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“Gun violence in this country is an epidemic and it’s an international embarrassment,” Biden said last week

Biden’s recently unveiled executive actions include efforts to restrict weapons known as “ghost guns” that can be built using parts and instructions purchased online.

His announcement came after several high-profile mass shootings rocked the nation, including one at a supermarket in Boulder, Colorado, that killed 10 people and a shooting rampage in the Atlanta, Georgia, area that killed eight people.

Several times in late July and early August, so many workers were missing that the furnace line had to shut down in midday — even more disruptive than an early-morning halt. That hadn’t happened in years, employees said. Some workers cite illness, while others claim days under the Family and Medical Leave Act, saying they are taking care of sick relatives

On the worst days, according to one group leader, up to one in five workers are out. It’s true that the company has been running the factory hard — up to 60 hours a week with mandatory overtime, six days in a row — and some absenteeism could be due to sheer exhaustion, Mr. Roell allowed. But “bad blood,” as he put it, is at least as much to blame. “Workers feel like Carrier is going to leave,” he said, “whether we come to work or not.”

A week after the election, the president-elect called the chief executive of Carrier’s parent, United Technologies. They worked out terms: Carrier would lay off 632 of its roughly 1,350 blue-collar employees in Indianapolis, but in exchange for $7 million in tax breaks, it would keep the plant open and invest $16 million in new equipment. A little more than half of the workers would keep their jobs.

“There have been a few days when three people don’t show up and I’ve had to work on the line all day,” Mr. Maynard said. “The attitude, the demeanor — they’re not grateful that they have a job. The absenteeism is real bad. A lot of us need our jobs. Others look at it and they don’t really care anymore.”

The bad vibes can be catching. “It makes it so depressing you don’t feel like going in,” he added. “I need the job, but some days you just want it to be over with.”

Yes, Mr. Hayes said, the company would invest in the Carrier facility, as it had promised Mr. Trump. But those funds were earmarked for automation, and would ultimately mean fewer jobs in Indianapolis, not more. Assembly-line positions there were not ones “that people really find all that attractive over the long term,” Mr. Hayes said. There were “great, great people” there, he added, “but the skill set to do those jobs is very different than what it takes to assemble a jet engine.” The Carrier faithful didn’t appreciate the slights

Even before the closure announcement, he said, supervisors gathered people from the lines and pointed out, ominously, that their counterparts in Mexico missed fewer days. “I’m worried they will use the absenteeism as an excuse to shut the factory,” Mr. Roell said. “They aren’t doing anything to improve morale.”

Mr. Roell doesn’t want his son, 10, or his daughter, 15, to follow him into factory work. “We tell them all the time to go to college or trade school,” he said. “It’s just not stable working in manufacturing. One day, the factory is going to go to another state or country.

Now, months after the demonstrations that followed the killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police in May, the full scope of the country’s policing response is becoming clearer.

In city after city, the reports are a damning indictment of police forces that were poorly trained, heavily militarized and stunningly unprepared for the possibility that large numbers of people would surge into the streets

The New York Times reviewed reports by outside investigators, watchdogs and consultants analyzing the police response to protests in nine major cities, including four of the nation’s largest.

Almost uniformly, the reports said departments need more training in how to handle large protests.

Those first days of protest after Mr. Floyd’s killing presented an extraordinary law enforcement challenge, experts say, one that few departments were prepared to tackle.

The reports are strikingly similar, a point made by the Indianapolis review, which said that officers’ responses “were not dissimilar to what appears to have occurred in cities around the country.”

Departments also were criticized for not planning for protests, despite evidence that they would be large

The independent report on the Los Angeles police, commissioned by the City Council, said officers who may have had insufficient training in how to use the weapons fired into dynamic crowds. “To be precise takes practice,” it said.

On May 29, Indianapolis police showed up with helmets, face shields, reinforced vests and batons. Protesters told investigators this “made the police look militarized and ready for battle.”

The reports repeatedly blamed police departments for escalating violence instead of taming it. At times, police looked as if they were on the front lines of a war.

In Portland, where protests continued nightly, police officers used force more than 6,000 times during six months, according to lawyers with the U.S. Department of Justice

In Denver, officers used similar “less lethal” weapons against people who yelled about officers’ behavior. Officers also improperly fired projectiles that hit or nearly hit heads and faces, according to the report by the city’s independent police monitor.

For decades, criminal justice experts have warned that warrior-like police tactics escalate conflict at protests instead of defusing it.

As with the protests in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6 that culminated in the Capitol riot, police also did not understand how angry people were, in some cases because they lacked resources devoted to intelligence and outreach that would have put them in better touch with their communities.

The Chicago police response on the night of May 29, when hundreds of people marched through the streets, “was marked by poor coordination, inconsistency, and confusion,” the city’s Office of Inspector General found.

Chicago police also did not have enough computers to process large numbers of arrestees. In Los Angeles, police did not have enough buses to transport arrested people — a problem the department has had for a decade

All told, the reports suggest the likelihood of problems in the event of future protests. The trial now underway in Minneapolis of the officer facing the most serious charges in Mr. Floyd’s death, Derek Chauvin, is one potential trigger.

Talks about implementing a federal licensing system gained some traction a couple years ago when New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker introduced the Federal Firearm Licensing Bill, which would have expanded the criteria used to screen prospective gun buyers. Under this plan, attorneys general would have more information about prospective gun owners and could deny licenses to people who violate stalking restraining orders, as well as gun traffickers and people with histories of making threats of violence. Even though the National Rifle Association might try to tell you differently, these are not controversial early steps in a massive gun grab. These are modest expansions of a failing background check system. Unfortunately, this bill died in the Senate.

“I’m not worried about the polls. They’re good one week; they’re bad the next week. I

“You see it on TV, and you assume it’s some place far away, don’t you?” she said. “You hear this hateful talk about women, and you want to say: Enough, enough! That’s not who we are.”

“When he first announced, I kind of rolled my eyes, too,” Fuller said about Trump. “But I got it soon enough.

Trump meandered his way toward a discussion of why he could win. He has spoken more about poll numbers, in his set speeches, than any candidate in the same position. He tends to focus on the numbers that show him competitive

‘Well, that is his plateau. He won’t go higher.’ ”

Another theory is that his support could be so robust from white voters — who have steadily trended Republican — that he could capi­tal­ize on Clinton’s unfavorable numbers and win.

Clinton’s strategy assumes she has lost voters’ esteem since then. Even before the unexpectedly stiff challenge of Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont

Eight years ago, both she and Obama campaigned on “clean coal.” This year, she has said that “we’ve got to move away from coal” and put “a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business” as the economy gets greener. (Sanders has roughly the same position but has not received the same backlash.)

Indiana ended the campaign of Trump’s last serious rival, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), another candidate who was navigating soaring unfavorable ratings. In his final days, Cruz regularly made four or five campaign stops, o

“Maybe in the Hillary Clinton camp, he’s unpopular. Maybe among some of these other Republicans like John Boehner

“Look at what went on at the Trump rallies just this week. They were the socialists, the communists, NARAL, Occupy Wall Street. Those people are going to exist, and a lot of them are paid protesters.”

Sanders said.

Among them are variations on a proposal that exploded in Indiana last year, when controversy over a so-called religious freedom law became a flashpoint in the ongoing debate over religious belief and legal equality. The Hoosier State’s measure led to an estimated $60 million in lost revenue, and after weeks of economic and political pressure, Indiana Governor Mike Pence approved revisions to the law clarifying that businesses couldn’t use it to turn away LGBT patrons.

To many supporters, these bills are necessary to protect deeply held religious beliefs and are worth the controversy and lost revenue. To critics, however, the measures seemed aimed at allowing people to treat LGBT citizens differently, based on moral opposition to homosexuality and transgenderism, and serve as a reminder that the lessons of the Indiana fight were fleeting.

The fight in South Dakota echoes earlier clashes over gender identity and bathroom use of transgender people. The sponsor of the South Dakota bathroom measure, state Rep. Fred Deutsch, has argued in committee testimony that it is necessary to protect the “bodily privacy rights” of “biologic boys and girls” and that transgender students should be offered alternate accommodations if they do not wish to use the facilities that correspond to their sex assigned at birth.

The fight has played out at the state level largely because there is no federal law that bans discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. The Equality Act, a federal bill that would create such protections, is unlikely to go anywhere in a Republican-controlled Congress.

Rebecca Dodds, the mother of a transgender son who recently graduated from high school in the state’s famed Black Hills, said compelling students to use a separate facility could force them to out themselves to their peers, which could lead to harassment or violence.

Speaking in support of the bathroom bill, a representative from South Dakota Citizens for Liberty said the measure offers a good compromise: “It allows for the sensitive accommodation of students who are experiencing personal trials,” Florence Thompson testified at a hearing of the Senate education committee on Feb. 11. “And does so without giving preferential treatment to a tiny segment of the student population at the expense of the privacy rights of the vast majority.”

It extends protections for people with three moral beliefs that are laid out in the bill’s text: (1) Marriage is or should only be recognized as the union of one man and one woman (2) Sexual relations are properly reserved to marriage (3) The terms male or man and female or woman refer to distinct and immutable biological sexes that are determined by anatomy and genetics by the time of birth.

While critics worry about such bills being used to turn away LGBT people from housing, jobs or businesses, they also worry it could open the door to a broader insertion of personal morality in the public sphere. A pharmacist might, for instance, refuse to fill a birth control prescription for an unmarried woman or a child care agency might refuse to look after a boy or girl with gay parents, without risk of losing their state licenses.

Though the bill does not specify what those accommodations would be, schools that have dealt with conflicts over bathroom use have often instructed transgender students to use staff or nurse facilities, or facilities in buildings separate from their peers. The Department of Justice has issued several rulings and opinions that say such treatment of transgender students amounts to sex discrimination under Title IX, though federal courts are still weighing the issue.

Meanwhile, the majority of states lack LGBT non-discrimination laws, although a bill in Pennsylvania will likely add sexual orientation and gender identity to the state’s non-discrimination protections.

In Georgia, where lawmakers are considering at least four religious freedom bills, a group of businesses—including Coca-Cola, AT&T and Delta—has formed to promote “inclusive” policies, explicitly mentioning sexual orientation and gender identity as qualities that should be respected.

In South Dakota, dollars and cents may determine whether the bathroom bill passes too, with the ACLU arguing that the passage of such a law would put the state in direct conflict with federal policy—and therefore all but guarantee costly litigation for school districts that are forced to choose to follow one or the other. Failing to comply with guidance from the Department of Education, which has said that students’ gender identities must be respected, could run the risk of costing local districts hundreds of millions in federal funds.

Yet supporters like Deutsch say that the guidance coming from the federal government is the reason such bills are needed, so that South Dakota won’t be pressured into providing facility access for transgender students that is not yet explicitly laid out in federal law.

Meanwhile, a Syrian couple and their two small children arrived safely Monday night in Indianapolis

It said the family fled Syria three years ago and underwent two years of security checks before being allowed to enter the U.S.

But he said he welcomed them anyway because helping refugees "is an essential part of our identity as Catholic Christians."

But Pence indicated he wouldn't try to deny Medicaid, food stamps or other social services to any refugees who do arrive in Indiana.

Texas has taken in more refugees than any other state in the last five years, including about 250 Syrian refugees. But it also fought harder than any other state to stop the inflow of Syrian refugees after the attacks.

If we did, we would know that this speech so deeply connected to the notion of a dream of a different America begins with a history lesson, tying modern America to President Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation.

But there is more in the "I Have a Dream" speech that is often ignored or forgotten. King used the term "police brutality" twice in this historic address, and here we are many seasons later wondering why police-community relations are so tainted.

"'When will you be satisfied?'

Yet they, too, will pause on the King national holiday and say they loved the man and his ideals, when we know that is not the truth.

But they heard about the March on Washington, they heard about these people, mostly black but also white sisters and brothers, too, who were making their way to America's capital to fight for freedom, equality and jobs for all people.

And as he instructed folks to go back to their home states to keep marching and fighting for what was righ

learn that King had been killed because he was fighting for the rights of black people, of all people. Doubly confused me that his words spoke of love and peace, yet he was gunned down in cold blood on the balcony of a motel.

I lost respect for King, when I was in college, because I did not think he was as fearless as other black leaders of his time, like Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party.

For it takes great courage to love any people who do not love you. It takes great courage to push for peace with every fiber of your being when violence is the language of those who believe in hate, division and fear.

And it takes great courage to see an America full of unity and togetherness even when fellow Americans cannot imagine it for themselves.

The killings of the prayer group in Charleston, South Carolina, echoes the four little girls killed in a Birmingham church the same year King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech. That kind of trauma and shock makes you question America, makes you question humanity, and makes you question King's dream itself.

To paraphrase the words Bobby Kennedy said to an Indianapolis crowd on the night King was assassinated, we've got to make an effort to be compassionate and show love, toward ourselves, toward each other, for the sake of ourselves and for the sake of America.

If we did, we would know that King declared, matter-of-factly, that America had not made good on its promise of full citizenship rights to black people. We would acknowledge, 50 years later, how sad and unfortunate it is that we are still having the same conversations about equality for people of color, women, the LGBTQ community

a lesson some of us need to learn or relearn as we engage in civil disobedience in this new millennium. But those who say movements of today are disrupting their lives also fail to connect that the civil rights movement was completely about making the comfortable uncomfortable until real justice was served.

g's "I Have a Dream" speech. My mother and her family were so poor she interrupted her education for the first of many times when she was only 8 years old, to pick cotton on land owned by local whites that had been forcibly taken from her grandfather upon his death at their hands. The family was so poor there was no telephone, no television, no radio, and no indoor plumbing.

Nor do they love people like my mother, a woman born and bred in the backwoods of South Carolina, whose 20th birthday was the same day as Ki

"I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of 'interposition' and 'nullification' — one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers."

I sensed his sorrow when he talked about the need for a relevant ministry among the faith community, and how so many have moved so far away from being relevant in these times. I think of how King asked us to practice a dangerous kind of selflessness, to not put ourselves, our lives, our material things, before people. The dream cannot be only about individual success, individual progress, while ignoring the plight of others. Even if we have some form of privilege, as King himself had, we must never forget that the basics of life must be for all people.

Economists said it was still too early to gauge the depth and length of the pandemic’s impact on the jobs market. Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis president James Bullard has said he expects unemployment to hit 30% in the second quarter, while Morgan Stanley has estimated that unemployment would average 12.8% over that time period.

Trump is concerned the quarantine measures could prove more harmful than the virus, an opinion that is disputed by economists and health experts.

According to Johns Hopkins University there are now 55,233 confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the US and 802 reported deaths, up from 302 last weekend. Despite the rising casualties, president Donald Trump said this week that he would like the country “opened up and just raring to go by Easter”.

A record 3.3 million people filed claims for unemployment in the US last week as the Covid-19 pandemic shut down large parts of America’s economy and the full scale of the impact of the crisis began to emerge.

The release offers the first official glimpse of the severe economic downturn that the US faces as companies shutter businesses and states across the country move to prevent people from gathering in crowds in an attempt to contain the virus.

Nearly every state cited the impact of Covid-19, the labor department said. Service industries broadly, particularly accommodation and food services, were hard hit although states also cited healthcare and social assistance, arts, entertainment and recreation, transportation and warehousing, and manufacturing industries.

Taylor Cox, a 29-year-old bartender from Indianapolis, was laid off 12 days ago. “People are scared, people don’t know what’s going to happen. The idea of a tipped worker going without tips for eight weeks or more is one of the most frightening things to have to confront,” told the Guardian.

Economists said it was still too early to gauge the depth and length of the pandemic’s impact on the jobs market. The Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis president, James Bullard, has said he expects unemployment to hit 30% in the second quarter, while Morgan Stanley has estimated that unemployment would average 12.8% over that time period.

The controversy broke Thursday after a coach from Stanford University posted a photo to social media comparing the men's and women's weight setups.

the NCAA had originally intended for women's players to have access to a full weight room once their team had reached the third round of the tournament. The men's teams had access to a full weight room during the entirety of their tournament run.

The controversy picked up steam as more disparities were revealed: uninspiring box meals compared to a buffet with steak filets and lobster mac & cheese; swag bags appearing to be a third the size of the men's.

the school's men's team were being tested daily with highly accurate PCR COVID-19 tests, while his women's team were receiving antigen tests, which are less accurate. The NCAA later confirmed that the two tournaments are using different testing methods.

Reaction to the disparities was swift and negative. Joining the voices of women's players facing the conditions in San Antonio were NBA stars like Steph Curry and Kyrie Irving alongside top college administrators and coaches. "I appreciate that [the NCAA] is working on a solution, but this is unacceptable to begin with," wrote Ross Bjork, the athletics director at Texas A&M, on Twitter. "No one in athletics would have thought this was appropriate if someone would have been consulted."

said longtime Notre Dame coach Muffet McGraw. "The NCAA had an opportunity to highlight how sport can be a place where we don't just talk about equality we put it on display. To say they dropped the ball would be the understatement of the century."

NCAA officials said that despite appearances, the swag bags were equal in value, and that the food quality had been "addressed immediately" with the hotels in San Antonio housing the women's players.

As for the differences in testing, NCAA President Mark Emmert said Friday that he had "complete confidence" in the different protocols, pointing to the organization's partnerships with local health organizations in Indianapolis and San Antonio.

This isn't a new problem, but woefully and painfully familiar. 

Biden said gun violence "pierces the very soul of our nation"

Despite these earnest calls for action, it's not yet clear how -- or if -- Congress will act.

America's Covid-19 vaccinations continue, despite the week's J&J pause, and more than 202 million doses have been administered according to CDC data published Friday.

If it’s time for a new outsider, it does sort of seem that Andrew Yang ought to fit the bill. Yet he’s run a rather strange campaign — lots of interesting ideas but often the kind you hear from a guy who’s on a six-month internship at City Hall before being posted someplace else.

But we’ve had more than 45 mass shootings in the United States just since the Atlanta killings last month. Many of which we haven’t even heard of because there were more injuries than deaths.

Bret: It may be my congenital contrarianism, Gail, but after spending the better part of the pandemic feeling optimistic about the future, I’ve now sunk into deep fatalism. Cases are edging up again, driven by the new virus variants, and the steep decline in Covid deaths since January also seems to have bottomed out at an average rate of around 700 a day, which is just horrific.

This April, prodded or perhaps even shamed by prominent Black business leaders, 170 executives of major companies signed a statement protesting a vote-suppression measure enacted in Georgia and ones pending in other states.

And this brings us to a subject that corporate America would evidently prefer not to talk about: abortion. It’s possible I’ve missed something, but I’ve been listening hard, and so far all I’ve heard is the sound of silence.

. The article pointed out that in the four days between April 26 and April 29, 28 new abortion restrictions were signed into law in seven states. As of mid-May, bills proposing 549 separate abortion restrictions had been introduced in 47 states, including 165 that would ban abortion.

Much of this activity might have been shrugged off as just so much political theater had the Supreme Court not agreed last month to hear Mississippi’s defense of its ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, a law that under current doctrine is unconstitutional. While the country may not learn until a year from now how receptive the court is to revising or abandoning its abortion precedents, its acceptance of the Mississippi case for argument in the fall serves as a welcome mat to states trying to outdo one another in anti-abortion zealotry.

But nothing can compete with the law that Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas signed last month. Not only does it ban abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected — which can occur as early as six weeks, before many women realize they are pregnant — but it effectively deputizes the entire world’s population to enforce the ban, authorizing “any person” to sue anyone who performs or facilitates an abortion outside that time frame

All would be subject to a $10,000 fine plus the plaintiff’s court costs for each successful lawsuit. At the same time, the law strips the state itself of enforcement power. The purpose of that novel provision is to prevent abortion providers from going to court, because there is no entity they can sue.

Abortion may be an uncomfortable subject to talk about, but don’t misunderstand the silence. Abortion is not rare. It is, in fact, a common female experience, although I’ll grant that it is not as common as voting. Nearly half of all pregnancies in the United States are unintended, and some 40 percent of those end in abortion. This is life as women live it, even in Texas.

Your silence is acquiescence; it’s a decision. You’re making a decision. Your silence is a decision. And when you recognize that, some of these issues are so salient and so critical that you have to take a position.

In Rochester, N.Y. the Safety Commissioner told police to keep the noise levels down, out of consideration for the high number of people sick with flu or pneumonia who need “rest and quiet” to get better.

In Maryland, concerned that warm weather would bring people out and too close together, the Baltimore Health Commissioner banned “frolics” such as street celebrations, arguing that “while the epidemic’s sweep was becoming milder, it was still dangerous to permit large assemblages of persons.”

“ticklers and brushes are particularly forbidden, and confetti throwing will not be allowed because in contact with the hands clothes and the persons of the people throwing enhances the danger of spreading influenza,” reported the Oct. 30 Pittsburgh Gazette Times.

Indoor Halloween parties were banned as well. “Halloween parties are taboo, as are all other indoor gatherings, as the danger of spreading the influenza is still great,” declared Denver Mayor W.F.R. Mills, according to the Denver Post.

In Indianapolis, the top health official lifted the ban on public gatherings just for Halloween, allowing residents to “go ahead and have all the Halloween parties they wanted to,”

On the other hand, even where cities tried to target large gatherings, local newspaper coverage of scattered incidents of individual mischief-making suggests that the tricks part of trick-or-treating was especially pronounced.

It’s unclear what kind of effect these rowdy Halloweens had on case counts more than a century ago, especially given that it wasn’t the only event drawing people into crowds around that time: Election Day was just a week later, and people flocked to the streets again to celebrate the end of World War I just days after that.

Regardless of Halloween’s role, a long winter was ahead, and the flu did continue to spread at pandemic levels well into 1919, spiking in the following winter and in early 1920 as well. In the end, about 675,000 Americans and 50 million people died, and about 500 million people were infected globally.

Republican groups have invested millions in this cycle to win back seats they lost in 2018, forcing Democrats to spend significantly to defend these first-term lawmakers.

Polls show some races are tight in places that President Trump won in 2016. They include two open seats currently held by Republicans: Virginia’s Fifth District, where Democrat Cameron Webb is running against Republican Bob Good, in a mostly rural district currently held by Republican Rep.

In Arkansas, GOP Rep. French Hill is facing a tougher-than-expected race against state Sen. Joyce Elliott in a district that Mr. Trump won by 11 points in 2016.

There are 94 GOP women running in the general election, a record for the party, breaking its previous high mark of 53 GOP women who made it through the primary elections in 2018

Democrats have almost universally focused their messaging on health care and addressing the coronavirus pandemic, while Republicans have attacked Democrats for being socialists or espousing liberal ideas from the party’s far-left flank, such as defunding the police. The message that is most successful could help frame postelection priorities.

Democrats, meanwhile, have focused on Republicans’ efforts to undermine the Affordable Care Act, arguing they could jeopardize protections for people with pre-existing conditions. Democrats are running ads focusing on this popular part of the ACA in districts such as GOP Rep. Chip Roy’s Texas district, where he is being challenged by former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis.

Presidential candidates not only sat home but didn’t even campaign before 1840, when Ohio’s William Henry “Old Tippecanoe” Harrison became the first to give speeches with a campaign of carnival-like rallies. In 1880, Republican James Garfield campaigned from his farm in Mentor, Ohio. In 1888, Republican Benjamin Harrison, William Henry’s grandson, ran from his house in Indianapolis.

Harding’s campaign theme was “a return to normalcy” after the turmoil of World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic.Instead of going to the people, he had the people come to the large, curving front porch of his wood-frame house in Marion, a town of about 30,000 residents.

Meantime, Harding’s Democratic rival, Ohio Gov. James Cox, was campaigning by train in 36 of the 48 states.

Cox said he was “carrying his front porch” to the country, while his opponent continued “his self-isolation in a small Ohio community,”

By October, Harding was far in the lead. His front-porch campaign had drawn more than 600,000 people.

Harding didn’t make it to the end of his first term. In the summer of 1923, after a bout of flu, the president took a cross-country train trip. On Aug. 2 in San Francisco, he died after a heart attack.

Harding’s legacy was tarnished by scandal following his death. In 1927, it was ruled that his interior secretary secretly sold drilling rights to federal oil wells in Teapot Dome, Wyo., to private oil interests.

In 1927, young Nan Britton published a book claiming she was Harding’s mistress and gave birth to his daughter. Decades later, love letters were uncovered showing, in a Stormy Daniels-like moment, the Republican Party in 1920 had paid another Harding high-society mistress to take a long voyage until the election was over.

For the first time in American history, in 1994, the federal government funded states to change their laws and practices that treated domestic violence and sexual assault as less serious than other offenses. The law included a provision to address state justice system’s routine mishandling of sexual assault cases, putting accountability in the hands of survivors by enabling them to seek redress themselves. The law declared it a federal “civil right” to be free from gender-based violence.

In 2000, the Court declared the Violence Against Women Acts’s civil rights remedy unconstitutional precisely because it dealt with sexual abuse crimes.  Despite the fact that the law allowed private survivors to seek damages, the court ignored the civil nature of the remedy and declared the underlying fact of sexual abuse had to be considered a crime.

The justices were almost hysterical about the danger: If the federal government could regulate sexual abuse, they said it would “obliterate” the distinction between the federal and state governments.

The decision was supposed to be about federalism, but it led to no legal revolution.  In fact, five years later, the Court decided another case, Gonzales v. Raich, allowing the federal government to regulate an individual’s marjuana possession, even though that too involved “crime,” on the theory that there was a commercial market for marijuana.  Many law professors think Gonzales silently overruled Morrison, giving the federal government the power to regulate all sorts of crime, just not sexual assault.