From this fan’s perspective, the Paris Olympics are starting to slow down – women’s gymnastics ended this morning, the men’s 100m sprint was yesterday, swimming and men’s golf both ended yesterday – and as such I can start to make a little time for blog updates again.

It’s Monday morning and the stock market is poised to have its third straight significant down day; right now the S&P 500 is down 6.5% since the market opened Thursday. I have been expecting a stock market downturn for some time now, and from a political standpoint have been nervous about the downturn hitting during the heat of the Presidential election campaign; perhaps that particular chicken is indeed coming home to roost now.

Over the weekend, the mandate in U.S. v. Trump (D.C. edition), the federal Jan 6th case, finally returned to Judge Chutkan in the aftermath of the SCOTUS presidential immunity ruling in Trump v. U.S. She has asked both sides to submit a proposal this week on future scheduling in the case, with a hearing to be held on August 16th to discuss.

To my knowledge Special Counsel Smith has yet to file his appeal with 11th Circuit in U.S. v. Trump (Florida edition); he must do so by August 27th but he doesn’t have to wait that long. I wanted to highlight an excellent but lengthy article by a member of the SCOTUS appellate bar, Adam Unikowsky, which engages seriously with Cannon’s opinion dismissing the case. His conclusion is that her view of the relevant law is intellectually defensible, but in order for her view to be the correct one then you would have to conclude that vast numbers of other lawmakers and lawyers have made a number of different types of mistakes going back over the past century-and-a-half, all the way back to 1870.

The first two weeks of the Harris campaign continue to have gone about as well as one could imagine. By now she is officially the nominee, thanks to a virtual roll call. She was the only qualified candidate; three other people, none of whom I’ve ever heard of, filed the necessary paperwork but none were able to demonstrate the requisite level of delegate support. Yesterday afternoon Harris pulled ahead of Trump in Nate Silver’s model for the first time, moving up from 38% to 51% over the course of the past week on the strength of recent swing-state polling.

Everyone is expecting that Harris will announce her vice-presidential pick in the next 36 hours. She reportedly had final in-person meetings yesterday with each of Kelly, Shapiro, and Walz. There has also been reporting that one name I hadn’t mentioned previously, Governor Pritzker of Illinois, was part of the official vetting process; personally I think adding a blue-state billionaire to the ticket would be a bad look.

Finally, Trump has announced he is pulling out of the previously announced presidential debate on ABC on September 10th, and challenged Harris to appear on a debate on Fox News in an arena setting on September 4th. Nobody is expecting her to take that bait; she responded that she’ll be showing up on the 10th as originally planned.