The two biggest political topics of the past week were the continuing outrages piling up from both the Supreme Court and the House Select Committee on January 6th.

On Tuesday, a young aide who worked for Trump's chief of staff, Mark Meadows, appeared in a surprise House committee hearing. The previous week, the committee had let it be known that there would be no hearings over the two-week Independence Day break. But a day beforehand, a new hearing was announced without fanfare and without any details.

The witness who appeared, Cassidy Hutchinson, had apparently been getting threatening messages from those still surrounding Donald Trump. They read like mob bosses leaning on a witness who might spill the beans:

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Barack Obama created many memorable soundbites and campaign slogans, but one of the best-remembered is (as he phrased it in a tweet): "There are no red states or blue states, just the United States." This call for unity in politics was generally well-received, since it spoke to (as another former president once put it) "the better angels of our nature."

But what is becoming more and more obvious is how wrong Obama got this. His words sound blissfully naive, at this point. Because we are devolving further into the Divided States of America, seemingly with every passing day. Today's Supreme Court decision which overturned Roe v. Wade is merely another milestone on this grim journey.

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We were reminded of the whole Wonderful Wizard of Oz metaphor early this week, when we saw Mehmet "Dr." Oz at a last-minute Pennsylvania campaign rally, holding up his smartphone to the crowd, as the disembodied voice of the great MAGA Dear Leader bellowed forth bombast and nonsense to the crowd. All it needed was some smoke and fireballs at the sides of the stage, really. It seemed to us (but then we do have a rather warped sense of humor...) that Oz was begging the crowd to please pay lots of attention to the man behind the curtain.

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Today is a big primary day, and it could perhaps be the most interesting in this year's election calendar. It's not officially "Super Tuesday," but it might at least be considered "Rather Interesting Tuesday." There are multiple close races to watch, there are both ideological battles and personality contests in both parties, and the punditocracy is going to go into high gear afterwards drawing all sorts of conclusions on a nationwide basis (on races that may in fact only be limited to very local issues, or the strengths and weaknesses of individual candidates). So it's going to be a big night, no matter what happens. But everyone should keep in mind that these are just the primaries -- which means a big win for one faction or another tonight might translate into a big loss for the party in November.

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Intraparty, Republican-on-Republican violence aside, however, this was really a one-story week in Washington.

That story was the immense scoop of Politico publishing an almost-100-page draft opinion from Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. This is virtually unheard of -- such a major leak from the Supreme Court. But it's easy to see why someone decided it was time to tell the public what was about to happen.

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The very first column I ever wrote (for the Huffington Post, I didn't actually start this blog until a year later) was titled "Democratic Demagoguery." It urged Democrats to take a page from the Republican playbook and learn how to viscerally present issues and their party's agenda, in order to get more voters to vote for them. It started off (you'll soon note that this was 2006, as some of the current "hot button" issues plainly show) with the following:

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As we write this, everyone inside the Beltway is getting ready for the upcoming White House Correspondents' Dinner, which President Joe Biden has said he will be attending (after a hiatus of presidents attending due to COVID and, earlier, due to Donald Trump having incredibly thin skin). But, as usual, our invitation seems to have been lost in the mail or something. Ahem.

We are excited with a sort of "something good is about to happen" feeling, however, because the House Select January 6th Committee has finally announced a preliminary schedule for public hearings. Here's the story (as it stands so far):

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So who am I? I am a straight, White, Christian, married suburban mom. Who knows that the very notion that learning about slavery or redlining or systemic racism somehow means that children are being taught to feel bad or hate themselves because they are White is absolute nonsense.

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For the first time in American history, today the Senate confirmed a Black woman to become a justice on the United States Supreme Court. Since its formation in 1789, the Supreme Court has only had two previous Black justices (Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas), both of whom were male. Out of 115 justices who have ever sat on the highest court in the land, 108 of them have been White men. Only seven have either been women or non-White. And when the court convenes next fall, for the first time White men will actually become a minority on the court. Or, to put this a much better way: for the first time, the highest court in the land will actually be a lot more representative of the makeup of the citizens of the United States of America. This is a historic occasion, and a very hard-fought victory for all who aren't White men.

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Lo, how far the moralistic mavens of the Republican Party have fallen! They keep attempting to take the moral high road so they can piously point out all the failings of their political opponents in this realm... but they keep being undermined by fellow Republicans who have embraced the new amoralism Donald Trump ushered in to the GOP.

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