Democrats were always going to run their 2020 campaign on a platform of "Reform!" They have made no secret of this fact. The very first bill Nancy Pelosi took up in the House of Representatives after regaining control of the chamber -- "H.R. 1" -- was a sweeping reform bill that is almost breathtaking in its scope of ethics and other governmental reforms. So from the very start, Democrats have signalled that this is going to be a key part of their agenda moving forward. Today, they followed up on this by introducing another sweeping reform bill, one that specifically addresses executive branch reforms which are now necessary after President Donald Trump's widespread abuses of power.

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Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg now rests in peace.

For the rest of us, there will be no rest and very little peace for the next few months -- of that much we can be certain. Because while the phrase is occasionally overused, it is no hyperbole to say that Ginsburg's death has now left America in what can only be called a true constitutional crisis.

There are all sorts of ways this could play out, ranging from the reasonable to the apocalyptic. At this point, the paths to reasonableness seem few and narrow, while the paths to chaos are much more wide and numerous. It's not even overstating the case all that much to say that we have never been closer to a second civil war in this country.

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Olivia Troye used to be a high-level staffer for Vice President Mike Pence, and she worked closely with him on the coronavirus task force which he led. She recently quit in disgust and went public this week with her support for Joe Biden (in yet another "Republican Voters Against Trump" video). The most damning thing she had to say about the president was the following:

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Another week, another stunning revelation about the dishonesty and shallowness of our president, it seems. Last week, you'll remember, it was the low regard Trump held ("suckers" and "losers") for American soldiers who died in wartime, American soldiers who were wounded ("nobody wants to see that"), and American soldiers and veterans in general. This week, Bob Woodward leaked a few key excerpts (backed up by audio recordings) from his upcoming book Rage, which showed that Trump understood how serious the coronavirus was going to be and then lied to the American public about it. There simply is no bottom, with Trump -- every time you think that he's reached the lowest of the low, he will once again prove that he can go even lower.

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We have a new contender for the biggest Trump lie yet. This is mostly due to its all-encompassing nature. Trump is lying not only about the issue of the day, but about his entire political career as a whole, as well.

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It has been three weeks since we've done this, since for the past two Fridays we were still writing up our notes on the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. Now that all that hoopla is over, we can return once again to our usual Friday Talking Points format.

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Today, I am going to let Joe Biden speak for himself. In past election cycles, I have printed transcripts of speeches from Democratic candidates, but I don't believe I've ever done so during the general election.

I felt it was worth it today, because I just read the speech Joe Biden just gave in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This is the kickoff to the traditional general election season, and Biden makes his case in such strong and forceful language that, rather than just running excerpts and commenting on them, I felt the entire speech deserved to be presented. It really is that good.

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When reading other reviews of the Republican National Convention today, many seemed to me to be making the mistake of proclaiming: "Trump is preaching to the choir, he's only interested in firing up his base." There is indeed a lot of this sort of thing, but there is also a sustained effort at pandering to distinct voter demographics where Trump is either performing weakly or worse. The two efforts -- fire up the base and reach out to possible "persuadable" voters -- set up another disjointed disconnect of epic proportions, to be sure, but as Trump says, it is what it is.

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Republicans promised they'd put on an uplifting convention. To say they failed to reach this goal on their first night is a vast understatement. What we got instead was fear, on steroids.

Granted, their job was a tough one from the get-go. During the Democratic convention, there was a mix of (as Joe Biden framed it) the light and the dark. But the Democrats' message was pretty clear: we're in a dark period right now, and we can move towards the light with the repudiation of Donald Trump and all his enablers. The Republican message was the opposite, which is a pretty hard case to make, considering the current state of affairs. According to the Republicans, everything is just peachy right now, but if Biden wins, things will become apocalyptically bad overnight. There's just one problem with this formulation, however, and that is that we are hardly experiencing Utopia right now, as the COVID-19 deaths climb towards 180,000, unemployment is still in double digits -- higher than at any point during the Great Recession -- and the economy looks like it is now stalling due to the Republicans refusing to pass another pandemic stimulus bill. In other words, the American public is fully capable of looking around at their own lives and seeing that Utopia is far from what they're experiencing right now.

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Today's one of those days when I had a subject already in mind for a column, but then read a few other columns that essentially already said what I was going to say (and in at least one case, said it much better than I could have). Fortunately, a second subject also popped up while reading the news today. So what I'm going to do is provide a few longish excerpts from the articles I read on the first subject at the end of this column, as a sort of "imagine the column Chris would have written" mental exercise (I even had a theme song in mind...), complete with the links to the original articles.

Instead, I'm going to write about weed. Weed voters, in particular. Now, any longtime reader of this column knows that I've been banging this particular drum for a very long time -- in particular, the fact that marijuana legalization is a political issue ripe for support from one of the major political parties. Sadly, both parties continue to shy away from it, although the Democrats have done a lot more "evolving" on the issue than most Republicans. Some Democrats, I should say, because not everyone's on board yet. I didn't notice this at the time, but here's a rundown of what happened to the party's official platform document this time around:

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