The Daily Parker

First, Andrew Sullivan makes a very good, nuanced point about President Biden pardoning his son:

A consensus of sorts has emerged among historians. Little abuses of power in the Roman system slowly multiplied, as rival factions exploited loopholes, or made minor adjustments, for short-term advantages. And so, for example, the term-limits of consuls — once strictly limited to two years in order to keep power dispersed — were gradually extended after the first breach, which set a precedent for further bigger breaches. An esoteric emergency measure — the provision of a “dictator” to restore order in a crisis for a limited six months — was — surprise! — extended indefinitely under Sulla and then Caesar.

This was always the model for the collapse of liberal democracy in America. Not Weimar, which was a very new republic, buffeted by sanctions and reparations after a calamitous war. Rome, like contemporary America, was well-established in its republican ways, and, after throwing off a monarchy, had practiced them for centuries, before it slid into strongman rule.

And if there were a single constitutional provision that, if abused, could tip the American republic into a post-legal authoritarian system, it would surely be the pardon power.

A pro-active pardon for criminality ordered by the president is, after all, another phrase for the categorical end of the rule of law. It means that a president’s flunkies — or anyone else in presidential favor — can commit any crime in the secure knowledge there will never be punishment. It thereby puts an entire class of people selected by the president effectively above the rule of law. It makes the president a king.

Second, for some reason this story gave me hope and inspiration:

The world’s oldest known wild bird, a 74-year-old Laysan albatross named Wisdom, is expected to welcome another baby chick in the coming months, astonishing scientists who have been tracking her since the Eisenhower administration.

Wisdom laid an egg on Nov. 27 on Midway Atoll, a speck of land in the Pacific Ocean, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said. Researchers said they were optimistic that it will hatch in about two months, making her a mother for the 30th or so time. Her last chick hatched in 2021.

While albatrosses usually mate for life, they will find new mates to breed with if their partner dies. Dr. Plissner believes Wisdom has outlived at least three mates.

Wisdom has outlived Chandler Robbins, the well-known ornithologist who banded her in 1956. He died in 2017.

Two things immediately occurred to me: (a) we're all better when wisdom outlives romance; and (b) my jokes have laid eggs my whole life, but clearly I have a long way to go.

Finally, if you want to relax this winter, NASA has just the ticket. Enjoy.

I believe the precipitating event that led to the OAFPOTUS winning re-election was President Biden's decision to run for re-election—something he promised, in 2020, he would not do.

This evening the news comes that he has pardoned his son Hunter for the crimes he went to jail for, crimes that we can state with some certainty he would not have committed or been charged with had his dad not been president.

[President] Biden said that he came to the decision this weekend, which coincided with the family being together in Nantucket, Massachusetts, for Thanksgiving. Hunter Biden’s attorneys this weekend also mounted a vigorous public defense, releasing a 52-page paper on Saturday titled “The political prosecutions of Hunter Biden.”

“I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice,” Biden said in his statement. “… I hope Americans will understand why a father and a President would come to this decision.”

There's a lot to untangle here, but bottom line, I think this was a bad move on principle. Yes, Hunter Biden was only prosecuted (by an OAFPOTUS-appointed US Attorney) because his dad was president. And yes, the actual offenses he was convicted of were not even in the same league as the offenses the OAFPOTUS pardoned Charles Kushner for in 2020.

But we're going to spend the next four years opposing an unprincipled horse's ass. We have to be better than that. It's literally what we are fighting for.

The intersection of my vacation next week and my group's usual work-from-home schedule means I won't come back to my office for two weeks. Other than saving a few bucks on Metra this month, I'm also getting just a bit more time with Cassie before I leave her for a week.

I've also just finished an invasive refactoring of our product's unit tests, so while those are running I either stare out my window or read all these things:

• Yes, Virginia (and Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and North Carolina), you are much better off than you were four years ago.
• The Illinois Attorney General has filed an environmental suit against Trump Tower for refusing to fix its water-intake system.
• A New York City cop who fought against "courtesy cards" won a $175,000 settlement from the city.
• A developer plans to raze a 175-year-old house in Glencoe, Ill., designed by William Boyington, because we can't have nice things anymore.
• Speaking of not having nice things, after £175m spent and 12 years of construction, the Old Street roundabout in Islington, London, looks...about the same as before.

Finally, the New York Times ran a story in its Travel section Tuesday claiming Marseille has some of the best pizza in Europe. I will research this assertion and report back on the 24th.

President Biden has (finally!) proposed using the power of Article I to de-politicize Article III:

[W]e have had term limits for presidents for nearly 75 years. We should have the same for Supreme Court justices. The United States is the only major constitutional democracy that gives lifetime seats to its high court. Term limits would help ensure that the court’s membership changes with some regularity. That would make timing for court nominations more predictable and less arbitrary. It would reduce the chance that any single presidency radically alters the makeup of the court for generations to come. I support a system in which the president would appoint a justice every two years to spend 18 years in active service on the Supreme Court.

He also proposed a constitutional amendment to ensure presidents can be held criminally liable for acts while in office, and extending the judicial code of conduct to the Supreme Court.

The thing is, it sure looks like Article I gives the legislature the power to enact term limits on the Court without an amendment. And doing so should command bipartisan support, because it ends the Supreme Court sweepstakes that destabilizes the rule of law.

Of course, one of our parties has strayed a bit from believing in the rule of law, which means it will probably be ours who enacts this reform. So we'll just have to win both houses of Congress and the White House in November, right?

Too bad I'm in my downtown office. It's a perfect, sunny day in Chicago. I did spend half an hour outside at lunchtime, and I might take off a little early. But at least for the next hour, I'll be looking through this sealed high-rise window at the kind of day we only get about 25 times a year here.

Elsewhere in the world:

• Former CIA lawyer James Petrila and former CIA spook John Sipher warn that the Supreme Court's decision in Trump v US could undo 50 years of reforms that reined in illegal clandestine activities here and abroad.
• James Fallows reviews President Biden's "quasi-valedictory" address from last night.
• The doddering, elderly, convicted-felon Republican nominee for President seemed to have some difficulties at last night's rally. Maybe he's too old to be president and he should withdraw from the race?
• Helen Lewis, shaking her head sadly at the mess of a human being that is Republican Vice-President nominee JD Vance, hopes the XPOTUS "kept the receipt."
• Bowing to market pressure, Southwest Airlines has announced an end to its chaotic boarding process, and will now assign seats like a grown-up airline.
• London expanded its Ultra-Low-Emissions Zone (ULEZ) to encompass most of the metro area last year, which has resulted in improved air quality equivalent to taking 200,000 cars off the road.
• Unfortunately, this side of the pond, the Illinois Dept of Transportation seems unable to comprehend the opportunity we have to remake DuSable Lake Shore Drive for the future, and instead wants to repeat all the mistakes of the past. All the aldermen along the north lakefront oppose the plan, fortunately.
• The South Works site on the southeast side of Chicago, which used to house one of the world's largest steel mills, will soon become a quantum-computing research facility.

Finally, the various agencies charged with protecting the Democratic National Convention next month have published their plan for a 60-hectare "pedestrian restriction" zone around the United Center and a smaller zone around McCormick Place. "Only people with credentials who 'have a need to be there' – such as delegates, volunteers and other workers – will be allowed within that inner perimeter, said 2024 DNC coordinator Jeff Burnside." Presumably people who live on the Near West Side will be able to get to and from their homes as well.

The President will go on the air tonight at 8pm EDT to explain why he dropped out of the race, and presumably also to endorse Vice President Harris as his successor. This has the XPOTUS so rattled that a campaign lawyer whined to the television networks that the XPOTUS wants equal time so they can whine to everyone. OK, Boomer.

Meanwhile:

• Hillary Clinton lays out a strategy for Harris to do what she couldn't: become our first female president.
• The European Union's climate-tracking directive reported that Sunday was the hottest day in recorded history, with the average surface temperature of the planet cresting 17.09°C.
• Jennifer Rubin (and a few other writers) believe we'd all be better off with a centrist government. (I'm sure if we explain this to the Republican Party carefully and rationally, they'll tone down their extremism right away.)
• Speaking of centrism, Julia Ioffe digs into what a President Harris foreign policy might look like.
• Because of a confluence of events "that Tolstoy could not have made up," Israel has an opportunity this week to change the Middle East for the better—if only they didn't have a troglodyte for a prime minister.
• Pilot Patrick Smith explains turbulence, and why it has suddenly become so newsworthy.

Finally, the Times examines why some people continue to write negotiable orders of withdrawal (i.e., paper checks) despite their obvious inconveniences and vulnerabilities. I haven't written one in about 18 months, and the last time I used one in any capacity was (with no small irony) to set up automatic billing with my HOA.

The last 48 hours have no precedent in US politics. People have only just started to absorb what it means for President Biden to drop out of the election and Vice President Harris to take his place (which she has almost certainly done, based on delegate counts--and the endorsements of both the House Minority Leader and Senate Majority Leader). No polling data released before Thursday will have captured any of that.

I will say, however, that I feel so much better about the election than I did Sunday morning, I believe we will win it. Clearly, I'm not alone.

The election is 15 weeks from today. That's 13 weeks longer than most people pay attention. And given how much has happened in just the last 4 weeks, a lot more can happen before November.

But for the first time in a while, I feel great about our chances.

What a consequential 24 hours we've had.

After President Biden's historical withdrawal from the 2024 election, he endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. So far, dozens of other elected Democrats have followed, including Illinois governor JB Pritzker just this morning.

And because the Vice President is already on the campaign, according to Federal election rules, she can use the entire $96 million campaign fund—and in fact she's already filed with the Federal Election Commission to do so.

In other words, Harris is, without question, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, which means next month's Democratic National Convention in Chicago will be the election kickoff we hoped for and not a repeat of 1968.

Some reactions from the usual suspects:

• Tim Alberta: "This is exactly what the Trump team feared."
• Frank Bruni: "What Joe Biden just did is utterly extraordinary."
• Jonathan Chait: "The cop against the criminal."
• James Fallows: "Joe Biden passes the torch."
• Tom Nichols: "A candidate, not a cult leader."
• Jennifer Rubin: "Biden and his team reach the right decision."
• Author John Scalzi: "Here we go."
• Alex Shephard: "Donald Trump is now the weaker candidate."
• Simon Tisdall, The Guardian UK: "The post-Biden era may be uncertain for the Democrats, but for Trump it will be utterly dismaying."

I should also add Aaron Sorkin's piece from yesterday's Times, published before President Biden's announcement: "How I would script this moment for Biden and the Democrats." But no, we aren't going to nominate Mitt Romney (R-UT).

Meanwhile, the news has put the Republican party in complete disarray as their entire election strategy just evaporated. Over the next few days we will see the convicted-felon rapist XPOTUS back in form as the racist, misogynist wanna-be thug that he is. But the best news of all from yesterday is: the chances we need to care about him for longer than 106 more days just got a lot smaller.

One or two other things happened yesterday, including the last-surviving piping plover chick on Montrose Beach getting a name. I'll have more later today.

The New York Times reports that President Biden has withdrawn from the 2024 election:

After three weeks of often angry refusals to step aside, Mr. Biden finally yielded to a torrent of devastating polls, urgent pleas from Democratic lawmakers and clear signs that donors were no longer willing to pay for him to continue.

Mr. Biden said he will not resign the presidency, and intends to finish out his term even as he leaves it to others to try and defeat Mr. Trump. Over the next several months, the president faces the ongoing war in Ukraine and the increasingly desperate efforts to reach a negotiated deal to end the fighting between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

No sitting American president has dropped out of a race so late in the election cycle. The Democratic National Convention, where Mr. Biden was to have been formally nominated by 3,939 delegates, is scheduled to begin Aug. 19 in Chicago. That leaves less than a month for Democrats to decide who should replace Mr. Biden on the ticket and just under four months for that person to mount a campaign against Mr. Trump.

And now the race is between a demented 78-year-old who has a proven track record of chaos and corruption against a brilliant 59-year-old who has a proven track record of accomplishment and fighting for our rights.

The XPOTUS's campaign must be shitting bricks right now.

Here's the President's statement:

Lots of stories in the last day:

• Are we about to see a historic change at the top of the Democratic ticket?
• What's the connection between vice-president nominee JD Vance (R-OH) and Hulk Hogan?
• Or between JD Vance and Faust?
• Or between JD Vance and your menstruation cycle?
• The City of Chicago has approved tearing down the Eamus Catuli building on Waveland.
• We actually had 25 tornados on Monday. Twenty five.

Finally, comic genius and Chicago native Bob Newhart has died at age 94. He was a national treasure.