The Tribune

With Charlie Harper

THIS morning, the 2024 American presidential election is almost exactly 19 months away. Is all the suspense already gone?

Events this week certainly make that a more likely outcome.

Many observers have long suspected that a curious anomaly that has dominated American national politics for half a dozen years already will continue to do so.

The anomaly? Current President Joe Biden might have a tough time beating any Republican opponent in 2024 – with the notable exception of the man he is almost certain to face. The same man he defeated already: his predecessor Donald Trump.

Trump’s indictment in New York City on Tuesday revealed that almost nothing has really changed on the national American political landscape as the result of the November 2020 election, the January 6, 2021, storming of the US capitol or the November 2022 election.

You’d think that those events would have changed minds and the course of political developments in America. But they have seemingly altered very little.

Trump’s Manhattan indictment was on charges that are either spurious or substantial, depending on whom you consult.

Once safely back in Florida after his court appearance, Trump’s response was altogether characteristic, though he did look tired and almost haggard after his history-making day as the first US president ever indicted for a crime, in or out of office.

“They can’t beat us at the ballot box, so they try to beat us through the law. We are a nation in decline, and now these radical left lunatics want to interfere in elections by using law enforcement,” Trump said, linking his prosecution and the multiple investigations he faces to his phony claims of a rigged election in 2020. “We can’t let that happen.”

Trump said prosecutors in Atlanta should stop investigating his effort to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia; mocked a New York state investigation into his business, and described as a “lunatic” the Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith, who is overseeing the federal probe into his handling of classified documents and his actions in helping to incite the January 6 mob attack on the US Capitol.

“With all of this being said, and with a very dark cloud over our beloved country, I have no doubt nevertheless we will make America great again,” Trump said. “The only crime that I have committed is to fearlessly defend our nation from those who seek to destroy it,” he added.

Not much new there. Nor was there anything new in the support for Trump in his indictment by almost all national Republican politicians – despite the fact that he is blamed for GOP failures in the past three American national elections.

Perhaps most notable was South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham on TV right after Trump’s indictment was announced, looking bleary and disheveled, shouting that viewers on Fox News should immediately contribute to Trump’s legal defense. That was embarrassing, even in the context of the chaos that is American politics these days.

As to the legal merits of the New York indictment of Trump, it’s hard to know what to believe. There are lots of legal experts all over the place on this.

A law professor who worked in independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s office during President Bill Clinton’s impeachment told reporters this week that in her opinion, Trump’s positions as a candidate and a former president don’t make his actions political rather than criminal.

“To call this political, when it is about a politician, is double-speak,” Kim Wehle said. “There are plenty of politicians who have been indicted, prosecuted and convicted over the course of American history. The fact that he is embroiled in politics does not somehow lower the standard or change the standard for prosecution from the standpoint of lawyers and the law.”

Wehle said she believes Bragg would have indicted Trump only if he believed he could prove crimes were committed. “But by all accounts, Bragg is a careful and experienced prosecutor. He understands the stakes, so I doubt this will be a flimsy case,” she said.

Wisconsin supreme court judge changes and the effects of gerrymandering

It’s hard to minimise the significance of an election held in Wisconsin on Tuesday. This midwestern swing state, once reliably Blue but moving through Purple toward Red in recent years, voted to fill a position on the state’s supreme court being vacated by a reliable conservative justice. The ideological balance on the state’s highest court hung in the balance for the evenly-split six remaining judges.

A Democrat won, rather easily. Liberal-leaning family court judge Janet Protasiewicz triumphed, and it wasn’t that close. The state supreme court has been in the hands of a conservative majority for 15 years; in fact, only the surprise defection of one of them kept Wisconsin from actually overturning the 2020 presidential election results in the state and certifying a bogus Trump slate.

The conservative majority court in Wisconsin had repeatedly enabled former governor Scott Walker to seriously weaken the state’s public employee unions, and might well have ratified the GOP-dominated legislature in its attempts to enforce an ancient law over 150 years old that might have outlawed abortion in the state.

Furthermore, this court had approved some of the more outlandish gerrymandering in the entire country over the past several years.

All of this can now prospectively be undone by the new liberal majority on the court.

One well-respected local commentator told reporters that this was an election that was overwhelmingly about abortion and redistricting.

“These are issues that affect people’s real lives, and they’re deeply intertwined. In a decade of polling,” he said, “roughly 60 percent to 65 percent of Wisconsin voters have consistently said that abortion should be legal in all or most circumstances. Gerrymandering means that the majority cannot enact its beliefs into law.

“If I had one big thing that I want to get across to you, it’s that the deadlock between the political branches, which is related to districting, is one of the reasons why the supreme court has become such a hot race,” he said. “Because it’s become the arbiter of that deadlock.”

Electing judges brings us to a famous American jurist. Readers may well remember US Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. The first woman ever appointed to the American high court, she was the choice of President Ronald Reagan and had been educated at Stanford University, where she met her husband. Growing up on a ranch in Arizona, O’Connor embraced conservative jurisprudence.

But over the years of her service on the court, she also became a swing vote of reason on many issues. When her husband began succumbing to Alzheimer’s disease in the 2005, O’Connor resigned from the court to care for him.

This opened the door for President George W Bush to choose Samuel Alito as her replacement. It was the pivotal event, beginning the high court’s move to the right, now embodied in a sturdy 6-3 majority.

O’Connor is still alive, and still speaking out. The point of mentioning her in the context of the Wisconsin high court election is that she is a passionate advocate for appointing judges rather than electing them as is now the case in many states.

Wisconsin’s experience over the past 15 years of rightward, unrepresentative judicial decision-making by its highest court is regrettable. But there’s no guarantee that the new liberal majority won’t make similar oversteps in the exercise of its legal purview in the years to come.

As O’Connor says, appoint judges. Don’t make them politicians by electing them. Especially not now, when the country is so polarised.

Florida teams make splash in basketball championships

AFTER the nets had finally been cut down on the 2023 men’s and women’s American national collegiate basketball championships, there were no Florida teams still standing. But it was certainly an unexpectedly fine men’s tourney for the likes of the University of Miami, Florida Gulf Coast and Florida Atlantic.

 It was nice to see high-performing athletes representing Florida schools on the basketball court as well as on the football and baseball fields.

 The women’s final drew a TV audience of ten million viewers to watch the LSU Tigers derail Caitlin Clark and the Iowa Hawkeyes. That figure set a record, and the gesturing and finger-pointing during and after the game between these teams should help to promote the popularity of this women’s sport to new and unprecedented levels.