When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on Friday, the question on millions of people’s minds was not a matter of if Mitch McConnell would attempt to shove through a nominee before the election, but just how shameless he would be in doing so. And it turned out the answer was: pretty freaking shameless! Before RBG’s body was even cold, the Senate majority leader, who blocked a vote on Merrick Garland about nine months before the 2016 election, said he would quickly move to confirm Donald Trump’s nominee to replace Ginsburg. Rewriting the arbitrary rule he came up with to block Barack Obama’s replacement for Antonin Scalia, the senator from Kentucky attempted to cast his reversal not as wildly hypocritical—which of course it is—but as the fulfillment of a promise to the American people. “In the last midterm election before Justice Scalia’s death in 2016,” McConnell wrote in a statement, “Americans elected a Republican Senate majority because we pledged to check and balance the last days of a lame-duck president’s term. We kept our promise. Since the 1880s, no Senate has confirmed an opposite-party president’s Supreme Court nominee in a presidential election year. By contrast, Americans reelected our majority in 2016 and expanded it in 2018 because we pledged to work with President Trump and support his agenda, particularly his outstanding appointments to the federal judiciary. Once again, we will keep our promise.”

Rewind to 2016 and that’s not what McConnell said at the time—only that it was necessary to delay Garland’s nomination because voters should get to decide, therefore it would only be fair to wait until the next president was installed. (Perhaps the majority leader is referring to the unspoken promise he made, which was to fuck over Democrats from here to eternity and bury small d democracy in a shallow grave. In that case, yeah, he kept his promise!) If the whole thing wasn’t so evil it would almost be impressive. “No, no, we didn’t say you couldn’t put someone on the Supreme Court in an election year. What we said was you couldn’t do it when Mercury was in retrograde, there was a full moon the night the departing justice died, and I was just sitting down to a heaping bowl of Fiber One when I got the call. Those conditions are different this time, so it’s okay.”

On Monday, apparently to give the nation a preview of the stomach-churning hypocrisy he’ll be engaging in over the next 42 days (and, obviously, for the rest of his time in Congress), McConnell took to the floor of the Senate to declare that while he is leading the party trying to steal a second seat on the Supreme Court, it’s the Democrats who are engaging in the kinds of underhanded maneuvers that he just won’t stand for.

“President Trump’s nominee for this vacancy will receive a vote on the floor of the Senate,” McConnell said, his neck pouch quivering with faux outrage. “Now already some of the same individuals who tried every conceivable dirty trick to obstruct Justice [Neil] Gorsuch and Justice [Brett] Kavanaugh are lining up, lining up to proclaim the third time will be the charm. The American people are about to witness an astonishing parade of misrepresentations about the past, misstatements about the present, and more threats against our institutions from the same people—the same people—who’ve already been saying for months—well before this—that they want to pack the court.”

On the matter of Gorsuch, McConnell will have to forgive people if they were still just a touch bitter about his decision to block Obama’s nominee almost 300 days before another president took office. As for Kavanaugh, it’s not actually a dirty trick to vigorously oppose a man credibly accused of sexual assault, who suggested the investigation into his conduct was a Democratic conspiracy, for a lifetime appointment on the highest court in the country. Meanwhile, expanding the Supreme Court has been floated as a reaction to Republicans’ highjacking of SCOTUS. As for threats against our institutions? They’re definitely coming fast and furiously, but not from the people McConnell suspects!

If you would like to receive the Levin Report in your inbox daily, click here to subscribe.

Trump gives himself a 10/10 on pandemic response, two enthusiastic thumbs-up

Well, this doesn’t sound shady at all

Surely there’s a reasonable explanation here and it’s not that the president is again trying to downplay the threat of COVID-19 by strong-arming federal agencies. Per the Wall Street Journal:

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention pulled new guidelines acknowledging the new coronavirus could be transmitted by tiny particles that linger in the air, saying a draft version of proposed changes was posted in error on the agency’s website. For months, the CDC said the new coronavirus is primarily transmitted between people in close contact through droplets that can land in the mouths or noses of people nearby. On Friday, however, it added that COVID-19 can also be spread by “droplets or small particles, such as those in aerosols” that can be inhaled and cause infection. Then abruptly on Monday, the CDC reversed course and removed the additions.

The agency last week walked back a controversial recommendation that close contacts of COVID-19 patients don’t need to get tested if they don’t have symptoms. The latest change, aerosol experts say, could further confuse the debate around how COVID-19 is spread…. “The tide had turned toward science when the CDC” acknowledged aerosol transmission, said Joseph Allen, a health scientist and director of Harvard University’s Healthy Buildings program, which studies how buildings affect human health. “It was a watershed moment where people would believe this. To backtrack instantly is devastating,” he said.

In an email, a spokesman for the CDC told the Journal that “a draft version of proposed changes to these recommendations was posted in error,” before the CDC could complete its updated recommendations regarding airborne transmission of the virus. “Once this process has been completed, the update language will be posted,” he said. And sure, that could very well be the explanation. Except, we already know COVID-19 is airborne, as the president admitted himself in a call with Bob Woodward. We also know the administration has tried to minimize the risks of the virus and that people who’ve contradicted him are silenced. So who knows what’s happened here!

Surprise: Trump doesn’t think he should be investigated for tax fraud

New York prosecutors believe otherwise:

The Manhattan district attorney’s office, which has been locked in a yearlong legal battle with President Trump over obtaining his tax returns, suggested for the first time in a court filing on Monday that it had grounds to investigate him and his businesses for tax fraud. The filing by the office of the district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., offered rare insight into the office’s investigation of the president and his business dealings, which began more than two years ago. Mr. Vance, a Democrat, has never revealed the scope of his office’s criminal inquiry, citing grand jury secrecy. The investigation has been stalled by the fight over a subpoena that the office issued in August 2019 for eight years of the president’s tax returns. Lawyers for Mr. Trump have said the subpoena should be blocked, calling it “wildly overbroad” and politically motivated.

Mr. Vance responded to that argument in a carefully worded new filing that did not directly accuse Mr. Trump or any of his businesses or associates of wrongdoing and took pains to avoid disclosing details about the inquiry. However, prosecutors listed news reports and public testimony that alleged misconduct by Mr. Trump and his businesses. The reports, prosecutors wrote, would justify a grand jury inquiry into a range of possible crimes, including tax and insurance fraud and falsification of business records. It was the first time the office had suggested tax fraud might be among the possible areas of investigation.

“Even if the grand jury were testing the truth of public allegations alone, such reports, taken together, fully justify the scope of the grand jury subpoena at issue in this case,” prosecutors wrote in the filing. A lawyer for Trump declined the New York Times’ request for comment. While the DA office could, one day, in theory obtain Trump’s tax returns, grand jury secrecy rules mean it would be unlikely they would become public unless he was charged and they were introduced as evidence. Or maybe he’ll make good on his promise to release them after that routine audit, wink, wink.

Elsewhere!

Trump Zeroes In on Coney Barrett as Likely Supreme Court Pick (Bloomberg)

A Young Kennedy, in Kushnerland, Turned Whistle-Blower (The New Yorker)

Bank stocks fall after documents allege $2 trillion in criminally linked transactions (NYP)

Stock sell-off accelerates and is expected to get worse before it gets better (CNBC)

The N95 shortage America can’t seem to fix (Washington Post)

Morgan Stanley Warns Nasdaq 100 May Fall More Than 20% From Peak (Bloomberg)

Kelly Loeffler Ad Boasts She’s More Conservative Than Attila the Hun (Intelligencer)

Official: Toilet display mocking mail-in voting is a crime (AP)

Annual dog surfing contest in California goes virtual (UPI)

— Melania Trump Sounds a Lot Like Her Husband in Stephanie Winston Wolkoff’s New Book
— Jesmyn Ward Writes Through Grief Amid Protests and Pandemic
— How Trump’s Handling of White Supremacists Could Create a Homegrown Crisis
— Ashley Etienne May Be Biden’s Deadliest Weapon Against Trump
— What’s the Reality Behind Netflix Hit Selling Sunset?
— How to Abolish the Police, According to Josie Duffy Rice
— The Pandemic Is Creating an Endless Summer in the Hamptons
— From the Archive: The Perks and Perils of Being Donald Trump’s Daughter

Looking for more? Sign up for our daily Hive newsletter and never miss a story.