Yesterday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average
rose above 40,000 but then dropped back below it; today it closed above 40,000 for the first time in
history, ending the day at 40,003.59. This extraordinary performance means
investors have confidence the Federal Reserve will get inflation under
control without throwing the country into a recession. It is a triumphant
vindication of the financial policies advanced by President Joe Biden and
Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen. In comparison to the breathless
coverage of the stock market during Trump’s administration, this milestone is
getting very little coverage. Under Trump, the stock market had the highest
annualized gain of any Republican president since Calvin Coolidge in the
1920s, but at 11.8%, that annualized gain was lower than the annualized
return under Democratic presidents Barack Obama (12.1%) and Bill Clinton
(15.9%). Biden’s annualized return passed Trump’s in April 2024, as well. The stock market’s performance is
being ignored partly because Democrats tend to underplay the role of the
stock market as an indication of economic health because they recognize it is
not the only important way to think about the economy. But since he took
office, Biden has also had to contend with the constant stream of outrageous
news coming from the radical right. Today is no exception. Indeed, today’s news is among the most shocking that we’ve had since
Biden took office. Yesterday evening, Jodi Kantor of
the New York Times reported that in the days before Biden’s
inauguration, an upside-down American flag flew in front of Supreme Court
justice Samuel Alito’s home. A U.S. flag flown upside down is a universal
symbol of distress. In the days after the January 6, 2021, insurrection, Trump loyalists flew the
upside-down flag as a symbol of “the impending death of the nation and a call
to arms,” according to American studies professor Matthew Guterl. Leading scholar of the American
right Kathleen Belew explained on social media that the upside-down flag was
“not just signifying that the election was ‘stolen.’ The inverted flag means
the country has been overthrown (to many, if not most, on the right). This is
a profound act of symbolism and appalling at the home of a Supreme Court
Justice.” For Alito to fly it was an
indication that he was part of the insurrection. In September 2021, Trump loyalist lawyer Sidney
Powell, who was part of the team trying to get the results of the 2020
presidential election overturned, told a right-wing talk show host that while
rioters were attacking the Capitol, she and her team were trying to get an
emergency injunction to prevent Congress from certifying Biden’s
victory. “We were filing a 12th Amendment
constitutional challenge to the process that the Congress was about to use
under the Electoral Act provisions that simply don’t jive [sic] with the 12th
Amendment to the United States Constitution,” she said. “And Justice Alito
was our circuit justice for that.” The plan was thwarted, she said,
when then-House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) reconvened Congress and certified
Biden’s win that night. “[S]he really had to speed up reconvening Congress to
get the vote going before Justice Alito might have issued an injunction to
stop it all, which is what should have happened,” Powell said. Senate Judiciary Committee chair
Dick Durbin (D-IL) said today that “Justice Alito should recuse himself
immediately from cases related to the 2020 election and the January 6th insurrection, including the
question of the former President's immunity in U.S. v. Donald Trump,
which the Supreme Court is currently considering. The Court is in an ethical
crisis of its own making, and Justice Alito and the rest of the Court should
be doing everything in their power to regain public trust.” House minority leader Hakeem
Jeffries (D-NY) also called for Alito to recuse himself from cases involving
the 2020 election and Trump. The potential for Alito to destroy
our country in order to restore Trump to the presidency has continued. Along
with Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, whose wife Ginni was in both
sympathy and communication with the others trying to overturn the results of
the election, as well as the three extremist justices Trump appointed, Alito
has been part of a court that has delayed its decision about whether Trump
can be tried on criminal charges for conspiring to overturn the results of
the 2020 presidential election for so long that Trump likely has won his
gambit to avoid trial before the 2024 election. When Trump claimed last October that
he could not be prosecuted, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is
overseeing his trial, rejected the argument in December. Trump appealed, and
Special Counsel Jack Smith asked the Supreme Court to decide the case immediately.
The Supreme Court refused. Then, after a three-judge panel of a federal
appeals court unanimously affirmed Chutkan’s ruling in a February 2024 decision that legal observers
praised as “thorough and compelling,” Trump appealed to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court then accepted his appeal and scheduled oral arguments for
late April, more than a month after the original trial date set by Judge
Chutkan. The result of all this delay, former
federal prosecutor Ankush Khardori wrote in Politico last
month, is “that a question whose answer was obvious back in December is
unlikely to get that answer from the Supreme Court until its session ends in
June.” “If the Court hadn’t intervened, we would already have a verdict in
the January 6 case,” political strategist
Michael Podhorzer wrote, “and we don’t know whether the Court would have
decided to intervene without Thomas and Alito.” When the story of Alito’s misuse of
the flag broke, the justice explained himself to Fox News Sunday host Shannon Bream. He blamed his wife, Martha-Ann
Alito, for flying the flag, saying she had hung it up in response to a “F***
Trump” sign that was “within 50 feet of where children await the school bus
in Jan[uary] 21.” He said that the neighbors are “very political” and had had
“words” with the Alitos that had upset Mrs. Alito. While Justice Alito blamed his wife
for the flag, he could hardly have missed seeing it above his house.
Former Chicago Tribune editor Mark Jacob wrote: “When I was
an editor at the Chicago Tribune, I would’ve been in trouble if
I’d let my wife put a political bumper sticker on our car. But a Supreme
Court justice’s home can fly a flag of insurrection and he’s still allowed to
rule on whether the head insurrectionist has immunity.” The deputy chief of staff for
Representative Don Beyer (D-VA), who represents the town in which the Alitos
live, noted that the local schools were all remote in January 2021 because of the pandemic. “No
children were waiting for buses,” he noted. Legal analyst Elie Mystal added:
“Sam Alito running to Fox News to explain how…he’s not politically motivated
at all…is an under-appreciated part of this ongoing ethical disaster.” It would be bad enough for a Supreme
Court justice to announce a partisan preference. But, as David Kurtz
wrote this morning at Talking Points Memo,
Alito’s embrace of the insurrectionist flag “was a bold declaration of
affinity for and alignment with the smoldering insurrection led by a
president of the same party that had just been put down but which still
loomed as a threat to civic order, the peaceful transfer of power (which at
that point had still not yet happened), and the rule of law.” The call is coming from inside the
house. —Heather Cox Richardson Notes: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/05/17/dow-jones-average-40000/ https://www.usbank.com/investing/financial-perspectives/market-news/stock-market-under-biden.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/16/us/justice-alito-upside-down-flag.html https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/06/politics/trump-immunity-court-of-appeals/index.html https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/02/supreme-court-takes-up-trump-immunity-appeal/ https://www.scotusblog.com/2023/12/court-wont-hear-trump-immunity-dispute-now/ https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/17/us/upside-down-american-flag-alito.html https://talkingpointsmemo.com/morning-memo/the-insurrectionists-in-our-midst (X): bresreports/status/1791487198182703348 bresreports/status/1791574545754710428 RonFilipkowski/status/1441958869442260994 kathleen_belew/status/1791538901435220063 mike_podhorzer/status/1791568604682391969 ShannonBream/status/1791483561675022624 Fritschner/status/1791530635502239985 |
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