Opinion

There were many points at which if the government had acted the Jan. 6 insurrection might never have happened.

Leading up to the failed coup every alarm was ringing. Capitol Police knew a violent invasion was in the works, the Department of Homeland Security knew, the FBI knew, warning of “war at the Capitol.” Hundreds of security officials at 80 Fusion Centers set up after 9/11 to combat domestic terrorism knew. They shared “an avalanche” of warnings about violence beginning at “1 p.m., U.S. Capitol, Jan 6.” Nonetheless, the police allowed the invasion to happen.

It is difficult if not impossible to solve a problem when one lacks the language to properly describe and understand it. That problem is made worse if the language is available but people refuse to use it.

This article first appeared in Salon.

Death threats will change a person. During previous testimony before a Senate panel, the nation’s top infectious disease expert was calm and deferential. This week marked a break from the past. Enough is enough, apparently. Dr. Anthony Fauci was no longer in the mood.

Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas kept pressing the question of financial disclosures, implying that Fauci was benefiting from the effort to vaccinate the country against the covid pandemic.

In a new ruling on Thursday, the six conservative justices on the U.S. Supreme Court blocked the Biden administration from implementing a sweeping requirement for vaccines under the Occupation Safety and Health Administration. Using OSHA's power to regulate employers, the administration sought to require any company with 100 workers or more to ensure that employees are either vaccinated against COVID-19 or are tested weekly for the virus.

Writing in a per curiam decision, the court's six-justice conservative majority used twisted logic to overrule the administration's decision. The three liberal justices wrote a joint dissent, arguing that the court's decision overstepped its own authority.

In February 2019, Donald Trump's former lawyer — or, as Michael Cohen called himself, his "fixer" — testified in front of the House Oversight Committee, a mere two months after he was sentenced to prison for committing campaign finance crimes on Trump's behalf. The committee had recently come under Democratic control, but alas, Republicans were still allowed to sit on it, which meant that both Cohen and the nation were subject to a garbage truck's worth of bad faith grandstanding. The ringleaders of the disingenous theatrics were then-congressman Mark Meadows — who later went on to become Trump's chief of staff — and Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, who started with a failed effort to stop Cohen from testifying and moved on to highly performative accusations that Cohen was somehow lying about claims that any fool could see were obviously true, such as that Trump is a racist.

Cohen, who was clearly rattled by the operatics, nonetheless pulled himself together and issued a sobering warning to the Republicans who strive to cover up Trump's seemingly endless list of crimes.

We’ve now reached a critical stage in which President Biden went full force in attacking those standing in the way of voting rights, comparing them to the racists of the past, including George Wallace. And the president, in his powerful speech in Georgia yesterday in which he demanded the Senate create a filibuster carve-out for voting rights, didn’t distinguish between Republicans and those two Senate Democrats, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who refuse to back a carve-out.

This article was originally published at The Signorile Report

The New York Times reported Thursday that the Republican Party sent a letter to the Commission on Presidential Debates saying it's working to ensure that if Donald Trump doesn't want to do the debates he doesn't have to.

"The nonprofit commission, founded by the two parties in 1987 to codify the debates as a permanent part of presidential elections, describes itself as nonpartisan," wrote Times reporter Maggie Haberman. "But Republicans have complained for nearly a decade that its processes favor the Democrats, mirroring increasing rancor from conservatives toward Washington-based institutions."

As a thought experiment, see if you can consider any of today's societal problems independent of politics. You may find it impossible, since many of us believe our problems are caused by our divisive politics.

Voting rights. Climate change. The pandemic. Health care. The economy. Education. Infrastructure. All of them have a political component, and because of that a good argument could be made that divisive politics is the single largest problem we face.

The Republicans are sabotaging the country’s full recovery from the covid pandemic. They don’t think so, though. They think they are standing up for individual liberty and citizen autonomy. What does sabotage have to do with defending our constitutional rights?

Not surprising.

No one should ever accuse Ted Cruz of being held back by a basic sense of dignity.

Last week, the Texas Republican got into hot water with Donald Trump loyalists, who will brook no criticism of the fascist insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol last year. Cruz, who has otherwise been an advocate of Trump's Big Lie as one of eight senators who voted to throw out the results of the 2020 election so that Trump could illegally remain in power, dared to suggest that the people who used violence for that same goal had engaged in a "terrorist attack."

Something unusual happened last weekend that may portend a little bit of dissonance in the Republican Party. A conservative senator went on television and directly refuted Donald Trump's Big Lie.

ABC's George Stephanopoulos asked Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota, "What do you say to all those Republicans, all those veterans who believe the election was stolen, who have bought the falsehoods coming from former President Trump?" Rounds responded:

“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.” — Archbishop Desmond Tutu

The world lost a great moral leader this Christmas when Archbishop Desmond Tutu passed away at the age of 90. I had the honor of meeting him a few times as a child. I was raised by a family dedicated to doing the work of justice, grounded in the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and also sacred texts and traditions. We hosted the archbishop on several occasions when he visited Milwaukee — both before the end of apartheid and after South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission was formed in 1996.

Regular readers are familiar with my obsession with political time – or how one party and its ideas prevail with a majority of Americans for four or five decades before falling into a period of transition, after which the other party and its ideas prevail.

But most don’t know why I’m obsessed. I’ll tell you. It’s because I have been feeling hopeless. I hate feeling hopeless. Knowing that history isn’t static – knowing that it moves in recurring cycles rather than in a straight line with a beginning and an end – well, that gives me hope. It gives me hope to know, good or bad, nothing stays the same.