The Weekly Sift

I should have waited a week to sum up what we know about the Trump coup plot. Last week was the one-year anniversary of his mob invading the Capitol, but two significant new chunks of the story came out this week: An indictment describing the Oath Keepers’ plans to hold the Capitol after the mob seized control, and the fraudulent documents by which Trump’s defeated electors attempted to certify themselves to Congress.

Michigan’s attorney general has referred the Electoral-College-fraud case to the Justice Department, and we don’t know what they’ll do with it. But the Oath Keeper plan came out in the first DoJ indictment that puts January 6 in its political context: The charge is seditious conspiracy, not trespassing, assaulting an officer, or some other offense that could have been committed by an impulsive mob.

I’ll describe all that in “Merrick Garland Starts Getting Serious”, which I’m hoping to post by 11 EST.

Before that, though, I’ll cover the Supreme Court’s pair of vaccine-mandate decisions, which are no less bizarre because they were expected. Roberts and Kavanaugh switched sides between the two cases, and so were in the majority both times as Biden’s OSHA mandate was struck down, but his HHS mandate upheld. The issues were virtually the same in the two cases, and only minor editing could have turned the majority opinion in the HHS case into a dissent in the OSHA case.

That will be the subject of “The Court and the Vaccine Mandates”, which should be out around 9.

The weekly summary still has the Senate’s failure to protect voting rights to cover, as well as the apparent top of the Omicron surge, Matt Gaetz’ legal woes, Novak Djokovic, Prince Andrew, and a few other things, before closing with a mash-up showing that six country-and-western hits are really the same song. That should appear between noon and 1.