Joe Biden Wants a Filibuster Carve-Out for the Democratic Party

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, June 30, 2022

 

Per NBC, Joe Biden wants the Senate to abolish the filibuster so that it can preempt abortion law in all 50 states.

 

This is a bad idea — for a couple of reasons. First, because there is no such thing as a “carve-out” to the filibuster. Like a turkey, if any part of the filibuster is “carved out,” it will die. Biden and his party keep proposing this idea: a carve-out for voting rights, a carve-out for abortion, a carve out for gun-control . What they mean, of course, is that they want a carve-out for the Democratic Party. But this is never going to happen, because such a system would be unsustainable. If they carve it out, they end it.

 

Which brings us to the second problem: That whatever Democrats chose to do with their abolished filibuster would be undone — and possibly inverted — by the Republicans within a few years. Tomorrow, the Democrats abolish the filibuster and pass a bill that “codifies” Roe. And in 2025, the GOP repeals it with 50 votes, and maybe even replaces it with a national ban.

 

When Kyrsten Sinema talks about the value of the filibuster as a means by which to avoid radically see-sawing national policy, this is exactly what she means. Joe Biden ought to listen to her more.

On Top of All These Problems, an Economic Recession?

By Jim Geraghty

Friday, July 01, 2022

 

Right now Democrats are talking themselves into believing that they can mitigate the red wave of the midterms by focusing on abortion, gun control, and January 6.

 

One of their many problems is that Americans will regularly get fresh reminders about the other issues that are driving their irritation with the Biden administration — and not just every time they fill up their tank with gas or go shopping for groceries. Once a month, new Consumer Price Index numbers come out, reminding the country of just how high inflation is. Once a month, new U.S. Customs and Border Protection numbers come out, reminding Americans that hundreds of thousands of migrants are attempting to enter the country illegally each month.

 

And on July 28, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis will release the newest gross domestic product numbers. The Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow measure, which tracks economic data in real time and adjusts continuously, expects second-quarter output to contract by 1 percent. This week the BEA offered its adjusted numbers for the first quarter, finding the U.S. economy decreased at an annual rate of 1.6 percent last quarter, a little worse than the earlier assessment of 1.5 percent. Two consecutive quarters of decline is traditionally defined as a recession.

 

There is a good chance that on the morning of July 29, the headline will be, “U.S. NOW IN RECESSION.”

 

Are there voters out there who will be more concerned about abortion, gun control, and the events of January 6? Sure. But those voters will be dwarfed by the number of voters who are irate about runaway inflation, high gas prices, high food prices, difficulty finding infant formula, lingering supply-chain problems, shrinking 401(k)s and the market, dwindling savings, and on top of all that, an economic recession.

How Mitch Daniels Made Purdue an Affordable Free-Speech Haven

By Charles Hilu

Saturday, July 02, 2022

 

In 2012, Mitch Daniels, then serving as governor of Indiana, was already a very accomplished man. The former businessman had worked in the presidential administrations of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, and his gubernatorial administration passed a right-to-work law and balanced the state’s budget.

 

There was speculation that he would want to become president, and he did — just not of the country. With six months left of his term as governor, he was selected as Purdue University’s next president. Now, with a ten-year record of success in higher education, he has announced that he will step down at the end of the year. In a recent interview with National Review, he reflected on his accomplishments in that office — perhaps chief among them Purdue’s renowned affordability.

 

While tuition and fees have skyrocketed at most American universities, in-state students attending Purdue have paid $9,992 per year in tuition for the past eleven years, and its room-and-board rate is the lowest in the Big Ten Conference. The question other university presidents competing for students might — or should — be asking is, how did Daniels do it?

 

“Instead of starting with the question — as too much of higher ed seems to — ‘How much would we like to spend next year?’ and dialing up tuition to produce that amount, we started with the question, ‘What would it take to keep our student’s costs where they are?’” Daniels explained.

 

He added that spending more time in business than in government helped him learn “how to be cautious with other people’s money.” Another lesson he learned was that it was essential to “get a large, complex organization of people enthusiastic about a common goal,” such as a tuition freeze.

 

Additionally, he focused on getting down to his institution’s core functions. Purdue is a midwestern land-grant university, and its main purposes are teaching, research, and engagement. “If you’re not doing that, what are you doing? And why?” Daniels said.

 

Also on Daniels’s résumé is Purdue’s culture of free speech. When he took office, the school had the lowest rating from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. In FIRE’s most recent rankings, Purdue sits at sixth in the country, and the highest in the Big Ten.

 

The most important step he took toward that accomplishment was adopting the “Chicago Principles.” In 2014, University of Chicago president Robert Zimmer commissioned a Committee on Freedom of Expression to outline the school’s commitment to First Amendment principles.

 

The next year, the committee returned the Chicago Principles, which declared that “the University’s fundamental commitment is to the principle that debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the University community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed.” Its report also prohibited students from disrupting unpopular speakers. Daniels took note of the report and immediately adopted the principles for Purdue.

 

“I said to people here, ‘You know, we could commission a committee of our own. They could spend three years, and it wouldn’t be any better than this,’ so I called . . . Robert Zimmer and said, ‘Would you mind if another school Xeroxed your principles?’ And he said they’d be flattered. So we did,” Daniels said.

 

Daniels adhered to the principles of free speech throughout his tenure. In December, a Chinese student at Purdue praised the students killed in the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre committed by the Chinese Communist Party. Other Chinese students at his school attempted to intimidate him into silence and reported his family to the Chinese government. When Daniels learned about the incident, he sent a message to the campus community defending the freedom-loving student and vowing to punish those who reported him. In that message, he wrote:

 

Joining the Purdue community requires acceptance of its rules and values, and no value is more central to our institution or to higher education generally than the freedom of inquiry and expression. Those seeking to deny those rights to others, let alone to collude with foreign governments in repressing them, will need to pursue their education elsewhere.

 

Another pillar of his commitment to free speech is his own conduct. Though he writes a regular column in the Washington Post, he makes a habit of choosing not to comment specifically on political matters, such as elections and political parties.

 

“Out of respect for this public university that I serve, I’ve taken a vow of political celibacy during my time of service,” he told NR, adding that “I stopped talking, or certainly taking any part in, and even commenting on any partisan activities. The day I took this job, I still had six months to go in elected office at the time.”

 

Like his actions in support of free speech, Daniels set himself apart in handling the Covid-19 pandemic. While other schools moved entirely or predominantly online, Daniels made the 2020–21 school year much more normal than his counterparts did, keeping students in class throughout the year with masks and social distancing.

 

“We didn’t mandate,” Daniels said. “We didn’t lock down. But on a voluntary basis, our whole community, most notably the students, stepped up to their responsibility to practice careful health habits themselves and to encourage others to do so.”

 

Daniels bucked another national trend in the fall 2021 semester, refraining from requiring vaccines for all students, while still seeing vaccination rates comparable with those at schools that did have mandates. Purdue had an 80 percent vaccination rate in September, which grew to almost 90 percent by January. Daniels did require masks throughout the year and made unvaccinated students undergo surveillance testing.

 

What comes next for Daniels? We don’t know for sure. There’s been some speculation that he would return to public office, with some of his advisers saying he is warm to the idea, but he has been coy about his future ambitions.

 

“People asked in the last few days. I had to laugh and say that apparently some people were thinking and talking about it, but I’m not one of them,” he said. “So now I’ve got six-plus months to go here in the job I just described with its characteristics and limitations. I’m going to keep my mind on those things every day of those six months.”

 

Wherever Daniels chooses to go next, that institution or workplace will welcome a man of many accomplishments. One of the keys to his success is his affinity for the people he serves. Daniels loves the students at Purdue, who, he says, inspire him.

 

“If one wants to be optimistic about the nation’s future, spending time with the kind of young people I have spent ten years with will do it for you. They are purposeful. They are sincere. They’re caring,” he said. “It’s from that that I draw my greatest source of optimism about the years ahead.”

A Historically Great Term

National Review Online

Friday, June 01, 2022

 

Conservatives are accustomed to losing. Sometimes, we grow too accustomed. Thus, conservative voters often pose Disraeli’s stinging question to their leaders: What have you conserved? Few institutions have provoked this question more often than the Supreme Court, despite the fact that 20 of its last 29 justices have been appointed by Republican presidents, and that we have had a Republican chief justice continuously since 1953.

 

The best answer, often, is what didn’t happen: Bad laws were not passed by Congress, bad decisions were not made by the courts, political fads burned out. But the harder task comes when ground is lost, and must be reclaimed not only by adherence to ancient principles but by the courage and force of will to restore things to their proper order and function. Sometimes, containment must give way to rollback.

 

That is where we find the American constitutional order, or at any rate, where the Court found it when it recessed for the summer this time a year ago. The cultural priorities of progressive elites have been imposed on the people by judicial fiat, with no basis in the Constitution. Meanwhile, liberties expressly secured in the Bill of Rights are trampled, and religious believers face discrimination and exclusion. Laws are enacted by the executive branch instead of the legislature. When Congress does act, it assumes national police powers properly reserved to the states. The Court too often either has acted as the catalyst for these usurpations and derelictions, or has stood by meekly and acquiesced in them.

 

This year, for the first time in memory, the Supreme Court concluded a term in which it consistently did its job. The Court has been holding the line against liberal adventurism on a gradually lengthening list of issues for some decades, but with mixed results, especially on cultural issues. This year, the first full term since Justice Amy Coney Barrett replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Court not only resisted further mischief, it repeatedly stood up for the Constitution and the rule of written law to the point of rolling back ground seized by the anti-constitutionalists. The shrieking you hear in progressive quarters is the predictable result of rejecting their view of History.

 

The Court started and ended by telling the administrative state that it cannot simply write laws just because Congress has failed to do so. The Court ruled that the CDC cannot unilaterally declare itself a national housing regulator preventing evictions, that OSHA cannot use workplace safety as an excuse to mandate vaccines, and, finally, that the EPA cannot write carbon-emission rules that Congress repeatedly rejected. The alphabet-soup administrative agencies are now on notice that they must pay attention to the legal basis of their exercises of power.

 

The Court stood up for the rights guaranteed specifically by the text of the Constitution. A scholarly opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas, who survived a hospitalization in March and a continuing public campaign to use his wife to delegitimize his work, delivered a stirring and overdue defense of the right to carry guns for self-defense, ending a decade of malign neglect of lower-court resistance to the Second Amendment. The Court allowed a public-school football coach to pray, and a religious flag to be flown, on public property just the same as if they were secular speech. It struck down FEC regulations that deterred non-billionaire political candidates from lending money to their own campaigns, a blow for freer political speech. By contrast, the Court rejected an effort to turn a verbal censure into a free-speech violation: Sometimes, speech can be met with more speech.

 

Most dramatically, in a powerful and methodical opinion by Justice Samuel Alito, the Court ended five decades of judicial overreach by telling a simple truth: The Constitution never protected a right to abortion. That common-sense step required tremendous fortitude in the face of an unprecedented leak, protests at the justices’ homes, and even an assassination attempt on Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

 

The Court summoned the courage to discard old and discredited precedents. It consigned to the dustbin not only Roe v. Wade but also Lemon v. Kurtzman, an early-1970s decision pretending that any “entanglement” between a public school and religion was tantamount to establishing a state church. The restoration of sanity to the Court’s establishment-clause jurisprudence not only allowed the Court to defend the individual rights of the praying coach and a Christian group’s flag, but also, in an opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, to protect the right of religious parents to use school-choice vouchers for religious schools on the same basis that they are used for secular private schools. In each case, the Court recognized, allowing private citizens to choose their own religious faith in the public square is the antithesis of requiring conformity to a state church.

 

The Court also stood up for the adversarial process itself, allowing the Kentucky attorney general to defend a state abortion law, and, in an opinion by Justice Neil Gorsuch, allowing North Carolina legislators to defend their state’s voter ID law; in each case, Democratic officials were trying to quietly undermine the laws they were sworn to defend.

 

At the same time, the justices took care not to extend the frontiers of previous judicial innovations, resisting the expansion of the Bivens doctrine to allow new civil-rights lawsuits never authorized by Congress, and refusing to allow lawsuits over failures to give Miranda warnings without proof that this resulted in a coerced confession. In the Texas abortion case, the Court resisted calls to allow novel injunctions against state-court clerks and judges just for accepting the filing of lawsuits.

 

Along the way, the Court’s new majority of six Republican appointees, five of them fairly reliable votes for constitutional originalism and statutory textualism, has discredited the critics of the originalist project from the right who claimed that all originalist judges know how to do is lose the Constitution more slowly. Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett were all consistent votes and voices — sometimes joined by Roberts — for restoring a government of laws rather than acceding to a government of whatever is popular with lawyers.

 

There is more work to be done. The Court’s precedents remain littered with deviations from the constitutional design. More hot-button cases will be back in the fall. A new justice, who was confirmed amid promises to apply the Constitution as originally understood, will be put to the test. Democrats continue to threaten all manner of assaults on the Court’s independence and legitimacy. But justice should be blind to outside pressures. For a year of doing their jobs in accordance with their judicial oaths, we say to the Court’s majority: Well done. Enjoy the summer.

The Supreme Court’s Civics Lesson

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, June 30, 2022

 

A momentous term for the Supreme Court ended on Thursday with one of the most consequential rulings it has handed down this year. With its decision in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, the Court has affirmed the notion that it is the purview of Congress—not the federal bureaucracy—to write laws. That lesson will be bitterly resisted, which is why it is so vital.

 

In this case, the Court was asked to determine whether the EPA has the authority to set rules around emissions generated by coal-burning power plants that are so strict they could have no other effect than to remove coal from the nation’s electricity mix. The Court ruled that this administrative effort to render an entire sector of the economy obsolete was not supported by statute or Congressional intent. Indeed, it was contemptuous of both.

 

“EPA claimed to discover an unheralded power representing a transformative expansion of its regulatory authority in the vague language of a long-extant, but rarely used, statute designed as a gap filler,” read the syllabus of the decision authored by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. “That discovery allowed it to adopt a regulatory program that Congress had conspicuously declined to enact itself.”

 

The EPA’s expansive interpretation of its statutory jurisdiction extended well beyond what Congress had approved. Indeed, the agency’s authority appeared to have been derived from that which Congress explicitly spurned. “Nor can the Court ignore that the regulatory writ EPA newly uncovered,” Roberts added, “conveniently enabled it to enact a program, namely, cap-and-trade for carbon, that Congress had already considered and rejected numerous times.”

 

The EPA seems to have assumed that “Congress implicitly tasked it, and it alone, with balancing the many vital considerations of national policy implicated in the basic regulation of how Americans get their energy. There is little reason to think Congress did so.” Given the burdens these regulatory actions impose on private interests—”billions in compliance costs,” an increase in “retail electricity prices,” the inevitable “retirement of dozens of coal plants,” and the elimination of “tens of thousands of jobs”—only Congress has this authority. Moreover, those burdens and their political consequences are so weighty that there’s no reason to believe Congress would have pursued such a course.

 

We know what the objections to this decision will be. The agencies tasked with protecting the environment from abuses by avaricious actors in the private sector assumed this expansive authority because Congress had not acted with sufficient zeal or alacrity. “The plaintiffs want to hem in what they call the administrative state,” New York Times reporter Coral Davenport’s dispatch ahead of the Court’s decision in this case read. “That should be the role of Congress.” Correct. “But Congress has barely addressed the issue of climate change,” she continued. “Instead, for decades it has delegated authority to the agencies because it lacks the expertise possessed by the specialists who write complicated rules and regulations and who can respond quickly to changing science, particularly when Capitol Hill is gridlocked.” This is the essence of the majority opinion striking down the EPA’s power grab.

 

None of this justifies seizing power extra-legally. Moreover, just because the federal legislature’s lethargy has led it to cede power to the executive branch and its stable of “experts,” that does not render its “delegation” of its constitutional authority valid. Congressional inaction is a verdict in and of itself, and the federal legislature is not obliged to outsource its obligations to unelected functionaries just because it’s squeamish about doing its duty.

 

The word “Chevron” appears only in passing in the majority opinion (though it features prominently in Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent), but this ruling will have a sweeping effect on the power of the administrative state to do what the country’s elected representatives would not. In 1984, the “Chevron Deference” established a principle that compelled federal courts to generally defer to an executive agency’s interpretation of unclear statutory language under the assumption that those agencies are better equipped than Congress to understand the minutiae they are tasked with regulating. This ruling does, however, chip away at that principle. The cracks that are forming around the blow the Supreme Court just struck against that doctrine are likely to grow in future terms.

 

“When an agency claims the power to regulate vast swaths of American life, it not only risks intruding on Congress’s power, it also risks intruding on powers reserved to the States,” the majority opinion noted. For those who cannot abide sitting around and waiting for the nation’s elected legislators to act on their demands, this is a terrifying prospect. This decision could imperil any number of what they consider vital regulatory frameworks that are legally supported by a dubious interpretation of the law. They should be afraid. They’re right.

Larry Arnn Is Right about Education Majors

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, June 01, 2022

 

A local CBS affiliate in Nashville thinks it has uncovered a scandal: Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, has been exposed — via “hidden-camera video” no less! — saying things in private that Larry Arnn often says in public, in this case that the people who become public-school teachers tend to come from low-performing academic backgrounds. From News 5 Nashville:

 

Dr. Larry Arnn, president of Michigan’s ultra-conservative Hillsdale College, also takes aim at diversity efforts in higher education, claiming people in those positions have education degrees because they are “easy” and “you don’t have to know anything.”

 

. . .“The teachers are trained in the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges in the country.”

 

The thing is, Larry Arnn is right about this. Our friends from CBS should check out . . . CBS, which notes a strange outcome: Education majors enter college with the lowest standardized-test scores, but they finish college with the highest grades. Students majoring in math and science enter with relatively high test scores and finish up with relatively low grades. Why? Because education programs are not very academically rigorous. Drop a 3.9 GPA education major into a physics program and chances are that he isn’t going to finish at all. “Dr.” Jill Biden probably would have had a tough timing earning a doctorate in, say, mathematics.

 

The scandal isn’t that Larry Arnn says these things. The scandal is that these things are true.

 

Side note: The CBS reporter, Phil Williams, describes Hillsdale as “ultraconservative.” I wonder what he thinks that means? For comparison, Williams is a graduate of Middle Tennessee State University, which didn’t manage to admit its first black student until 118 years after Hillsdale did, Hillsdale having been open to African Americans from its founding by abolitionists in 1844. Hillsdale was also the second U.S. college to grant four-year degrees to women. It is true that Hillsdale emphasizes classical and Christian education, and that Larry Arnn is what you would call a “movement conservative.” I suppose Hillsdale is “ultraconservative” if your yardstick is Bryn Mawr, but why should we accept that as our norm?

 

(Disclosure: I once taught a seminar at Hillsdale as a Pulliam fellow. As I recall, the students were pretty good, and we didn’t talk much about politics.)

The January 6 Hearings Changed My Mind

By Batya Ungar-Sargon

Wednesday, June 29, 2022

 

When I first learned that the January 6 Committee was planning to air its hearings on primetime, I was deeply skeptical. The gross spectacle of that day wasn’t some secret scandal that, like Watergate, required deep reporting to uncover the truth. We had all watched it. Anyone who wanted to relive it could stream the documentary on HBO.

 

Then there was the fact that so many Americans that I know are struggling under the double whammy of rising crime and runaway inflation. I could think of few things less urgent than actions committed a year and a half ago by a president who no longer holds public office at a time when so many are making agonizing decisions like whether to buy meat for dinner or use the money for gas and settle for rice and beans instead. 

 

For months now, I’ve been pointing out how self-indulgent it was for these politicians to demand that we endlessly empathize with the trauma they suffered on January 6 because of the danger posed by a riotous mob—while they refuse to do anything about the life-threatening danger that their constituents have learned to live with. (The week the hearings began, there were 11 mass shootings in cities across America that left 17 dead and 62 injured. This past weekend, 24 people were shot in Chicago. A five-month-old baby was among the casualties.)

 

It also felt wrong to me that there were no Trump supporters on the committee to cross-examine witnesses, and I was deeply put off by the highly produced nature of the spectacle, which seemed designed to electrify a moribund base. It lent credence to the idea, held by many on the right, that the committee’s real aim was to bar Trump from the ballot box in 2024.

 

Reader, I was wrong. 

 

I had thought: January 6 was one of the most covered days in American history. What more can we possibly learn?

 

The answer is: a lot.

 

For starters, there was a lot that the committee was only able to uncover through its subpoena powers, and the revelations have been substantial. There has been significant evidence presented to suggest that Trump knew he had lost the election, or at the very least, that many of the people closest to him who really wanted him to win repeatedly told him he’d lost and that there was no real evidence of fraud. And yet, Trump continued to tell his supporters that he won the election and per the committee, proceeded to defraud them of $250 million that he said would go to an official election defense fund, which didn’t exist.

 

At one time, Trump spent his rallies talking about jobs and NAFTA and the abandonment of the working class by a contemptuous elite. They stole everything from you, he told his supporters, over and over. The January 6 Committee hearings are revealing in great detail who Trump became in the wake of his loss (or maybe always was): a man singularly focused on a new message. They stole everything from me.

 

We also learned about President Trump’s callous disregard for the safety of his vice president, Mike Pence. As the rioters at the capitol chanted “Hang Mike Pence” and erected a gallows outside the Capitol, President Trump said “Mike deserves it,” according to Tuesday’s testimony by Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows. Trump fanned the flames by tweeting about Pence’s cowardice. “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!” the President tweeted. Hutchinson was horrified. “As an American, I was disgusted. It was unpatriotic, it was un-American,” she testified.

 

I’m glad I know about that, and I’m glad I know how brave Vice President Pence was to go ahead with certifying the election, knowing that he’d been abandoned by the president, who should have been a bulwark standing between him and the mob, but instead was an accelerant to their rage. 

 

We learned more things from Hutchinson’s testimony. She testified that Trump demanded to be taken to the Capitol to join the rioters, and when his security detail started driving him back to the White House, he tried to grab the steering wheel, then lunged at his Secret Service detail. (Trump has denied that this happened on his social media platform, Truth Social, and sources are suggesting that the Secret Service may dispute the story in front of the committee.)

 

Most explosively, Hutchinson also testified that President Trump was informed that there were people armed with AR-15s among his supporters and demanded that they be allowed to join the crowd outside the White House. “You know, I don’t effing care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me,” President Trump said, according to Hutchinson. “Let my people in.”

 

If true, it was a breathtaking abdication of leadership that could have endangered his family, his supporters, and everyone around him. 

 

Me, me, me.

 

I’m still not convinced that January 6 was an insurrection. It still seems to me that, beyond a handful of extremists, January 6 was a riot that got out of hand, and that a selfish President Trump hoped he might profit from the chaos. (Hutchinson’s testimony from Tuesday reveals only that Trump’s team knew there might be a riot and it might get ugly, not that they helped plan it.)

 

I’m also not convinced that his actions on January 6, however heinous, are enough to erase Trump’s policy legacy—getting rid of NAFTA, the First Step Act, taking on NATO and China, and Operation Warp Speed. But I know I’m not alone in thinking he is not suited to carry it further.

 

I still believe that the Democrats are hoping these proceedings save them from having to compete with Trump on the campaign trail. And I still feel sickened by the fact that many of these politicians tweeting endlessly about that day are not lifting a finger to help their own constituents, who are living daily with the kind of chaos and violence they supposedly abhor.

 

And yet, I’ve come to believe that the question of what exactly happened on January 6 matters. It matters because there is a lot of talk flying around about the weakness of our democracy. Most people making that argument point to the violence of January 6 as Exhibit A. But the picture that’s emerging from these hearings is quite the opposite: Institutions, staffed by patriotic Americans, held against a massive onslaught from without and perhaps a greater one from within.

 

Many of the testimonies played during the hearings have been delivered by people who faced down the president’s wrath by relying on their faith and patriotism. There were some among them—like an “apparently inebriated Rudy Guliani,” as Liz Cheney put it—who told the President what he wanted to hear. But many more told the truth, calling upon the oaths they took. 

 

None stood out more than Rusty Bowers, the Speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives. “It is a tenet of my faith that the Constitution is divinely inspired,” he testified. To break his oath, as Trump requested, would be “foreign to my very being.” It would betray “my most basic foundational beliefs.” It’s worth watching the whole thing.

 

January 6 was a horrifying day. But the hearings have exposed more than just more awful details. They’ve revealed the courage of people like Bowers. To watch the hearings is to remember that those better angels Lincoln talked about are a constant choice—one many good Americans made even as a braying mob was demanding fealty to false gods.