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Last weekend, forty-three members of the United States Senate voted to acquit former President Donald J. Trump of inciting the insurrection at the Capitol, on January 6th, which claimed the life of a police officer and four protesters and could have resulted in the deaths of members of Congress. Fifty Democrats and seven Republicans voted to convict Trump, but they fell far short of the sixty-seven votes that would have made him, in addition to being the only President to be impeached twice, the first President to be convicted in a Senate trial. The Republicans who sided with the Democrats are already facing intense blowback from Republicans nationally, and some are facing it from their own state parties. As it stands, weaponizing a mob to lay siege to a coequal branch of government, and standing idly by as it ransacks Congress and hunts for elected officials, is apparently consistent with the Presidential oath to âpreserve, protect, and defendâ
Calling themselves the Three Amigos, a self-appointed legal SWAT team of former Solicitors General ran through all the Doomsday scenarios they could think of except armed insurrection at the Capitol.
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Among the firsts in Amanda Gormanâs inaugural poem, âThe Hill We Climb,â is the concept of democracy that it assumed. Democracy, according to the twenty-two-year-old poet, is an aspirationâa thing of the future.
The word âdemocracyâ first appears in the same verse in which Gorman refers to âa force that would shatter our nation rather than share it.â The insurrection at the Capitol on January 6th took place while Gorman was working on the poem, although the âforce,â one may assume, is bigger than the insurrectionâit is the Trump Presidency that made the insurrection possible, and the forces of white supremacy and inequality that enabled that Presidency itselfââit / Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy / And this effort very nearly succeededâ the poem continues. âBut while democracy can be periodically delayed / it can never be permanently defeated.â
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In his first hours in office, Joe Biden has settledâalmost certainly, once and for allâone of the greatest environmental battles this country has seen. He has cancelled the permit allowing the Keystone XL pipeline to cross the border from Canada into the United States, and the story behind that victory illustrates a lot about where we stand in the push for a fair and working planet.
To review: Keystone XL, a project of the TransCanada Corporation (now TC Energy), was slated to carry oil from Albertaâs tar sands across the country to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico. President George W. Bush approved the original Keystone pipeline, and it went into service, early in the Obama years, without any real fuss. A new XL version, announced in 2008, was larger and took a different course across the heartland. And, this time, there was opposition. It came first from indigenous people in Canada, who had watched tar-sand mines lay waste to a vast lands