Opinion

Books possess great power. Those who own only a few, yet return to them like old friends for wisdom, comfort and knowledge, or to revisit a special memory, know this to be true. Those of us who have many books — who read and and reread them and carefully compile our collections — know this also.

Our books are a type of biography in themselves, an accounting of our lives. I take my books very seriously. People know not to ask if they can borrow any of my books.

In June 2016, I organized a meeting for the local council of churches in an English town to discuss issues relating to the forthcoming European Union (EU) Referendum. The meeting was intended to provide an opportunity for airing Christian views on the subject. It was well attended and drew in participants from across the wide denominational spectrum of churches.

The evening was lively. Many of my friends (regardless of whether they were ‘Leave’ or ‘Remain’ in the context of the EU Referendum) expressed astonishment afterwards at the way the discussion developed.

Normal people don’t pay much attention to the United States Supreme Court. I don’t know why. Here’s nine people who tell us what the law is. They tell us what the law is even if their reasoning for it is trash.

Such is the case with the court’s latest ruling. The six Republican justices could have said to themselves, “Gee, the pandemic is bad. It’s killing a lot of people. Maybe we shouldn’t second guess the people who know what they’re talking about when it comes to public health.”

Oh boy, remember the summer of 2021? That's when we were deluged with spicy hot takes about how the Supreme Court isn't nearly as bad as liberals feared it would be. Well, here we are half a year away and that supposedly reasonable Supreme Court just proved all of its critics right. They are a bunch of partisan hacks who will ignore the plain letter of the law in order to undermine Democratic governance and install Republicans into power.

Thursday's decision to strike down President Joe Biden's COVID-19 vaccine mandate for private employers certainly wasn't the result of a good faith reading of the law. It wasn't even an expression of some ideological opposition to the "administrative state," as Steve Bannon and other authoritarian nuts sneeringly call it. No, the only jurisprudence guiding the Republican-controlled Supreme Court — which has a whopping three appointees by Donald Trump sitting on it — is a belief that the only legitimate presidents are Republicans. We know this not just because of the bad faith of the decision itself, but also by contrasting it with the warm-and-fuzzy feelings that the justices have towards expansive presidential powers when Republicans are in charge.

The potential for violent extremism in America to erupt into full-fledged conflict across the country is a common topic of discussion nowadays.

A recent FBI report highlights an increasing risk of violence against government institutions, private organizations and individuals. The possible perpetrators: primarily “lone wolves,” but potentially also militias and other organized groups such as animal activists, anti-abortionists and white supremacists.

It's very hard to fathom why the right seems so determined to prolong the deadly COVID-19 pandemic but it's obvious that they are. From politicians banning mask requirements to media celebrities pushing disinformation about vaccines, there is no escaping the fact that Republicans and their allies simply do not care that more than 850,000 thousand Americans are dead in less than two years from this scourge and that hundreds of thousands of them are still dying because they refuse to take life-saving vaccines. That the majority of them are their own constituents who have died because they believe right-wing conspiracy theories is just mind-boggling, but apparently they are convinced that this is good for them politically and gives them great ratings.

I guess I was hoping against all evidence to the contrary that there was some corner of the former conservative world that was above exploiting a global health catastrophe for their own gain but that was a silly illusion. Not even the Supreme Court could set aside their partisan and ideological goals in the face of a calamitous crisis. Yesterday they joined the anti-vax fanatics of Fox News and Info-Wars and blocked the implementation of the Biden administration's "vax or test" requirements for large businesses. If they could bend the rules just a little bit further the majority no doubt would have joined Tucker Carlson last night for a celebration.

The J6 committee is publicly opening a new front in its investigation of the insurrection: Donald Trump’s massive pressure campaign to overturn the election at the state level.

Thanks to open records requests by Nicholas Wu of Politico, we know that the J6 committee is looking at fraudulent certificates of ascertainment submitted by Republicans in the Biden swing states purporting to cast their electoral votes for the former president.

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