurers encourage the use of mail-order prescriptions, the Comstock Act is both an obsolete tool ill-suited to the modern health care economy and a menace. If the statute bars the mailing of abortifacients — drugs used to perform a procedure that is still legal in half the country — doesn’t it also criminalize mail-order birth control and Viagra? Mail-order sex toys, lingerie, pornography (for those without a good internet connection) and steamy romance novels? Paintings depicting nudity?

    The answer is yes, of course — if one applies consistent logic (a standard that has never much concerned conservative legal activists). And that is the tell. No thinking person would invoke the Comstock laws in a modern legal brief or court ruling unless they truly endorsed the use of state power to restrict private freedoms.

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    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • Opinion | Abortion Is Terrifying Republicans

    Opinion | Abortion Is Terrifying Republicans

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    You could say the Republican fight or flight instinct is kicking in, except it’s none of the former and all of the latter.

    It’s like the nature show set in the Serengeti when all the gazelle sense lions in the vicinity and freeze in place, their heads in the air on high alert, waiting to make their next move — but pretty certain someone’s getting taken down, no matter what direction they run.

    Much of what has happened since Dobbs is what you’d expect after a longstanding national legal regime on abortion is lifted and the states are given the freedom to decide their own policies. There has been a sorting out toward a new political and policy equilibrium, with red and blue states occupying different poles of the spectrum, and purple states up for grabs.

    The good news for Republicans is that there are more restrictions on abortion in place than at any time in the last 50 years, and they still took a majority in the House in last year’s midterms, if smaller than expected.

    There is broad sentiment for more restrictions than existed under Roe, but location and specifics matter immensely.

    In Indiana and in much of the South, Republicans have passed sweeping abortion bans and paid no discernible political price for it.

    In Georgia, Republican Gov. Brian Kemp signed a six-week ban on abortion in 2019. It went into effect after the Supreme Court overturned Roe, and Kemp won reelection handily in a race where the Democrat, Stacey Abrams, made abortion a major issue. In Texas, the details differ, but the story is much the same. The GOP-controlled Florida House takes up a six-week abortion ban on Thursday that Gov. Ron DeSantis is expected to sign after it’s passed.

    But especially in Michigan and Wisconsin, the issue has been a debacle for the party, and it has suffered notable losses elsewhere, with perhaps more in the offing.

    One lesson should be that Republicans can’t just run and hide on an issue that has been of defining importance to their base and that Democrats are going to hammer them on regardless of how they try to minimize it.

    Another is that outside of the Deep South, complete bans can’t be defended politically, and the traditional exceptions for rape, incest and life of the mother are essential; polling for anti-abortion groups shows that even Republicans and conservatives don’t support prohibitions without the exceptions, which account for a tiny proportion of abortions.

    What is required is a meeting somewhere in the middle between an anti-abortion movement that has to embrace incremental change and a Republican establishment that has to be willing to fight.

    The Michigan and Wisconsin disasters stemmed from statutes that no one would have written in the post-Dobbs environment. Michigan had a 1931 law still on the books, and Wisconsin’s dated from 1849. These complete bans with narrow exceptions went too far for these purple or blue states, and Republicans were inevitably going to get hurt by their association with them.

    In Kansas last year, a ballot measure that said the state’s constitution “does not create or secure a right to abortion” went down to a stinging defeat — the vagueness of the proposal allowed opponents to fill in the picture by arguing it would clear the way for a total ban.

    Republicans should be pushing for restrictions that go as far as a state’s voters are willing to accept, and no further, while being absolutely clear about the details. This will require keen political judgment and shrewd tactics, both of which are hard to muster in the midst of a panic.

    The other obvious imperative for the GOP is to try to focus attention on the extremism of the Democratic maximalist position on abortion, which is out of step with public opinion (Gallup finds that only 35 percent of people say abortion should be legal with no restrictions). Republican candidates who emerged unscathed on the issue last year had some success in flipping the script this way.

    In the current controversy over the abortion pill, that means hitting the Biden administration for attempting an end run around an 1873 law prohibiting the use of the mail to deliver an “instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing” that could be used in an abortion, as a way to undermine abortion restrictions in red states.

    While the Republican record fighting ballot measures to guarantee access to abortion is dreadful in the post-Dobbs era — they’ve lost everywhere — they are going to have to do more of it. Emboldened Democrats are getting referenda on the ballot in a number of red states over the next two years. A signature battle will be a vote to write abortion rights into the state constitution in Ohio later this year. If opponents defeat the measure, it will be on the strength of arguments that the amendment will end up making parental consent laws impossible and go further than the pre-Dobbs abortion regime.

    Make no mistake: In many places, Republicans are simply seeking to neutralize the Democratic political advantage on the issue and fight to a draw. If this is unsatisfying and discomfiting, it’s still better than the pre-Dobbs context when the politics were easier but it was impossible to get any meaningful restrictions done. Yes, it would have been better if Republicans had spent a little more time during the prior half-century contemplating what they’d do if Roe fell, but here we are.

    If there’s one thing that should be clear, it’s that fear — no matter how natural or visceral — is no substitute for careful thought and considered action.

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    #Opinion #Abortion #Terrifying #Republicans
    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • Opinion | The Trump-Netanyahu Strategy Is Revealed

    Opinion | The Trump-Netanyahu Strategy Is Revealed

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    I hasten to add the obvious, that comparing Israel with the United States takes imagination. Israel is four-fifths the size of Massachusetts, with a population something less than Greater Chicago’s — and that’s before we get to history, religion, resources and culture.

    But Israeli and American politicians often seem caught up in the same game. Israel, like America, suffers tensions between people on the peripheries of cities and those on the urban coast, between the less well-educated, who are often religiously dogmatic, and those more cosmopolitan and scientifically inclined; between those leaning to the right and those to the left. A broad middle also exists, with people who may be religiously sentimental, or reasonably tolerant, or just can’t be bothered; over 40 percent of Israelis are secular, about 30 percent of Americans. Israel’s inequalities are generated by a globalized, technological and entrepreneurial economy. When Israelis say “elites,” they mean pretty much what Americans do.

    Israel, like America, moreover, is a nation of immigrants whose patchy ethnic origins torture collective identity; and though Israelis and Americans assume a powerful (arguably unrivaled) military, national unity is most effectively mobilized by, well, the threat of catastrophe. Finally, Israel, like America, has a checkered constitutional history, where high ideals espoused in a Declaration of Independence were not exactly enacted; it’s a reality largely owing to bigotries against a large minority who, for good reason, did not suppose themselves welcomed into their country’s founding — bigotries that can be invigorated by demagogues.

    Which brings us back to Trump and Netanyahu.

    For both, regaining or holding on to power means, among other things, subordinating judicial institutions that define and enforce the rule of law. That’s because both have hanging over them grave allegations of high crimes against the state. They cannot risk responsible legal professionals grinding away at their jobs. Netanyahu’s assault on Israel’s judiciary is his preemptive strike. Trump knows something about debasing constitutional norms, but his own assault on prosecutors and courts may just be gearing up.

    Trump, famously, is under investigation for his role in fomenting the bloody Jan. 6 Capitol riot, which sought to thwart the transfer of power. Less well-known is Netanyahu’s jeopardy. A year ago, before he returned to the premiership, Israel’s government — its “change coalition” — voted to empower an independent state commission to investigate Netanyahu’s role in the defense ministry’s 2016 procurement of submarines and other vessels from the German company, Thyssenkrupp — a deal in which he overrode the objections of his defense minister and the I.D.F.’s general staff. Close associates, and arguably, Netanyahu himself, profited; billions of defense ministry dollars were involved, not to mention millions in commissions and enhanced stock values. This was corruption with real national security implications. With Netanyahu back in power, that commission is, for the time being, dead.

    But the parallel, alas, does not end there. For both Trump and Netanyahu are also charged with lesser corruptions that are comparatively difficult to prove, or at least easier for supporters to overlook: Trump’s alleged hush money to Stormy Daniels; Netanyahu’s payments — allegedly bribes — from foreign associates, and his alleged use of regulatory power to bend the news for his political benefit. In a way, moreover, both men have been lucky to be charged with these lesser crimes first. Netanyahu has already proven how an indictment of this kind can be useful in rallying the base, along with blocking potential challenges from feckless leaders of one’s own party.

    His playbook is pretty much self-evident. You prompt condemnation of the less egregious charges as amounting to a witch hunt enabled by a “weaponized judiciary.” You discredit prosecutors and judges before they can convict you, and you justify your reelection, in part, by promising to tame them. The larger crime is thus submerged in “politics-as-usual” sparring — catnip for reporters and pundits who like the sport.

    A “weaponized judiciary,” in other words, is your sly complaint when seeking power and your first priority when exercising power.

    Netanyahu’s judicial “reform,” accordingly, is meant to make prosecutors and judges subservient to his cabinet. And, simultaneously, Netanyahu has made an alliance with ultra-Orthodox theocrats and pro-settlement zealots who feared that judicial enforcement of civil rights and the rule of law would undermine their privileges: a free hand in the West Bank, say, or control over marriage, or exemptions from the army for male yeshiva students. Netanyahu appointed the Kahanist bigot and provocateur Itamar Ben-Gvir to head the ministry overseeing the state police, which would be like Trump appointing Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers, to run the FBI.

    These moves may have no direct analogue in America. But Trump’s embrace of the anti-abortion movement is nothing if not submission to religious activists — including, ironically, reactionary Supreme Court justices, whom Netanyahu can only envy. And executive power carries other privileges. If Republicans win back the Senate next year, and Trump regains the White House, one can imagine whom he might install as attorney general. Jim Jordan is already chair of the House Judiciary Committee. Trump may be far from locking up the nomination, but he can take heart from Netanyahu’s brazenness. Trump’s enablers in the Republican Party (Fox News, and so forth) jumped to condemn his indictment as just another gambit by the liberal elite and “woke” Deep State. Trump is already promising presidential pardons for (and essentially singing along with) extremists who stormed the Capitol.

    If there is good news from Israel, it came from the streets.

    Israel’s preeminent physicians, scholars, entrepreneurs, bankers, generals, pilots, entertainers — the leaders, not of Greater Israel, but Global Israel — pushed back, especially in and around the coastal plain. From Tel-Aviv to Haifa, they led hundreds of thousands what can only be called a mass uprising of urbane men and women — people who revere their freedoms and were appalled by the prospect of living under a government with no checks and, worse, inflected by religious tribalism. As the historian Yuval Noah Harari put it in Haaretz on March 9: “Bring the coup to a halt, or we will bring the country to a halt.” Which is exactly what they did (though to what effect, we must wait and see).

    Here there is an analogue. Assume Trump is reelected, or perhaps more plausibly, some younger, more acerbic Republican populist appealing to the Trumpist base loses the popular vote by a sound margin but squeaks into office owing to the way the Electoral College is stacked against Democrats. Assume the Senate goes Republican for the same reason — you get the idea. Now, assume this president moves against established liberties in predictable ways — using the pardon power the way Trump has, or having the F.B.I. hound “socialist” teachers, or even deploying martial law to enforce a false claim of election fraud. It can happen here. It almost did.

    Israeli liberals have shown that, to protect a democratic commonwealth, one may act in ways that go beyond any particular election. It is a common wisdom that the American electoral map shows a distinct pattern in almost every state: blue counties in the cities, red counties in the rural exurbs and towns. What the map doesn’t show is how heavily the blue subsidizes the red. The top 25 metro areas make up half of U.S. GDP while the other roughly 350 smaller cities account for a little over 38 percent. Israelis have shown the power of bigger cities engaging in civil disobedience. The ferocity and stamina of the most educated citizens shouldn’t be underestimated.

    Indeed, America’s democratic defenders may have an advantage that Israelis do not yet have. I noted earlier that Israel, like America, has a sizable minority that sees itself as just a latter-day beneficiary, if at all, of the country’s democratic norms. But African Americans nevertheless vote in large numbers in crucial elections and, rightly, see themselves as an indispensable constituent of democratic politics. The turnout rate for Black voters was 63 percent in 2020. Arab Israelis, in contrast, are discouraged by the ongoing occupation and other inequalities; if they voted at 63 percent in the fall of 2022, Netanyahu would not have won. This is not to underrate Trump’s menace, or Netanyahu’s. But there is reason for American democrats to trust, in a way Israelis still cannot, that victories at the ballot box can make victories in the streets unnecessary. In either case — in any case — democracies require vigilance.

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    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • Opinion | America Doesn’t Want Joe Manchin

    Opinion | America Doesn’t Want Joe Manchin

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    There is no doubt that the former governor, hailing from a red state where Democratic presidential candidates lose by 40 points, is a different kind of Democrat, especially on energy, cultural issues such as guns, abortion and immigration, and procedural matters like the filibuster and court-packing.

    Yet, he’s still recognizably a Democrat, who tends to be there for his party — whatever drama he might create during the sausage-making — on big pieces of legislation.

    During an appearance on “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Manchin spoke openly about the possibility of a presidential run. He portrayed himself as a unifying force occupying the neglected center. “I’m fiscally responsible,” he said, “and socially compassionate” — a sentiment that owes more to false labels than no labels.

    Let’s review the past two years: Manchin voted for the $1.9 trillion Covid relief bill at the outset of the Biden administration; he voted for a $550 billion infrastructure bill; he voted for a $280 billion chips bill; and, finally, he voted for — indeed, helped craft — nearly $500 billion in yet more spending on green-energy and health care initiatives in the so-called Inflation Reduction Act that is offset by what is supposed to be roughly $800 billion in new taxes and reductions in Medicare spending.

    Add it all up, and this is not the voting record of a fiscal conservative, a fiscal moderate, or even a fiscal realist.

    It’s true that Manchin cut down Biden’s Build Back Better proposal by a couple of trillion before it morphed into the Inflation Reduction Act. But if your party wants to shoot money out of a powerful M20 Super-Bazooka (which was developed near the end of World War II), and you want to shoot money out of an earlier, less potent M1 Bazooka instead, that doesn’t make you a force for austerity.

    In point of fact, you don’t need to shoot money out of bazookas at all.

    While the Senate was evenly split, Manchin had stopping power. He could have single-handedly prevented Biden from spending an additional dollar. Instead, he went along with the big-ticket items and made it possible for Democrats to get more than they reasonably could have hoped for — and now harangues Biden to do more about the debt.

    This is an accomplice to a crime after the fact, tsk-tsking the mastermind of the heist for not being more law-abiding.

    Manchin has taken to complaining that his baby, the Inflation Reduction Act, has been distorted by the Biden administration. “When President Biden and I spoke before Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act last summer,” he wrote in The Wall Street Journal last week, “we agreed that the bill was designed to pay down our national debt and shore up America’s energy security.”

    He might have wanted to get that in writing. If the rest of your party is convinced that a major bill is climate legislation — and proudly touts it as such — while you are the only one who believes that it is really about deficit reduction and exploiting more fossil fuels, there is a good chance you are the one who is wrong.

    Say this for Biden — he may have lost a step, but he apparently can still take Manchin to the cleaners.

    The senator had a large hand in drafting the bill, and had the leverage to insist on any provision that he wanted. There is nothing he wants now that he couldn’t have insisted on or made explicit in the legislation. Manchin’s denunciations of how the bill is being implemented are really confessions of his own poor negotiating and shabby legislative draftsmanship.

    None of this is an auspicious launching pad for a national campaign. The typical fallacy of such third-party efforts is the belief that all, or a lion’s share, of self-identified independents would vote for an independent candidate. This ignores the fact that many independents lean Democrat or Republican, and vote much like actual Democrats and Republicans.

    While the distaste for another Trump and Biden race is real, most Republicans and Democrats will make peace with these candidates if they win their respective nominations. Even if there is greater openness than usual to an alternative at the outset of the race, an independent candidate will inevitably look more like a spoiler or a wasted vote the closer the election gets, eroding their support further and making the campaign look even more quixotic and forlorn.

    There’s also the matter of charisma and star power. The last independent candidate to get real traction, Ross Perot in 1992, was a one-of-a-kind American original with a kind of anti-charm and a set of distinctive issues, running in just the right populist environment. Manchin can do Sunday shows and looms large in West Virginia, but there’s nothing to suggest he has the performative ability or a unique ideology to dominate on a national stage.

    Even if he did, he’d be most likely to help elect Trump. Biden wants to win independents and disaffected Republicans, the voters Manchin would be targeting as well. If he were serious about winning, Manchin would have to argue that Biden is not the moderate he campaigns as, and thus help make Trump’s case for him.

    We live in a time of political unpredictability and disruption, just not enough for Manchin 2024 to make sense.

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    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • Opinion | The Gaping Hole in the Middle of the Trump Indictment

    Opinion | The Gaping Hole in the Middle of the Trump Indictment

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    For example, Bragg states that Trump “took steps that mischaracterized, for tax purposes, the true nature of the payments made in furtherance of the scheme.” But what tax crime exactly? Bragg doesn’t even specify whether it was a federal or state crime, or how he thought Trump intended to violate criminal tax laws.

    To be sure, you can look at details within the statement of facts and try to guess at what those tax crimes might be. In one paragraph, Bragg explains how Trump’s payment to then-lawyer Michael Cohen to reimburse him for paying off Stormy Daniels was “doubled” to $360,000 so Cohen “could characterize the payment as income on his tax returns” so that Cohen would be “left with $180,000 after paying approximately 50 percent in income taxes.”

    On its face, it sounds like Bragg believes that Trump intended to commit another crime by causing Cohen to falsely report on his tax return that he had too much income, thereby paying too much in taxes. A jury might have trouble believing that Trump intended to commit a crime by paying more money than necessary to the government in taxes.

    But there’s another plausible reading of the statement of facts — that Trump “disguised” the reimbursement to Cohen as “a payment for legal services” so he could deduct it as a business expense. Either of these potential theories could be a criminal violation of either state or federal tax laws. But nothing in the statement of facts or the indictment makes clear what Bragg’s legal theory is or what state or federal tax law he alleges that Trump intended to violate.

    Bragg also alleges that Trump “violated election laws” and repeatedly refers to the fact that Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to violating federal election laws. But again, neither the indictment nor the statement of facts cites any campaign finance or election laws, and neither document explains how Trump allegedly intended to violate election laws.

    During a press conference after the arraignment, Bragg stated that Trump’s “scheme violated New York election law, which makes it a crime to conspire to promote the candidacy by unlawful means,” a reference to New York Election Law 17-152, a misdemeanor with a two-year statute of limitations. Bragg also noted that the payments to Daniels exceeded federal contribution limits.

    It remains unclear whether Bragg relies on federal or state election laws, and both pose legal issues for the prosecution. If he relies on state election law, there is an argument that the New York state law is preempted by federal laws. After all, Trump was running for federal office. Bragg would be on stronger ground if he relied on federal election law, but it is not yet settled in New York courts that federal crimes can be used to bump up these crimes to felonies.

    I’m not alone in wondering what the exact “other crimes” are. Since the indictment was released to the public, I’ve spent hours discussing the indictment with other lawyers, including multiple former Manhattan assistant district attorneys. None of us could determine with certainty what crimes Bragg is using to bump up the misdemeanor counts to felonies.

    That is a serious problem. Like every other defendant, Trump has a right to be informed of the nature of the charges against him. His legal team can’t prepare a defense if they don’t know what Bragg’s legal theory is.

    I expect Trump’s team soon will file a motion for a bill of particulars, the formal method by which defendants can demand prosecutors provide more specifics about the charges. Most of these motions are a waste of time, but in this case, the motion should be granted.

    For now, Bragg seems to be leaving his options open, giving himself an opportunity to adjust his case in the upcoming weeks. That’s not how our system is supposed to work. While vagueness might give Bragg an advantage at this stage, prosecutors are supposed to promote justice, not try to gain an edge unfairly.

    To be fair to Bragg, his office usually does not spell out what the “other crimes” are in an indictment. But as former Manhattan assistant district attorneys have pointed out to me, usually that is because the other crimes are charged within the same indictment, leaving little doubt regarding what they are. Given that no other crime is charged here besides Falsifying Business Records, it’s not clear what those “other crimes” are in Trump’s case.

    That is not just a problem for Trump. That’s a problem for all of us. Bragg should know that the entire country is watching the proceedings brought by his office, and every American deserves to know exactly what the former President of the United States is accused of doing.

    The indictment of a former president is a statement that no one is above the law. But that principle requires that every defendant is treated fairly. Trump — and the American people — deserve fair notice of the crimes that form the basis of the felony charges in the indictment.

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    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • Opinion | The Russians Are Coming. There Could Be Downsides.

    Opinion | The Russians Are Coming. There Could Be Downsides.

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    At the same time, more and more Georgian politicians are spreading anti-western sentiments, even accusing U.S. Ambassador Kelly Degnan of allegedly forcing Georgia to go to war with Russia. The Georgian opposition claims that the anti-western rhetoric is being promoted by Ivanishvili, but the roots of the problem are more likely in Moscow, which has been waging both hot and irregular wars against Georgia since the Georgian government expressed its desire to join the European Union and NATO.

    This time, the protestors or more accurately the people of Georgia, gained a big victory. The ruling party recalled their proposal.

    But that victory could be short-lived. In this state of political disarray, Georgia provides fertile soil for Russia’s psychological operations. For example, disinformation suggesting the United States was working to drag Georgia into the Russian-Ukrainian war could lead both to the escalation of conflict among the elites and violence on the streets. This is just one hypothetical line of disinformation. There could be many. With the rise of populism around the world, including in the United States, utter lies become a tool of both domestic and international politics.

    There is more the FSB could do to unsettle the region. The FSB can blackmail refugees by threatening the safety of their relatives in Russia; there is evidence that the head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, a Putin ally, has been doing this for years with the Chechen diaspora in Europe and Canada. Kadyrov’s methods are brutal, including taking relatives of refugees as hostages, threatening the Chechens who do not cooperate with torture, paying those who cooperate, recruiting young Chechens through martial arts clubs, and fabricating criminal charges against refugees.

    The FSB may also be planning red-herring operations with the purpose of creating tensions between refugees and their hosts. The Russians already did something similar in Germany in 2016, when Russian media used an alleged kidnapping and rape of a 13-year-old Russian girl by refugees from the Middle East in Berlin to accuse Germany of being lenient on child abuse and Muslim immigrants’ alleged criminal behavior. After an investigation, the case turned out to be a fake, yet it caused a series of protests by Russian speakers in German cities. The goal of the operation was to spike anti-immigrant sentiment and boost support for right-wing political parties.

    Lastly and most disturbingly, the FSB could stoke anti-western attitudes among the refugees themselves. Nationalism is not alien to the Russian diaspora. Russians can vote abroad as long as they maintain Russian citizenship, and many do so, in spite of living permanently in other countries. Many among those who left the USSR or Russia in the 1980s, 1990s and in early 2000s — especially in the United States and United Kingdom – initially voted against Putin yet switched their allegiance after Russia invaded and annexed Crimea in 2014. In 2018, Putin received a stunning 81 percent of the vote by Russian citizens in Germany, 72 percent in Israel, 63 percent in France, 63 percent in the United States of America, and 52 percent in the United Kingdom — a country which is a home to many anti-Putin activists.

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    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • Opinion | The Extraordinarily Misguided Attack on TikTok

    Opinion | The Extraordinarily Misguided Attack on TikTok

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    The stated concern is that because TikTok’s parent company is Chinese owned, the government in Beijing could ultimately access data on hundreds of millions of American users. As FBI Director Christopher Wray said, “This is a tool that is ultimately within the control of the Chinese government — and it, to me, it screams out with national security concerns.” The other concern held by some critics is that the Chinese government could use TikTok’s algorithms to barrage American users with disinformation and propaganda, potentially creating domestic havoc in the United States.

    These issues can’t be dismissed out right, but they are almost certainly overblown, according to security experts.

    The data of TikTok users — age, region, passwords, names, buying habits — is no different than that collected by countless online merchants and other social media sites. While that data is private and encrypted, much of it can either be scraped anonymously (and often is for use in the vast and profitable commercial data market) or already accessed by cyber spy agencies. User data isn’t particularly secure anywhere. Whatever the Chinese government wanted to glean from TikTok users, it likely can glean anyway, regardless of where that data is stored.

    Then there’s the chaos engine theory — that TikTok on instructions from the Chinese government could sow confusion in domestic politics or promote a certain ideology in the United States. It has echoes of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, which naturally causes some alarm. But while a foreign government can try to use social media to spread disinformation and spur division, the net effect of that in the context of so much other noise in the cyber world is unclear. Could it amplify an already fractious political climate? Maybe, but almost certainly not on its own and not in any clear directional way, and that assumed full and total control of TikTok by Beijing, which is something hardly anyone currently believes or alleges.

    But let’s say that the Communist Party of China could and will use TikTok. Even then, banning the app is a terrible idea for the United States. Why? Because the foundational strength of the United States is that it is an open society where information can and does flow freely. Banning TikTok, a platform of often astonishingly creative and often incredibly banal content that reaches 150 million Americans, is a step back from an open society and toward a closed one.

    That is why the United States mulling a TikTok ban is a very different thing than, say, India, which has already barred TikTok. The government of Narendra Modi in India has been tightening its censorship in multiple spheres, and its moves against TikTok and other Chinese apps are part of a broader attempt to control information. The United States, however, has a rich tradition of free speech and has erected a legal apparatus designed to protect it and encourage the open flow of information. It’s not just the First Amendment to the Constitution and subsequent court cases and precedent designed to bolster the right of free expression; it’s the implied link between a healthy, robust democracy and the ability to communicate all ideas, even ones that many find wrong and reprehensible, without fear of censorship or government suppression.

    The Chinese government holds no such values, and indeed it believes that information should first and foremost serve the interests of the state. Yes, the Chinese constitution does provide for the right of free speech but not if such speech “undermines the interests of the state.” Free speech in China is not seen as a key pillar of societal strength; it is provisional and valuable only insofar as it does not challenge the primary of the Communist Party.

    The United States, by contrast, has championed an open society as the ultimate guarantor of human liberty and prosperity, and as one of the most robust checks on the untrammeled exercise of government or corporate power. We can debate if openness and free speech do in fact serve those functions, but they at the very least make exercising control more difficult. And the sheer noisy vibrancy of American society has been a notable contrast to many other countries over time and one of the hallmarks of a democracy that has allowed individuals to say and do what they choose.

    That has, in turn, been the fuel for a rich culture of innovation and creativity, scientifically and artistically, including the invention and commercialization of the cyber world that we all now inhabit. TikTok may be a Chinese app, but it is built on American innovation.

    But if TikTok as a social media app par excellence is in essence a manifestation of American strength, banning TikTok is in essence a mimicking of Chinese policy. China has created its own internal intraweb and erected its “Great Fire Wall” to keep unwelcome information out of the public sphere. The Chinese government, with its legion of censors, polices what can be said and how, and punishes those who deviate too far from accepted parameters. That has only increased after the country’s “zero-Covid” policies that relied on mass surveillance of smart phones to control the movement of Chinese citizens. The efforts to control 1.5 billion people, what they say and how they say it publicly, are one way that the party retains control in China. It is a source of their strength.

    The United States will never be able to compete with China in censoring information, nor should it. But it could undermine its own vitality as an open society if it heads down the path of trying to ban apps in the name of national security. The wave of blacklists and McCarthy era crackdowns on Americans who professed Communist and even socialist beliefs and sympathies did not make the United States more secure in the early days of the Cold War; it made the country more paranoid and brittle, undermined creativity and the free flow of scientific information and briefly threatened to undermine the stability of the very government agencies such as the State Department and the Defense Department that were tasked with preserving national security.

    America does not do suppression of free speech particularly well, which is a good thing. And we should not optimize for a future where we do it better by making a new go at censorship. For the United States, the risks of TikTok are far outweighed by the risks of banning TikTok.

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    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • Opinion | The Painful Lesson Donald Trump Could Learn from R. Kelly and Michael Avenatti

    Opinion | The Painful Lesson Donald Trump Could Learn from R. Kelly and Michael Avenatti

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    But today’s announcement is not good news for Trump. Even if he ultimately beats the charges in Manhattan, the mere fact that he is facing charges there will make it more difficult for him to defend himself in criminal cases elsewhere, be it Fulton County, federal court in Washington, or Florida where a classified documents case might be filed.

    I’ve defended clients who face charges in multiple jurisdictions at the same time, and it’s a challenge. One might think that each case stands on its own merits, but in reality there is a multiplier effect that works against defendants. Instead of considering the best move in any one particular case, defense counsel have to consider how their words or actions in one case (Manhattan, for example) will impact other cases, including ones that haven’t been charged yet. Defending a client facing charges in multiple jurisdictions requires a defense team to weigh competing priorities and play three-dimensional chess while the prosecutors in each case can focus like a laser on the case at hand.

    Don’t believe me? Just ask the beleaguered lawyers who defended R. Kelly in a wide-ranging racketeering case in New York federal court, an obstruction and child pornography case in Chicago federal court, a solicitation of a minor and child prostitution case in Minnesota state court, and a child sex abuse case in Chicago state court at the same time. They managed to ensure that the weakest case — the New York racketeering case — went first. But Kelly lost in both New York and Chicago federal court, even though some of his Chicago co-defendants were acquitted, and he was subsequently sentenced to 31 years in federal prison.

    Michael Avenatti, who once represented Trump accuser Stormy Daniels, faced a similar meat grinder. In late March 2019, Avenatti was charged by federal prosecutors in New York with attempting to extort $25 million from Nike. On the same day, federal prosecutors in California charged Avenatti with wire fraud and bank fraud. Less than a month later, he was charged with embezzling money from clients. A month after that, prosecutors charged him with defrauding Daniels out of proceeds from her book deal. Avenatti lost the Nike extortion trial in New York in early 2020. Two years later, he pleaded guilty to stealing millions of dollars from his clients in California. The bottom line is that he prevailed in none of the cases and is due to be released in 2026.

    One of the challenges facing most defendants who juggle cases in multiple jurisdictions is a drain on resources and attention. By the time Avenatti stood trial in California, he was out of funds and represented himself. Kelly, a multiple platinum-selling R&B singer whose net worth was once estimated at nearly $100 million, was so broke that he was unable to post $100,000 in bail. Trump likely won’t have that problem, so long as he can continue to pay for his legal bills using money raised by his political action committee.

    But a conviction can be a problem for a defendant like Trump in a later trial. By the time Avenatti and Kelly reached their second trials, they were both convicted felons, which made it difficult for either to take the stand in his own defense. One of R. Kelly’s co-defendants testified for over four hours, and was ultimately acquitted, but Kelly couldn’t even consider doing so given his prior conviction. Trump needs a clean sweep in Manhattan to avoid a similar fate. Even a conviction on a misdemeanor falsifying business records charge, for example, would potentially be admissible to impeach Trump’s credibility if he testified in a federal trial.

    Even if Trump is acquitted in Manhattan, that case might still create problems for his legal team. Typically, defense attorneys avoid taking positions — or having their clients say much at all — because every word from the client can be used against him in subsequent proceedings. If Trump takes the witness stand in Manhattan, prosecutors in other jurisdictions can comb through the transcript for nuggets to use against him in other trials.

    Of course, Trump’s lawyers also appear to be unable to keep him from speaking publicly about the Manhattan charges. Those public statements, outside of a courtroom, can be used against him too.

    The documents produced by Trump’s team in the Manhattan case can be obtained and used by prosecutors elsewhere. The legal positions he takes can preclude him from taking the opposite position elsewhere. A judge would be far less likely to take Trump’s position seriously in a subsequent case if he had taken a contradictory position earlier. The witnesses who testify on his behalf will never surprise another prosecutor again with their presence or their testimony.

    When I was a federal prosecutor, the defense attorneys who gave me the most trouble were nimble and aggressive, hitting me with arguments and evidence that I did not expect. But it’s difficult to be nimble or aggressive when you have to consider how each word you say and action you take impacts multiple other cases that have been or could be brought against your client. That is the unenviable position that Trump’s attorneys find themselves in.

    To be clear, Trump is not going to prison simply because multiple prosecutors might indict him simultaneously. Facts matter, of course, and defendants have tools they can use to manage this difficult situation. Trump’s team could try to employ a strategy used by the attorneys for the late Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, who requested a speedy trial in his corruption case and won an acquittal. But there was only one case against Stevens and it was weak from the start. (A subsequent investigation revealed that federal prosecutors withheld evidence beneficial to Stevens.)

    Trump and his team can take solace that the first prosecutor up to the plate has a relatively weak case, but no one with experience handling multiple cases at once would argue that Wednesday was a good day for Team Trump. They face the prospect of a multi-front war and they may not have the luxury of fighting one battle at a time.

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    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )