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With the nation in fresh mourning and horror over the shooting deaths of 19 children and two teachers at a Texas elementary school and the delayed response of law enforcement, many Texas politicians and performers skipped the National Rifle Association convention, which began Friday in Houston.That was not the choice of former President Donald Trump, who headlined the NRA's opening day meeting and chided those who did not "show up" at the event. He started with an homage to the victims, reading each name as a gong resounded offstage. He then segued into a laundry list of policies to control gun violence – some of which have been undermined as details of Tuesday's mass shooting have been revealed.

"We witnessed a now familiar parade of cynical politicians seeking to exploit the tears of sobbing families to increase their own power and take away our constitutional rights," Trump said, slamming Democratic lawmakers who have appealed for universal background checks or more restrictive gun laws.

Clearly reveling in the warm reception he got from the NRA members – none of whom was allowed to carry guns into the event, since Trump is protected by the Secret Service – Trump pledged that the GOP would be back in control of Congress after this year's elections and back in the "beautiful" White House after the 2024 contest.As the NRA held its convention, officials 275 miles away in Uvalde struggled to explain why law enforcement failed to enter Robb Elementary School even as children lay dying and calling 911 with pleas for help.

The next few days are going to be long, but by the end of Wednesday, we expect that President Donald Trump will be impeached a second time.

The US Capitol has become a fortress in Washington as Democrats -- keenly aware that a new President will be inaugurated in just eight days -- grapple with how to curtail the damage that could be done by the outgoing man in the White House.

there is no stopping impeachment now.

Over the last month, ever since the indictment of 13 men for plotting to kidnap the governor of Michigan, the word “militia” has appeared in thousands of newspaper headlines and TV news reports.

But all of these headlines are wrong, and almost every instance of the use of the word militia by journalists—as well as politicians and even law enforcement—has been wrong. Why? Because there is no such thing as a legal private paramilitary militia.

“The use of the word ‘militia,’ when you are talking about anything other than a state militia like the National Guard, is just wrong. Using that term without putting the world ‘unlawful’ in front of it suggests there is some constitutional authority or legitimacy for their existence, which there isn’t.”

Milligan, Wasserman continued, “could reverberate across the Deep South leading to the creation of new Black-majority, strongly Democratic seats in multiple states

If Democrats can gain five seats, it will critically affect the balance of power in Washington.

Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a law professor at Harvard and an expert on election law, wrote by email that Milligan is significant both substantively and politically:First, it means that Section 2 remains fully operative as a bulwark against racial vote dilution; second, it signals to conservative lower courts that they need to rule in favor of plaintiffs on facts like those in Milligan; third, it takes off the table arguments that Section 2 must be narrowly construed to avoid constitutional problems; and fourth, if Section 2 is constitutional, so should be other laws targeting racial disparities.

The overall impeachment process laid out in the Constitution is relatively simple: President commits "high Crime or Misdemeanor," House votes to impeach, Senate conducts a trial.

The one President Donald Trump faces now, after inciting a riotous mob to attack the Capitol, is unprecedented in all sorts of ways, which means the process will feel entirely new and different from the one we saw in late 2019 around the Ukraine investigation.

Specifically, this House impeachment vote is likely to be done Wednesday,

Another thing I read recently, and it’s probably become my second-favorite piece of reading material right after the Bible, is the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. It’s all about how to remove the President and replace him with the Vice-President. I have to admit that it was a kick to start reading the dusty old Constitution for the very first time and see yours truly right in there!

It turns out that the Twenty-fifth Amendment says that the country can remove the President if he is found to be “incapacitated.” That can mean anything from physically incapacitated, like being in an irreversible coma, to mentally incapacitated, like being seen raving like a lunatic during a visit to the C.I.A. Either way, if folks decide that it’s time to put a fork in you, see you later, alligator!

And so, my fellow-Americans, I encourage each and every one of you, history buffs or otherwise, to read the Twenty-fifth Amendment today—especially Section 4, which is a little complicated but really exciting, too. If you enjoy reading it as much as I did, let me know. I’m in my office in Washington and you can reach me anytime—I’m of sound mind and body.

“I’ve told my six-year-old daughter, ‘Running for office is real simple: you just surgically disconnect your shame sensor,’” he said. “Because you spend every day asking people for money.

Starting with the attack on the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law in 2003, opponents have won an accelerating series of victories against similar laws. The result has completely changed the world of campaign finance. Citizens United struck down limits on independent expenditures. SpeechNow made it possible for contributions to be largely hidden. Aggregate limits on personal contributions were swept away by McCutcheon v. FEC in 2014

even as it fails to rise to the top of most voters' agendas, majorities of Democrats, Republicans, and independents have voiced concern about the corrupting influence of money in polls, and the public generally supports spending caps.

unpeople fall into several categories. There’s, first of all, the indigenous population, either in the territories already held or those that were expected to be conquered soon. It didn’t apply to them. And, of course, it didn’t apply to those who the Constitution declared to be three-fifths human, so therefore unpeople. That latter category was transferred into—theoretically, into the category of people by the 14th Amendment, that—essentially the same wording as the Fifth Amendment in this respect, but now a person was intended to hold of freed slaves. Now that was in theory. In practice, it barely happened. After about 10 years, the category of three-fifths human were returned to the category of unpeople by the divisive criminalization of black life, which essentially restored slavery, maybe something even worse than slavery, actually went on 'til the Second World War. And it's being reinstituted now, past 30 years of severe moral and social regression in the United States.

Well, the 14th Amendment was recognized right away to be problematic. The concept of person was both too narrow and too broad, and the courts went to work to overcome both of those flaws. The concept of person was expanded to include legal fictions, sustained—created and sustained by the state, what’s called corporations, and was also narrowed over the years to exclude undocumented aliens. That goes right up to the present, to recent Supreme Court cases, which make it clear that corporations not only are persons, but they’re persons with rights far beyond those of persons of flesh and blood, so kind of super persons. The mislabeled free trade agreements give them astonishing rights. And, of course, the court just added more

But the crucial need to make sure that the category of unpeople includes those who escaped from the horrors we’ve created in Central America and Mexico, try to get here—those are not persons, they are unpeople. And, of course, it includes any foreigners, especially those accused of terror, which is a concept that has taken a quite an interesting conceptual change, an interesting one, since 1981, when Ronald Reagan came into office and declared the global war on terror,

Like all the black men and women in my family, he believed in hard work, but like all the black men and women in my family, no matter how hard he worked, he never got ahead.

So when I was young, that flag outside our home never made sense to me. How could this black man, having seen firsthand the way his country abused black Americans, how it refused to treat us as full citizens, proudly fly its banner? I didn’t understand his patriotism.

I had been taught, in school, through cultural osmosis, that the flag wasn’t really ours, that our history as a people began with enslavement and that we had contributed little to this great nation. It seemed that the closest thing black Americans could have to cultural pride was to be found in our vague connection to Africa, a place we had never been

Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville has an idea about how to make next week's inauguration as safe as possible: Just move it to a few weeks later!

"We probably could have had a swearing-in and inauguration later after we got this virus behind us a little bit," Tuberville suggested in an interview

Er, so, this is awkward, senator, but the whole Inauguration Day thing isn't, um, movable?

the problem of public ignorance and fake crises transcends politics. Profound pessimism about the state of the nation is empowering the radical, revolutionary politics that fuels extremists on the right and left.

now, for parts of MAGA, the Constitution itself is part of the crisis. If it doesn’t permit Trump to take control, then it must be swept aside.

Elements of this argument are now bubbling up across the reactionary, populist right

The great issues of the war were not resolved on that April morning at Appomattox.

not only is the Civil War not over; it can still be lost.

if the Civil War were fought in the United States today with its ten-fold greater population, 7.5 million soldiers would die.

Perhaps the most consequential change Trump has wrought is in the Republican Party’s attitude toward democracy. I worked in the administration of George W. Bush, who was the first president since the 1880s to win the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote.

Bush recognized this outcome as an enormous political problem. After the Supreme Court ruled in his favor, on December 13, 2000, the president-elect promised to govern in a bipartisan and conciliatory fashion: “I was not elected to serve one party, but to serve one nation,”

You may believe that Bush failed in that promise—but he made that promise because he recognized a problem. Two decades later, Trump has normalized the minority rule that seemed so abnormal in December 2000.

BRANDON TERRY: Well, there’s this puzzle when we think about somebody like Martin Luther King Jr. And it’s that on the one hand, we have a national holiday devoted to him, an imposing monument on the hallowed space of the National Mall; he’s invoked in all manner of political speeches from across the political spectrum, probably the most famous African American of the 20th century.

But at the same time, if you ask even really well-educated people, they often don’t know that he’d written five major books, that he’s a systematic theologian with sustained interest in political philosophy who’s written lots and lots of things, incisive things, on some of the most pressing political and ethical matters.

King wants to say something different, I think. He wants to say that we are both of these things. We are a society with what he called the congenital deformity of racism — that it’s shot through many of our deepest institutions and structural arrangements, and because it has not been redressed on the scale that it would have to be to achieve true justice, it festers. It’s a rot. It’s a challenge that every generation is called on to pick up and try to do better than their forebears.