We’re now in the toughest part of this year’s Annual TPM Journalism Drive. That’s the part between $300,000 and $400,000. Once we get passed the latter number people start to focus on being near the goal ($500,000) and the pace of contributions builds. But we need to get there first! If you can, please take a moment to contribute today. Any amount means the world to us, and it’s critical to this organization’s future. Just click right here.
Update: We’re just $1,358 short of getting to $310,000 tonight!
Donald Trump has announced that he will impose in 30 days a new round of tariffs on Canada. Those tariffs are at best of dubious legality. They are justified under the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which has quite likely been superseded by subsequent post-war trade legislation. But questions of legality, while critical, tend to obscure the more elemental question of, why? There are at least arguments as to why the US might want to impose protectionist measures against China or other countries with far lower wages and workforce protections. There are other weaker but still arguable rationales for protectionism targeting Europe. One can even make arguments about Mexico since wages south of the border are still much lower than in the US. (To be clear, I mostly don’t agree with these arguments, though I also disagree with a doctrinaire free trade approach.) There’s really no economic or strategic argument for these tariffs on Canadian goods at all. Canada has comparable living standards and regulatory regimes to the US; key US industries like autos are woven across the US border. The anchor of US prosperity has always been the way it amounts to a massive free trade zone. And Canada only extends that to the north. And yet tariffs against Canada appear to be the White House’s near or entire focus.
I’ve got to give Mike Lindell credit for engaging our questions about whether he’s actually registered to vote in Minnesota, where he’s running for governor. But his explanation here – he texted our reporter a copy of a temporary driver’s license that expired in January – will truly make your day. See here.
New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill held a press conference today in which she announced that the state had just discovered that in 2023 and 2024 the state’s motor voter compliance system had automatically registered to vote 6,600 non-citizens who had said on the form that they were not citizens. (In other words, these people affirmatively said they were not citizens and were automatically enrolled as voters anyway.) She went to say that “fewer than 400” of them had gone on to vote.
A few weeks ago I wrote this post about how Google, once a foundation of the open web, had shifted decisively against it by transforming search into the front end of a chatbot. Now the Times has a piece that examines the same issue. This is usually presented as a extinction event or at least a catastrophe for publishers. It is. (It’s not for us because we were never very reliant on search.) But as I noted in that June post, there’s much more here than an issue for publishers. It’s part of the broader oligarchic moment in which a literal handful of monopoly tech platforms further entrench their monopolies, lock in ever greater profits and continue to plug that money back into to the political system they need to control to sustain and guard those profits.
I wanted to direct your attention to this podcast episode from Slate. It’s actually the first episode of a series Slate is doing on popular constitutionalism. (The page linked above is paywalled. But, I’m told, the ‘By the People’ pod series itself is not. So you should be able to find it on podcast platforms.) It brings together in a engaging and coherent way a number of themes we’ve been discussing over the last couple years about the problem of and the corruption of the U.S. Supreme Court. And it frames the question around a 20-year-old book on popular constitutionalism by Larry Kramer (The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review).
It was not known publicly that a federal prosecutor marched to the Capitol on Jan. 6. He was appointed this year to run a national task force targeting alleged left-wing political violence.
