Bobby Miller

For the second consecutive time, the opening of a congressional session has been mired in chaos. In 2021, the certification of the presidential election was the issue. In 2023, House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy is being denied the speakership after waiting in line for well over a decade. Some of McCarthy's detractors make the case that this is simply his comeuppance, the natural consequence of appeasing the rightmost flank of his party during the Trump years. There's an element of truth to this. Too often, he has gone out of his way to placate the demands of the fringes in an attempt to secure their support, only for recalcitrant right-wingers to continue to see him as part of the establishment.

In two weeks, with great sorrow, our nation will mark the second anniversary of the culmination of an unprecedented self-coup attempt by a sitting president: the January 6 Capitol riot, which resulted in five deaths. The callous barbarism we witnessed that day was nothing less than a brazen assault on the fountainhead of American self-governance, the Constitution. No amount of Tucker Carlson’s documentaries or Revolver News clickbait can change that inconvenient fact. Conservatives who dismiss what happened as nothing more than a false flag operation designed to initiate a “patriot purge” are doing themselves a grave disservice. Since July of last year, the January 6 Committee has been charged with investigating the events of the fateful day and what precipitated it.

Over the past fifty years, America has allowed a grave atrocity to persist. The magnitude of the callous disregard for human life constituted by abortion is unconscionable. Now, at long last, we can now begin the work of rectification. With the Supreme Court's rejection of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, countless innocent lives have been spared. America can now rejoin the ranks of nearly every other developed democracy, placing basic, democratically enacted limitations on when in a pregnancy an abortion may occur. Instead of a debate shrouded in legal jargon, we can finally have the necessary conversation about whether this is an acceptable practice in a civilized society.

Two men stare down as they prepare to brawl in a made-for-TV spectacle. The cameras spotlight their faceoff as the referee restrains them from coming to blows prematurely. No, this wasn’t a promotional for the UFC heavyweight world championship live on HBO at the MGM Las Vegas. This was the GOP Ohio Senate Forum hosted by FreedomWorks. The Buckeye State has produced some of America’s greatest statesmen. It’s given us eight presidents and giants of the Senate from Robert A. Taft to the retiring Rob Portman. Now it's given us a car full of clowns. A few months ago, I wrote about how the Republican primary contest for Ohio's Senate seat was descending into madness. It’s now entered the realm of complete absurdity.

In Christianity, it’s referred to as “excommunication.” In Judaism, it’s known as “Herem.” On today’s law school campuses, where one misconstrued tweet can land you an ecclesiastical censure, it’s called “administrative leave.” Ilya Shapiro, senior lecturer and the executive director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution at the university’s Law Center (GULC), is the latest casualty of the puritanical terror currently bedeviling higher education.

It’s often said that memory is a fickle thing. Today, that fickleness has become a danger to the republic. If you turned on any of the major news networks over the past week, with the possible exception of Fox News, you’d have seen wall-to-wall coverage of the anniversary of the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol building. What’s concerning about this is all the misplaced lamentations. The travesty of the day was not the riot itself, though the assault was obviously horrific and a symbol of America’s democratic backsliding into an illiberal abyss. But the rampage was never an actual existential threat to the United States government and calling the attack an “insurrection” isn't accurate.

A veteran, some career politicians, and a venture capitalist-turned-author meet on a debate stage. No, this isn’t the start to a joke. These are the Republican candidates vying to replace Ohio’s moderate GOP senator, Rob Portman, who announced his retirement in January. Since then, a flurry of contenders have thrown their hats into the ring. Josh Mandel is the former treasurer of Ohio who's run a mostly spectacle-laden campaign, sucking up to Trump and lighting masks on fire. J.D. Vance is the author of Hillbilly Elegy and is popular among nationalist and postliberal thinkers in Washington and on Twitter. The race so far has been a circus. Yet the differences between the two headliners couldn't be more stark.