One of the hearings today on Capitol Hill was with former Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen. This was another Big Lie/January 6th hearing. And Rosen caught a lot of grief for refusing to discuss what happened during his January 3rd meeting with President Trump. Rosen seemed to be hinting at assertions of privilege but wouldn’t quite say why he was refusing. A logical read is that Rosen – who after all got the acting gig because Trump thought he was reliable – was still covering for Trump. But it’s not the only possible explanation, nor the most interesting one.

Let’s recall that ex-Presidents have zero privileges to assert as President. They still have lawyer-client privilege for communications in their personal capacity during their presidency. But they have zero power to assert any of the privileges unique to presidents. Only the current President can do that, i.e., Joe Biden. In practice, President’s have long deferred to former Presidents in decisions over privilege for a variety of reasons. But it is entirely the current President’s call. Rosen said he was operating under the guidance of the current DOJ. So let’s pull that thread and see where it might lead.

On Tuesday’s Inside Briefing, Josh Marshall spoke with Professor Marc J. Hetherington, a professor of Political Science at UNC Chapel Hill. He is also the author of, among other books, “Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics“, which he coauthored with Jonathan Weiler.

Today in Congress we’re seeing a pseudo reckoning for the Jan. 6 insurrection playing out in real time.

The big story is that Liz Cheney was ousted from her leadership position for not supporting the Big Lie of the stolen election and for not endorsing the insurrection. But we knew that was coming. The big story today had to do with how the vote was held. These are usually recorded votes and secret ballots. That was the case last month when Cheney retained her position by a decisive margin. Today it was a voice vote. After the vote, as Tierney Sneed notes here, a request for a recorded vote was denied.

This tells you the real story of what happened here.

Four months after the worst insurrection since the Civil War, the House GOP ousted one of its leaders for not condoning the vast Trump-led conspiracy to overturn the election that culminated with the insurrection. That Liz Cheney is a firebrand conservative and the scion of one of conservatism’s leading families for the last half century only sharpens the point. American democracy may be past the event horizon and we still not know it.

We have a beehive of activity on the Hill today, a combination of the Liz Cheney ousting and several committee hearings, all of which one way or the other flows directly from the Jan. 6 insurrection.

We, as in the nation, are still grappling (poorly) with the aftermath of what happened then. We, as in TPM, decided it was worth covering today as one big Jan. 6 story with distinct but highly related moving parts. And we’re doing it right here. I hope this gives you more context and grounding in where we are four months after the attack on the Capitol than a bunch of disparate stories about separate hearings would. Feedback welcome, as always. Check it out.

As you’ve likely seen, what began as civil disturbances in East Jerusalem has cycled into a full scale military engagement between Israel and the Hamas quasi-state in Gaza. Every level of these issues trace back more than a century, or decades, depending on which dimension of the interlocking stalemates you look at. But we shouldn’t ignore the way this particular conflagration has been spurred and accelerated by the protracted crisis of government within Israel itself. Having helped drive the crisis, Benjamin Netanyahu, now acting as the caretaker Prime Minister, has little incentive to deescalate it.

Sen. Josh Hawley’s (R-MO) raised fist — coupled with his vote against the Electoral College certification and various other instances of stolen-election fearmongering — has earned him accolades with the Trump true believers and made him one of the most prominent faces of insurrection incitement, aside from Trump himself and, perhaps, Ted Cruz.

I wanted to add or emphasize a point about yesterday’s post on whether Biden is ‘over-negotiating’. The current dynamic is almost certainly driven by Sen. Joe Manchin’s demand for bipartisan legislation, or at least making protracted, do-everything-you-can efforts to achieve bipartisan deals. But that doesn’t really answer the question. It just frames it.

What I mean is this.

Very interesting to see this backdraft of opposition to Kevin McCarthy’s role in the ouster of Liz Cheney. She’s toast. She’s going to be replaced by the arch-toady Elise Stefanik. But the margin of the vote will be instructive. These are secret ballots. So everyone gets the opportunity to make their point free of repercussions or payback.