Justice Elena Kagan proposed Chief Justice John Roberts appoint a panel of judges to enforce the US Supreme Court’s code of conduct.

While speaking Thursday at a judicial conference in Sacramento, California, Kagan said she trusts Roberts and if he creates “some sort of committee of highly respected judges with a great deal of experience and a reputation for fairness,” that seems like a good solution.

The court has been dogged by controversy following reports of lavish vacations, private jet flights, and other gifts received by Justice Clarence Thomas. The justices adopted a code of conduct for the first time in November in response to growing demands for transparency and accountability, but it’s been criticized for lacking an enforcement mechanism.

Kagan, in response to a moderator’s question at the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit’s annual judicial conference, acknowledged there are difficulties in deciding who should enforce an ethics code for the justices.

“But I feel as though we, however hard it is, that we could and should try to figure out some mechanism for doing this,” she said.

During the Republican National Convention last week, each night had its own theme, starting with “Make America Wealthy Again” on the party gathering’s first day. As it turns out, however, voters won’t have to put the White House in the GOP’s hands to achieve such a goal. NBC News reported:

Economic activity in the U.S. was considerably stronger than expected during the second quarter, according to an initial estimate Thursday from the Commerce Department. Real gross domestic product, a measure of all the goods and services produced during the April-through-June period, increased at a 2.8% annualized pace adjusted for seasonality and inflation. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been looking for growth of 2.1% following a 1.4% increase in the first quarter.

The latest data is roughly in line with the kind of quarterly GDP reports we saw across much of Donald Trump’s pre-pandemic presidency — when Republicans said Americans saw the greatest economy in the history of humanity.

In fact, all of this comes against a backdrop of the 2024 election cycle, as the former president and his allies try to convince the public that the economy is dreadful, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding......

A Washington Post report added, “The United States is the only advanced economy growing significantly faster than the bank anticipated at the start of the year.”

Around the same time, The Atlantic’s Rogé Karma described the U.S. economy as “the envy of the world.”

If the United States’ economy were an athlete, right now it would be peak LeBron James. If it were a pop star, it would be peak Taylor Swift. Four years ago, the pandemic temporarily brought much of the world economy to a halt. Since then, America’s economic performance has left other countries in the dust and even broken some of its own records. ... There are many ways to define a good economy. America is in tremendous shape according to just about any of them.

Four years ago, Trump told supporters that Democratic policies would “unleash an economic disaster of epic proportions” and force the country “into depression.” Everything he said and predicted was wrong — and the former president hasn’t even tried to explain why his predictions were so hilariously misplaced

In the aftermath of the assassination attempt targeting Donald Trump, many leading Republicans not only blamed Democrats, GOP officials pointed specifically to one Democratic talking point: Describing the former president as a threat to democracy, Republicans said, was simply beyond the pale.

The GOP nominee is apparently thinking along the same lines. Politico reported:

Former President Donald Trump suggested Wednesday that Democrats calling him a “threat to democracy” could have led a 20-year-old gunman to try to assassinate him, though the FBI has not unveiled a motive behind the July 13 shooting. “Such a distressed sick world but you know what could be caused when they call you a threat to democracy,” Trump told a crowd of supporters in North Carolina.

It might seem like a simple, albeit cheap, line at a campaign rally, but the closer one looks at the rhetoric, the more important it becomes......

Complicating matters, the Republican candidate might not like the Democratic line, but it’s rooted in fact. As we’ve discussed, this is a White House hopeful who has repeatedly raised the prospect of creating a temporary American “dictatorship,” and who has talked about “terminating” parts of the Constitution that stand in the way of his ambitions.

He’s running on a platform of rejecting election results he doesn’t like, militarized camps, pardons for politically aligned criminals, friendships with foreign authoritarians he holds in high regard, and mass firings of federal bureaucrats who are deemed insufficiently loyal to Trump’s ideological ambitions.

If Trump doesn’t want to be accused of threatening democracy, then he might want to try curtailing his threats to democracy.

Finally, it’s hard not to wonder what Republicans’ internal polling has to say on this. The scope of the pushback against this specific talking point suggests it might be potent.

Seven years ago next week, Christopher Wray, Donald Trump’s choice to lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was sworn into office. After the 2020 elections, President Joe Biden had an opportunity to replace Wray with his own FBI director, but the Democrat said he was comfortable leaving Wray in place......

The FBI chief testified yesterday before the House Judiciary Committee and offered new insights into the investigation of the recent assassination attempt targeting Trump. But as part of the hearing, Republicans pressed Wray on whether he’d seen a decline in Biden’s health. He said he had not.

As NBC News reported, the comments were not well received by the former president who appointed him.

Trump called for FBI Director Christopher Wray’s resignation, pointing to Wray’s denial in testimony before Congress today that he has seen Biden experiencing cognitive issues. Trump said Wray should resign for “lying to Congress,” arguing that “anybody can see that Joe Biden is cognitively and physically challenged, and if you can’t see that, you sure as hell can’t be running the FBI.”

In an online statement published to his social media platform, the Republican candidate specifically called on Wray to “resign immediately,” adding, “Wray has to resign, and NOW, for LYING TO CONGRESS!”......

During the same hearing, for example, Wray said there’s some uncertainly surrounding the precise nature of Trump’s injury from the shooting in Pennsylvania.
https://x.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1816274358761095670

“I think with respect to former President Trump, there’s some question about whether or not it’s a bullet or shrapnel that hit his ear,” Wray told lawmakers, adding, “There’s a whole lot of work underway and still a lot of work to do. The shooter may be deceased, but the FBI’s investigation is very much ongoing.”

This, coupled with the fact that the former president and his team have been reluctant to share even basic details about his medical care after the shooting, is generating new questions on Capitol Hill.

For example, Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman of New York — a member of the House Judiciary Committee and a former prosecutor — wrote online this morning, “We must see Donald Trump’s official medical records.”

We probably haven’t heard the last of this.

All of this has the effect of alerting the public to the right-wing agenda’s existence — which again is what Democrats are hoping for — while simultaneously reminding voters that the Project 2025 is so outlandish that even Trump doesn’t want to be associated with it.

But there’s a related problem: The more Trump tries to distance himself from Project 2025, the more we’re confronted with evidence pointing in the opposite direction. A Media Matters report explained:

Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, recently named as Donald Trump’s running mate, wrote the foreword to Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts’ forthcoming book, Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, the proceeds for which will partly benefit Heritage. The Heritage Foundation is leading Project 2025, a far-right staffing and policy initiative backed by more than 100 conservative groups that seeks to remake the federal government into a vehicle for Trumpism and would severely inhibit protections around reproductive rights, LGBTQ and civil rights, and immigration, as well as climate change efforts.

Well, that certainly won’t help.

Complicating matters, a recent CNN report explained that “at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration had a hand in Project 2025 ... including more than half of the people listed as authors, editors and contributors to ‘Mandate for Leadership,’ the project’s extensive manifesto for overhauling the executive branch.”

What’s more, NBC News tracked down a 2022 speech in which Trump spoke at a Heritage Foundation event and said, “This is a great group and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do ... when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America.”

In case that weren’t quite enough, Media Matters also discovered that Paul Dans, a former Trump administration official and the director of Project 2025, told a right-wing podcast last year that his group has a “great” relationship with the former president and that “Trump’s very bought in with this.”

I can appreciate why Trump doesn’t want to be associated with Project 2025 — most voters would find the agenda to be almost cartoonishly extreme — but his denials keep running up against reality.

AUSTIN, Texas — Texas Democrats claim Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. "failed miserably" to get on the state's ballot.

In May, Kennedy posted photos on social media of his team turning in 245,572 signatures at the Texas Secretary of State's Office to get on the ballot.

However, in a letter obtained by KVUE that was sent to Secretary Jane Nelson's office, the Texas Democratic Party's voter protection director claimed Kennedy "failed to submit the statutorily required number of signatures to qualify for the November 2024 General Election ballot."

An internal review of the signatures by Democrats allegedly found that 69% of the first 245,000 signatures were invalid. Democrats have also challenged Kennedy's quest to appear on ballots in Delaware, Georgia, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey and New York.

AUSTIN, Texas — Texas Democrats claim Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. "failed miserably" to get on the state's ballot.

In May, Kennedy posted photos on social media of his team turning in 245,572 signatures at the Texas Secretary of State's Office to get on the ballot.

However, in a letter obtained by KVUE that was sent to Secretary Jane Nelson's office, the Texas Democratic Party's voter protection director claimed Kennedy "failed to submit the statutorily required number of signatures to qualify for the November 2024 General Election ballot."

An internal review of the signatures by Democrats allegedly found that 69% of the first 245,000 signatures were invalid. Democrats have also challenged Kennedy's quest to appear on ballots in Delaware, Georgia, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey and New York.

Vice President Kamala Harris did not come to play — she came to decimate.

Her campaign made this plain Thursday morning in an email responding to former President Donald Trump's recent television interview entitled "Statement on a 78-Year-Old Criminal's Fox News Appearance."

"After watching Fox News this morning we only have one question," the Harris campaign wrote. "Is Donald Trump ok?"

Harris' campaign then provides a list of takeaways that suggest their answer would be in the negative, noting Trump praised the Project 2025 platform he has repeatedly tried to distance himself from and praised abortion bans.

"Trump is flustered and lashing out," the Harris campaign writes. "When Trump wasn't lying, he was making threats."

Another bullet point earned an "LOL" from Huffington Post reporter Jennifer Bendery: "Trump is old and quite weird?