I’ll be chatting with Hunter Walker about the Fulton County election office raid and the fringe characters driving the Trump administration’s latest push to interfere in U.S. elections this morning. Join us on Substack Live at 11 a.m. ET. See you there!

I got a number of fascinating replies to yesterday’s post about the federal calendar and presidential holidays, specifically whether we should ditch Columbus Day in favor of a national holiday celebrating Abraham Lincoln. I also learned a bit more about how Lincoln never got a national holiday originally because the states of the old Confederacy, whose representatives and senators had outsized seniority throughout the 20th century, simply wouldn’t hear of it. Indeed, the 1968 federal law which clustered federal holidays into long weekends and which in effect though not formally consolidated Washington’s birthday into “President’s Day” was still under the shadow of southern resistance to anything commemorating Abraham Lincoln.

When I was a little boy in the Southern California school system in the 70s and 80s, there were separate holidays for Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays. Or at least this was my recollection. Both were celebrated. Then Martin Luther King Day became a federal holiday in 1986. I thought at time and for many years after that Presidents Day was created out of a consolidation of Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays in order to make room for Martin Luther King Day, on the reasoning that there’s a limit on the number of federal holidays. A number of years ago I looked into this and it turned out that this wasn’t true. I can’t remember the exact details. Lincoln’s birthday was never a federal holiday but it was celebrated in California. There was also a shift beginning around the same time to rebrand Washington’s birthday as Presidents Day. (Officially, it’s still Washington’s Birthday.)

In any case, my interest in this is that Abraham Lincoln should really have a national holiday. Some of this is a matter of him just really being a great president quite apart from the revolution brought about by the Civil War and the Reconstruction amendments. Sometimes great iconic figures aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. But the twin presidencies of Washington and Lincoln are if anything more powerful and important on close examination than they seem, though Washington’s role isn’t limited to his presidency. You have to see it in the context of his military and de facto political leadership during the Revolutionary War and his role in the period between the Revolution and his presidency, including his role at the constitutional convention. In any case, point being Washington and Lincoln are both critical figures in our national history. The holiday problem is that we have a logjam of birthdays, with King’s in January and both Washington’s and Lincoln’s falling in February. I guess there’s some reason why we can’t have that many national holidays right after each other. Fine. I don’t make the rules.

Yesterday, one of ICE’s and the White House’s prize ICE-as-victim cases blew up. We’ve seen a version of this happen before. The story is pushed on Fox. Charges follow. But as it begins to make its way through the courts, it falls apart and the charges are more or less quietly dropped. We’ve seen so, so many of these cases where it’s clear that what the ICE agents said just wasn’t true. I don’t even have to tell you about some of the more obscure ones. Though they didn’t get to charges since the purported attackers were already dead, you can see the pattern in the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. First, the story was that protestors were trying to kill ICE agents and the agents barely emerged alive. Then we see the video and none of that is true. The key, though, is that in those cases where charges were filed, it’s always no harm no foul. The claims of ICE agents are shown to have been false, but it’s on to the next wilding spree. There are no consequences. Not for the original behavior. Not for lying about it.

But yesterday something different happened. The DOJ went into court and asked that a set of charges be dismissed with prejudice, i.e., they can’t be filed again. And the reason was this sentence that’s been rattling around my head for the last 24 hours. “Newly discovered evidence in this matter is materially inconsistent with the allegations in the Complaint Affidavit.”