A state study of the economic contributions of undocumented immigrants in 2006 concluded that they contribute to the state’s economy. But Governor Greg Abbott is a leading voice for deporting them en masse. The study has never been updated, for obvious reasons. Demonizing these people, rather than recognizing their contributions, is political gold.

When they are gone, who will plant, tend, and pick the crops? Who will be the landscapers and gardeners? Who will work in the restaurant kitchens? Who will fill the need for construction workers? Who will staff the hotels? Governor Abbott doesn’t care. If he were wise, he would demand the ouster of those who have criminal records and seek a path to citizenship for the vast majority who are hard-working, good people. They build Texas.

Alessandro Serrano of The Texas Tribune wrote:

In 2006, Texas State Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn set out to assess the impact undocumented Texans have on the state economy and found that they contributed more to Texas than they cost the state.

“This is the first time any state has done a comprehensive financial analysis of the impact of undocumented immigrants on a state’s budget and economy,” Strayhorn, a Republican, wrote at the beginning of the report.

It was also the last time Texas did such a study.

The state has not updated Strayhorn’s analysis or conducted a similar review since it was issued 18 years ago. But a series of reports released by nonprofits and universities have confirmed what Strayhorn’s office found.

Those findings contradict notions that undocumented immigrants strain state resources — a common argument made by some state Republican leaders in interviews and lawsuits challenging the federal government’s immigration policies.

“Texans are hardworking and generous people, but the cost of illegal immigration is an unconscionable burden on the taxpayers of our great state,” Attorney General Ken Paxton said in January 2021. “Texas will always welcome those who legally immigrate, but we cannot continue forcing taxpayers to foot the bill for individuals who skirt the law and skip the line.”

The studies also offer hints of the cost that Texans could pay if the incoming Trump administration follows through on its promise to conduct mass deportations of undocumented immigrants across the country.

Strayhorn’s analysis estimated that the absence of 1.4 million undocumented immigrants living in Texas in 2005 would have cost the state about $17.7 billion in gross domestic product, which is a measure of the value of goods and services produced in Texas.

“Blanket mass deportations would be devastating not only for Texas’ economy, but for Texas families,” said Juan Carlos Cerda, Texas state director for the American Business Immigration Coalition, a pro-immigrant group of business leaders. “We’re talking about industries like construction, agriculture, health care, manufacturing that are growing but depend heavily on immigrant labor — and many of these workers have been in the state for decades.”

As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to return to office, Texas state leaders have been eager to help him carry out his pledged immigration crackdown. A major pillar of Trump’s first campaign that lifted him to office in 2016 was a promise to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. This time he vowed mass deportations.

Since his victory, Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham has offered the incoming administration1,400 acres in the Rio Grande Valley that could be used as a staging area for deportations.

Texas is home to about 11% of immigrants in the United States and an estimated 1.6 million undocumented persons — the second-most in the country after California.

When Strayhorn’s office studied their impact on the state’s economy, it found that undocumented Texans at the time produced about $1.6 billion in state revenues collected from taxes and other sources — exceeding the roughly $1.2 billion in state services, like public education and hospital care, they received.

The study also found that local governments “bore the burden” of $1.4 billion in health care and law enforcement costs that were not compensated by the state.

Since then, there have been a handful of studies that reached similar conclusions.

“Beneath all of the sound and fury, however, is one incontrovertible fact: TEXAS NEEDS THE WORKERS!!” stated a 2016 paper published by the Perryman Group, a Waco-based economic and financial analysis firm. The group’s review estimated that undocumented Texans contributed $11.8 billion to the state — after subtracting the $3.1 billion Texas spent on them for health care, education and other public services.

The paper added: “While there are many considerations, the fact is that undocumented workers in Texas generate millions of jobs and billions in tax revenue. Restrictive immigration policy will cause substantial economic and fiscal losses, and optimal policy would be crafted to minimize these dislocations.”

Trump selected a hard-right lawyer, Harmeet K. Dhillon, as assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the Department of Justice. She is the former vice-chair of the California Republican Party. Born in India, she is a practicing Sikh. She was leader of Lawyers for Trump in 2020, which tried to overturn the election.

In standard Trump fashion, he has selected a hard-right lawyer who has never fought for traditional civil rights issues, but will vigorously support his anti-“woke,” anti-DEI agenda.

She has opposed corporate diversity programs, COVID safety measures, and gender-affirming care for transgender people.

In sum, her own priorities are exactly the opposite of the division she was chosen to lead. Under Trump, the civil rights gains of the past 60 years will go dormant or be reversed.

Trump said in a press release:

“Throughout her career, Harmeet has stood up consistently to protect our cherished Civil Liberties, including taking on Big Tech for censoring our Free Speech, representing Christians who were prevented from praying together during COVID, and suing corporations who use woke policies to discriminate against their workers.”

Politico reported:

Dhillon founded a law practice, Dillon Law Group Inc., and a nonprofit firm called the Center for American Liberty. She gained notoriety filing free speech-suits on behalf of conservative clients, including the Berkeley College Republicans and a Google engineer who was fired for his memo blasting the company’s diversity policies. She led multiple lawsuits against the state of California in 2020, challenging Covid-19 policies like stay at home orders and mail-in ballots.

In the lead up to the 2024 election, she led the effort to prevent Colorado from knocking Trump off the ballot.

Democracy Docket reported:

On Dec. 28, 2023, the day after the Colorado Republican Party asked the U.S. Supreme Court to weigh in on the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to disqualify former President Donald Trump from appearing on the state’s primary ballot, Harmeet Dhillon tweeted: “Democrats are conspiring to commit the biggest election interference fraud in world history, right before our eyes, as government officials avert their eyes to the mockery of the constitution and our laws. This is a low point in American history.”

It’s a typical statement for Dhillon: defending Trump, bashing Democrats and alluding to a crime they’re committing that didn’t actually happen. The kind of statement her biggest client, Trump, would tweet. Lately, Dhillon’s been busy with Trump’s effort to remain on the ballot in the 2024 presidential race. The Dhillon Law Group is one of the law firms representing the former president in his legal fights in Maine and Colorado to remain on those state’s ballots. 

Over the past few years, Dhillon — a conservative lawyer and the Republican national committeewoman from California — has become a fixture in Trump’s GOP, appearing on Fox News to rail against Democrats, cancel culture and the “woke” liberal agenda and representing the likes of Tucker Carlson, Andy Ngo and other far-right personalities in headline-seeking free speech lawsuits…

Dhillon and her namesake law firm she founded in 2006 has become one of the leading legal groups working to roll back voting rights across the country. In the past few years, Dhillon — or an attorney from her law firm — has been involved in at least 16 different lawsuits in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Maine, Michigan, North Carolina, Virginia and Washington, D.C. challenging voting rights laws, redistricting, election processes or Trump’s efforts to appear on the ballot in the 2024 election, according to our case database.

And, much like her biggest client, the lawyer who’s representing the former president and asserted herself as a legal crusader to roll back voting rights has her own sordid history of controversy. That includes promoting baseless conspiracy theories, connections to controversial right-wing groups like the Federalist Society and Turning Point USA and questionable financial dealings involving her nonprofit, the Center for American Liberty. 

Democracy Docket reported in a post yesterday that Dhillon has a history of opposing laws to strengthen voting rights:

In the past few years, Dhillon — or an attorney from her law firm — has been involved in more than a dozen lawsuits challenging voting rights laws across the country.

How will she defend voting rights when she opposed them in private practice? Will she defend equal treatment of women and oppose discrimination against racial minorities? Will she defend LGBT persons who are discriminated against?

Don’t be surprised when she doesn’t. You have been warned.

David Pepper writes in his blog about the success of Biden’s economic measures, which produced strong economic growth and a remarkable increase in employment. Trump will inherit this strong economy and will claim that he did it. As Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure legislation churns out huge capital improvements, Trump and his fellow Republicans will attend the ribbon cutting ceremonies, not acknowledging that most Republicans voted against this massive investment in the future. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 passed the House by a vote of 228-206. Only 13 Republicans in the House voted for it. All Democrats except six members of “The Squad” supported it. In the Senate, the vote was 69-30, including 19 Republicans and every Democrat.

Remember: Biden did it. Not Trump.

Pepper writes:

Day 6–December 6, 2024

The American economy in November exceeded expectations, gaining 227,000 jobs, including 26,000 manufacturing jobs. Wages also grew by .4% in November, stronger than expected—lifting the annual increase to 4%.

With only two months to go in the Biden administration, November’s numbers take the total number of jobs under Biden (since January 2021) to more than 16 million, and extending an impressive streak: a net positive of jobs created every month of his tenure. In that time, the nation has also seen the lowest average unemployment of any administration in 50 years.

I share these numbers for several reasons. 

First, remember them. They will be a valuable point of comparison to what happens once Trump takes over and imposes another round of billionaire-inspired trickle-down policies—which never work for anyone but those at the top. Last time, of course, he had already squandered the strong economy he inherited by 2019. Ohio and other states lost jobs between January 2019 and January 2020 (including manufacturing jobs), the first time that happened since the Great Recession and reversing the long period of Obama job growth. (Things only got worse amid Trump’s disastrous mismanagement of COVID.) 

Second, let these job growth numbers challenge you—and all of us—because they also underscore one other reality:

The failure to translate consistent and robust job growth into political traction is a crisis Democrats desperately need to confront, study and correct. After all, it’s Democratic administrations where almost all the jobs are created. (As Clinton reminded us at the convention, it’s 50 million to 1 million).

But amid this dramatic contrast in jobs growth, Americans: 1) still generally give more credit to Republicans and Democrats on how they handle the economy; 2) told pollsters in the middle of 2024 that they believed the country was in a recession (here’s one poll from May, where that number stood at 56%); and 3) voted for the guy and policies that lost jobs as opposed to the people that sparked four years of job growth.

If that’s not a crisis, I don’t know what is.

Needless to say, there are several things going on here.

First, economics. 

Clearly, how people rate the economy goes beyond job growth and GDP. 

Wages, inflation, stability, broader income inequality, health care, debt, unaffordable housing, and other elements all factor in as well. If Americans don’t feel secure economically amid years of steady job growth, that itself is a problem crying out to be addressed. And the challenge presented to Democrats—and all policy makers—is to find and implement policies and create circumstances such that Americans feel more economically secure amid even low unemployment.

Second, politics.

Still, there’s a major political problem as well.

Just look at this graph summing up the facts in a different way:

And to be clear: beyond not creating jobs in all these decades, Republican policies have also not added to economic security in the other ways I list above. In most aspects, their policies (whether attacking unions, or wages, or health care, spending cuts, etc.) have taken things in the wrong direction. That may be a major reason that when Trump left the White House, he did so with an approval/disapproval rating of 34/61, “the lowest on record dating back since scientific polling began.”

But despite all that reality, Biden/Harris lose. And they lose amid exit polls finding that “[t]wo thirds of voters described the economy as bad, and those voters who did went big for Trump.”

And that, my friends, is a political problem. A five-alarm fire of a political problem.

It poses the basic question: How do you have four straight years of monthly job growth, record low unemployment, versus an administration that lost jobs, and ended as the most disapproved administration on record…and lose….on the very issue where you performed so markedly better.

Until we answer that question, we will struggle.

Pepper goes on to discuss how Democrats can win the PR battle next time. Open the link and keep reading.

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Elon Musk and his little sidekick Vivek Ramaswamy are gearing up to redesign the federal government. Musk is the richest man on the planet; Vivek is only a multimillionaire. But together they are smarter than the rest of us.

Who elected them? Not me. Not you. No matter. Their patron Donald Trump has given them a drawing board and told them to have at it. Slash and burn. Cut and kill agencies and programs.

So they (or their PR team) wrote this article for the Wall Street Journal. Note: only Congress can create “departments,” but theirs was created overnight without Congress. Who needs Congress when we have two self-anointed geniuses to reshape our government?

President Trump has asked the two of us to lead a newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to cut the federal government down to size. The entrenched and ever-growing bureaucracy represents an existential threat to our republic, and politicians have abetted it for too long. That’s why we’re doing things differently. We are entrepreneurs, not politicians. We will serve as outside volunteers, not federal officials or employees. Unlike government commissions or advisory committees, we won’t just write reports or cut ribbons. We’ll cut costs.

We are assisting the Trump transition team to identify and hire a lean team of small-government crusaders, including some of the sharpest technical and legal minds in America. This team will work in the new administration closely with the White House Office of Management and Budget. The two of us will advise DOGE at every step to pursue three major kinds of reform: regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions and cost savings. We will focus particularly on driving change through executive action based on existing legislation rather than by passing new laws. Our North Star for reform will be the U.S. Constitution, with a focus on two critical Supreme Court rulings issued during President Biden’s tenure.

In West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency (2022), the justices held that agencies can’t impose regulations dealing with major economic or policy questions unless Congress specifically authorizes them to do so. In Loper Bright v. Raimondo (2024), the court overturned the Chevron doctrine and held that federal courts should no longer defer to federal agencies’ interpretations of the law or their own rulemaking authority. Together, these cases suggest that a plethora of current federal regulations exceed the authority Congress has granted under the law.

DOGE will work with legal experts embedded in government agencies, aided by advanced technology, to apply these rulings to federal regulations enacted by such agencies. DOGE will present this list of regulations to President Trump, who can, by executive action, immediately pause the enforcement of those regulations and initiate the process for review and rescission. This would liberate individuals and businesses from illicit regulations never passed by Congress and stimulate the U.S. economy.

When the president nullifies thousands of such regulations, critics will allege executive overreach. In fact, it will be correcting the executive overreach of thousands of regulations promulgated by administrative fiat that were never authorized by Congress. The president owes lawmaking deference to Congress, not to bureaucrats deep within federal agencies. The use of executive orders to substitute for lawmaking by adding burdensome new rules is a constitutional affront, but the use of executive orders to roll back regulations that wrongly bypassed Congress is legitimate and necessary to comply with the Supreme Court’s recent mandates. And after those regulations are fully rescinded, a future president couldn’t simply flip the switch and revive them but would instead have to ask Congress to do so.

A drastic reduction in federal regulations provides sound industrial logic for mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy. DOGE intends to work with embedded appointees in agencies to identify the minimum number of employees required at an agency for it to perform its constitutionally permissible and statutorily mandated functions. The number of federal employees to cut should be at least proportionate to the number of federal regulations that are nullified: Not only are fewer employees required to enforce fewer regulations, but the agency would produce fewer regulations once its scope of authority is properly limited. Employees whose positions are eliminated deserve to be treated with respect, and DOGE’s goal is to help support their transition into the private sector. The president can use existing laws to give them incentives for early retirement and to make voluntary severance payments to facilitate a graceful exit.

Conventional wisdom holds that statutory civil-service protections stop the president or even his political appointees from firing federal workers. The purpose of these protections is to protect employees from political retaliation. But the statute allows for “reductions in force” that don’t target specific employees. The statute further empowers the president to “prescribe rules governing the competitive service.” That power is broad. Previous presidents have used it to amend the civil service rules by executive order, and the Supreme Court has held—in Franklin v. Massachusetts (1992) and Collins v. Yellen (2021) that they weren’t constrained by the Administrative Procedures Act when they did so. With this authority, Mr. Trump can implement any number of “rules governing the competitive service” that would curtail administrative overgrowth, from large-scale firings to relocation of federal agencies out of the Washington area. Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome: If federal employees don’t want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn’t pay them for the Covid-era privilege of staying home.

Finally, we are focused on delivering cost savings for taxpayers. Skeptics question how much federal spending DOGE can tame through executive action alone. They point to the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, which stops the president from ceasing expenditures authorized by Congress. Mr. Trump has previously suggested this statute is unconstitutional, and we believe the current Supreme Court would likely side with him on this question. But even without relying on that view, DOGE will help end federal overspending by taking aim at the $500 billion plus in annual federal expenditures that are unauthorized by Congress or being used in ways that Congress never intended, from $535 million a year to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and $1.5 billion for grants to international organizations to nearly $300 million to progressive groups like Planned Parenthood.

The federal government’s procurement process is also badly broken. Many federal contracts have gone unexamined for years. Large-scale audits conducted during a temporary suspension of payments would yield significant savings. The Pentagon recently failed its seventh consecutive audit, suggesting that the agency’s leadership has little idea how its annual budget of more than $800 billion is spent. Critics claim that we can’t meaningfully close the federal deficit without taking aim at entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid, which require Congress to shrink. But this deflects attention from the sheer magnitude of waste, fraud and abuse that nearly all taxpayers wish to end—and that DOGE aims to address by identifying pinpoint executive actions that would result in immediate savings for taxpayers.

With a decisive electoral mandate and a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, DOGE has a historic opportunity for structural reductions in the federal government. We are prepared for the onslaught from entrenched interests in Washington. We expect to prevail. Now is the moment for decisive action. Our top goal for DOGE is to eliminate the need for its existence by July 4, 2026—the expiration date we have set for our project. There is no better birthday gift to our nation on its 250th anniversary than to deliver a federal government that would make our Founders proud.

Donald Trump refused to accept the fact that he lost the 2020 election. He tried to overturn the election in federal and state courts and lost more than 60 times, because he had no evidence. He summoned his devoted fans to Washington on January 6 and whipped them into a frenzy, encouraging them to march on the U.S. Capitol to stop the certification of the Presidential vote. (“March peaceably and patriotically…fight like hell or you won’t have a country anymore!”)

Never in American history had a defeated President refused to participate in the orderly transition of power. Yet Trump escaped accountability for the violence he incited.

In Politico Magazine, Ankush Khordori analyzes who is to blame for the failure to hold Donald Trump accountable for trying to defy the Constitution and overturn the election.

Khordori wrote:

We have just witnessed the greatest failure of federal law enforcement in American history.

The reasons for Donald Trump’s reelection are numerous and will be hotly debated in the weeks ahead. But the story of his comeback cannot be told without seriously grappling with how he managed to outrun four criminal cases, including — most notably — the Justice Department’s prosecution over Trump’s alleged effort to overturn the 2020 election.

At the root of it all are the considerable and truly historic legal missteps by the Biden administration and Attorney General Merrick Garland, as well as a series of decisions by Republicans throughout the political and legal systems in recent years that effectively bailed Trump out when the risks for him were greatest.

The two federal criminal cases against him are now dead as a practical matter. Already there is reporting suggesting that special counsel Jack Smith will leave his post and dismiss the pending cases, which is not that surprising considering that Trump pledged to fire him once back in office anyway. The Georgia case, an overhyped and misguided vehicle for post-2020 legal accountability, is going to remain on ice and perhaps get thrown out entirely in the coming years, at least as to Trump (if not his co-defendants). In Manhattan, where Trump was supposed to be sentenced in a matter of weeks after his conviction in the Stormy Daniels hush money case earlier this year, Trump is likely to ask the court to cancel the sentencing date; regardless of the mechanics, there is no reasonable scenario in which Trump serves some period of incarceration while also serving in the White House.

All of this will happen despite the majority of the public’s stated interest in concluding the criminal cases — the federal election subversion case in particular — as well as polling that suggested that Trump’s conviction early this year hurt his standing across the electorate and with independents in particular.

If that seems incongruous, it is not. The most obvious explanation for Trump’s win despite his considerable legal problems is that a critical mass of voters were willing to set aside their concerns about Trump’s alleged misconduct because of their dissatisfaction with the Biden-Harris administration. Fair or not, this was absolutely their right as voters.

But if the system had worked the way it should have, voters would never have faced such a choice. If Trump had actually faced accountability for his alleged crimes, he may not have even appeared on the ballot.

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It is now clearer than ever that Garland was a highly questionable choice to serve as attorney general from the start. From the outset of the Biden presidency, it was readily apparent that Garland had little desire to investigate and potentially prosecute Trump.

The most comprehensive accounts on the matter, from investigative reporting at The Washington Post and The New York Times, strongly indicate that the Jan. 6 committee’s investigation and public hearings in 2022 effectively forced Garland to investigate Trump and eventually to appoint Smith in November of that year — nearly two years after Trump incited the riot at the Capitol.

There are many people — including many Democratic legal pundits — who have continued to defend this delay and may continue to do so, so let me be very clear: Those people are wrong.

It was clear after Trump’s loss in 2020 — even before Jan. 6 — that his conduct warranted serious legal scrutiny by the Justice Department, particularly in the area of potential financial crimes. But that probe, which could and should have been pursued by Biden’s U.S. Attorney and aspiring attorney general in Manhattan, somehow never materialized.

It was also clear — on Jan. 6 itself — that Trump may have committed criminal misconduct after his loss in 2020 that required immediate and serious attention from the Justice Department.

The formation of the Jan. 6 committee in early 2021 did nothing to change the calculus. There too, it was clear from the start that there would still need to be a criminal investigation to deliver any meaningful legal accountability for Trump.

In fact, the warning signs for where this could all end up — where the country finds itself now — were clear by late 2021, less than a year into Biden’s term. The public reporting at the time indicated (correctly, we now know) that there was no real Justice Department investigation into Trump and his inner circle at that point, even though the outlines of a criminal case against Trump — including some of the charges themselves that were eventually brought nearly two years later — were already apparent.

As a result, the Biden administration and the Garland Justice Department were running an extremely obvious risk — namely, that Trump would run for reelection and win, and that any meaningful criminal accountability for his misconduct after 2020 would literally become impossible. That, of course, has now happened. It was all eminently predictable.

Garland’s defenders over the years — including many Democratic lawyers who regularly appear on cable news — claimed that Garland and the department were simply following a standard, “bottom-up” investigative effort. Prosecutors would start with the rioters, on this theory, and then eventually get to Trump.

This never made any sense.

It did not reflect some unwritten playbook for criminal investigations. In fact, in criminal cases involving large and potentially overlapping groups of participants — as well as serious time sensitivity — good prosecutors try to get to the top as quickly as possible.

The Justice Department can — and should — have quickly pursued the rioters and Trump in parallel. The fact that many legal pundits actually defended this gross dereliction of duty — and actually argued that this was the appropriate course — continues to amaze me.

As for Garland, his legacy is now out of his control, and the early returns are not looking good.

Garland is a serious, well-intentioned and complex figure. But given all this, he may go down as one of the worst and most broadly unpopular attorney generals in American history — hated by the anti-Trump part of the country for failing to bring Trump to justice, and hated by the pro-Trump part of the country for pursuing Trump at all. I sincerely hope he provides a first-hand accounting of what happened after he too leaves office next year.

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None of this, however, excuses the Republican political and legal class for their role in all this as well. In fact, Trump could not have pulled it off without a great deal of help from them too.

Start with Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans in 2021. They could — and should — have voted to convict Trump after his second impeachment, which would have prevented him from running again for the presidency. Instead, McConnell and almost every other GOP senator let him off the hook.

Trump then proceeded to execute perhaps the most remarkable political rehabilitation in American history, but which should not have been nearly such a surprise. He never seemed to lose his grip on the party and in fact strengthened it over the course of 2021, as the likes of Kevin McCarthy and others quickly rallied around him.

The Republican presidential primaries also proved, in the end, to be a boon for Trump in his legal fight. By the time they concluded, Trump had been indicted by the Justice Department and local prosecutors in Manhattan and Fulton County. Under the traditional rules of politics, this should have provided incredible fodder for his adversaries and essentially killed his campaign.

Instead, his most prominent primary opponents — his opponents — came to his defense. As the prosecution in Manhattan came into focus, for instance, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis belittled the effort as “some manufactured circus by some Soros-DA.” Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy both said that they would pardon Trump if elected.

It was no surprise, then, that Republican primary voters rallied around Trump. Perhaps it was inevitable, but it was certainly made easier by the fact that Trump’s supposed adversaries were all endorsing his legal defense as well as his false claims about the prosecutions themselves.

Last but most certainly not least: The Republican appointees on the Supreme Court bailed Trump out this year — in the heart of the general election campaign and when it mattered most.

A very large swathe of the public — somewhere around 60 percent according to our polling and others — wanted Trump to stand trial this year in the 2020 election subversion case. Before the Supreme Court weighed in, an even larger portion of Americans — somewhere around 70 percent — rejected the idea that presidents should be immune from prosecution for alleged crimes they committed while in office.

The six Republican appointees — three of whom, of course, were appointed by Trump himself — sided with Trump on both counts.

They first slow-walked Trump’s appeal on immunity grounds this year and then created a new doctrine of criminal immunity for Trump that had no real basis in the law — effectively foreclosing the possibility of a trial before Election Day. It was a gross distortion of the law in apparent service of the Republican appointees’ partisan political objectives.

This was all quite bad all around, but make no mistake: Trump’s reelection caps off the most remarkable reversal of legal fortunes in the history of American law. And besides Trump himself, many political figures in both parties share the blame.