Attention to the Unseen

Alan Z. Rozenshtein and Jed Handelsman Shugerman write: Until Tuesday, we had both publicly stated that the Department of Justice had insufficient evidence to indict former President Trump for his conduct on Jan. 6. Our conclusion, which we each came to independently, was largely grounded in First Amendment concerns about criminalizing purely political speech. But Tuesday’s explosive testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, changed our minds. In particular, Hutchinson testified to hearing…

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Quinta Jurecic writes: During its astonishing Tuesday hearing about Donald Trump’s actions on the day of January 6, the House select committee investigating the insurrection made clear that the integrity of its work is under threat. “The same people who drove the former president’s pressure campaign to overturn the election are now trying to cover up the truth about January 6,” warned committee chair Bennie Thompson. “But thanks to the courage of certain individuals, the truth won’t be buried.” The…

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Jamelle Bouie writes: The Constitution gives our elected officials the power to restrain a lawless Supreme Court, protect citizens from the “sinister legislation” of the states, punish those states for depriving their residents of the right to vote and expel insurrectionists from Congress. They are drastic measures that would break the norms of American politics. They might even spark a constitutional crisis over the power and authority of Congress. But let’s not be naïve. The norms of American politics were…

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Mark Joseph Stern writes: If anyone still doubted that the Supreme Court served as the nation’s chief policymaking institution after Dobbs, Thursday should put that to rest. The court is ruthlessly efficient, putting our gridlocked Congress to shame with its speedy and definitive resolution of the most pressing issues facing the country today. It does not require hourslong hearings or endless negotiations to operate. The six-justice conservative majority chooses which conflicts to prioritize, takes up cases that present them, then…

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Toni Aguilar Rosenthal, Mekedas Belayneh, and Glenna Li write: During his campaign, now-President Biden loved likening his image to that of FDR. But when a rogue U.S. Supreme Court threatened to overturn the sweeping reforms of FDR’s New Deal, Roosevelt directly challenged their gross power grab by threatening court expansion coupled with expansive judicial reforms. The controversial move paid off; the Court subsequently backed down and FDR preserved the slate of New Deal–era reforms that kept the working class alive…

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Ian Millhiser writes: The Supreme Court’s announcement on Thursday that it will hear Moore v. Harper, a case that could concentrate an unprecedented amount of power in gerrymandered state legislatures, should alarm anyone who cares about democracy. The case is perhaps the gravest threat to American democracy since the January 6 attack. It seeks to reinstate gerrymandered congressional maps that were struck down by North Carolina’s highest court because they “subordinated traditional neutral redistricting criteria in favor of extreme partisan…

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George T. Conway III and Randall D. Eliason write: Some argue that prosecutors could face difficulty proving criminal intent if it appears that Trump sincerely believed he had won the election. But that argument is misguided. Even if Trump believed, however implausibly, that there really had been massive voter fraud, that would establish only his motive for acting, not his intent. But a righteous motive is not a defense. Put simply, criminal acts motivated by an honest belief in the…

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The New York Times reports: It was one of the most dramatic moments in a presentation filled with them: Just before President Donald J. Trump went onstage near the White House last year and urged his supporters to “fight like hell” and march on the Capitol, an aide testified on Tuesday, he was told that some of them were armed. It was also a potentially consequential moment for any prosecution of Mr. Trump, legal experts said. Knowing that his crowd…

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Robin Blackburn and Rasha Elass write: In the early hours of Oct. 11, 2021, in the rural town of Martindale, Texas, Terry Turner, a 65-year-old local, shot and killed an unarmed man who was sitting in a vehicle. Turner then called 911 and said he just “shot a guy,” claiming his victim had a gun. The victim was 31-year-old Moroccan national and U.S. immigrant Adil Dghoughi, a recent business school graduate who was in the midst of looking for a…

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CNN reports: Aides to former President Donald Trump were left speechless amid the first half of Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony on Tuesday, acknowledging to CNN that her testimony was “a bombshell” with potentially huge repercussions for Trump. Trump was already bracing for an explosive day of testimony from Hutchinson, who previously told the House select committee that the former President approved of rioters chanting violent threats against Vice President Mike Pence on January 6, 2021. “This is a bombshell. It’s stunning….

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The New York Times reports: Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is calling for a House investigation into whether two Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade should be impeached for lying at their confirmation hearings about their views of the landmark abortion-rights case. In a Sunday interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat and progressive firebrand, said that she thinks the justices, Neil Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh, were dishonest when discussing Roe at…

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Vox reports: When the Supreme Court issued its 6-3 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, declaring that there is no longer a constitutional right to end a pregnancy, it ushered in a series of new and fiercely contested legal questions about who can be punished for doing so, and where, under newly restrictive state laws. Can a state punish a resident for getting an out-of-state abortion? Can it punish the provider in another state who facilitated it? Or as…

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The New York Times reports: In the spring of 1985, a 35-year-old lawyer in the Justice Department, Samuel A. Alito Jr., cautioned the Reagan administration against mounting a frontal assault on Roe v. Wade, the landmark ruling that declared a constitutional right to abortion. The Supreme Court was not ready to overturn it, he said, so urging it to do so could backfire. In a memo offering advice on two pending cases that challenged state laws regulating abortion, Mr. Alito…

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