Page 24 - Jonathan Bernstein News Today

This year's primary election season reached its conclusion in three Northeastern states on Tuesday and MAGA Republicans succeeded in New Hampshire. Meanwhile, state Supreme Court justices defend their own role and an intergovernmental feud heats up.

Here's your AM rundown of people, politics and policy in the Sunshine State.

A decision Monday by a federal judge granting former President Donald Trump's request for an independent review of the FBI's seizure of documents at Mar-a-Lago last month has prompted an unusually forceful backlash within the legal community.

From the commentary: It’s still possible that Biden’s unpopularity will swamp everything else once the majority of voters start paying attention. But it’s also possible that for perhaps the first time in modern U.S. history, the party out of power will manage to throw away an election that they stood to win.

From the column: "Any effort to draw conclusions from the current political landscape about what might happen in 2024 is almost certainly premature."

The biggest problem facing the IRS isn’t bad management or lack of resources, but the metastasizing complexity of the tax rules it must administer.

Congress is known for being dysfunctional. Why hasn’t it been over the past two years?

From the commentary: If that’s the case, then we can think of the complex system of multiple points where policy ideas can be initiated or vetoed as a mechanism to force those who choose to advocate for something such as a veterans health bill into having to learn the system, bargain with others with equally legitimate private interests and work out compromises. That is, it’s a system that tries to teach the advantages of a life of public participation.

Prosecutors have to balance the threat to the nation from indicting a former president against the threat of not doing so. Given the facts, it's just not that hard a choice.

The U.S. political system tries to teach the advantages of bargaining with others and working out compromises.