Crooked Media - What A Day: Thanking his lucky Mazars

The president isn’t above the law, yet by total coincidence his crime-ridden financial records will remain hidden until after November 3, and half of Oklahoma is a Native American reservation: Happy last day of the Supreme Court term. 
 

• The Supreme Court rejected President Trump’s absurd claim that he enjoys sweeping immunity from investigation while in office, clearing the way for New York prosecutors to access his financial records. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion, “no citizen, not even the president, is categorically above the common duty to produce evidence when called upon in a criminal proceeding.” That’s a stunning legal (and ego) defeat for Trump, but not necessarily a political one—grand jury secrecy rules mean those records probably won’t be publicly available until after the election, if ever. 
   
• In a separate decision, the Court ruled that Congress can’t obtain many of the same records, at least for now. The justices punted the case back to the lower courts, ruling that they hadn’t adequately considered separation-of-powers concerns over Congress’s power to compel production of a president’s personal records. That delay will, again, shield the documents for the foreseeable future. Both cases involved subpoenas to Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars USA, while the House also subpoenaed records from Deutsche Bank and Capital One.
   
• For all practical purposes the Supreme Court did Trump a huge favor today, but the finding that he could eventually be held accountable for crimes did not go over well. Trump raged about the split decision on Twitter, seemingly unaware that most presidents aren’t huge criminals like he is, calling himself the victim of “political prosecution”: “Courts in the past have given ‘broad deference’. BUT NOT ME!” Anyway, both of Trump’s appointees, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Beer Brett Kavanaugh, sided with Roberts and the liberal bloc in both 7–2 decisions. 

The third major ruling of the day was an historic victory for Native Americans, with the Court recognizing nearly half of Oklahoma as “Indian Country.”
 

• Gorsuch joined the four liberal justices in ruling that the eastern half of Oklahoma, including Tulsa, still belongs to Muscogee Creek Nation—a huge vindication of tribal sovereignty. McGirt v. Oklahoma hinged on whether a Muscogee citizen could be prosecuted by state authorities for a crime committed within the Nation’s historical boundaries, which Congress had never terminated. (For a deeper dive into the lawsuit that gave rise to this case, and the history baked into it, check out Rebecca Nagle’s terrific podcast This Land.)
   
• The decision is potentially one of the most consequential victories for Native Americans in decades, and could have far-reaching implications for the 1.8 million people who live in the area. It means that federal officers, rather than state officials, have authority to prosecute serious crimes committed by tribal members. Hundreds of state convictions may need to be undone and retried in federal court, and the decision could reshape the legal framework for things like taxation and zoning in eastern Oklahoma.

So, the good news: The majority-conservative Supreme Court unexpectedly upheld Native American treaty rights, and refused to let Trump declare himself an untouchable dictator-king. The bad news: There’s no actual legal ambiguity over whether Congress should be able to subpoena the president’s financial records, and by pretending there is, the Court has let Trump remain functionally untouchable. For now. 

New merch alert! Keep cool this summer with our brand new Friend of the Pod styles. We updated our classic with new fits and colors AND we slapped it onto a water bottle because you can never have enough of those. Plus, some classic Pod Save America merch is now back in stock. Check it all out at the Crooked Store → 

The new Trump-appointed CEO overseeing Voice of America will not extend its foreign journalists' visas. Michael Pack has signaled he won’t approve visa extensions for dozens of foreign nationals, many of whom would be forced to return to authoritarian countries and face serious repercussions for having worked at a U.S. broadcasting agency. VOA also depends on those journalists for their language skills, which are crucial to the agency’s mission of covering news in countries without a free press. Pack fired the top officials of five media companies under his control immediately upon taking office, and his move to expel foreign journalists seems to be the next step in reshaping Voice of America to broadcast Trump administration propaganda.

• American workers filed 2.3 million new claims for unemployment benefits in the past week. That’s the 16th week in a row that new claims have exceeded one million.
   
• Ousted U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman testified that Attorney General Bill Barr repeatedly pressured him to resign, in a closed-door House Judiciary Committee hearing. Berman told lawmakers that Barr dangled other positions in government in front of Berman to try to coax him to step down during a meeting at the Pierre Hotel in New York. 
   
• Health-care workers face dire PPE shortages, again. Nurses say they’re reusing N95 masks for days and even weeks at a time, while state officials scramble to fill orders with international suppliers. White House officials have denied that shortages are still a problem.
   
• The Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld most of the lame-duck laws passed by the state’s GOP legislature to strip power from Gov. Tony Evers (D-WI) before he took office.
   
• Michael Cohen has been taken back into federal custody after he “refused the conditions of his home confinement,” according to the Bureau of Prisons. Cohen reportedly refused to sign papers requiring that he not talk to reporters or write a book. It appears a guy just went to jail for planning to write a tell-all book about the president.
   
• There have been at least 66 car attacks on protesters nationwide since George Floyd’s death. Seven of them have been by law enforcement officers. It’s not clear how many were premeditated, but accounts in far-right social-media circles have been circulating memes encouraging the attacks. 
   
• The WHO formally acknowledged that the coronavirus can spread via airborne transmission, under pressure from scientists around the world. 
   
• Glee actor Naya Rivera is presumed dead after she went missing at a lake in Southern California on Wednesday evening. Her 4-year-old son was found alone on the boat she had rented. 
   
• The country band formerly known as Lady Antebellum has sued Anita White, a Black blues singer who has performed under the name Lady A for the last 20 years, for the right to keep using the name Lady A. One good rule of thumb: If your anti-racist awakening culminates in suing a Black woman, it is possible you’ve made a wrong turn.

There are several possible explanations for the gap between the rising coronavirus case count and plateauing death count, which President Trump and his allies have cited to brush off the new surges as harmless. Here’s the short version, but the full article is worth a read:

• The death curve typically lags behind the infection curve, both because people don’t die immediately after getting sick, and there are lags in issuing death certificates and the reporting of that data. The surge in deaths may have simply not hit yet.

• Expanded testing means the current infection data includes more mild and early cases, making the current curve difficult to compare to the initial surge. Identifying more cases earlier on could also suggest that a death surge is still ahead, with a longer lag.

• Coronavirus patients are getting younger, now that young people have been forced back to work in the service industry, and assured by their governments that it was safe to hit the bars. Those patients are less likely to die of the virus, but still face extreme danger, and risk infecting more vulnerable people.

• Hospitalized patients are dying less frequently, possibly because doctors now know more about how to treat them, and hospitals haven’t been as overrun. 

• Summer might have something to do with it. Warm weather may have stamped out other illnesses that were weakening our immune systems. And as people wear masks and move their activities outside, they might be coming into contact with smaller infecting doses of COVID-19, which some epidemiologists think has an effect of the illness’s severity.
   

We don’t know exactly why death figures are lagging, but there’s no world in which that lag is a reason to declare victory. Hundreds of Americans are dying every day, untold thousands more are facing serious long-term health complications, and all of it was preventable. 

It's hard to find eco-responsible cleaning products that actually work. But Dropps has finally done it. With Dropps, you can live clean, live green, eliminate waste, and leave no trace. With over 10k 5-star reviews, you'll see in no time how great their products are. Give Dropps a try today and use code WHATADAY15 for $15 off your first order of $40+.

Mi Familia Vota, a Phoenix-based Latinx organization, has announced a $10 million voter turnout campaign starting in Arizona and Florida.
 

Portland, OR, has become the latest city to approve a cap on fees that food delivery apps can charge restaurants. 

The University of California has named Dr. Michael Drake as president. He’ll be the first person of color to hold the position in the system’s 152-year history.
 

Amazon has joined Walmart, Nike, and Target in pulling all Washington Redskins merchandise from its site.