It’s Time I Told You

Hello, it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕

When I first started as an intern at TPM in the summer of 2014, our publisher Joe Ragazzo thought I was a plant.

The internship I had before TPM was at a news outlet not at all like TPM. I had spent a few months shadowing reporters on Capitol Hill and getting coffee for a guy who, at the time, ran a website that’s actually still alive and unhinged today, though he is less involved now. He became more famous for his next job. I won’t name any names beyond this: my then-boss went on to become a very loud guy on Fox News who, just recently, got fired in rather epic fashion.

I don’t talk about that time in my life publicly because it is a long story and a weird story. But the ways in which I ended up interning for a conservative news website during my junior year of college at a small evangelical Christian school are sort of complex and sort of out of my control and mostly boring. But I’m sharing it with you Weekenderers because you’ve been around for a while! And the story is a crucial part of my TPM journey and why this is the kind of news site and workplace you should consider supporting. (Also, please don’t cancel me.)

I was born and raised in the midwest as a Nazarene preacher’s daughter and when that’s your background, there’s a laundry list of things you question and have existential crises about before even getting into politics. I decided after joining my high school newspaper that I wanted to be a journalist and never really veered off that course. I went to college at said evangelical school where I learned a couple of things, but mostly that I was not an evangelical anymore. I was running the school newspaper by my sophomore year and got into a competitive internship program with the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities – a program based in D.C. that taught journalism courses and set students up with internships almost exclusively at conservative and right-wing news outlets.

A few weeks into my internship at one such outlet, I started reading TPM. I learned about it from Sahil Kapur, a TPM reporter at the time who I met at a networking event. I told him where I was interning, and that I liked my employer’s not-too-serious approach to politics, but didn’t really like the perspective it took on those political stories. He told me I should try reading TPM to get a better perspective, with a better sense of humor. I’ve been reading it every day since.

After barely graduating from my little evangelical school (I almost had my diploma withheld because I filed a FOIA and published a story in the school paper about my school’s Title IX exemption application that allowed them to discriminate against LGBTQ students), I applied for an internship at TPM with my wonky little resume and a long winded, deeply embarrassing essay about how reading TPM had changed my politics and opened my eyes.

For some reason, they hired me.

The rest is sorta history. Outside of a two and a half year stint as an education reporter at my hometown newspaper, I’ve been working for TPM ever since; as a newswriter, a special projects editor and now associate editor, meaning I’m involved in nearly every aspect of our day-to-day operations on the editorial and sometimes publishing side of things. But most importantly, I get to edit (and occasionally write) this newsletter.

In my six-plus years here, I’ve learned a lot and grown a lot. In fact, I learn something new every day from one member of our team or another. From sneaking quick reads of Josh Marshall’s columns in the summer of 2013 while I fetched Tucker Carlson’s coffee (oops, did I share that) to writing my own evening columns in the ed blog today, TPM is sewn into the very fabric of my political ideology. I’m sure many of you feel the same.

If you want to support a workplace that takes chances on fresh faced naive dumbs like myself — whether they’re a plant for the Daily Caller or not! — please consider contributing to the TPM Journalism Fund. We can’t do it without you.

More on other news below. Let’s dig in. 

— Nicole Lafond

Supreme Court Goes Out With A Bang 

The Supreme Court’s term ended Friday with its customary batch of major decisions.

The right-wing majority summarily knocked down President Joe Biden’s student debt plan on a tortured application of the “major questions doctrine,” a made-up theory that lets the Court reject any agency action it decides is too big. Lately, that has been a lot of them.

Justice Elena Kagan, writing the dissent, underscored the danger of the unelected Court’s habitual appropriation of congressional and executive branch power to itself.

“When the Court refuses to respect the full scope of the delegations that Congress makes to the Executive Branch,” she writes, “the Court becomes the arbiter — indeed, the maker — of national policy.”

“That is no proper role for a court,” she adds. “And it is a danger to a democratic order.”

In another six-three decision, the conservatives blessed a would-be wedding website designer’s effort to outrightly exclude same-sex couples from her services.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor penned a lengthy dissent.

“Today, the Court, for the first time in its history, grants a business open to the public a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class,” she writes.

“It is that in a free and democratic society, there can be no social castes,” she adds. “And for that to be true, it must be true in the public market.”

The decisions come the day after the Court ruled against affirmative action, an upset of precedent accompanied by unusually personal intra-bench warfare.

And with that, the Court rests until the fall. 

— Kate Riga

Pizzagate, Ron DeSantis Edition 

Ron DeSantis was in TPM’s turf this week, stopping by a pizzeria next to our NYC office for a slice of coal-fired pie and culture warring. The issue is this: conservative media outlets are running with a false story about New York libs banning wood and coal-fired pizza ovens in the Five Boroughs to protect their precious little climate. DeSantis went to a coal-fired pizza joint (our local Grimaldi’s) to complain, and to tell Fox News’ Jesse Watters what he things about immigration and control-focused libs.

The problem is that it’s all wrong. The pizza ban isn’t a ban; it’s a rule under review which would require all solid fuel-burning restaurant ovens to install scrubbers to remove particulates from the smoke they emit. I spent Friday researching this, speaking with a Grimaldi’s co-owner, a New York pizza historian, and reading through reams of records about the law, the pizza chain, and the Florida man at the center of it all. It’s a unique and utterly typical story about right-wing media contorting people into caricatures, with pizza at the center. 

— Josh Kovensky

Fake Electors, Real Laws

For Trump to attempt to reverse his loss in 2020, he first had to believe it could be done — and convince others to believe that as well. For that, he had a team of attorneys, who created an elaborate, fictive universe in which Trump could win by having his losing slates in the electoral college go through the steps they would have taken had he won. Thereby, in this world, they would have “preserved their votes” for Congress to take up later on, awarding the election to Trump.

The problem for Trump, his attorneys, and the fake electors is: they did the thing in our world, where perjury, creating fake government documents, and lying to Congress and federal agencies are crimes. Prosecutors with Special Counsel Jack Smith gave two Nevada fake electors immunity in exchange for testimony. Emails I unearthed show Trump attorneys closely coordinating the work of the fake electors, opening up interesting questions about where prosecutors may be looking.

— Josh Kovensky

“There may have been a time — 50 years ago — when we needed to affirmatively take steps to correct long term racial bias in institutions of higher education. But I can tell you, as a father of three college graduates, those days are long over.”

That’s former Vice President and 2024 contender Mike Pence mansplaining why we don’t need affirmative action anymore.

Who really needs the Supreme Court anyway, when we have a white man who used to be the governor of Indiana telling all the students of color out there that affirmative action is no longer needed because his three, privileged white kids managed to get into college — elite non-ivies at that. 

— Emine Yücel