William P. Barr just gave the worst speech by an Attorney General of the United States in modern history. Speaking at Notre Dame University last Friday, Barr took “religious liberty” as his subject, and he portrayed his fellow-believers as a beleaguered and oppressed minority. He was addressing, he said, “the force, fervor, and comprehensiveness of the assault on religion we are experiencing today. This is not decay; this is organized destruction.” In three cases argued last week—Bostock v. Clayton County, Altitude Express v. Zarda, and Harris Funeral Homes v. EEOC—the Supreme Court confronted this question: Does Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination “because of [an] individual’s … sex” forbid discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity? Facebook Inc Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg told employees in July that the company would “go to the mat” to defeat Democratic candidate Elizabeth Warren’s expected effort to break up the world’s largest social media company if she were elected president, according to audio of two internal company meetings from July published by The Verge. Elizabeth Warren fired back at Mark Zuckerberg on Twitter Tuesday morning, after the Facebook founder and CEO said it would "suck" if his company had to fight her future administration's plans to break up certain tech giants. Frank O. Bowman wrote the book on impeaching the 45th president. Published in July, High Crimes and Misdemeanors: A History of Impeachment for the Age of Trump seeks to ground the talk about removing the president from office in centuries of history and practice. A law professor who teaches at the University of Missouri and lectures at on impeachment at Georgetown, Bowman doesn’t pretend to be above the fray, politically. He describes himself as a “centrist” Democrat. But he insists, “I’ve tried hard to play it straight in applying rigorous legal and constitutional analysis.” Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said Monday that Senate rules would require him to take up any articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump if approved by the House, swatting down talk that that the GOP-controlled chamber could dodge the matter entirely. Shortly after eight on Monday morning, the President of the United States, making maximal use of his “executive time,” wielded his smartphone to issue a legal threat against the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. It is worth reading the missive from @realDonaldTrump in full: “Rep. Adam Schiff illegally made up a FAKE & terrible statement, pretended it to be mine as the most important part of my call to the Ukrainian President, and read it aloud to Congress and the American people. It bore NO relationship to what I said on the call. Arrest for Treason?” In the course of just two weeks, a previously unknown scandal sprawled to imperil Donald Trump’s presidency. News broke that the Trump administration was withholding a mysterious whistleblower complaint from Congress on September 13. The chaotic days afterward were filled with leaks, revelations, document releases, and a new Democratic consensus in favor of an impeachment push. More than half of Americans — and an overwhelming number of Democrats — say they approve of the fact that Congress has opened an impeachment inquiry into President Trump. But as the inquiry begins, there is no national consensus on how to assess the president's actions. If you’re looking at history to provide a guide to the impending impeachment saga … don’t. With only three past examples, involving three very different controversies, there’s thin gruel that will provide little nourishment. So let’s turn to a different tool: the concept of an infinite number of universes, where events play out in different ways, depending on everything from consequential decisions to random chance. Modesty forbids asserting that any of the outcomes listed below will happen; only that they might. For President Donald Trump, impeachment once seemed like a vacation compared to the never-ending, leak-filled Mueller investigation. The president for months genuinely believed he’d gain politically from an impeachment inquiry because he thought Democrats were out to get him on any issue they could, and such an inquiry would make that clear, according to two former senior administration officials. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Friday asserted that Attorney General William Barr had “gone rogue” in his handling of an explosive whistleblower complaint that allegedly implicates him in efforts by President Donald Trump to solicit foreign interference in the 2020 election. For nine out of 10 Republicans in the House or Senate, the defense they’ve mounted of Donald Trump is simple, if a little strange: They’ve forgotten how to read. Senator after senator escaped Washington on Thursday, and every Republican cornered as they hurried toward the next available flight to anywhere else was quick to claim that handling a seven-page complaint had just done them in. Maybe someone can read it to them over the break. In Federalist 65, Alexander Hamilton considers the problem of impeachment. The process, the Constitution framer writes, is meant for offenses “denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.” Political offenses are, by nature, politicized. They “agitate the passions of the whole community” and “divide it into parties more or less friendly or inimical to the accused.” The danger, Hamilton says, is that the impeachment process will be decided “more by the comparative strength of parties, than by the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.” If that proves either the perception or the reality of impeachment, the process loses its legitimacy, and America loses critical protection against tyrants and criminals. The whistleblower’s identity remains obscured, the details of his work for the CIA cloaked in secrecy. But the document he delivered reveals almost as much about the investigative mission he carried out in stealth as it does about the alleged abuses of power by the president.
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