Opinion

Namely, a coveted endorsement from former President Donald Trump.

As Axios reports, Oz, a celebrity physician, has quietly ditched the Trumpian branding from his campaign website as he moves into the thick of the general election campaign against Democrat John Fetterman.

With its Siamese-twin decisions on Thursday and Friday, the Supreme Court didn't just turn back the clock or flip through the pages of the calendar looking for a new decade — or century — to love. Calling themselves textualists and originalists, they simply put the Constitution through a search engine and told it to look for some key words: Abortion? Uh-huh, not there. Gay sex? Not in 1791 or 1868! Same-sex marriage? Are you kidding?

This article first appeared in Salon.

"What's the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change," said one senior Republican official. "He went golfing this weekend. It's not like he's plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan. 20. He's tweeting about filing some lawsuits, those lawsuits will fail, then he'll tweet some more about how the election was stolen, and then he'll leave." --- November 9, 2020, Washington Post

That senior Republican official is very lucky the journalist agreed to confer anonymity. It may be the most laughably incorrect prediction in history. The January 6 committee hearings are proving in meticulously laid out detail that Donald Trump plotted to prevent Joe Biden from taking power from the moment he lost the 2020 election. (Actually, he was laying the groundwork long before the election.)

In this term, the Supreme court has issued two decisions that limit habeas corpus and the right to judicial review of unlawful detention. A third ruling treats the death penalty with a casualness that undermines the constitutional justifications for the punishment.

While this extremely narrow view of habeas corpus is being pushed by the legally incoherent rightwing of the Supreme court, in this instance they are finding legislative support in a bipartisan piece of legislation called the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act from 1996.

Welcome to the new Dark Age.

With the U.S. Supreme Court overturning the 49-year-old precedent of Roe v. Wade, Americans and Kansans can no longer depend on our government safeguarding our individual and inalienable rights. We can no longer depend on a commonly agreed upon public policy that respects the rights of women, people of color and the LGBTQ community.

The Texas Republican Party issued its platform Monday. Among other terrible things, it called for the Lone Star State to secede from the US.

This was met with mixed reactions from liberals. On the other hand, some said great – good riddance! On the other, some said secession would mean the abandonment of people who are already on the margins of society. As my friend, the historian Thomas Lecaque said: “Every time you say ‘let them secede,’ slap yourself in your stupid overprivileged face.”

If Merrick Garland truly wants to protect the Department of Justice (DOJ) from political interference and salvage the institution's reputation, then he must charge Donald Trump for his crimes related to his 2020 coup attempt. That's the main takeaway from the House committee to investigate the January 6. It is the message the committee clearly hopes will be heard by the attorney general, and was the underlying message of the committee's fourth hearing on Thursday.

Garland is under increasingly sharp criticism for failures to hold high level Republicans accountable for the roles they played in both the overall coup effort and the attack on the Capitol on January 6. Garland's slow-walking a criminal investigation into Trump and his GOP co-conspirators has largely been perceived as an attempt to "depoliticize" the DOJ after Trump and his attorney general Bill Barr did so much to disgrace the agency. But as Thursday's hearing made indisputable, the biggest threat to the DOJ's reputation of independence from politics is Trump himself. As long as Trump is free to worm his way back into the White House, legally or not, the DOJ is in very real danger of being corrupted in Trump's image.

And so it came to pass that in the Year of Our Lord 2022, logic and facts left the room and the Republican Party replaced them with "We've got lots of theories, we just don't have the evidence."

This is the postmodern world, devoid of reason and chock-full of stooges like Donald Trump, John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani. It is the world we were warned about by Michael Cohen in a 2020 Rolling Stone article: "I believe that he would even go so far as to start a war in order to prevent himself from being removed from office. My biggest fear is that there will not be a peaceful transition of power in 2020."

It’s not a crime when a Republican does it.

For normal people like you, the answer is obvious. If people break the law, they should be brought before a jury and prosecuted justly for breaking the law. This question has an obvious answer, because we have all drunk deeply from the well of American exceptionalism.