I used to think Donald Trump’s claim that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it was a bit of hyperbole from a circus clown. I never imagined it would actually be an understatement.
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The entire impeachment process is built on a false premise: that politicians are fit to judge their own. It may have worked in theory in 1787, but it doesn’t work in theory or in practice now. Using a partisan grand jury and a partisan panel of political jurists to decide the fate of a sitting president (or any other partisan figure) is about as sensible as allowing members of Congress to redraw their own districts. When you trust the foxes to guard the henhouse, you shouldn’t be surprised if all your eggs have been broken and the chickens have been butchered.
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Despite the founders’ intent to create a nation that was welcoming to those of all beliefs, an aura of awe and majesty has been superimposed on both those founders and the document they produced. They’re seen as prophets of sorts, and the Constitution they produced as holy writ: inspired and inerrant. To question it, or them, is seen as unpatriotic.
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I watched most of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ inauguration Wednesday, and I was struck by one thing. … The best way to describe it is feeling like a fever had broken: that moment when you’re lying in your bed, exhausted from fighting a really bad case of the flu, but the chills are gone, the headache had subsided, and you’re no longer shivering. When you feel weak from the fight, but no longer weak from the disease.
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Would these lawmakers bolt the party for Trump’s new party if he were to form one? Given their — and their constituents’ — unflinching loyalty in deep-red (or deep-Trump) gerrymandered districts, they might feel as if they had no choice.
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These numbskulls pose a threat precisely because they’re so stupid it’s hard for anyone to take them seriously — but they’re also smart enough to use that to their advantage. And those of us who thought we were smart turned out to be the stupid ones: We naïvely thought that everyone had enough brain cells to dismiss absurd conspiracies out of hand. We overestimated their intelligence. But they didn’t overestimate ours.
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