covid diary: day 120

"It's too hot for this crap."

The Supreme Court ruled today, in two different cases, that no president is above the law. One of the cases, Trump v. Vance, was about whether Trump has to produce financial records in a state-level prosecution looking into his hush money payments to women he had affairs with (you'll remember that this exact thing is why Trump's lawyer Michael Cohen is in prison right now). SCOTUS said, by a margin of 7-2, that the president is not above the law and deserves no special circumstances and must answer a subpoena like any other citizen, but then sent the case back down to the lower courts to give Trump the opportunity to argue against the subpoena on any grounds that a normal (non-president) citizen could argue. So it's tied up for a while, and legal experts seem to be pretty evenly split on whether documents might be produced before the election or not.

The second case, Trump v. Mazars, involved the question of whether Congress can compel the president to produce documents. Again, in a 7-2 ruling, SCOTUS said that Congress can compel such documents if they meet certain criteria laid out by the court. This one was a little more mixed in that SCOTUS rejected the standard of absolute immunity put forth by the president, but also rejected the much lower standard put forth by the House. So this is going back to the lower courts too, and will take much longer than the Vance case to be resolved (if it ever is).

So it's great that he lost (and greater that the court affirmed that no person is above the law), but also, in losing, he gets to appeal and run out the clock and keep hiding whatever it is he's so eager to protect in those documents. 

Also today, the washer broke in mid-cycle. Mike spent the whole evening trying to fix it, but the end result is that we've got a part on order (not arriving until next week) and a basket full of soaking wet, half-washed clothes. And no guarantee that the part Mike ordered will fix the problem, so it might be a while before we have clean laundry again. Or I might pretend to be in college and take my laundry back home to Mom. Anything can happen, folks. It's an unpredictable world.

Nationwide cases: 3,118,168. Deaths: 133,291.