Jerrold Nadler

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor is at the nice old age of sixty-nine. Considering the average age of a US senator is sixty-five, she’s essentially in the prime of her political life. But that hasn’t stopped the growing calls for her resignation.   Connecticut senator Richard Blumenthal, who himself is seventy-eight, recently compared the justice to a pile of bones. “The old saying — graveyards are full of indispensable people, ourselves in this body included,” Blumenthal told NBC on Wednesday. He’s worried that unless Sotomayor steps down, the court will be left with a RBG repeat and the ascension of another conservative judge.

Attorney General William Barr’s seemingly interminable testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday demonstrated two things. First, AG Barr is the most patient and unflappable man in Alpha Centauri. Second, his would-be inquisitors in the Democratic party have succumbed to a virus far more toxic than the Wuhan flu. Political epidemiologists who identify the virus as Trump Derangement Syndrome are not quite right in their diagnosis. To be sure, TDS is a common comorbidity that renders this new infection more virulent and debilitating. But the nervous disorder on view yesterday, while it presupposes tertiary Trump Derangement Syndrome, is actually distinct from that malady. I am not sure that public health officials have yet settled on a name for the sickness.

‘Breaking news’ sirens sounded over the Twitter webs when Nancy Pelosi announced she is instructing House Democrats to draft articles of impeachment against President Trump. I hope you’re all sitting down. I’m as shocked as you are. Shocked!Of course, no news is breaking here. Pelosi is doing what anyone with a political pulse knew was inevitable when the Democrats took the House in 2018. It was only ever going to be a question of how and when. The head-scratching part of the ‘when’ is that Pelosi’s announcement comes only a day after the House committee hearings featured a professor at Hogwarts and a woman throwing full-sized cats at Rep. Matt Gaetz.

Donald Trump, never one to miss a slight, canceled a scheduled Nato press conference on Wednesday, going into a snit about a video showing various panjandrums, including Justin Trudeau, yukking it up over his antics at the summit, including his impromptu and lengthy press conferences. https://twitter.com/PnPCBC/status/1202008162997538817 Trump employed the term 'two-faced' and he was emphatically not referring to the DC Comics character who first battled Batman in 1942. Instead, Trump, as is his wont, sought to depict himself as a victim of the condescension of both European elites and Congress.For now, the real target of his ire appears to be the congressional lawmakers who keep stealing the headlines from him.

Oscar Wilde once observed that only very superficial people don’t judge things by their appearances. Like many of Wilde’s quips, that observation has the dual advantage of being both witty and true. Its apparent flippancy — in fact, its flippancy is genuine, not just apparent — does not so much conceal as embody the deep truth it expresses. Thomas Aquinas also appreciated the importance of appearance as the ambassador of truth. Aquinas tended to speak of pulchritudo, ‘beauty,’ which he congregated with the good and the true as interwoven ‘transcendentals.’ The beautiful, Aquinas wrote, is id quod visum placet, that which having been seen, pleases.

Did House Democrats actually want Attorney General William Barr to show for Thursday’s House Judiciary Committee hearing? No chance. The Committee knew at latest Sunday that Barr did not plan to appear under the additional strictures Democrats had decided to impose on a typical House hearing. They could have sent a subpoena. Instead, they waited for Thursday to advance the #ChickenBarr narrative and assert that the Attorney General is somehow evading the withering interrogation Democrats had planned. Democrats hoped a Barr questioning would provide their dozens of presidential contenders with viral YouTube moments.