Oof, what a Tuesday: the worst state legislator in America is identified, a couple hundred former federal prosecutors grumble about the president not being indicted but never quite get around to weighing in on impeachment, and a long-suppressed urge to discuss Avengers: Endgame is unleashed.

The Worst State Legislator in America

Last week we met the worst city councilman in America, Zach Adamson, who accused Indianapolis’ Shapiro’s Deli of “feeding Nazis” when the NRA came to town.

Now meet the worst state legislator in America, Pennsylvania state representative Brian Sims, who decided to film himself confronting and furiously denouncing pro-life demonstrators praying on the sidewalk outside of a Planned Parenthood clinic. You may have heard this video described, but it is worth watching yourself.

Stalker-like, Sims keeps following a protester praying the rosary, declaring “She’s an old white lady who’s going to try to avoid showing you her face.” As far as we can tell, the woman hasn’t said anything to him, but he berates her, “How many children have you clothed today? Have you fed any children today, or have you just stood out in front of a Planned Parenthood shaming people for something that they have a constitutional right to do?” Sims asks, describing her protest as “an attack on the Constitution.” He tells her she can pray at home. “Shame on you! Shame on you for hiding your face! Shame on you, what you’re doing out here is disgusting.” He keeps accusing her of “shaming” other people and telling her that she doesn’t have “a moral right to be out here.” At least on the video Sims recorded, she never says anything towards anyone entering or exiting the clinic. She’s not shouting anything or harassing anyone. She’s praying — and this apparently drives Sims mad with rage.

After she takes out her rosary, Sims starts denouncing the Catholic Church:

How many Catholic churches are you protesting after 400 priests in Pennsylvania indicted for child molestation . . . The amount of mental gymnastics it must take to think that you have a right to tell a woman what’s right for her body and yet you will support a faith that has molested children across the planet? Shame on you.

Everyone needs to find a sense of purpose, and Sims has found his through furious hatred of pro-lifers and Catholics. It is now up to Pennsylvania voters to decide whether this is the man they want representing him.

I’ve discussed in the past the experience of encountering folks on Twitter who say they wish you were dead and who also have “No H8” in their bios. Hatred does not just exist in the form of backwoods losers wearing white robes.

A Whole Lot of Retired Prosecutors: We Would Have Indicted Trump, You Know

Three hundred and seventy former federal prosecutors sign on to a statement declaring, “the conduct of President Trump described in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report would, in the case of any other person not covered by the Office of Legal Counsel policy against indicting a sitting President, result in multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice.”

They contend that if Trump were anyone but the sitting president, he would be indicted. But the reason Trump was in position to do things like fire an FBI director and attempt to limit the scope of the Mueller investigation is because he’s the sitting president. You don’t see a lot of people in the private sector indicted for obstructing justice because they fired the FBI director. The complaint is that the Department of Justice is treating the president differently than everyone else, but . . . the president, by virtue of the authority of his office, is in a different situation than everyone else.

As many of us have repeated over and over, the Constitution provides a mechanism to address presidential wrongdoing and lawbreaking: the impeachment process. Do these 370 former federal prosecutors think impeachment should be pursued? One might construe that from their tone, but if they had unified agreement on that, you would think they would mention it.

A couple Republicans, including President Trump, are clucking about Texas Democratic representative Al Green’s declaration on MSNBC, “I’m concerned if we don’t impeach this president, he will get re-elected. If we don’t impeach him, he will say he’s been vindicated. He will say the Democrats had an overwhelming majority in the House and didn’t take up impeachment.” The takeaway is that Democrats are pursuing impeachment to impede Trump’s reelection chances.

Allow me to offer a contrary theory. By not pursuing impeachment now, Democrats can keep it in their back pocket as “Plan B” if Trump gets reelected, as long as they keep control of the House in the 2020 elections. Reaching 67 votes in the Senate was always going to be a difficult climb, but Democrats could put Trump through the wringer the way Bill Clinton was in 1998 and 1999. Picture it: Trump gets reelected, Democrats discover some new “serious allegation” after the election and begin impeachment proceedings. Despite widespread acknowledgement that two-thirds of the Senate will never remove a newly-reelected president, the hearings, testimony, debate and House vote, and Senate trial, eat up six months of 2021, mitigating any mandate from reelection, and driving Trump and his supporters bonkers.

If we’re destined to have an impeachment fight, driven by a Democratic party base that will never see Trump as a legitimately elected president, then let’s get this thing over with sooner rather than later.

Marvel’s Greatest Triumph, and Maybe One of their Biggest Mistakes . . .

It’s safe to discuss Avengers: Endgame now, right? If you’re worried about spoilers, stop here.

Endgame earns all of the effusive praise it’s received. They mixed, big action scenes, emotional beats and payoffs, a delightful what-else-could-go-wrong heist, a tour of at least five other Marvel movie settings, snuck in a slew of well-kept secret cameos, and stuck the landing.

I left feeling a little bit sad — that no matter what Marvel does in the future, no film they create will ever really feel like this one: a spiritual sequel to about 20 films simultaneously, allowing at least half of their major characters to ride off into the sunset with a satisfying sense that their tale had been completely told.

But there’s one nagging problem that I fear could cause headaches for Marvel movies to come.

By and large, the Marvel films have done a terrific job of continuing their larger meta-narrative story from movie to movie, usually in the background of a character-focused main adventure. But a bit more regularly than anyone likes to admit, Marvel’s creators make a seemingly big and consequential change, and some subsequent creative team finds that change unworkable and reverses it.

Tony Stark blew up all of his suits in Iron Man 3, but then he’s got new suits and a small army of drones by the time Age of Ultron starts. InWinter Soldier, SHIELD was infiltrated by Hydra and publicly disgraced! But by Age of Ultron, the old SHIELD crew brought the heli-carrier out of mothballs and rode to the rescue. Thor 2 ended with Loki on the throne of Asgard in disguise, a seeming formula for disaster . . . and Thor figures it out and fixes it within the first fifteen minutes of Thor: Ragnarok. Captain America: Civil War ended with half the Avengers as wanted fugitives! But we saw little to nothing of the fugitive lives of Captain America, Falcon, Black Widow, and Scarlet Witch and by halfway through Infinity War, everybody’s working together again.

It’s not quite Emily Litella, but we now know that the creative team might just conclude “never mind” if a particular plot twist proves unworkable or inconvenient for future stories.

Infinity War ended with the ultimate shock downer (if you hadn’t read the comic series) – Thanos snaps his fingers and instantly eliminates half of all life in the universe. But we in the audience know that it will be reversed somehow. Black Panther made a billion dollars and the movies with Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, and Guardians of the Galaxy weren’t too far behind that. There’s no way Marvel would kill off a slew of their popular characters. (Spider-man: Far from Home trailers came out in between Avengers movies!) We knew Thanos’s act will be reversed, but we didn’t know how.

In Endgame, directors Anthony and Joe Russo pull a fantastic trick on the audience: The heroes hunt down and confront Thanos, even behead him . . . and realize that it solved nothing. His snap -the “Snapture”? — cannot be reversed. Five years go by, and the world tries to function with half of its population suddenly gone. An atmosphere of persistent grief and gloom pervades the world. And then when the heroes get their Terminator-style opportunity to go back in time and reverse things . . . they make the boldest and most surprising choice imaginable: They bring the missing half back, but five years later. Half the world has experienced five years of grief and misery, and for half, no time has passed at all.

Just try to get your head around what that would be like: The first hours after the snap would be apocalyptic; cars and airplanes with drivers and pilots suddenly gone and crashing everywhere. Every regime on earth would probably go to DefCon One. Plenty of Christians would think it was the Rapture — with the unnerving implications of being left behind. Every single person on the planet would be grappling with the loss of half their family, friends, colleagues, and community. Think about the upheaval to governments, economies, and societies with half their people gone in an instant. Do wars break out? Rioting? Doomsday cults? Mass suicides? It would be a long while before anything resembling “normal life” returned.

The small glimpse of “Five Years Later” we see in Endgame portrays a world just hanging on, featuring a great scene of Steve Rogers leading a support group for survivors. (There are a ton of docked ships around the Statue of Liberty. Is it a floating refugee camp? Or does it symbolize that people are now afraid of separation and sailing far from shore?)

Now imagine after five years, all the missing people come back! It would be a joyous miracle but also enormously bittersweet and extremely complicated. As Ant-Man discovers, he’s missed five years of his daughter’s life. Everyone who disappeared would find how others had moved on without them. Some people who lost spouses must have remarried. People would return to find their parents had new children. One twin would be five years older than the other. And obviously, death did not take a holiday during those five years. How many people would reappear, only to learn that a loved one had died in the interim?

This is the state of the Marvel cinematic universe is as Endgame finishes, with Spider-Man: Far from Home about two months away. This is the biggest and most consequential sequence of events imaginable. Thanos’s snap and the return of the disappeared ought to be a combination of V-E Day, the Trinity atomic test, the moon landing, 9/11 and the bin Laden raid, only a thousand times more emotionally intense. Nothing would be the same.

And the next movie is going to be about . . . Peter Parker and his classmates going on a school trip to Europe? Doesn’t that seem a little mundane? And doesn’t the (potential) twist suggested in the new trailer seem pretty obvious to anyone who’s even vaguely familiar with the comic books?*

Beyond that, the events of Endgame mean that the world we see in the Marvel movies is now completely different from the one outside our window. The early Iron Man movies emphasized that the Marvel universe was a lot like our own, with a bit more advanced technology: Figures such as Jim Cramer, Bill O’Reilly, Elon Musk, and Christian Amanpour popped up in brief cameos. (I subscribe to David French’s theory that Garry Shandling was playing the Marvel universe’s version of the late Senator Arlen Specter.) The U.S. was fighting in Afghanistan against warlords. World War Two had ended more or less the same, except for a rogue Nazi science division called Hydra.

The Marvel universe is now completely unlike our own — it’s now taking place in 2023, half the population aged five years while the other half blinked out of existence, and it’s survived a global cataclysm. My fear is that future Marvel movie writers will find this difficult to incorporate into stories and deemphasize these differences over time. I doubt they’ll ever un-do it, we’ll just find that the Marvel universe of 2023 and beyond will look and feel pretty similar to our own, despite these huge events. And then what was meant to be the most hugely consequential event in these movies . . . won’t seem so consequential after all.

*In the comics, Mysterio is a frequent foe of Spider-Man who uses special effects and gadgets to create illusions. In the trailer, Nick Fury describes Mysterio as a hero from another dimension . . . which leaves me thinking he’s successfully conned Fury and creating the elemental-monsters himself in a plot to establish himself as a hero.

ADDENDA: Over on the homepage today, a look at some of the legislation that Democratic presidential candidates have introduced in Congress — price controls and revoked patents, vastly expanded government benefits programs, much higher taxes, bans on the closure of federal-agency field offices, and a general appetite to expand the size of government at all levels.