A jury convicted four more members of the far-right Oath Keepers group of seditious conspiracy today, bringing to a close one the highest-profile prosecutions to be brought thus far in response to the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6. It also leaves us with the question: will that be it when it comes to accountability for the attack?

In closing arguments on Monday, some of the Oath Keepers’ lawyers were not subtle in outlining where they believe the real blame for the attack should lie.

“Responsibility really rests at our politicians’ feet,” Scott Weinberg, the attorney for Oath Keeper David Moerschel said on Monday, per the Washington Post. “The president and Stewart Rhodes were claiming that the world is coming to an end even before the election.”

Rep. Ruben Gallego of Arizona announced his campaign for Senate this morning in a campaign video on Twitter. The possibility of his run has been in the cards for months and was made all but official in press reports last week. It’s not a surprise. But it’s a major development. In a way, perhaps, it was inevitable. The question for most of the last year was whether Gallego would give up his safe House seat to challenge Kyrsten Sinema who spent the last two years wrecking her standing with Arizona Democrats. That’s always an extremely high-risk gambit.

But now that’s all moot. Sinema is not running in the Democratic primary. She’s switched to being an independent. (Indeed, that was the whole point of doing so: to avoid this primary.) If she runs in 2024 she’ll run as an independent. For now Gallego is the only candidate in the race and my impression is that he’s a strong favorite to win the nomination. So the question really becomes about Sinema and the eventual Republican nominee. A lot will depend on what kind of candidate Republicans nominate. Will they nominate someone like popular outgoing Gov. Doug Ducey, who suggests he won’t run but hasn’t ruled it out, or one of the many feral Republicans in the Kari Lake and Blake Masters mold?

I’ve been hearing from people in and out of the political world saying things like this: folks like Dick Durbin really need to retire. Yes, I’m talking about his Sunday show appearance yesterday and his commenting on the Biden classified documents. What I’m describing here isn’t only about Dick Durbin. But he is one of the prime offenders.

What is Dick Durbin doing in the Senate exactly? What I’ve seen from him, know of him mostly for years is appearances like that on the Sunday shows, ones which play to the D.C. press and establishment opinion. It’s of a piece with Durbin’s position or really non-position on “Roe and Reform.” Durbin was one of the prime holdouts. Well, he wasn’t even a holdout really — he simply wouldn’t discuss it at all. The best he could manage in mid-2022 were some vague comments about not being over-hasty about things.

Along with a categorical refusal to negotiate on raising the debt ceiling, Democrats need to start now making the affirmative case that the debt ceiling is itself unconstitutional. Back in 2011 President Obama said he had spoken to legal scholars and concluded this was not “a winning argument.”

This again is an example of Democrats playing to the elite legal academy, credentialed opinion.

Like more than a few Democrats, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) embarrassed himself this morning on the Biden documents case. He said President Biden is “diminished” by the situation. On Trump and Biden: “At its heart, the issue is the same. Those documents should not have been in the personal possession of either Joe Biden or Donald Trump,” he said. In each case, after whacking Biden around a bit, he went on to lamely distinguish between the two situations. Those distinctions, needless to say, will never be the headlines, never garner attention, never be what shapes news coverage. Manchin of course was worse, saying Biden “should have a lot of regrets” and questioning whether we know whether Biden’s or Trump’s actions are more egregious.

For those of you who remember the embarrassment of the Times coverage of the “Whitewater” scandal, it must seem like déjà vu all over again. It does to me. The paper’s editors are trying, and I mean really trying, to make the Biden classified documents issue a thing. And I mean a grave thing. The stage was ably set by the subject line of the email I received blasting out their latest deep dive on the story: “Inside Biden’s 68 days of silence.” It’s this like a Gabriel García Márquez homage? I mean good lord. Are we really doing this again? Of course we are. It’s how they roll.

I took the liberty of a short set of annotations.