This beautiful thing happened

What an epic night it was! The bride and groom wrote vows that were loving and vulnerable and wise and funny, and we cried and laughed and felt so much joy and hope in their union. It will be a while before we get the official photos, so these are just snaps that different people took with their phone cameras. Perhaps my favorite picture from the night was taken by the owner of the 24-hour bodega across from our hotel in Brooklyn. Realizing they hadn’t eaten, the happy couple stopped in there in the wee hours after the hopping dance party that was their reception, thinking to get ramen noodles to tide them over till morning—they met in college after all. The deli owner took one look at them and realized they were tired and pleasantly sauced newlyweds, so he took their picture and gave them a discount. It was such a New York moment.

Relativity

I've written so many posts in my head, but the world is swirling too fast for me to make the words settle down into coherent sentences. Whatever I write changes in the next minute, and we're all watching it happen in real time anyway, so I let it go, and never quite get around to exploring my thoughts here.

My daughter gets married this week. That beats bullets—or broken teleprompter glass—grazing the orange felon's ear at a campaign rally. Out on the street, I passed someone railing to his companion, "The fucker missed!" The fucker was dead a moment after he pulled the trigger, as sharp shooters on another roof had already trained their rifle sights on him. Beats me why they waited for the would-be assassin to get so many shots off. One rally goer, a firefighter, dead, his widow refusing to take Biden's condolence call, because her husband wouldn't have liked that. Never mind that their candidate went golfing the next day and didn't even bother to reach out.

My daughter gets married this week. That still beats Joe Biden putting the good of his country over his personal drive to do good, and dropping out of the presidential race due to the incursions of age. He endorsed Kamala Harris, and the entire Democratic bench is now lining up to support her. Though I was ridin' with Biden, a transformative president (despite, it must be said, his troubling fails in Gaza), and would have voted for him even if he was comatose (there was really no alternative), when he stepped down yesterday, I felt a jolt of excitement that the race is now completely new. The prosecutor running against the felon. VP Harris’s rollout speech today was electrifying. I’d say she’s pinned the fascist and is ready to prosecute this campaign.

But amid all this, my baby girl is getting married this week, and that’s where I’m fixing my gaze. Her dad is making her bouquet. She and her love are over there in Brooklyn working out seating charts and writing their vows. I can hardly wait to be in the room, incandescent with love, all of us watching these two souls pledge to go forth in this life together, and then I will exhale.

Interlude

My son and his wife went to Lake Como, Italy, where as part of a wedding party they stayed in a charming Mediterranean villa with the bride and groom's families. My son said they had an amazing time, and that he may be ruined for every other hospitality experience for life. I love that my children are able to get out in the world and have adventures, that they can know geographies as varied as the green hills and shimmering waters of the Caribbean islands and the Renaissance churches and cobalt lakes of northern Italy. My daughter in law sent me this photo of them taken the day they arrived in Milan, before boarding a train north to meet up with the wedding party at a place called Villa Lario. They're back home now, tired but still with that soft vapor clinging to them that life can be so damned magical. 

Social recap, styling notes, and a thought about the debate fallout

After her wedding dress fitting last week, my girl and I went for dinner and margaritas at our favoritie place by the river. We laughed, we shared tender heartfelt things, and at one point she cried, still gutted by grief, even as she prepares for her happy day. As the tears fell, I quietly held her hand, marveling at the way one can allow the rain to fall while never relinquishing the sun. But that's life, right? It's never just one thing. And so just two days later my cousins from Virginia and Maryland came to town so that we could all attend the funeral service of another cousin, Derrick, the patriarch of our generation, who recently died. Our generation of twenty-nine Stiebel first cousins is now only twenty souls strong on this earth, with my brother as the new patriarch.

Derrick loved music, used to engineer his own speaker sound systems, and he and his wife were famous for basement dance parties at their home on Long Island. At his service, everyone joined in singing Bob Marley's "Three Little Birds" as a moving send-off ("Don't worry, 'bout a thing, 'cause every likkle thing, gonna be alright ..."), and the repast afterward, held on the upper floor of a Uniondale firehouse, was a rousingly DJ'ed dance party. Derrick was in his eighties when he died. He had a good innings, and everyone was in the mood to celebrate his life, and to remind ourselves of the particular blessings and joys of growing up close to so many cousins.

Continuing the social round, we rang in my son-to-be's thirtieth birthday on July 4, at his family's cookout in upstate New York. My daughter and her love took off early the next morning on a flight to Maine for the first of three weddings this month, which will culminate in their own. I took the advice of some of you here and consulted with a stylist about what I should wear as the mother of the bride. The upshot is I now have three good options, all of them quite simple, nothing fussy, which means I will be comfortable in any of them. I will probably go with the a floaty green tunic over white for the photos, but who knows, I might change into a second look for the reception! 

One of the stylist's most critical contributions was advising me on what garments worked well together, and also sourcing accessories that I love—well, the metallic gold sandals look great, but I think I'm only going to wear them for the pictures, and change into my old faithful Finn Comfort sandals afterwards. But the necklace and earrings are a definite win; they totally lift the whole look, and they didn't break the bank either. But the thing I am most grateful to the stylist for is that she brought in her tailor and is having the pants and gauzy white shell altered to fit my specific body. 

The stylist is a gorgeous woman, who is herself plus size, and she had me ordering smaller and smaller sizes, thereby demonstrating to me that I have been wearing tops four times larger than my actual size, and that I should be wearing pants two to three sizes smaller. At one point, trying on a garment, I complained to the stylist, "But I can feel the armholes of this blouse," to which she replied, "That's because it fits you." It was a revelation. Once I knew my actual size (she took all my measurements), I realized that a blouse I loved that I thought didn't come in a large enough size to fit me, could actually be mine. So I ordered it. It arrived. And it fits! It is one of the three options.

So that's my wedding news. As for my daughter, she is refusing to overthink the details. "My dog died, I'm not stressing it," has become her mantra and, you know, it's actually a very healthy attitude. This new sense of perspective is carrying her through.

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A word on that disastrous debate showing by Joe Biden, which is all anyone can talk about, even though the orange wannabe dictator lied his way through the whole thing, and made outrageous promises about all the fascist actions he will undertake once in office, and the revenge tour he will embark on to neutralize his enemies. With the Supreme Court conservative majority ruling he is immune for official acts—and, not incidentally, reserving the court's right to determine what actually constitutes official acts—such revenge might well include tribunals and worse. You may think I'm being hyperbolic, but if Trump gets back in office, it's well within the realm of what's possible. 

Now everyone is calling for Biden to step down, and right after the debate, I thought he should too, but now I think we all better strap in and go along for the ride, because if anyone is actually depending on who is on the Democratic ticket in order to vote blue, then we're in trouble. Apart from the fact that Biden will have more moral people in positions of authority around him, helping to guide the country forward, the only criteria for this vote is to ensure that Trump and his Heritage Foundation Project 2025 handlers do not win the White House in November. If Project 2025 is implemented, women, immigrants, LGBTQIA people, teachers, the disabled, pregnant people, the elderly, Muslims and all other racial and religious minorities will have hell to pay. Social security, Medicare, the Department of Education, the FBI, and Environmental Protection Agency will also be abolished, and that just for starters.

The first step, on day one, will be to fire thousands of federal workers and replace them with Trumpers willing to sign a loyalty pledge and do as he directs. Go look it up. Believe me, even if you think you have nothing to fear from a second Trump presidency, unless you are a straight White man of some means, you'll be just as f*cked as everyone else.

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I'm just really gobsmacked as I contemplate the extreme duality of life, right now. Life is good. Life is horrifying. Both are true.

It appears we are properly f*cked

The Presidential immunity ruling by the Supreme Court is in.  

In her prescient 1993 novel Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler tried to warn us of the future she saw us rushing inexorably toward.

Today, in a 6-3 decision, with Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson dissenting, the Roberts court ruled that presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts is "absolute." They declined to decide what constituted official acts in connection to the January 6 insurrection, however, instead sending that back to the D.C. District Court to be decided within the guardrails the decision outlined, including the edict that private communications by the president that include references to his core constitutional powers must be excluded from consideration.

So if Trump consulted with the Justice Department on how to throw the election to himself or do some other nefarious thing, even and up to assassinating a political rival, that would be excluded because a president consulting with Justice Department is an official act. And of course, every action related to January 6 that the district court rules to not fall under the umbrella of official conduct will be appealed ad nauseam, so the litigation will go on forever.  Trump will never be held accountable.

Chief Justice Roberts basically wrote the decision to gut all the criminal cases against Trump, but especially Jack Smith's January 6 case. For example, Trump’s speech at the Ellipse exhorting people to go to the Capitol and "fight like hell" to shut down the certification of the 2020 election by Vice President Pence and Congress must be excluded from evidence, because that speech was given in Trump's official capacity as president.

It gets worse with almost every sentence the Chief Justice wrote. “In dividing official from unofficial acts, courts may not consider the president’s motives,” he opined. Does this mean Trump can now appeal the New York hush money 34-count conviction because some of the evidence introduced might now be considered official acts, like his conversations with White House staffer Hope Hicks? And what does it really mean that in both official and private acts the president's motives cannot be considered? The whole New York hush money case turned on his criminal motives!

The Supreme Court's six conservatives have essentially created an imperial presidency. Can you imagine what Trump will do under cover of this ruling if he wins in November?

Justice Sotomayor wrote the 3-person dissent, joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson, with Justice Jackson also writing her own dissent. 

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From Justice Sotomayor's powerful dissent:

 

Justice Sotomayor further elucidated the dangers of "absolute" presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for so called "official acts":

Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune...

Never in the history of our Republic has a President had reason to believe that he would be immune from criminal prosecution if he used the trappings of his office to violate the criminal law. Moving forward, however, all former Presidents will be cloaked in such immunity. If the occupant of that office misuses official power for personal gain, the criminal law that the rest of us must abide will not provide a backstop.

With fear for our democracy, I dissent.

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Justice Jackson's dissent was also much quoted in news reports:

Justice Jackson, a brilliant and deeply moral jurist, was appointed to the Supreme Court at perhaps the most nakedly political moment in its 233-year history, and yet I continue to be grateful for her strong principled voice, and that of the Court's two other progressive women, going on the record with their sharply reasoned and blistering dissents.