Charles Lipson

January 6, 2021 is a day that will live in infamy. On that day, our Capitol was assaulted by a violent mob, forcing the House and Senate to run for cover, interrupting their affirmation that a new president and vice president had been elected. Now that the rioters have been dispersed and the election formally completed, the vital task is to restore a sense of public order and constitutional continuity. Vice President Mike Pence is doing that. President Trump is not. The President’s latest decision, not to attend the inauguration, is yet another damaging expression of his petulance. Democrats have seized the moment and pressed their partisan advantage by saying President Trump should be immediately removed from office.

When a violent mob broke into the Capitol building, they did more than breach the barriers of House and Senate chambers. They breached the barriers of our Constitution and the Republic for which it stands. The scale and symbolic significance of this attack are new and profoundly troubling. But it is also the culmination of several disturbing trends. For months now, we have witnessed a degradation of public order — mobs roaming city streets, unpunished; an effort to take over and firebomb a federal courthouse in Portland, unpunished; delegates attacked on the streets of Washington after the Republican convention, unpunished. And now this, far worse than anything that came before. One photograph captures this appalling collapse of law and constitutional order.

Recent political talk has focused almost entirely on January 5 (the Georgia Senate runoffs) and January 6 (congressional certification of the Electoral College results). Important as they are, we also should remember January 20. On that day Americans will witness a truly remarkable tradition: the peaceful transfer of power between opposing parties. Such handovers are extremely rare in history and a towering, hard-won achievement. Our next one is worth celebrating, regardless of how you voted.It is especially important for Donald Trump to attend this one since he has contested the November outcome so aggressively. Those challenges have gone well beyond formal legal contests. He has rallied supporters to challenge the legitimacy of the election outcome.

Whoever Joe Biden picks for attorney general is in a lose-lose situation. Why is that job so hard? At least three reasons stand out:  The ongoing criminal investigations of Joe Biden’s family A boiling cauldron of divisive legal questions facing the new administration, particularly immigration and gun control Pressure to investigate everything the Trump administration ever did All those will land in the attorney general’s lap. The first one, involving the Biden family, is especially vexing.The probe into Biden’s grifting kin will face the AG immediately. The President-elect’s son Hunter and brother James both grew rich by trading on the family name. That, in itself, is not illegal.

Before the showdown in old Western movies, one character would issue a barbed challenge and his rival would confidently reply, ‘Them’s mighty big words. Are you big enough to back ’em up?’ That’s the question facing President Trump’s lawyers. Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis threw down the challenge at an incendiary press conference on Thursday. Now, they have to back up ‘them big words,’ and do it fast. The stakes couldn’t be higher. It goes beyond who sits in the Oval Office next January 20.

In the countdown to Election Day, the two campaigns are taking starkly different approaches.Joe Biden is sitting on a lead in the polls, trying to run out the clock, while Donald Trump is making a frenzied dash for the finish line, selling optimism.Both strategies make sense.Like a football team leading in the final quarter, Biden’s goal is simply to keep the clock ticking down to zero. Nothing fancy. Just avoid mistakes and prevent the other team from getting the ball back.To avoid those mistakes, Biden is rarely leaving his basement. When he does, his goal is less to rouse voters than to prove he’s still alive and capable of traveling across state lines. He speaks to small crowds and says whatever’s on the teleprompter.

Thursday night’s debate was far calmer and more substantive than the street brawl that preceded it. If we score it like a boxing match, it was pretty close. Both Donald Trump and Joe Biden landed punches. Neither had to be carried out on a stretcher. But that’s the wrong way to look at it. It matters, obviously, that neither candidate won a decisive victory and that Trump needed one more because he’s trailing, according to polls. But the debate helped Trump in another way. Biden said things he will regret. Time and again, he made false or misleading claims and politically-questionable promises. Three stand out: 'super predators’, fracking and family corruption.

The vice presidential debate was a predictable clash between two solid professionals, each with plenty of debate experience. Both said what they came to say, and not one jot more. Both evaded several hard questions, such as how they would handle changes in abortion laws, if the Supreme Court rules force some changes. 'I'm glad you asked about baseball, Susan, because the American people love sports. And the sport they really love is football. That's what's on their mind now.' That's how they answered questions. If they had a prepared answer about football, that's the answer they gave. That meant Pence never explained how a second Trump term would handle pre-existing medical conditions and Harris never renounced a court-packing scheme.

Does Nancy Pelosi’s unfortunate trip to a hair salon have any news value? Or is it much a hairdo about nothing? Compared to the big stories of the day, it hardly matters. The country faces violent disorder, we’re unsure who will become our next president and millions of people are trying to get back to work and school. To paraphrase Humphrey Bogart, 'It doesn't take much to see that the problems of one person getting a shampoo and blow-out don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.' But even in this crazy world, Pelosi’s misstep deserves some attention because it so perfectly encapsulates a larger, more troubling problem. Insiders like Pelosi are allowed to play by a different set of rules than the rest of us.

Some conflicts begin with clear aims but morph into endless battles, the original motives forgotten. The timeless metaphor for self-sustaining battles is Jarndyce and Jarndyce, the inheritance case at the heart of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. ‘Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on,’ he wrote. ‘This scarecrow of a suit has, over the course of time, become so complicated, that no man alive knows what it means... Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it.’ Now we have Portland v. Public Order. What Jarndyce was for the law, Portland is for the lawless. For over two months, young demonstrators have gathered each night in Oregon’s largest city.

Joe Biden’s speech was effective in many ways and sure to please his supporters. But anyone who expected him to say something substantive about his policies left empty-handed. He did little more than spin gauzy pictures of a rosy future.First, the good news for Biden supporters. He looked strong, never stumbled, and delivered the speech with remarkable empathy, energy, and modulated tones. His performance showed no traces of the confusion he has shown occasionally or the cognitive decline he has been charged with. He was at his best.Biden also made the best of his strongest quality: he’s a likable guy, whose tragedies have made him deeply sympathetic to others facing their own difficulties. He’s not faking that, and it shows.