Letters from an American - May 17, 2024

Episode Date: May 18, 2024

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May 17, 2024 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. first time in history, ending the day at 40,003.59. This extraordinary performance means that investors have confidence the Federal Reserve will get inflation under control without throwing the country into a recession. It's 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 have had since Biden took office. Yesterday evening, Jody Cantor 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 Gutterill. Leading scholar of the American right Kathleen Ballou 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 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, a Democrat of California, reconvened Congress and certified Biden's win that night. She 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, a Democrat of Illinois, said today that Justice Alito should recuse himself immediately from cases related to the 2020 election and the January 6 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, a Democrat of New York,

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 Ginny 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. 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 Chutkin. The result of all this delay, former federal prosecutor Ankush Kordori 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. intervene, we would already have a verdict in the January 6th 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 January 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 have 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, Representative Don Beyer, a Democrat of Virginia, 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 Ellie Mestal added, Sam Alito running to Fox News to explain how he's not politically motivated at all is an underappreciated part of this ongoing ethical disaster.

is an underappreciated 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. Letters from an American was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dedham, Massachusetts.

Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss. This is your world.