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If a black man is carrying a weapon, the chance is 0.00075. One is too many, but it seems to me important to get the scale of this right. Our perceptions are not reality.

I have no doubt at all that Kaepernick and Reid are sincere, and I absolutely defend their right to protest in the way they have, and am disgusted by the president’s response. But on the deaths of unarmed black men, the left-liberal characterization of the problem just does not match the statistical reality.

A Cornell Ph.D. student, Philippe Lemoine, has dug into exactly that: by examining the data from the Police-Public Contact Survey, conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. This is testimony from black people themselves, not the police; it’s far less tainted than self-serving police records.

It’s a big survey — around 150,000 people, including 16,000 African-Americans.

are black men in America disproportionately likely to have contact with the police? Surprisingly, no. In the survey years that Lamoine looked at, 20.7 percent of white men say they interacted at least once with a cop, compared with 17.5 percent of black men.

black men (1.5 percent) are indeed more likely than whites (1.2 percent) to have more than three contacts with police per year — but it’s not a huge difference.

You could also argue that lynching was statistically very rare in the past, but it instilled a real terror that belied this real fact.

If you restrict it to physical violence, the data is worse: Of men who have had at least one encounter with the police in a given year, 0.9 percent of white men reported the use of violence, compared with 3.4 percent of black men.

I think it shows the following: that police violence against black men, very broadly defined, is twice as common as against white men, and narrowly defined as physical force, three times as common, but that there’s no racial difference in police violence that might lead to physical harm, and all such violence is rare.

the 3.4 percent of black men who experience violence at the hands of the police are 3.4 percent of the 17.5 percent of those who have at least one encounter with the cops, i.e., 0.5 percent of all black men.)

Is “rare” a fair judgment? It’s certainly a subjective one, and I do not know how I would feel if there were a 0.5 percent chance that any time I encountered a cop, I could be subjected to physical violence, as opposed to the 0.2 percent chance that I, as a white man, experience.

What makes it worse for black men, of course, is something called history, in which any violence by the state rightly comes with immensely more emotional and political resonance — and geography. Police violence may be rare across the entire country, but it is concentrated in urban pockets, where the atmosphere is therefore more fearful — and there’s a natural tendency to extrapolate from that context.

Specific horrifying incidents — like Alton Sterling’s death — operate in our psyches the way 9/11 does. It understandably terrified Eric Reid — but also distorted his assessment of the actual risk that one of his family members could suffer the same fate.

It’s true, too, that the huge racial discrepancy in the prison population affects our judgment.

On the key measure of use of force by the cops, however, black men with at least one encounter with cops are more than twice as likely to report the use of force as whites (one percent versus 0.4 percent). That’s the nub of it. “Force,” by the way, includes a verbal threat of it, as well as restraining, or subduing.

we’re not talking about extralegal lynchings by civilians, in the context of slavery or segregation or state-imposed discrimination. We’re talking about instantaneous decisions by cops, often in contexts where their own lives are at stake as well. Their perspective — and many of these cops are also African-American — matters as well.

This is the balance we have to strike. We can and should honor the spirit of the protests. But we cannot allow ourselves to let emotion, however justified, overwhelm reality

t the election wasn’t just an anti-May vote. It was also a pro-Corbyn one, especially among the rising generation. Millennials, having never experienced socialism, love it. And Corbyn is on the leftist edge of socialism. He’s for huge increases in taxation and public spending, he promises free college for all, he wants to instate rent controls across Britain’s major cities, and, in his speech last Wednesday, he described gentrification as “social cleansing.”

Most of his proposals would add mountains of debt to the British economy, and he doesn’t really care. Austerity is so over.

This makes him a bigger leap to the left than Trump is to the right. It’s as if Roy Moore were the GOP nominee — and leading in the polls.

another key factor is Corbyn’s effortless Englishness. He is a very specific character — a very English leftist. He’s mild-mannered in speech, even as his ideas are radical. In the last election campaign, he came off as an ordinary man of the people

Evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and psychology are the foundation of Buddhism Is True. And I find much of it both intellectually convincing, and also recognizable with my own developing practice.

Thursday will see the much-anticipated testimony of Mr Comey, who was leading one of the Russia investigations before Mr Trump fired him.He will be quizzed on his interactions with the president before he was sacked.

Mr Clapper's comparison with Watergate will raise eyebrows - President Richard Nixon resigned amid an unprecedented American political scandal involving spying, burglary and a cover-up.

What seemed for generations the prerogative of powerful men has been fully revealed as a pernicious form of dehumanization. Men such as Bill O’Reilly, Harvey Weinstein and Charlie Rose have been exposed at their moments of maximum cruelty and creepiness — just as their alleged victims (on credible testimony) experienced them. An ethical light switch was flipped. Moral outrage — the appropriate response — now seems obvious.

Over a period of years, this is what happened with the same-sex marriage movement. A type of inclusion that initially appeared radical and frightening became an obvious form of fairness to a majority of Americans.

We are seeing an example of how social change often (and increasingly) takes place. Advocates of a cause can push for a long time with little apparent effect. Then, in a historical blink, what seemed incredible becomes inevitable.

Such rapid shifts in social norms should be encouraging to social reformers of various stripes. Attitudes and beliefs do not move on a linear trajectory. A period of lightning clarity can change the assumptions and direction of a culture.

The movement against capital punishment, for example, may be reaching such a point.

Advocates of gun control, in contrast, seem to have an endless wait. But the record of our times counsels against despair.

how we got here is instructive. Conservatives have sometimes predicted that moral relativism would render Americans broadly incapable of moral judgment. But people, at some deep level, know that rules and norms are needed. They understand that character — rooted in empathy and respect for the rights and dignity of others — is essential in every realm of life, including the workplace.

Conservatives need to be clear and honest in this circumstance. The strong, moral commitment to the dignity of women and children recently asserting itself in our common life has mainly come from feminism, not the “family values” movement. In this case, religious conservatives have largely been bystanders or obstacles. This indicates a group of people for whom the dignity of girls and women has become secondary to other political goals.

We are a nation with vast resources of moral renewal. It is a shame and a scandal that so many religious conservatives have made themselves irrelevant to that task.

prescribes a humanitarian approach to slavery -- free men could not be enslaved, and those faithful to foreign religions could live as protected persons, dhimmis, under Muslim rule (as long as they maintained payment of taxes called Kharaj and Jizya). However, the spread of the Islamic Empire resulted in a much harsher interpretation of the law.

Although the law required owners to treat slaves well and provide medical treatment, a slave had no right to be heard in court (testimony was forbidden by slaves), had no right to property, could marry only with permission of their owner, and was considered to be a chattel, that is the (moveable) property, of the slave owner. Conversion to Islam did not automatically give a slave freedom nor did it confer freedom to their children.

Whilst highly educated slaves and those in the military did win their freedom, those used for basic duties rarely achieved freedom.

Black Africans were transported to the Islamic empire across the Sahara to Morocco and Tunisia from West Africa, from Chad to Libya, along the Nile from East Africa, and up the coast of East Africa to the Persian Gulf. This trade had been well entrenched for over 600 years before Europeans arrived, and had driven the rapid expansion of Islam across North Africa

By the time of the Ottoman Empire, the majority of slaves were obtained by raiding in Africa. Russian expansion had put an end to the source of "exceptionally beautiful" female and "brave" male slaves from the Caucasians -- the women were highly prised in the harem, the men in the military.

alled “When is a Menorah ‘Jewish’?: On the Complexities of the Symbol During the Age of Transition” which is found in the collection, “Age of Transition: Byzantine Culture in the Islamic World”

“In the name of God the merciful, the compassionate, this territory, Nuba, and all its boundaries and its entire area, is an endowment to the Rock of Bayt al-Maqdis and the al-Aqsa Mosque, as it was dedicated by the Commander of the Faithful, Umar ibn al-Khattab for the glory of Allah.”

The menorah was a Jewish symbol; its use is testimony that Muslims didn’t have a problem with the Jews, he said

Fine writes that early Islamic coin designers used Byzantine and Persian models for their coins,

Elad writes it is significant for many reasons that the Dome of the Rock was built in the place where the Jewish Temple had stood.

There is clear evidence that Muhammad had some awareness of midrash [Jewish biblical exegesis]. There are midrashim clearly reworked and attributed to Muhammed’s entourage,”

“Now everything is based on hatred. We want to show that in the past there was dialogue — and that it can continue,” said Avraham.

The justices once again did not act on a high-profile petition from the state of Mississippi asking the court to review the constitutionality of a state law that bans virtually all abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Lower courts struck down the law.

Obama relied on the Antiquities Act of 1906, which allows the president to declare national monuments on “land owned or controlled by the federal government.” The designation resulted in a ban on most commercial fishing, prompting a group of commercial-fishing associations to go to court, where they argued that the designation as a monument went beyond Obama’s power under the Antiquities Act because submerged land in the ocean is not land “controlled” by the federal government.

. Sotomayor stressed that Longoria’s case “implicates an important and longstanding split among the Courts of Appeals over the proper interpretation of” the commentary, with most circuits concluding that “a suppression hearing is not a valid basis for denying the reduction.”

The Sixth Amendment guarantees “the right to a speedy and public trial.” In Smith v. Titus, the Supreme Court on Monday turned down the case of a Minnesota man who was convicted of murder for the shooting deaths of two people who had broken into his home.

Smith argued that the decision to close the courtroom violated his rights under the Sixth Amendment. The Minnesota Supreme Court rejected that argument, and federal courts turned down Smith’s requests for post-conviction relief. Smith came to the Supreme Court in November, contending that the state supreme court’s ruling was contrary to clearly established Supreme Court decisions – the standard for relief under federal post-conviction laws.

The truth, I suspect, was simultaneously about as bad as I suspected, and paradoxically anticlimactic. Trump was surrounded by all sorts of odious characters who manipulated him into saying and doing things that ran against the national interest. One of those characters was Putin. In the end, their influence ran up against the limits that the character over whom they had gained influence was a weak, failed president.

Ultimately, whatever value Trump offered to Russia was compromised by his incompetence and limited ability to grasp firm control even of his own government’s foreign policy. It was not just the fabled “deep state” that undermined Trump. Even his own handpicked appointees constantly undermined him, especially on Russia. Whatever leverage Putin had was limited to a single individual, which meant there was nobody Trump could find to run the State Department, National Security Agency, and so on who shared his idiosyncratic Russophilia.

Mueller even testified that this arrangement gave Russia blackmail leverage over Trump. But by the time these facts had passed from the realm of the mysterious to the confirmed, they had become uninteresting.

Shvets told Unger that the KGB cultivated Trump as an American leader, and persuaded him to run his ad attacking American alliances. “The ad was assessed by the active measures directorate as one of the most successful KGB operations at that time,” he said, “It was a big thing — to have three major American newspapers publish KGB soundbites.”

To be clear, while Shvets is a credible source, his testimony isn’t dispositive. There are any number of possible motives for a former Soviet spy turned critic of Russia’s regime to manufacture an indictment of Trump

This is what intelligence experts mean when they describe Trump as a Russian “asset.” It’s not the same as being an agent. An asset is somebody who can be manipulated, as opposed to somebody who is consciously and secretly working on your behalf.

A second reason is that reporter Craig Unger got a former KGB spy to confirm on the record that Russian intelligence had been working Trump for decades. In his new book, “American Kompromat,” Unger interviewed Yuri Shvets, who told him that the KGB manipulated Trump with simple flattery. “In terms of his personality, the guy is not a complicated cookie,” he said, “his most important characteristics being low intellect coupled with hyperinflated vanity. This makes him a dream for an experienced recruiter.”

If I had to guess today, I’d put the odds higher, perhaps over 50 percent. One reason for my higher confidence is that Trump has continued to fuel suspicion by taking anomalously pro-Russian positions. He met with Putin in Helsinki, appearing strangely submissive, and spouted Putin’s propaganda on a number of topics including the ridiculous possibility of a joint Russian-American cybersecurity unit. (Russia, of course, committed the gravest cyber-hack in American history not long ago, making Trump’s idea even more self-defeating in retrospect than it was at the time.) He seemed to go out of his way to alienate American allies and blow up cooperation every time they met during his tenure.

He would either refuse to admit Russian wrongdoing — Trump refused even to concede that the regime poisoned Alexei Navalny — or repeat bizarre snippets of Russian propaganda: NATO was a bad deal for America because Montenegro might launch an attack on Russia; the Soviets had to invade Afghanistan in the 1970s to defend against terrorism. These weren’t talking points he would pick up in his normal routine of watching Fox News and calling Republican sycophants.

there was a reasonable chance — I loosely pegged it at 10 or 20 percent — that the Soviets had planted some of these thoughts, which he had never expressed before the trip, in his head.

Trump returned from Moscow fired up with political ambition. He began the first of a long series of presidential flirtations, which included a flashy trip to New Hampshire. Two months after his Moscow visit, Trump spent almost $100,000 on a series of full-page newspaper ads that published a political manifesto. “An open letter from Donald J. Trump on why America should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves,” as Trump labeled it, launched angry populist charges against the allies that benefited from the umbrella of American military protection. “Why are these nations not paying the United States for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing to protect their interests?”

During the Soviet era, Russian intelligence cast a wide net to gain leverage over influential figures abroad. (The practice continues to this day.) The Russians would lure or entrap not only prominent politicians and cultural leaders, but also people whom they saw as having the potential for gaining prominence in the future. In 1986, Soviet ambassador Yuri Dubinin met Trump in New York, flattered him with praise for his building exploits, and invited him to discuss a building in Moscow. Trump visited Moscow in July 1987. He stayed at the National Hotel, in the Lenin Suite, which certainly would have been bugged. There is not much else in the public record to describe his visit, except Trump’s own recollection in The Art of the Deal that Soviet officials were eager for him to build a hotel there. (It never happened.)

In 2018, I became either famous or notorious — depending on your point of view — for writing a story speculating that Russia had secret leverage over Trump

Here is what I wrote in that controversial section:

The annual return of the boys of summer carries a sense of renewal and possibility. A similar feeling is being conjured by stunning and welcome news of the success of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.

The results emerged as vaccine distribution quickly ramps up across the country, with more than 150 million doses of vaccine administered in the US and eligibility for inoculations fast expanding to almost all age groups in many states. The Pfizer news also offered President Joe Biden a powerful weapon in his drive to convince a sizable minority of skeptical Americans to get vaccinated to enable the country to reach the herd immunity that is necessary to eradicate the virus.

It's going to take widespread vaccination to drive the virus down sufficiently to allow a return to packed baseball stadiums later in the summer

"That's a decision they made. I think it's a mistake," Biden said. "They should listen to Dr. (Anthony) Fauci, the scientists and the experts. But I think it's not responsible," Biden said in an interview with ESPN in lieu of throwing out the opening pitch before the Washington Nationals season opener.

At least three players have tested positive for Covid-19 and another is considered a "likely" positive, Nationals manager Dave Martinez and general manager Mike Rizzo confirmed during a video conference Thursday.

The President also weighed into another controversy that encroached on the festivities of the first baseball games of the season — a new voting law passed by Republicans in Georgia that discriminates against Black voters and is based on ex-President Donald Trump's lies that the last election was marred by fraud.

Trump also openly feuded with sportsmen and women who spoke out in support of the Black Lives Matter movement in the racial reckoning that followed the death of George Floyd last year. At the same time as baseball was opening its season Thursday, the trial of the police officer charged with murdering Floyd entered its fourth day of testimony in Minneapolis.

Georgia GOP Gov. Brian Kemp, meanwhile, lashed out at the campaign to shift the venue, accusing Biden of trying to distract attention from a flood of child migrants at the southern border, which Republicans say is the result of his more humane immigration policies."You know, he's focused on trying to get Major League Baseball to pull the game out of Georgia, which is ridiculous," Kemp told Fox News.

The Georgia voting law may also be in the background at the Masters next week, the first men's golf major of the year at the Augusta National Golf Club. Racial issues were already to the fore of this year's tournament since Lee Elder, the first Black player to tee off at the Masters, in 1975, will be making his debut as honorary starter alongside Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player.

Most stadiums were much less than half full, with 20% to 30% capacity.

"I think today's professional athletes are acting incredibly responsibly. I would strongly support them doing that," Biden told ESPN. "People look to them. They're leaders."

At Yankee Stadium in New York, which has been doubling as a Covid-19 vaccine site, fans had to show they were fully vaccinated or post a negative Covid test before passing through the turnstiles.

Not all of the Opening Day challenges were caused by a pandemic and politics, however. In one sign of early season normality, the Boston Red Sox were rained out and will have to wait another day to welcome fans back to Fenway Park for the first time in 18 months.

Willis has said her investigation will expand past Trump's call with Raffensperger to include any efforts to influence the election in Georgia. She is also investigating a phone call between Trump loyalist Sen. Lindsey Graham and Raffensperger, the abrupt departure of Byung "BJay" Pak, the US attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, and the false allegations of election fraud Rudy Giuliani made before Georgia legislators.

The former President's legal troubles began to mount in the wake of a stunning January 2 phone call. In the 62-minute call, Trump lambasted his fellow Republican for refusing to falsely say that Trump won the election in Georgia and repeatedly touted baseless claims of election fraud. "The people of Georgia are angry, the people of the country are angry. And there's nothing wrong with saying that, you know, um, that you've recalculated," Trump said in one part of the call.

"All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state," Trump said. A person familiar with the investigation said Willis will not hesitate to dig into the details surrounding the call, even if Trump's team tries to claim various types of privilege to shield the former President from investigative inquiries.

"The repeated calls sort of start to tell the story that this was not, again, an official trying to talk to another official about problems that he or she might see in an election," Michael J. Moore, the former US attorney for the Middle District of Georgia between 2010 and 2015 under President Barack Obama, told CNN. "They paint a picture about intent and that's an important element for every prosecutor."

"He might say, his lawyers might say, 'No, no, no. He's calling to complain. He's Kvetching. He's saying I got cheated,' " Williams said. Trump's defense could be, "I'm not calling him to ask him to cheat for me, I'm calling him to ask him to undo the cheating," Williams added. A spokesman for Trump did not respond to a request for comment for this story. In a previous statement to CNN on February 9, Trump's senior adviser Jason Miller said there was nothing "improper or untoward" about the call between Trump and Raffensperger.

In the final days of the Trump administration, after numerous public attacks from Trump following the election, some members of the Secretary of State's office retained attorneys out of fear the then-President could leverage resources for political retaliation, a source with the office told CNN. And while Republican officials in Georgia have been eager to move beyond the drama of the election, they are expected to be drawn back into the investigation as Willis runs down the details surrounding the call with Raffensperger, as well as outreach from Trump and his GOP allies to other state officials

Trump also had contact with Georgia's Attorney General Chris Carr and Georgia GOP Gov. Brian Kemp.

Graham, a South Carolina Republican, was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee when he called Raffensperger on November 13 and inquired whether Raffensperger could discard all mail-in ballots from counties that had shown higher rates of unmatched signatures, the Republican secretary of state told the Washington Post at the time. Graham has denied the assertions from Raffensperger, who has stood firm on his account. Graham's spokesman Kevin Bishop has said that accusations that the senator's call was inappropriate were "ridiculous."

Willis has also expressed interest in exploring testimony from Giuliani before Georgia state senators, in which Giuliani promoted unfounded theories about why Trump won Georgia and a handful of other states that Trump had, in reality, lost. Giuliani told a room of mostly Republican lawmakers that Georgia's voting machines could not be trusted, tens of thousands of absentee ballots were illegally cast and not properly counted, and that the legislature should appoint its own electors who supported Trump. "It's your responsibility if a false and fraudulent count is submitted to the United States government, and it is clear that the count you have right now is false," Giuliani said during the hearing.

Giuliani said "the law gives you a lot of leeway to view the case in the light most favorable to your client."

"There are lots of different pieces and they're different acts and different people involved," Cunningham said. "Lawsuits all over the place, hoping to find a judge who would issue a temporary restraining order, asking a general assembly to intervene, of course raising all kinds of allegations of fraud, pressure threatening the Governor, threatening the Secretary of State."

While Willis wasted no time in launching her investigation into the former President, she said during the AP interview that she has no set timeline for completing her inquiry. "I'm in no rush," she said. "I think people think that I feel this immense pressure. I don't."

Just last Sunday, Trump announced to cheers of the right-wing audience at CPAC his plan to "get rid of" (aka "cancel") the 17 GOP members of Congress who voted to hold him accountable for his role in the January 6 attack on our Capitol.

Then there are the Republicans across the country trying to cancel access to the ballot box. In Pennsylvania, a battleground state Biden won, GOP lawmakers have announced proposals to "cancel" no-excuse mail-in ballots. The reason is obvious as Pennsylvania Democrats used mail-in ballots at three times the rate of Republicans in 2020.

In Arizona, a state Biden won by around 10,500 votes, GOP officials have alarmingly introduced a bill that would allow the GOP-controlled state legislature to "cancel" everyone's vote and award the state's electoral votes to the person of their choosing. Wow, talk about cancel culture!

They cited recent reporting from Vice showing that a new app to identify skin conditions hadn't been trained using a "sufficiently diverse" dataset and therefore wasn't effective on people with dark skin.

The senators suggested the company has not made good on racial justice pledges Pichai made in a letter to employees and congressional testimony following the murder of George Floyd a year ago.

The first step, the senators said, is a "racial equity audit." They want Google to work with outside civil rights and legal experts to identify the root causes of any discrimination within the company and its tools, and what it can do to address the problems.

The companies have also been slammed for not paying enough attention to the impact of their technologies on people of color and the way their design and development may perpetuate bias.

In their letter to Google, the lawmakers pointed to Facebook and Airbnb, which have done similar audits examining racial bias and discrimination on their platforms and within their companies after outside pressure from activists and lawmakers.

Murkowski, took aim at her GOP colleagues Thursday night for moving to block the measure -- and was critical of the rationale by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell that such a commission could prove politically problematic for the GOP ahead of the 2022 midterms.

The meetings highlighted the emotional toll that the riot has taken on the Capitol Hill community.

At least eight Republicans requested time to speak on the floor overnight -- for up to an hour each — to voice their objections to the legislative package aimed at China, known as "the US Innovation and Competition Act," and those GOP senators slammed what they said is a rushed process to make last-minute changes they have yet to review.

The bill aimed at China and US competitive would invest over $200 billion in American technology, science and research and had broad bipartisan support. Its struggles to advance highlight the difficulty Democrats will have to advance any legislation through the narrowly divided Senate, as several major issues are in negotiations among lawmakers.

The commission would attempt to find bipartisan consensus. The Democratic and Republican leaders of the House and Senate evenly split the selection of its 10 members. A subpoena can only be issued to compel witness testimony if it has the support of the majority of members, or if the commission's chairperson, chosen by Democrats, and the vice-chairperson, chosen by Republicans, come to an agreement.The commission is also required to submit to the President and Congress a final report by the end of 2021 and dissolve 60 days thereafter -- about nine months before the 2022 elections.

Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign, for instance, used a website with pre-checked boxes that committed donors to give far more money than they had intended, a recent Times investigation found. That cost some consumers thousands of dollars that the campaign later repaid.

“While there’s nothing inherently wrong with companies making money, there is something wrong with those companies intentionally manipulating users to extract their data,” said Representative Lisa Blunt Rochester, a Delaware Democrat, at the F.T.C. event. She said she planned to introduce dark pattern legislation later this year.

More than one in 10 e-commerce sites rely on dark patterns, according to another study, which also found that many online customer testimonials (“I wouldn’t buy any other brand!”) and tickers counting recent purchases (“7,235 customers bought this service in the past week”) were phony, randomly generated by software programs.

“The internet shouldn’t be the Wild West anymore — there’s just too much traffic,” said a Loyola Law School professor, Lauren Willis, at the F.T.C. event. “We need stop signs and street signs to enable consumers to shop easily, accurately.”

Shortly after that breach, demonstrators scuffled with state troopers and Salem police. One man is accused of spraying officers with bear mace, allowing the crowd to make their way further into the building.

At least three people who participated in the Salem protest went on to participate in the attack on the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.

Under the official misconduct charge, prosecutors stated that on Dec. 21, Nearman "being a public servant, did unlawfully and knowingly perform an act which constituted an unauthorize exercise of his official duties with intent to obtain a benefit or to harm another."

"He let a group of rioters enter the Capitol, despite his knowledge that only authorized personnel are allowed in the building due to the COVID-19 pandemic," the complaint said, calling Nearman's actions "completely unacceptable, reckless, and so severe that it will affect people's ability to feel safe working in the Capitol or even for the legislature."

The complaint requires an investigation into whether Nearman's actions broke workplace rules, a determination that would ultimately be made by a House committee evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. Nearman could face consequences ranging from counseling to expulsion if lawmakers conclude he violated legislative policy.

While that process plays out, Nearman has seen his ability to impact bills during the Legislative session severely diminished. He's been removed from all of his former legislative committees, and agreed to turn in his Capitol access badge and provide 24-hours notice before coming to the building. Nearman has still regularly appeared at House floor sessions.

The lawmaker also faces a rather large bill. In early March, the Legislative Assembly invoiced Nearman more than $2,700 for repairs following the December incursion.

Nearman has not said much about his role in the breach, but in a statement in January he emphasized his belief that the Capitol should be open to the general public, a position many of his Republican colleagues agree with. The building has been closed since March 2020, leading lawmakers to hold hearings and take testimony virtually during three subsequent special sessions and this year's regular legislative session.

Nearman suggested in the statement he was the victim of a political attack, and that he was being subjected to "mob justice."

While Democrats and left-leaning groups have railed against Nearman, his Republican colleagues have had little to say about his actions. In one of her only statements on the matter, House Republican Leader Christine Drazan of Canby said in January she'd support the result of a criminal investigation.

ne of the most conservative Republicans in the House, Nearman has been a lawmaker since 2015. In that time, he's been tied repeatedly to right-wing demonstrations. In 2017, his then-legislative aide gave a gun to a convicted felon, who then brought it to a pro-Trump demonstration at the Capitol, the Oregonian/OregonLive reported. Court records show the aide, Angela Roman, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor in the incident.

Nearman's dedication to right-wing causes has not flagged, despite his recent controversy. On Saturday, he's slated to appear at a Salem rally in support of gun rights alongside former congressional candidate and QAnon conspiracy theory supporter Jo Rae Perkins, according to a flyer for the event.