Sometimes, when a public official says something so racist that it stands out as exceptional, the Talking Points Memo team begins keeping an active tally in a shared Slack channel of others’ responses.

On Monday, as members of Congress came back to D.C. under the cloud of some exceptionally racist tweets from the President, the Slack channel buzzed with copying and pasting once again, as Caitlin MacNeal, Nicole LaFond, Kate Riga and Cristina Cabrera flagged down statements and I reached out to individual offices for comment, for what would ultimately become our headline on the response: “Top GOPers Silent.”

From TPM Reader JB …

The media and democrats really have to up their game in response to Trump’s calling out of some insensitive/obnoxious tweet to move the conversation on from the issue that makes him look bad. He yells squirrel and everyone looks to the side.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has ordered the Census Bureau to offer states information to institute a redistricting plan the architect of which described as intended to bolster the electoral power of “Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites.”

If you’re a Prime member I’d like to invite you to join Tierney Sneed and me tomorrow afternoon at 2:30 PM eastern for a video conference briefing and Q&A on Robert Mueller’s upcoming testimony: what to expect from the committees, from Mueller and what questions remain to seek clarity on from the report itself. If you’d like to join us, join me after the jump for how to sign up.

If you missed it over the weekend, take a look at this. The chain of events preceding what appears to be the US Attorney’s Office in Manhattan dropping the Trump Organization investigation with no charges really requires some scrutiny. Dropped requests for executive interviews, Deputy US Attorney departing, Barr getting sworn in – all come together in a disquietingly close timeframe.

TPM’s Josh Kovensky reports on the beginnings of a high dollar donor revolt at the NRA centered on allegations of corruption and cronyism against longtime NRA chief Wayne LaPierre.

Happy Monday, July 15. This morning, Trump doubled down on this weekend’s attacks on four Democratic women of color, in which he suggested they should leave the country. Here’s more on that and other stories we’re following.

TPM Reader MM is pretty liberal and pretty gung-ho for Joe Biden …

Nikole Hannah-Jones’s Times Magazine article on busing, which greeted me this morning, is a revolutionary contribution to my understanding of what segregation was and is, and the role that busing played and still plays in enabling it. I thought I knew something about it, but what I knew was the first few bullet points on page one of the Cliff Notes version of “Busing and Segregation Made More Comfortable for Affluent White Liberal Northeastern Late Baby Boomers”. I had no idea.

Never would I allow myself to languish in such a state of ignorance in regard to a matter of science relevant to my work or interest, or in regard to my outside-of-work (I’m thinking ‘hors-d’œuvre’, but that’s never understood literally and I don’t mean ‘appetizer’) interests: music, cooking, wine, French politics, and so on.

Let’s discuss this. There’s too little evidence here to support any clear theory. But given the current leadership of the Department of Justice, a hermeneutic of suspicion is called for. But consider these dates.

On Friday CNN reported that the US Attorneys Office in Manhattan appears to preparing to close its main investigation into the Trump Organization without filing any charges. Not every probe finds wrongdoing or chargeable offenses. But look at these two paragraphs …

President Trump has blasted the Supreme Court’s decision to block the census citizenship question. But on Friday, his personal attorney was referencing it in court to argue that the judges should block a subpoena of Trump’s financial records.