jan 6 insurrection
JD Vance—Who Once Called Trump 'America's Hitler'—Tapped for VP
The right-wing Ohio Republican, who opposes abortion rights and backed Trump's effort to overturn the 2020 election, is a former venture capitalist who portrays himself as a champion of the working class.
Former President Donald Trump on Monday chose U.S. Sen. JD Vance as his running mate despite the Ohio Republican formerly describing himself as a "Never Trump guy" and calling the presumptive GOP nominee an "idiot," an "asshole," and "America's Hitler."
Trump—who survived an assassination attempt at a Pennsylvania campaign rally on Saturday—announced his pick on the opening day of the Republican Party's convention in Wisconsin with apost on his Truth social media platform, calling Vance "the person best suited" to be vice president.
"JD honorably served our country in the Marine Corps, graduated from Ohio State University in two years, summa cum laude, and is a Yale Law School graduate, where he was the editor of the Yale Law Journal, and president of the Yale Law Veterans Association," Trump wrote. "JD's book, Hillbilly Elegy, became a major bestseller and movie, as it championed the hardworking men and women of our country."
Vance's selection came two days after the senator took to social media to assert that President Joe Biden's rhetoric—including the assertion that Trump "is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs"—led "directly" to Trump's attempted assassination.
Should he accept his selection, Vance—who turns 40 next month—would be making a stark departure from his previous views on Trump.
"I'm a Never Trump guy," Vance said in a 2016 interview with the late Charlie Rose. "I never liked him."
"My God what an idiot," he said of Trump on social media that same year.
In another message explaining his views on the rise of Trump, Vance wrote that the Republican Party "has itself to blame."
"Trump is the fruit of the party's collective neglect" of working-class Americans, Vance argued. "I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole" like former President Richard Nixon "who wouldn't be that bad... or that he's America's Hitler."
Vance, who claims to be a champion of working people and against elites, is a former venture capitalist whose 2022 Senate campaign was backed by billionaires and who has ties to Big Pharma. He opposes reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights. He has complained about high gas prices while raking in Big Oil campaign contributions. He says that Project 2025—a conservative coalition's agenda for a far-right takeover of the federal government—has some "good ideas" in it. He has fundraised for January 6 insurrectionists. He blamed the Robb Elementary School massacre in Uvalde, Texas on "fatherlessness." He wants to ban pornography.
"As Trump's running mate, Vance will make it his mission to enact Trump's Project 2025 agenda at the expense of American families," Jen O'Malley Dillion, chair of the Biden-Harris reelection campaign, said in response to Trump's pick. "This is someone who supports banning abortion nationwide while criticizing exceptions for rape and incest survivors; railed against the Affordable Care Act, including its protections for millions with preexisting conditions; and has admitted he wouldn't have certified the free and fair election in 2020."
"Billionaires and corporations are literally rooting for JD Vance: They know he and Trump will cut their taxes and send prices skyrocketing for everyone else," she added.
The Democratic National Committee (DNC) responded to Vance's selection in a statement asserting that "this is the most consequential election of our lifetimes, and with Donald Trump's decision today to add JD Vance to the Republican ticket, the stakes of this election just got even higher."
"JD Vance embodies MAGA—with an out-of-touch extreme agenda and plans to help Trump force his Project 2025 agenda on the American people," the DNC continued. "Vance has championed and enabled Trump's worst policies for years—from a national abortion ban, to whitewashing January 6, to railing against Social Security and Medicare."
"Let's be clear: A Trump-Vance ticket would undermine our democracy, our freedoms, and our future," the DNC added.
Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party, said in a statement that "Donald Trump just made clear that his calls for unity were hot air, and that he plans to double-down on his extremist agenda and sow further division."
"JD Vance has called for a national abortion ban and denied the results of the 2020 election," Mitchell added. "He's bankrolled by the same billionaire CEOs who are raising prices while slashing wages for working people. All of us who believe in a future where people can live safely and freely must come together to defeat Trump and Vance in November."
Food & Water Watch Action deputy director Mitch Jones said: "Just like Trump himself, JD Vance is a fossil fuel backer and climate change denier that poses a serious risk to public health and our environment. Among the countless reasons that Trump and Vance shouldn't be elected to lead our country, the duo represent an existential threat to a livable climate future for all Americans and people around the globe."
"For the sake of our planet and the wellbeing of current and future generations, it is critical that sensible people of all stripes come together to ensure that Trump and Vance are defeated in November," he added.
Alliance for Retired Americans executive director Richard Fiesta argued that Vance "locks in place a ticket that endangers the things that retirees care about the most: the protection and expansion of their earned Social Security and Medicare benefits."
"As a member of the U.S. Senate in 2023 and 2024, Sen. Vance earned just a 13% lifetime Pro-Retiree Score in the Alliance for Retired Congressional Americans Voting Record for his votes on important senior issues," Fiesta noted.
"Donald Trump has long acknowledged he would be open to slashing Medicare and Social Security spending in a second term as president, and Sen. Vance also supports cutting those benefits," he added. "The selection of Sen. Vance as his running mate is another major step in that direction."
Ultimately, critics contend, Trump chose Vance for the one thing many say the former president values most: loyalty. Vance has said he would have supported Trump's efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election.
"Vance stands for nothing but gaining power," said former Labor Secretary Robert Reich. "Trump picked him for vice president because he has publicly said he'd do what [former Vice President] Mike Pence refused to do—overturn democracy to place America under MAGA control."
"A Vice President Vance is one more reason why a second Trump term would be far more dangerous than the first," Reich warned.
Ocasio-Cortez Unveils Articles of Impeachment Against Alito, Thomas
"Congress has a legal, moral, and democratic obligation to impeach," said the New York Democrat.
U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Wednesday introduced articles of impeachment against Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, citing "widely documented financial and personal entanglements" that have sparked a full-blown ethics crisis on the nation's highest judicial body.
"The unchecked corruption crisis on the Supreme Court has now spiraled into a constitutional crisis threatening American democracy writ large," Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said in a statement, arguing that their refusal to recuse from key cases in which they had glaring financial and personal conflicts of interest "constitutes a grave threat to American rule of law, the integrity of our democracy, and one of the clearest cases for which the tool of impeachment was designed."
The impeachment articles against Thomas accuse the justice of "failure to disclose financial income, gifts and reimbursements, property interests, liabilities, and transactions, among other information," as well as refusal to recuse from matters concerning his spouse's legal and financial interest in cases before the court.
The Alito articles accuse the justice of "refusal to recuse from cases in which he had a personal bias or prejudice concerning a party in cases before the court" and "failure to disclose financial income, gifts and reimbursements, property interests, liabilities, and transactions, among other information."
"Justice Thomas and Alito's repeated failure over decades to disclose that they received millions of dollars in gifts from individuals with business before the court is explicitly against the law," said the New York Democrat. "And their refusal to recuse from the specific matters and cases before the court in which their benefactors and spouses are implicated represents nothing less than a constitutional crisis. These failures alone would amount to a deep transgression worthy of standard removal in any lower court, and would disqualify any nominee to the highest court from confirmation in the first place."
Today, I introduced articles of impeachment against Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.
Read my full statement: https://t.co/is5EiLXw56 pic.twitter.com/AGGZhuZUm4
— Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@RepAOC) July 10, 2024
Ocasio-Cortez argued that "Congress has a legal, moral, and democratic obligation to impeach," a statement that reflects widespread alarm over the Supreme Court's ruling last week that current and former U.S. presidents are entitled to sweeping immunity for actions that fall within the scope of their official capacities.
Both Thomas and Alito faced—and rejected—calls to recuse from the case, titled Trump v. United States.
Demands for Alito's recusal came in the wake of news that two flags associated with the January 6, 2021 insurrection were flown at his family's properties in Virginia and New Jersey. Alito blamed his wife for the flags and dismissed calls to step away from the case as baseless.
Thomas, for his part, faced calls to recuse due to his wife's role in efforts to overturn President Joe Biden's 2020 election win.
Additionally, Alito and Thomas have been the focus of recent ProPublicareporting detailing the extent to which both justices have accepted vacations and other undisclosed gifts from right-wing billionaires with interests before the court.
In response to the corruption crisis, the Supreme Court late last year unveiled an ethics code with no enforcement mechanisms—further showing to critics that the justices could not be trusted to police themselves.
"Given the court's demonstrated inability to preserve its own legitimate conduct," Ocasio-Cortez said Wednesday, "it is incumbent upon Congress to contain the threat this poses to our democracy and the hundreds of millions of Americans harmed by the crisis of corruption unfurling within the court."
Only one Supreme Court justice has been successfully impeached in U.S. history, and Ocasio-Cortez's articles have no chance of getting through the Republican-controlled House of Representatives.
Advocates nevertheless celebrated the impeachment effort as a necessary step toward reining in the high court.
"The framers of our Constitution called on Congress specifically to hold judicial officers, including Supreme Court justices, accountable for high crimes and misdemeanors that compromise the integrity of the court," Courtney Hostetler, legal director at Free Speech For People, said in a statement. "We're proud to have worked with Rep. Ocasio-Cortez's office to help draft these articles and further the process of restoring the Supreme Court to a nonpartisan branch of the federal government."
'The President Is Now a King Above the Law,' Sotomayor Warns in Chilling Dissent
A legal journalist described the liberal justice's dissent as "one of the most terrified and terrifying pieces of judicial writing I've ever encountered."
In her
dissent against the U.S. Supreme Court's Monday ruling in Trump v. United States, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor listed several acts that she argued the high court's right-wing supermajority has effectively sanctioned as unprosecutable exercises of presidential authority.
"Orders the Navy's SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune," wrote Sotomayor. "Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune."
The high court's 6-3 decision along ideological lines granted former President Donald Trump "absolute immunity" for acts that fall within the scope of the "responsibilities of the executive branch under the Constitution," as Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority.
The new ruling leaves it to the lower courts to determine whether the election-subversion acts for which Trump was charged last year in a case led by Special Counsel Jack Smith were "official" or "unofficial." The Supreme Court took more than four months to decide the case after agreeing to hear it, meaning Trump is unlikely to face trial before the November presidential election.
The Associated Pressnoted that the Supreme Court "further restricted prosecutors by prohibiting them from using any official acts as evidence in trying to prove a president's unofficial actions violated the law"—a move that Sotomayor condemned as "nonsensical."
While Roberts acknowledged that "not everything the president does is official," Sotomayor argued that the majority's expansion of "the concept of core powers beyond any recognizable bounds" means that "a president's use of any official power for any purpose, even the most corrupt, is immune from prosecution."
"Whenever the president wields the enormous power of his office, the majority says, the criminal law (at least presumptively) cannot touch him," wrote Sotomayor. "Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done. The relationship between the president and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the president is now a king above the law."
Sotomayor: Because our Constitution does not shield a former President from answering for criminal and treasonous acts, I dissent. pic.twitter.com/sJjM6iMvk1
— Leah Litman (@LeahLitman) July 1, 2024
Sotomayor expressed "fear for our democracy" as she closed her dissent against the ruling by the Supreme Court's majority, two members of which have recently faced intense scrutiny and calls to resign for accepting lavish gifts from right-wing billionaires.
"Justice Sotomayor's alarmed dissent was signed 'with fear for our democracy,'" U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) said in a statement Monday. "This is a blaring warning to voters of the anti-democratic forces pulling the strings both at the Supreme Court and in the Republican Party."
"Not only does this decision deprive the American people of knowing whether the former president is guilty of attempting to overturn the last election before they head to the polls in November, it also makes it much harder to hold a former president accountable for illegal acts committed while in office," said Whitehouse. "The far-right radicals on the court have essentially made the president a monarch above the law, the Founding Fathers' greatest fear."
Mark Joseph Stern, who covers the U.S. courts for Slate, called Sotomayor's dissent "one of the most terrified and terrifying pieces of judicial writing I've ever encountered."
Pointing to Sotomayor's dissent, U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) wrote Monday that "it is a dark day for democracy when presidents can commit any crime they want in their official capacity, and these justices are bribed for their decisions."
"Coup attempts are not 'official acts,'" she added.
Also writing in dissent was liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who warned that "in the majority's view, while all other citizens of the United States must do their jobs and live their lives within the confines of criminal prohibitions, the president cannot be made to do so; he must sometimes be exempt from the law's dictates depending on the character of his conduct."
"Indeed, the majority holds that the president, unlike anyone else in our country, is comparatively free to engage in criminal acts in furtherance of his official duties," wrote Jackson, who criticized the right-wing majority's "arbitrary and irrational" attempt to distinguish between official and unofficial acts.
"It suggests that the unofficial criminal acts of a president are the only ones worthy of prosecution," the justice continued. "Quite to the contrary, it is when the president commits crimes using his unparalleled official powers that the risks of abuse and autocracy will be most dire."