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Forget about term limits -- what American politicians need is a mandatory retirement age. Once they hit that age, they would no longer be eligible to be elected to any federal office. This is a radical proposal that would likely require a constitutional amendment, I fully admit, but I still feel the effort would be worth it.
I begin today by apologizing for getting ahead of the calendar, as the official "Silly Season" hasn't quite kicked off in Washington yet. Congress has yet to scarper off on their annual five- or six-week vacation (with full pay, courtesy of American taxpayers), so we have yet to hit the real dog days of summer in D.C.
One month from now, the first Republican presidential debate will take place. What will happen there is anyone's guess at the moment, but what is already assuredly true is that every candidate not named "Donald Trump" has to see the first debate (and the ones that will follow) as absolutely critical for their chances of success. Bottling lighting at a debate is likely going to be the only way any of them can stand out in any way, and the only chance any of them (excepting perhaps Ron DeSantis) will have of creating a surge of support in the polls.
We do try to resist the urge (we really do!), but this week it was impossible to focus on just about anything else in politics other than the tsunami of bad legal news for Donald Trump. Remember how Trump dominated each and every news cycle for over four years? Those days are back, sadly enough, and will likely continue (at some degree of intensity or another) for the foreseeable future. He is the quintessential car wreck towards which we all must dutifully rubberneck, so here we go....
Almost 2,000 years ago, the Roman poet Juvenal asked the question: "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" which is usually translated into English as: "Who will watch the watchmen?" When you give a group of people supreme power over others, how do you keep that power in check? It seems a fitting title today, as the Senate Judiciary Committee just passed (on a party-line vote) a bill which would require the Supreme Court to adopt a binding code of ethics.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is about to play some hardball in the Senate, in an effort to break the logjam on promotions in the military which has been thrown up by one recalcitrant senator, Tommy Tuberville. The Alabama Republican has thrown what can only be described as a hissy fit over the fact that the military respects the rights of the women who serve this country. Tuberville is the lone senator objecting to each and every Pentagon promotion that must be Senate-approved (as all the higher ranks are) until he can somehow force the military to deny women their reproductive rights. This has not just annoyed the military and Democratic senators, it is also not exactly supported by Tuberville's own party (who used to champion themselves as being "strong on the military"). And it has already affected the military readiness of this country, which is a dangerous thing. Schumer and other Democrats (including President Biden) have been denouncing Tuberville's military promotions boycott, but now Schumer appears ready to try a new tactic: give Tuberville an up-or-down floor vote on the issue to shut him up.
Donald Trump might need a bigger henhouse soon, as more and more of his legal chickens keep coming home to roost. After a very long two years of a whole lot of nothing happening (at least publicly), all of a sudden there is so much prosecutorial news it's hard to even keep track of it all. So I thought it'd be worth doing a rundown of all Trump's legal woes, as things stand right now (barring any further breaking news today).
Due to technical reasons (and not having a full-time staff to do this stuff the way big media organizations do), I wasn't able to post photos with all the stories from the Democratic National Convention. Instead, I'm just going to present them all together in this "album." A lot of these were mentioned in my previous coverage, but some of them are just random convention shots.
I have to begin by immediately offering my apologies to Rodgers and Hammerstein for that title, but the lyrics from The Sound Of Music's "Maria" have indeed been running through my head -- as I contemplate what all the other Republican candidates are going to do in the debate tomorrow night to differentiate themselves from their party's frontrunner, Donald Trump. Especially the ever-so descriptive line: "A flibbertigibbet... A will o' the wisp... A clown."
How do you solve a problem like The Donald, when he's standing center stage and everyone's eyes are on him? How do you deal with whatever Trump says from the podium? How do you stand out from the pack and make an impression on all the voters watching?
Yes, it's true. This past weekend, I joined 11,000 other people in Phoenix to "feel the Bern," as the supporters of Bernie Sanders would put it. Sanders held a rally in the city immediately after the Netroots Nation conference concluded, which made it pretty easy for me to attend (and take a few photos). Netroots routinely draws a crowd of around 3,000, so even if everyone from the conference went to the Bernie rally (actually, not everyone did), the conference crowd could only roughly have been about a quarter of the people there to see Bernie. The rest were locals from a very red state. All there to feel the Bern, as it were.