“The congressional town hall is becoming an endangered species,” Axios reports.
“August recess once meant lawmakers returning home to face constituents — sometimes friendly, sometimes furious. After a wave of explosive confrontations last year, many lawmakers have stopped them altogether.”
“Donald Trump is following an autocrat’s playbook in his second term, weakening checks on his power and leaving the U.S. less safe, former senior intelligence officials have warned, as they step up public criticism of the president’s authoritarian style of governing,” the Financial Times reports.
“Trump returned to office pledging war against the so-called deep state that he blamed for constraining his power during his first term. Since then, he has sought to silence critics and demanded loyalty from those around him.”
“Democratic turnout for House primaries in a majority-Black Tennessee county surged to the highest level in a decade, the latest sign that redistricting may be energizing Black voters across the South,” the Washington Post reports.
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“Earlier this year, the voters of Avenal, a community in California’s rural Central Valley, ousted their mayor and all but one member of their City Council,” the New York Times reports.
“Leaders of the recall celebrated the effort as democracy in action. The message: Get out.”
“But more than three months after the election, the recalled officials still won’t leave, claiming the process was unlawful. At a meeting in June, they made it official, voting 3 to 0 to ignore the results.”
“Their refusal to cede power — highly unusual even in an era of election denialism — raises a host of legal and political questions and has triggered one of the messiest recall battles in modern California history.”
“Former Vice President Kamala Harris made a recent slate of suggestions to help Democrats win in future presidential elections, including ‘revisit the Electoral College.'” NewsNation reports.
Said Harris: “I know this is going to be controversial coming from me in particular — we need to revisit the Electoral College. We need to revisit the point of expanding the court to 13 justices like we have 13 district courts. We need to revisit, if they so want, statehood for Puerto Rico and D.C.”
“Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) that he would not provide the Trump administration with a ‘blank check’ for the proposed ‘anti-weaponization’ fund and that rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, should not be allowed to benefit from it,” NBC News reports.
Jonathan Chait: “Legal filings submitted by James Comey this week argue that the Trump administration has subjected the former FBI director to a vindictive and meritless prosecution.”
“What stands out is how little effort the president put into pretending this is not the case.”
“U.S.-backed political negotiations in Venezuela that ultimately aim to set a course for future elections will begin later this week but without the full backing of either the opposition or the ruling coalition,” Bloomberg reports.
“The early lack of consensus underscores the steep challenges faced by the oil-rich South American nation that was recently hit by a pair of deadly earthquakes.”
Adam Serwer: “The Roberts Court accelerated its assault on the freedoms guaranteed by the Reconstruction amendments this term, leaving only the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship intact—and that by only one vote.”
“Across multiple cases dealing with voting and immigration, a consistent theme has emerged from the Roberts Court’s jurisprudence: a determination to ignore, rationalize, or misrepresent the explicit animus of government officials—and the president in particular—toward the groups that have been targeted.”
“This trend began in the first Trump administration, and has grown only more apparent as Donald Trump’s attacks on immigrants and ethnic minorities in the United States have become more brazen. The Court’s approach echoes one of the most notorious decisions in American history: the 1944 ruling in Korematsu v. United States, which upheld the forced relocation of tens of thousands of Japanese Americans in the middle of World War II.”
David Frum: “This is not a sentence written often lately, but the U.S. Supreme Court has just done a great service to American democracy.”
“On June 30, the Court struck down federal limits on the amount of money that political parties can spend in coordination with individual federal candidates. Some early reports on National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission represented the 6–3 decision as a victory for big money. To some extent, it is—but for once, in a good way.”
“Years of campaign-finance reforms have curbed the power and leverage that the Republican and Democratic Parties have had in elections, which has handily undermined the quality of candidates on the ballot (see: Graham Platner). Letting the parties spend more should helpfully restore some of their leverage. When the parties were stronger, they somehow managed to assemble hundreds of contending interest groups into just two broad coalitions. They negotiated compromises and reconciled differences. Who has that job now?”
“When President Trump tried to undermine and overturn the election results in 2020, he ran into stiff pushback — not just in the courts, but from many officials in his own government,” the New York Times reports.
“He made sure there would be little room for such dissent when he returned to the White House. Those seeking to join Mr. Trump’s second administration had to pass a key litmus test: Did they believe the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump?”
“With like-minded allies now positioned in key roles throughout the government, Mr. Trump has trained the full arsenal of the federal government on one of his most persistent obsessions: sowing doubt about the security of the country’s election systems.”
“President Trump used a lot of alarming words on Thursday night as he addressed the American people about threats to the integrity of elections in the United States: ‘Deep state.’ ‘Rigged and stolen.’ ‘Conspiring.’ ‘Manipulation.’ ‘Corrupt.’ ‘Fraud.’ ‘Cover up.'” the New York Times reports.
“But the bottom-line message he clearly wanted to leave with the public was this: He is not a loser, regardless of the result of the 2020 election. There were dark forces at work to thwart him. And if his party loses this fall’s midterm election, he intimated, that may not be an honest outcome either.”
Rick Hasen: “Trump has promised ‘really really big news’ in his speech. But talk is cheap, and from Trump on elections, usually unmoored to reality or evidence.”
CNN: Advisers debate how much to declassify and reveal in Trump’s primetime election speech.
“A federal design panel on Thursday will consider the Trump administration’s plan to add a permanent fence around Lafayette Square Park, a public space next to the White House that is frequently the site of protests,” the New York Times reports.
“The move comes as President Trump and the Secret Service say that they are concerned about the security of the White House during protests. The administration’s submission to the panel, the Commission of Fine Arts, includes photos of pro-Gaza graffiti left in the park, and of standoffs between police officers and protesters.”
“President Donald Trump has passed up multiple chances to explain to Americans how his latest escalation will win the war in Iran or how he’ll alleviate their perpetually high costs for groceries, housing and fuel,” CNN reports.
“Now he’s planning to anchor a national address Thursday evening on a personal fixation about the past — his false claim that he won the 2020 election.”
“Critics fear this is all part of a quickening effort to buckle trust in voting systems and to create a pretext to use federal powers to sway November’s midterm elections. It would not be the first time that this president — who convention states should seek to bolster American democracy — has instead undermined it.”
“President Donald Trump plans to use part of a primetime speech Thursday to discuss new findings about the security of American elections, among other topics — setting up yet another high-profile opportunity for the president to dispute the results of the 2020 election he lost,” CNN reports.
Said Trump: “It’s really, really big news, and our country has to shape up.”
He added: “It doesn’t get bigger, because without free and fair elections, you don’t have a country. We’ll be discussing other things too, but it’s going to be a very big announcement.”
Reuters: Trump’s to give speech about foreign interference in 2020 election.
“Americans are losing confidence in two main pillars of society: capitalism and democracy,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Just under half of Americans say capitalism is working very well or even somewhat well, down from 60% who said so about a decade ago, according to a new Wall Street Journal-NORC survey. Only 35% are even fairly sure that the nation offers people the ability to get good jobs and achieve the American dream.”
“Confidence in the nation’s system of government is even lower. Only 12% say democracy is working very well or extremely well, and a mere 16% say average citizens have considerable influence on politics.”
Ken Burns said the drafters of the U.S. Constitution “would be abjectly disappointed” by the state of the United States in 2026, especially since the legislative branch has effectively “abdicated so much of the power,” The Wrap reports.
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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