A Sense of Doubt blog post #3497 - Kamala Harris Gets TKO on Trump in Presidential Debate
In Trump world, he won.
Weak.
 September 11, 2024 |
Good morning. We’re covering the Harris-Trump debate — as well as Congress, California wildfires and marriage tuneups.
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| Kamala Harris and Donald Trump Doug Mills/The New York Times |
A good night for Harris
Debating has long been a Kamala Harris strength. It resembles courtroom argument, a core part of her career as a prosecutor. A debate helped her win her first statewide race in California, 14 years ago. In her only vice-presidential debate four years ago with Mike Pence, polls showed that she won.
And she certainly seemed to win last night’s debate with Donald Trump.
She was calm and forceful and repeatedly baited Trump into looking angry. As Trump told lies — about Obamacare, inflation, crime, immigrants eating household pets and more — she smiled, shook her head and then called him on the lies. She often looked directly at him or the camera; he seemed unwilling to look at her and looked mostly at the moderators.
During the debate, prediction markets shifted a few points toward Harris. Many political analysts, including conservatives, also judged Harris to be the winner — two-and-a-half months after many of those same analysts said Trump had trounced President Biden in their debate:
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Will it matter?
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| A debate watch party in Arizona. Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times |
There are a couple of important caveats.
First, Harris didn’t have a perfect night. She often ignored the questions from ABC’s moderators — like the opening question about whether Americans are better off than four years ago, as well as questions about her changed positions on fracking and other subjects. She recited her talking points instead.
She made a few false or misleading statements (though many fewer than Trump), including about the unemployment rate when he left office. She described her policies in ways that weren’t always easy to understand. In Trump’s closing statement, he parried her many promises by pointing out that she has been vice president for three-and-a-half years and asked, “Why hasn’t she done it?”
Second, it is uncertain how much Harris’s strong overall performance will matter. “Hillary Clinton also won the debates against Donald Trump,” Julia Ioffe of Puck News noted. The same prediction markets that shifted toward Harris last night continue to show the election as a tossup. The debate’s impact will become more evident as new polls emerge in coming days. But Harris’s campaign seemed very pleased with how last night went.
More on tactics
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| During the debate. The ABC News Presidential Debate |
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More on issues
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Commentary
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The presidential debate |
Who won the Harris-Trump debate? We asked swing-state voters. (The Washington Post)
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ANALYSIS Fact-checking 55 suspect claims, mostly Trump’s, in debate with Harris |
ANALYSIS Four takeaways: Harris made it all about Trump |
ANALYSIS Does it matter who won the debate in a race this close? |
Democrats cheer — and Republicans dismiss — Taylor Swift’s Harris endorsement
‘I’m talking now’: Most memorable lines from the Trump-Harris debate |
How Harris and Trump reacted to each other during the debate, in GIFs |
Opinion | Bad news for Trump: Harris is not Biden |
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| Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Jim Vondruska,Dave Sanders for The New York Times |
 | THE STAKES |
Presidential power
 | I cover legal policy and the Justice Department. |
Nearly every president has pushed the limits of the office’s power by taking actions that some legal scholars consider an overreach — in directing a military strike, issuing an executive order or filling a job without Congress’s approval. Checks and balances can frustrate a leader who wants to get stuff done. And in an era of polarized politics that can paralyze Congress, presidents often believe that their success hinges on unilateral action.
These pressures apply to both Republicans and Democrats. But that does not mean Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are equivalent. Harris hasn’t said anything to suggest she would expand presidential power as an end in itself.
Trump, by contrast, wants to concentrate more power in the White House and advertises his authoritarian impulses. (Read about his plans.) At Tuesday’s debate, he praised Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, who has eroded democracy in his country, describing him as “one of the most respected men — they call him a strong man. He’s a tough person. Smart.”
The Morning is running a series in which journalists explain how the government might work under Harris or under Trump. In this installment, I’ll discuss each candidate’s approach to the separation of powers and the rule of law. I’ve been writing about executive power for two decades, and this cycle I’ve been tracking such issues closely again.
Trump’s radical vision
Trump busted many norms while in office, like when he invoked emergency power to spend more taxpayer funds than Congress approved for a border wall. If he wins again, as my colleagues and I have reported in a series about the policy stakes of his campaign, he has vowed to go farther.
Trump says he’d make it easier to fire tens of thousands of civil servants and replace them with loyalists. (He issued an executive order laying the groundwork late in his term, but President Biden rescinded it; Trump has said he would reissue it.) He also says he’d bring independent agencies under White House authority and revive the tactic, outlawed in the 1970s, of refusing to spend money Congress has appropriated for programs he dislikes.
Building on how Trump pressured prosecutors to scrutinize his foes during his first term, the former president and his allies signal that they’d end a post-Watergate notion: that the Justice Department has investigative independence from the White House. He has threatened to order the prosecution of perceived adversaries, including Biden, election workers, a tech giant, political operatives and lawyers and donors supporting Harris.
Trump also wants to use American troops on domestic soil to enforce the law. And he is planning a crackdown on illegal immigration with millions of deportations a year — far higher than the several hundred thousand per year that recent administrations, including his own, managed. To do it, his chief immigration adviser has said, the government would carry out sweeping raids and construct giant detention camps near the border in Texas.
Trump is full of bluster. But there are reasons to believe that a second Trump term would carry out more of his ideas than the first. While he was sometimes constrained last time by judges or his own political appointees, he pushed courts rightward by the end of his term. And his advisers plan to hire only true believers in a second term.
Ordinary boundary-pushing
Unlike Trump, Harris is signaling that she would be a normal president. That would mean usually adhering to a consensus understanding of executive power. But I wouldn’t be surprised if she occasionally pushed the boundaries of presidential authority — albeit within ordinary parameters.
Presidents of both parties have stretched executive powers when they haven’t been able to get new bills through Congress — think of Barack Obama’s attempts to shield certain undocumented immigrants from deportation or Biden’s attempts to forgive student debt. They have also claimed sweeping and disputed power to use military force without congressional authorization — like when Obama ordered airstrikes on Libya and when Trump directed the military to attack Syrian forces.
Notably, when Harris sought the Democratic nomination in 2019, she wrote for an executive power survey I conduct every four years that “the president’s top priority is to keep America secure, and I won’t hesitate to do what it takes to protect our country.” Still, she also said presidents must obey surveillance and anti-torture laws that George W. Bush claimed the power to override — as well as a detainee transfer statute that Obama claimed he could bypass.
If Republicans in Congress blocked Harris’s nominees and legislative agenda, it is likely she would take more aggressive unilateral actions. Those typically lead to accusations of overreach and legal challenges. The growth of executive power has been a story of bipartisan aggrandizement: Presidents take a disputed action, pushing the limits of their legitimate authority; their successors build on that precedent. But based on what Trump has said he is planning to do, I would expect Harris to accelerate that trend much less than Trump.
More on the debate
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More on the election
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| In Lower Manhattan. Dave Sanders for The New York Times |
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THINGS TO READ
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/11/opinion/harris-trump-debate-winner-loser.html
https://ew.com/taylor-swift-endorses-kamala-harris-president-childless-cat-lady-8710068
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2409.14 - 10:10
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- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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