Eric Schmitt Deserves to Be Mocked Forever

If it were up to me, Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt’s monumental face-plant would play in a constant loop on all television networks until he resigned in shame and disgrace. Schmitt fully debased himself during Senate hearings designed to torture former special counsel Jack Smith, and I simply don’t think he should be allowed to have a public life after his incompetent performance.

For the uninitiated: During the hearing on Tuesday, Schmitt alleged that Smith and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis were partners in a grand conspiracy to “get” Donald Trump. Willis’s assistant and paramour Nathan Wade was somehow involved. The “evidence” of this conspiracy was supposedly an Atlanta Hawks basketball game that Schmitt alleged Willis and Smith attended at State Farm Arena in Atlanta on February 3, 2024.

Just to state an obvious fact that has been somewhat overlooked during all of this: State Farm Arena seats over 17,500 people. If Smith and Willis had been at the same game at the same time, it would have meant literally nothing. Lt. Daniel Kaffee had more on Col. Nathan Jessup in A Few Good Men when all he had was “phone calls and footlockers.” It is beyond ridiculous to try to pin an entire illegal conspiracy on a freaking basketball game.

In any event, Smith said he never attended that game. Schmitt smugly declared that Smith had perjured himself. He claimed to have text messages from Smith confirming his planned attendance at the “Hawks” game.

Jack Smith, who in this moment officially became my top choice for attorney general once the Trump era finally ends, slowly figured out what was going on. I posted a picture on my social media of the moment Smith realized that Schmitt was confusing the Atlanta Hawks—a men’s professional basketball team—with the Iowa Hawkeyes, which represent the University of Iowa. (At Above the Law, Joe Patrice shared more Louvre-worthy pictures, mostly of Republicans realizing Schmitt is an idiot.) Smith testified that he attended a women’s basketball game in February 2024, but in Maryland, not Georgia, in order to see Hawkeyes great Caitlin Clark play.

Senator Amy Klobuchar put Schmitt’s mistake into the record, which prompted Schmitt to respond as men of his type often do when they’ve been exposed as frauds: He yelled at her. Schmitt then went on The Charlie Kirk Show (because for some reason that’s still a thing) claiming victory. Despite the unraveling of his entire conspiracy theory in real time on CSPAN, the white-wing media machine continued to push Schmitt’s provably false narrative.

In a normal world, this would be the end of Schmitt’s career. But, of course, it won’t be. It won’t be because lies and incompetence are not deal-breakers for Republican voters.

The Bad and the Ugly

• The Supreme Court term starts on Monday with an important environmental law case that concerns a lawsuit filed by Boulder, Colorado, seeking damages against the fossil fuel industry for climate change. The energy companies will be down a man, because their boy, Justice Samuel Alito, has recused himself from the case (his wife holds stocks in some of the companies, because of course she does). This might look like a “win” for environmentalists. But I think there’s no way Alito would have recused if he weren’t sure his side already had enough votes to win.
• The Supreme Court used the shadow docket to allow Trump to deport people to “third party countries” while it waits to hear the case “on the merits.” That won’t happen until December. 
• This headline from Democracy Docket feels like it should be the epitaph of the 2020 election: “Election denier Kurt Olsen leaves DOJ after failing to find evidence of stolen election.”
• The GOP tried to attach a voter-ID requirement to a bill prohibiting Congress members and their families from engaging in insider trading. Democrats didn’t fall for it, so the Republicans are still allowed to enrich themselves through public corruption.
• Florida is in a state of emergency following a dengue fever outbreak. The combination of Flori-duh, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and climate change is going to kill many people before the sea swallows the state for good.

Inspired Takes

• Ray Epstein and Shannon Porter have a good article in The Nation about the rape charges filed against “Clavicular,” a social-media influencer known for “Looksmaxxing.” They do a great job of explaining how the manosphere dehumanizes women and encourages rape and sexual assault. I have two young boys, and I’m constantly on the lookout for the kind of misogynist messaging that permeates even the safe corners of the Internet we allow them to occupy. But I also feel like I don’t have to tell my kids to avoid using a hammer and needle to create microfractures in their jaw and chin to strengthen their jawline like Clavicular does. I feel like if you have to warn your kids not to do that, you’ve already lost.
• I don’t often get to link to my Nation colleague Sasha Abramsky because his excellent work publishes Friday, after this newsletter is out. But if you missed it last week, please check out his piece on Trump’s Hitler-esque speech to the United Nations.
• Jay Willis does a deep dive on the once proud SCOTUSblog and argues that it has become an absolute joke. This is a difficult story for me. I know and respect many of the people who work at SCOTUSblog. When I can read Amy Howe or Zach Shemtob, unfiltered from conservative justice bootlicking or a $200 paywall, I will. David Lat, who occasionally contributes for them, is literally my former boss. They provide an important service and original reporting. But the broader changes under the new right-wing leadership of Sarah Isgur, which include the seeming absence of any legal commentator of color, is becoming too much to bear.

Worst Argument of the Week

The Supreme Court on Wednesday night gave the green light to Tennessee to execute Christa Pike, who was convicted of brutally murdering her roommate in 1995, when Pike was 18. Now 50, Pike was set to be the first woman executed by the State of Tennessee in over 200 years.

I am devoutly against the death penalty, and the Pike case is as good an example of any as to why. Pike has admitted to committing the crime. But she appealed her case because her defense, at the time, did not enter into evidence her status as a rape survivor and the years she suffered childhood sexual abuse. Pike’s lawyers argued that, if she were given a new trial, a modern jury allowed to hear the new evidence might not return a sentence of death. Certainly, an 18-year-old girl suffering from the trauma of sexual abuse might not have been sentenced to death if the jury had been allowed to consider her circumstances.

Tennessee prosecutors did not repudiate the new evidence—they just said it shouldn’t matter. They said that Pike was merely engaged in a delaying tactic and trying to relitigate a case that is decades old. The six Republican justices agreed and upheld her death sentence over the objection of the three liberal justices (who, I will point out, happen to be women themselves).

With the blessing of the Supreme Court, Pike received two lethal doses of drugs on Wednesday night… but she didn’t die. After the second injection failed to kill her, Pike was taken to an on-site medical facility, where she remains, alive though most likely in agony.

Capital punishment is barbaric. Murderers should, of course, be punished, but killing people accomplishes nothing. The death penalty is applied arbitrarily and inconsistently, with the strength of one’s lawyers having more to do with life or death than the severity of one’s crimes. And we all know who gets the strongest lawyers and who doesn’t. Innocent people are sometimes killed. The death penalty lacks humanity, lacks wisdom, and far too often lacks even basic efficacy, leading to torture before death.

A civilized society would not do this, and certainly would not keep doing this. Every single state-sponsored execution is a stain on our society.

What I Wrote

I was minding my own business, watching young men damage their brains for my amusement, when Donald Trump tried to ruin my Saturday. So I wrote about his illegal campaign ads paid for with my money.

In News Unrelated to the Current Chaos

Apparently, Chief Justice John Roberts’s summer vacations in Maine are not what they used to be. Jodi Kantor spent some time in Roberts’s summer hideout and learned that the justice is increasingly beset by protesters who refuse to allow him a moment’s peace.

To which I say: “Good. More. Harder next time.” A man primarily responsible for the greatest revocation of individual rights in modern US history should not get three months of respite from being reminded of his culpability.

There’s a particular vignette Kantor includes that I’m sure was placed there to soften the hearts of people like me. It comes from Roberts’s daughter, Josephine, who at one point confronted protesters outside the family’s vacation home: “She asked them: What did they hope to accomplish? Had they considered how their actions affected the chief justice’s wife and children?… Her father wasn’t even home, Ms. Roberts told them. He respected that she had her own left-leaning political views, she said, according to the protesters’ written accounts. And he was a wonderful father, she added.”

This humanizing story didn’t work on me. I think that’s because I also try to be a “wonderful father.” I also try to respect my children’s political views, even when they’re different from mine. I also try to be a decent person who keeps to himself and enjoys lazy summer evenings surrounded by friends and family and lobster boils.

You know what I don’t do? Make it my life’s work to take away political power from Black people. I haven’t been on a decades-long crusade to reduce women to second-class status. I don’t deny water to people standing in line to vote or police where trans kids can go to the bathroom. I don’t send immigrants back to be tortured, and I sure as hell don’t condemn rape victims to death.

John Roberts and his court are not my legal and political opponents; they are my moral enemies. They threaten my life and the lives of every person I care about. They have mugged my political and civil rights.

I don’t expect that Josephine can understand that. She’s not Black and, hopefully, will never need a lifesaving abortion. Her father has been a good man to her, and that’s all that matters.

But what her father has done to the rest of us matters too. And conveying that is what the protesters “hope to accomplish.” They hope to tell Roberts that his attacks on the rest of us will not be forgotten.

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