The Week

• New York City mayor Eric Adams took nearly 100 “extremely dangerous” dirt bikes off the streets. Did he ever stop to think that maybe they’re just misunderstood?

• In the weeks since a man planning to assassinate Brett Kavanaugh was arrested outside the Supreme Court justice’s home, pro-abortion radicals have amped up their rhetoric and their calls for violence. On June 8, the day after that attempt, abortion supporters protested at Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s house (itself an illegal means of influencing a pending case), and one group of radicals, Ruth Sent Us, later suggested demonstrating at her children’s school. These aggressive tactics prompted Congress to pass a bill that would give additional security to the justices and their families. The bill faced temporary obstruction from Democrats but eventually went to the desk of President Biden, who signed it. But crisis pregnancy centers are also in danger. After the June 13 firebombing of a center in Oregon, another radical group, Jane’s Revenge, which has taken responsibility for several attacks, issued an ultimatum: Either pro-life organizations close their doors, or it will be “open season.” The group explained that its members “find joy” and “courage” in attacking “these violent institutions.” On June 11, leaders from multiple pro-life groups sent a letter urging Attorney General Merrick Garland to fight this terrorist campaign. A day after, the FBI announced that it was investigating the attacks. Undeterred, a group of young women protested illegally at Barrett’s house again, this time carrying baby dolls and wearing pants stained with fake blood. Let’s hope it all stays fake.

• Joe Biden isn’t mad. He’s just disappointed. You see, gas prices have risen during his presidency, and that’s making him unpopular with one of the most important voting blocs in America: people who purchase gasoline. So now he’s firing off notes to energy CEOs on White House letterhead, threatening them with government action if they don’t do what he wants. “Your companies need to work with my Administration to bring forward concrete, near-term solutions that address the crisis and respect the critical equities of energy workers and fence-line communities,” Biden wrote. Does he really need to pander to his progressive base in every threat, especially when that base’s policy prescriptions are a reason we’re in this mess? Refineries should not be built near places where people live, but we can’t build them where people don’t live, because then wildlife activists will object. America has not seen a new refinery since 1976, when Biden was a first-term senator. Building new refineries costs billions of dollars and takes years. It is difficult to return investment on them, and burdensome regulations disincentivize their being built. Biden laments that profit margins at those that remain are “well above normal.” To review, Biden’s position on oil refining is that new refineries should not be constructed, that the ones that exist should be regulated with increasing stringency if not closed down, and that even if they do stay in business, they shouldn’t be allowed to make too much money — but they should please refine more oil, or else.

• Biden fell while dismounting his bicycle after a vacation ride in Delaware. Presidents trip as often as their fellow Americans, and because they are filmed much more often, their pratfalls provide fodder for critics, sometimes unjustified: Recall the stumbles of Gerald Ford, the most athletic president ever, which allowed comedian Chevy Chase to memorialize him as a klutz. Biden, however, is not the most athletic president ever, and he is 79 years old. His term has two and a half more years to run. The White House says he intends to stand for reelection; he would be 86 at the close of a second term. His age and fitness are, and will remain, legitimate questions for his remaining years on the national stage. Biden’s dramatic dismount will be at best an awkward video clip; at worst, a snapshot of where he and the administration he leads now are.

• The Senate is currently attempting to strike a “deal” on a package of gun-control measures that it hopes to vote on before Congress breaks for July 4. Not all of the ideas are unwelcome, but, taken as a whole, the bundle shares the same flaw as most other gun-control efforts: Its terms have been determined more by a desire to do whatever “something” can be agreed upon in Washington than by a desire to address the problem at hand. The plan has three parts. First, to send money to the states to induce them to implement policies the federal government prefers. Second, to reiterate existing federal law, in the hope that it might finally be enforced. Third, to tweak the federal background-check system in the hope that, this time, the criminals who purchase their guns from licensed dealers will be caught before they commit violent acts. The first part is undesirable: There are, indeed, many states that have declined to enact “red flag” laws — or to invest in mental-health treatment — but their reluctance has been the product of a lack not of funds but of political desire, and the coercion that invariably comes along with federal money will diminish, not increase, that desire. The second is mere posturing: The lackluster enforcement of existing federal law is the result of a host of cultural and ideological factors that will not be fixed by further instructions from Congress. The third has potential merit, depending on a host of details. To the uninitiated, our debates over the so-called boyfriend loophole, or over the inclusion of juvenile records in adult databases, may seem esoteric and indulgent. But, in truth, they are extremely thorny, and, given the all-encompassing nature of federal law, it is important that our lawmakers get them right the first time around. The rushed timetable on which Congress is currently working makes such an outcome unlikely. It should take a pause and return to these questions when heads are clearer.

• Congress is poised to rebuke President Biden’s irresponsible defense-budget proposal for the upcoming fiscal year. A few months back, the White House released its budget plan, which allocated $813 billion for military spending. That’s not enough to keep up with inflation. Now, bipartisan majorities are preparing to pass a bigger defense-authorization bill. The Senate Armed Services Committee added $45 billion to the president’s proposal, with every member except Elizabeth Warren in support. Its House counterpart bucked Biden last time around and will surely do so again. Congress sees what the president doesn’t: Real-world deterrence requires meaningfully funding weapons systems, bases, and the personnel to operate them.

• South Carolina marked another skirmish in the intra-GOP Trump wars. Representatives Tom Rice and Nancy Mace both criticized Trump in the wake of the January 6 Capitol riot, Rice going so far as voting to impeach him. Trump backed challenges to both. In the June 14 primary Rice lost to state representative Russell Fry, while Mace beat former state representative Katie Arrington. Trump, said Rice, “is trying to set the Republican Party up as a bunch of yes-men loyalists.” So he is, and Rice’s defeat is a measure of Trump’s success. But Mace showed that a Trump critic can hold her own, at least if she picks her battles and has a more moderate district.

• In a 2020 interview, former NFL star and Georgia GOP Senate candidate Herschel Walker said that the “fatherless home is a major, major problem.” But it has now come to light that Walker, who is running against the incumbent Democrat Raphael Warnock, fathered three children he had not publicly acknowledged before the campaign. He has provided financial support but had little other involvement raising the children. The latest revelation about Walker’s secret children should remind Republicans that they must vet candidates before nominating them, and that their affinity for celebrities should not cloud their political judgment. There is a reason Walker and Warnock are running neck and neck in polls even as GOP governor Brian Kemp leads his Democratic opponent Stacey Abrams by five percentage points.

• Texas Republicans attending the state party convention in June disgraced themselves. One measure approved by the convention asserted that Biden “was not legitimately elected.” Another, far worse provision stated: “Texas retains the right to secede from the United States.” At the convention, a small group of extremists accosted GOP congressman Dan Crenshaw and called him “Eyepatch McCain” — a disgusting insult popularized by Tucker Carlson after Crenshaw (a former Navy SEAL who lost an eye to an IED blast in Afghanistan) joined most House Republicans in supporting $40 billion in aid to Ukraine. Elected Texas Republicans have largely governed their state well, but the spectacle in Houston was a sign of rot.

• Carl Paladino, candidate in the Republican primary for a New York congressional district, has two strengths: money (he is a real-estate developer) and loyal fans in Erie County, heart of his targeted district (when he ran for governor in 2010, he carried western New York despite being crushed by Andrew Cuomo statewide). His drawbacks are a loose mouth and a head filled with trash. In a 2016 interview, he called Michelle Obama a “trans gorilla.” In 2021 he said we needed a leader who could “arouse . . . the crowds,” “get up there screaming these epithets” so that “people were just . . . hypnotized.” That was a crackpot’s description of an effective leader; what made it revolting was that Paladino cited an example: Adolf Hitler. When the inevitable storm broke, Paladino said, “I should have used Churchill.” Representative Elise Stefanik, the third-ranking House Republican, has endorsed Paladino. He is certainly right that we could use more Churchill.

• Republican Mayra Flores won an upset victory in a Texas congressional district. Flores, who will be the nation’s first Mexican-born congresswoman, is the first Republican to win the heavily Hispanic South Texas district in more than 150 years. The district’s retiring Democratic representative won it by 13.6 points in 2020; Joe Biden carried it by four. But in the special election to fill the vacant seat, Flores, who campaigned on a slogan of “God, family, country,” won by more than seven and a half points. For decades, Democrats have pinned their political ambitions to the belief that the growing Latino share of the electorate will inevitably redound to their electoral benefit. That confidence increasingly looks misplaced.

• The biggest interest-rate hike from the Fed in decades, 0.75 percentage points, wasn’t enough. At 1.75 percent, the federal-funds rate remains well below any reasonable estimate of the neutral rate, while inflation is still at a gallop. Another sign the Fed still has further to go: Its policy-makers’ projections, released at the same time it raised rates, still show inflation staying elevated into 2024. When Fed chairman Jerome Powell first sold the idea of “flexible average-inflation targeting” in 2020, he implied it would make future price levels more predictable. The longer inflation stays above the Fed’s 2 percent target, though, the further the future price level exceeds previous expectations. It’s one thing to miss a target; it’s another to plan to miss it.

• President Biden signed an executive order directing his administration to “promote expanded access to gender-affirming care.” He warned of an alleged alternative: “so-called ‘conversion therapy.’” The president is deceptively conflating historic and current treatments. No one wants a return to the medical malpractice gays and lesbians suffered in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (i.e., hormones, castration, lobotomies, etc.). But what Biden is really condemning is talk therapies designed to help patients cope with gender distress or unwanted sexual desires. What he recommends instead involves experimental drugs and surgeries that can cause sterility, sexual dysfunction, and other medical problems — all part of a futile attempt to convert one sex into the other. If ever there were a time for “first, do no harm,” this is it.

• After reviewing its transgender-sports policy, FINA, the world governing body for swimming, has voted to separate athletes “into men’s and women’s categories based on biological sex.” This means that Lia Thomas, the male swimmer whom the NCAA permitted to dominate competitions for women, will be unable to compete as a woman in the Olympics. Any future NCAA swimmer will also have to stick to sex-based categories, since the organization said that, after Thomas, it would defer to national and international bodies’ rulings. There is one caveat: FINA has said that male swimmers may compete against females as long as they complete their gender transition prior to the onset of puberty. One injustice is ameliorated, then. But are child transitions a worse one? As even the New York Times acknowledged in a recent report, “gender-affirming care” is not the medical consensus it was made out to be. We can only hope a social contagion of rationality is about to break out.

• The Centers for Disease Control has issued some guidelines on how to avoid catching monkeypox while having sex, and their tone is oddly deferential. “Limit your number of partners” is good advice but might be a bit too imprecise for someone fighting satyriasis, and “Consider minimizing skin-to-skin contact when possible” contains at least two more wishy-washy qualifications than necessary. “Do not share things like towels, fetish gear, sex toys, and toothbrushes” is suitably emphatic, but the phrase “things like” needs explanation; and while “Masturbate together at a distance of at least 6 feet” is admirably precise, it seems unlikely to be considered an acceptable substitute. The same goes for “Consider having sex with your clothes on.” We’re beginning to think everyone should keep a safe distance from the CDC.

• Justice Sonia Sotomayor, speaking to a meeting of the American Constitution Society, a progressive legal group, made news with remarks about her most conservative colleague. “Justice Thomas is the one justice in the building that literally knows every employee’s name, every one of them. And not only does he know their names, he remembers their families’ names and histories. He is the first one who will go up to someone when you’re walking with him and say, ‘Is your son okay? How’s your daughter doing in college?’ He’s the first one that, when my stepfather died, sent me flowers in Florida.” This was as touching as it was evidently sincere. But she made two more points, beyond her warm feelings. One was tactical: You cannot understand an adversary if you begin by assuming that he holds his views in bad faith. The other was almost philosophical: Despite their different views of law and society, she and Thomas “share a common understanding about people and kindness towards them.” If she had added “a love of America and its ideals,” it would have been a home run. As it was, well done.

• The First Amendment says nothing about “separation of church and state.” It simply bans state-established churches and protects free exercise of religion. Yet for decades, liberals have wielded the establishment clause of the First Amendment against religious parents, demanding that they — and they alone — must choose between the school of their choice and the public support that every other student receives. The much-derided 1971 Lemon test proclaimed any “entanglement” between government and religious schools unconstitutional. The Supreme Court, which has been dismantling the Lemon framework in a series of decisions in 2002, 2017, and 2020, has now properly and finally interred all of this as extra-constitutional nonsense. As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in Carson v. Makin, which struck down a Maine law excluding sectarian schools from a tuition-voucher program, “a State’s antiestablishment interest does not justify enactments that exclude some members of the community from an otherwise generally available public benefit because of their religious exercise,” so long as the money flows “through the independent choices of private benefit recipients.” Roberts did not even bother to cite Lemon. While the Court’s three current liberals dissented, two of them conspicuously did not join Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent thundering that the Court “continues to dismantle the wall of separation between church and state that the Framers fought to build” and is “leading us to a place where separation of church and state is a constitutional slogan, not a constitutional commitment.” There is a name for that place — America.

• A federal court has ruled that the Charter Day School, in Leland, N.C., may not require female students to wear skirts. The decision was based on the 14th Amendment, since a sex-specific dress code was determined to violate the equal-protection clause; a separate suit will determine whether the skirt mandate also violates Title IX, the federal statute. The school was found to be subject to these rules because it receives state funding, and thus must be considered a “state actor.” The whole point of charter schools is that they are free from many of the regulations that entangle public schools, and thus can provide a valuable option for students and parents. But if a charter school can’t settle a matter as simple as a dress code without nine years of litigation, the charter-school movement will be vitiated — which is exactly why the public-school establishment and the teachers’ unions vigorously supported the plaintiffs in this case.

• In Pierce County, Wash., a police officer saw a man sitting in a car in a high-crime area and, suspecting theft, asked for his name and date of birth. The officer then went back to his car to check the information, which was false; the man drove away fast and a chase ensued, followed by a crash. In court, the driver, Palla Sum, asked to have the charge of making a false statement to the police dropped, since the officer had seized him illegally, without any cause, before asking for his name. The police objected, saying that Sum had not been seized (as that term is normally defined), but had merely been asked a question, which he answered voluntarily. Yet the court ruled unanimously that Sum had indeed been seized, and therefore must be released — since he is Asian, and the police have “a long history of implicit and explicit bias against people of color,” so he had reason to assume it was a seizure. In other words, the law must make up for past injustices. Consider it affirmative action for lawbreakers.

• A new law, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, is designed to prevent the importation into the U.S. of goods made using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region, the homeland of the Uyghurs and other oppressed Muslim minorities. Establishing who makes what in China is not straightforward, and so, with exceptions, the law covers any products mined, produced, or manufactured wholly or in part in Xinjiang. This will cause problems in America because of the opacity of Chinese supply chains and the wide range of metals mined or processed in Xinjiang. Those include the lithium used in batteries that power electric vehicles, a field dominated by Chinese manufacturers. When John Kerry, the administration’s climate envoy, was asked last year whether he had addressed the issue of forced labor during the course of many meetings with his Chinese counterpart, he replied that it was not in his “lane.” That’s an excuse he should no longer be allowed to hide behind.

• In mid June, China launched its first domestically designed and constructed aircraft carrier, the Fujian, at a shipyard in Shanghai. The supercarrier is a significant upgrade over the Soviet-era hulk that the Chinese purchased and retrofitted as the aircraft carrier Liaoning and her sister ship the Shandong, which was built in China but based on the Liaoning’s design. The new carrier, like the newest American carriers, has been built from the keel up to house electromagnetic catapults, giving the Chinese navy the ability to launch heavy modern warplanes. China’s goal is a true blue-water navy that can project power beyond its First Island Chain and turn the South and East China Seas into Beijing-controlled lakes. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told Congress in June that Beijing was undertaking “the largest-ever nuclear-force expansion and arsenal diversification in its history,” while Australia’s defense minister, Richard Marles, speaking in Singapore, said that “China’s military buildup is now the largest and most ambitious we have seen by any country since the end of the Second World War.” The Chinese challenge to the American-led security order is serious, unmistakable, and growing.

• Many analysts of Vladimir Putin depict the Russian’s attack on Ukraine as a response, however excessive, to fears of EU and NATO encirclement. What seems more on Putin’s mind is Russian history. He told an audience of scientists and entrepreneurs that he was like Peter the Great, simply taking back what was justly Russian — a reference to the Great Northern War, a 21-year struggle with Sweden. (A wake-up call to Estonia, in which the city of Narva, one of Peter’s notable victories, sits.) Putin looks fondly on later eras as well: Russian troops have renamed Freedom Square in the conquered Ukrainian city of Mariupol “Lenin Square.” Alongside these word and mind games, Russia pushes its offensive in the Donbas. Ukraine evidently hopes to use the enemy’s fixation there as an opportunity to counterstrike at Kherson, gateway to Crimea. To do that — or even simply to survive — it needs the best weapons the West can give it, as soon as possible. Peter and Lenin understood the application of force, though they knew nothing about liberty.

• Russian authorities have moved political prisoner Alexei Navalny to IK-6, a maximum-security facility known for its “abuse and torture” of inmates, according to his spokeswoman. Russian courts have manufactured a convoluted rap sheet against Navalny. It begins with his conviction in embezzlement cases that the European Court of Human Rights ruled to be unfair. On parole from his suspended sentences in those discredited cases, he was rushed to Berlin for medical treatment in 2020 after he was poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent, a signature of Putin’s retaliation against political opponents. Returning to Moscow in January 2021, he was promptly arrested for violating parole while in the hospital in Germany. He has remained in the custody of the Russian prison system ever since. The naked cynicism of the courts’ legal justification for locking Navalny up and preventing him from standing for public office, including the presidency, may intimidate the timid, but it further motivates the millions of Russians who would vote for him if they could. “The best support for me and other political prisoners is not sympathy and kind words, but actions,” he tweeted in March. “Any activity against the deceitful and thievish Putin’s regime.”

• As Russian troops advanced in March, musicians, singers, and dancers laid sandbags around the Odesa National Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet, to protect the famed symbol of the city’s cultural heritage. Members of its orchestra and chorus then performed outside it. Their program included Verdi’s “Va, Pensiero,” inspired by Psalm 137, Israel’s lament over its captivity by Babylon. Odesa remains on the war’s front lines. On June 17, the opera house reopened, sandbags still in place. Capacity was reduced, for security. Air-raid sirens delayed the event. Despite those circumstances, the gesture delivered a strong dose of the spiritedness that from the beginning of the Russian invasion has characterized the response of the people of Ukraine. Not since Victor Laszlo ordered the house band to play “La Marseillaise” in Casablanca has the performance of a national anthem felt quite so assertive, defiant, and heroic.

• Weeks after being elected for his second and final term, France’s President Emmanuel Macron has been humiliated in his country’s legislative elections. His supporters lost a once comfortable majority in the 577-member National Assembly. They now hold only 245 seats. Led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon (a more competent Jeremy Corbyn), NUPES (a coalition of the far Left), France’s much-diminished Socialist party, and the Greens took a remarkable 131 seats, while Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (the renamed National Front) increased its tally more than tenfold, to 89. Macron’s best hope of a majority depends on the center-right Republicans, latter-day Gaullists who saw their own representation almost halved, to 61 seats. At the time of writing, they are keeping their distance. What lies ahead for Macron is trouble for the more market-friendly and economically realistic aspects of his reform program, and a diminished status abroad. He will, even more than before, be pressing Ukraine to cut a deal with Putin. In 2017, Macron’s vaunted radical centrism laid waste to the establishments of both Left and Right. Neither he nor we should welcome what has replaced them, or the dangerously divided France that has come fully into view.

• “In Germany there is a very good Evangelical church,” Pope Francis said to Bishop Georg Bätzing of Limburg. “We don’t need two.” Francis, in an interview with the Jesuit periodical La Civilità Cattolica, recounted that conversation when asked about the Synodal Path, a series of several conferences attended by a few hundred German prelates, laypeople, and members of religious orders. At a session in February, a majority endorsed proposals for women’s ordination, public blessing of same-sex unions, and revocation of the discipline of priestly celibacy. Alert to the signs that bishops and lay leaders in Germany would like to establish an ecclesial body adhering to doctrines contrary to Catholic teaching, Francis continues to warn against the temptation while affirming the value of synodality, an effort to include the world’s far-flung dioceses in the mind of the church. He struck that balance, or strove to, in a letter to Germany’s Catholics after the bishops there announced their plans for the Synodal Path in 2019. It may be time, however, to admit that the critics were right and this path is a dead end.

• Mitch Daniels has held a variety of jobs. Among them: political aide to Reagan; budget director under George W. Bush; governor of Indiana; and president of Purdue University. He has distinguished himself in all of his roles. He became president of Purdue in January 2013 and he will step down in January 2023: a neat ten years. During his decade in West Lafayette, he has shown what a university president can do, and be. Still a budget hawk, he has frozen tuition for ten years. But in that time, Purdue has boomed, expanding in all sorts of ways. Furthermore, Daniels has been a champion of free speech, in an era when conformism is the rule. Over the years, many people have wanted Daniels to be president — of the United States. That is likely not to be. Yet he has been a standout in our public life.

• Mark Shields was a liberal Democrat admired, or at least enjoyed, by many a conservative Republican. He was an old-school New Dealer, and JFK-er, and RFK-er. He had an excellent, often wicked, sense of humor. When Jim Bakker, the televangelist, husband of Tammy Faye, was sentenced to prison, he said, “The judge offered him 40 years, or 20 with conjugal visits.” Critiquing a certain mindset on crime, he told a story: Two liberals come across a man in a ditch. He is bleeding and moaning. He has been beaten to a pulp, left for dead. One liberal turns to the other and says, “Quick, we have to find the people who did this. They need help.” Shields was one of the last of the old-time pro-life Democrats. He was a partisan but, obviously, not a blind one. He loved people and he loved America. He has died at 85. R.I.P.

January 6 in Review

As has been true of so many things surrounding Donald Trump’s career in politics, many more people have come out of the January 6 committee hearings looking worse than looking better. Most important, the whole tawdry spectacle reminds us: As many good things as Trump accomplished with the presidency, he was unfit to be entrusted with the office, and Republican voters should discourage him from seeking it again.

The committee itself has been controversial since the beginning. Much of its purview involves events that occurred in full public view or that were widely known in January 2021. This includes Trump’s refusal to concede defeat; his pressure campaign against state and local officials who would not do his bidding; his efforts to intimidate Mike Pence into violating his oath of office; his summoning supporters to a “wild” protest on January 6; and his reluctance to take action once it was clear the protest had escalated into an all-out riot at the Capitol. If it aims to hold Trump politically accountable, its newer revelations arrive far too late for the botched second impeachment. If it aims to build a case for criminal prosecutions, that is not a proper function of Congress. If it aims to score partisan points — as House oversight investigations usually do — it has no particular claim on our attention. Some of the committee’s hyped claims, such as efforts to paint House Republicans as active collaborators in the riot, have landed with a thud.

The committee was also poorly constructed. Kevin McCarthy selected Jim Jordan and Jim Banks, both of whom were apt to act more as advocates for Trump — or distracting grandstanders — than as sober-minded fact-finders. But such is often the role of the minority party in House hearings. Nancy Pelosi refused to seat Jordan and Banks on the theory that they had objected to Biden’s electors — yet she chose Bennie Thompson, who objected to George W. Bush’s electors, to chair the committee and Jamie Raskin, who objected to Trump’s, to serve on it. Pelosi’s unprecedented maneuver, which she said was justified by “the unprecedented nature of January 6,” gave McCarthy all the cover he needed to abandon cooperation with the committee, leaving its presentation one-sided. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger remained as the only Republicans on the committee, resulting in their effective alienation from their party’s caucus. Democrats have also sometimes been selective in what topics the committee should examine regarding the security of the Capitol. Bad faith and bad judgment all around.

The committee’s work has been predictably partisan and acrimonious. Steve Bannon, Peter Navarro, and other Trump associates have refused to cooperate, often on flimsy or implausible pretexts; Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice responded with overreaching indictments of Bannon and Navarro, although it declined the invitation to charge Mark Meadows and Dan Scavino. The committee also pursued ominous arguments in court; in its pursuit of John Eastman’s emails, it tried to convince a federal judge that lawyers can’t have privileged communications with their clients if they use their university email accounts. The choice of prime-time televised hearings was obviously designed for partisan ends to distract from an unpopular Democratic president and a looming midterm disaster for his party. That spirit has pervaded the hyperbole and opportunism of much of the media coverage.

Yet for all the problems in its design and operation, the committee has done important work. The January 6 Capitol riot and the associated “stop the steal” effort to prevent Joe Biden’s election from being certified is an important moment in our history, and there remains value in documenting it for posterity with evidence and testimony under oath. The subjects of what the president did after the riot started, and why the Capitol was not secured more swiftly and decisively, were insufficiently explored in the second impeachment, and have produced some revealing testimony.

The public record of Trump’s conduct has been damning, and his inability even to this day to let go of his false claims about the 2020 election — claims by the official constitutionally sworn to uphold the laws, claims that deluded and enraged his supporters, inspiring the more unhinged among them to storm the Capitol — are further evidence that he should hold no future public office. Trump was warned in no uncertain terms by people who had long been loyal to him that, in seeking to overturn Biden’s electors, he was pursuing an unlawful strategy based on lies. Too deeply invested in his own delusions, he ignored them all. Even his daughter Ivanka testified to Trump’s abusive tirades directed at his own vice president, drawing a rare public dismissal from her father. This is no way for the leader of a constitutional republic to behave.

Trump’s enablers have also not been covered in glory. Foremost among these is John Eastman, the constitutional-law scholar who acknowledged that his arguments would not draw a single vote from the Supreme Court, but insisted upon giving a fig leaf of lawyerly gravitas to Trump’s nonsense.

Amidst all of this, however, there have also been heroes. Mike Pence stands out for his principled refusal to cooperate in Trump’s scheme to object to Biden’s electors, a stance that was painful for Pence to take and that put him in the crosshairs of an angry, threatening mob that came within 40 feet of him. Pence admirably refused to leave the Capitol so long as the electoral-vote count remained unfinished. The vice president had to watch, from a secure location, while Trump continued to egg on the mob through his public Twitter feed.

Pence’s chief lawyer, Greg Jacob, and former federal appeals judge J. Michael Luttig played key roles in fortifying Pence’s position. Bill Barr’s testimony about how he refused to let Trump bend the Justice Department to endorse bogus election claims was characteristically blunt and unsparing. Several members of the Capitol Police and the D.C. Metropolitan Police also gave harrowing testimony that reflected their bravery and devotion in an intensely unstable and dangerous environment.

Moreover, say what you will of Liz Cheney’s political judgments; she has shown great courage in taking on this role at great cost, ending her tenure in House Republican leadership and quite possibly resulting in the loss of her seat.

Notwithstanding committee hyperbole about our democracy on the brink of destruction, the main hero of this dark episode is the Constitution. Ingeniously, the Framers divided power horizontally among the branches, and vertically among the federal government and the sovereign states. No one actor could have stolen this presidential election, and even a well-conceived conspiracy (which this wasn’t) would have been foiled at several turns. In this case, dozens of state and federal courts (including Trump-appointed judges and justices) rejected Trump’s frivolous lawsuits. The Justice Department’s top officials discredited his fraud claims and refused to thrust the baseless suggestion of voting fraud onto state election officials. Thanks to the separation of powers, those officials did not answer to Trump and would have defied him — as, in fact, Georgia officials did. And Trump never even tried to seek armed-forces support for his scheme to remain in power because he understood he’d never get it: The military was loyal to the Constitution. So was Pence.

The nation should move past Donald Trump. We should not forget what happened on January 6, but we should also be confident in the strength of our democratic institutions to withstand attempts by bad actors to cling to power illegitimately.

Editor’s Note: The next issue of National Review will appear in three weeks.