Good morning and whoo boy. It is July 2nd, the first morning since the death of the American Republic. It's a quite lovely morning in New York City. Moderate humidity, a good breeze, extremely clean and clear air. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. Apologies for skipping yesterday's recording, but the piano tuner was here and you did not want that in the background. Anyway, the news, of course, is that the Supreme Court abolished the rule of law in America, having last week issued a decision in which the famously sarcastic formulation by Anatole France that the law in its majestic equality forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges became the straight -faced legal justification for laws that criminalize being homeless by outlying camping. The court yesterday, after weeks and weeks of delays, aimed even higher or lower by taking up the disgraced Richard Nixon's 1977 contention to David Frost that when the president does it, that means it's not illegal. For 47 years, that quote stood as a monument to Nixon's degeneracy and lawlessness.

It was everything the American constitutional order was built to prevent. And as of yesterday morning, it's the law of the land. When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal. The headline across the forefront of this morning's New York Times is, Justices Give Trump Substantial Immunity. Landmark Ruling in January 6th Case Expands Presidential Power. Even that gravely undersells the decision. Chief Justice John Roberts writing for himself and his five Republican colleagues tried to make his decision sound as abstract as possible about the separation of powers and the authority singularly vested in the executive. But the specifics were that when Donald Trump sat his attorney general down and told him to announce he was opening fully fabricated investigations into voter fraud for the direct purpose of deceiving the public and helping Trump steal the election that he'd lost, that action enjoyed inherent absolute immunity.

The president is in charge of the Justice Department. Any orders he may give his attorney general are automatically unquestionably protected. The courts have no authority, Roberts wrote, to even inquire into a president's motives. That means the worst parts of Watergate are retroactively legalized. And going forward, if a president wants to maliciously prosecute someone and tells the Justice Department to make up a case against them, that president is acting under the strictest constitutional protections.

Roberts and the other five justices also declared that Donald Trump enjoyed presumptive immunity for trying to make Mike Pence subvert the Electoral College count and steal the election that way on the grounds that certifying the election was Mike Pence's official duty and the president was just discussing the official duties of the vice president with the vice president, one executive branch member to another. The court did allow that it's theoretically possible that Trump's calling around to state officials to tell them to steal the election for him may or may not count as a president's official duty, and that the court that was trying to prosecute him for his crimes on January 6th is free to wrestle with that problem, which should, in tandem with the court's entirely unexplained delays in issuing this ruling at all, guarantee that the Republican justices have successfully prevented the Republican presidential candidate from going to trial on his violent attempt to steal the last election before the next election day. It makes a mockery, just as Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, of the principle foundational to our constitution and system of government that no man is above the law. Again, that managed to be an understatement. It didn't just make a mockery of our fundamental principle. It absolutely nullified it. Donald Trump already bragged about having the U .S. Marshals assassinate a fugitive protester, took bribes from foreign governments, and saw the IRS launch statistically improbable audits of officials who tried to hold him accountable. In a second Trump term, those uses of the official powers of the presidency would be absolutely out of reach of the courts. Speaking of bribes, on page A7, the Trump Organization has signed a new deal with a Saudi real estate company to build a residential high -rise tower in the city of Jeddah, extending the Times' rights, the family's close ties with the kingdom.

Trump and his family members continue stacking up deals with the Saudis in advance, perhaps, of his once again using the full military and diplomatic powers of the presidency as he sees fit. Elsewhere on page one, there's how Democrats let Biden's run built into crisis. The short answer is inertia and lack of ideas. The slightly longer answer is that everyone who's supposed to know about politics thought the Democrats were going to get wiped out in the 2022 midterms. And when the opposite happened,

They were simultaneously tempted to press their luck and discredited in their ability to warn anybody about anything. And next to that is a news analysis piece from Paris about how President Emmanuel Macron, having received bad news about his party's political prospects, decided that the answer to losing one election was to blow everything up and shock people back to the polls for another election, an attempt at building on reverse momentum that somehow, to his surprise, sent his party into complete collapse and has neo -Nazis on the verge of taking power. Just a little story from a whole other place about what happens when the centrists panic and do something drastic in the hopes they can reboot their setup without cooperating with or ceding any ground to the left. That is the news. Stay safe out there. Thank you for listening. Please subscribe to Indignity to keep us going. And if all goes well, haha. Anyway, if some minor subset of things unrelated to the collapse of American democracy goes, well, we will talk again tomorrow.