Republican Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita has been hit with a formal misconduct complaint over his threats to prosecute a doctor who performed an abortion for a 10-year-old rape victim.

The Washington Post reports that Lauren Robel, the former dean of Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law, filed a complaint against Rokita in which she alleged that he intended to "harass and intimidate" Dr. Caitlin Bernard when he falsely insinuated that she did not properly filed a terminated pregnancy report with the Indiana Department of Health and the Department of Child Services.

In an interview with the Post, Robel singled out Rokita's decision to publicly disparage Bernard and threaten to prosecute her during an interview on Fox News as a major red line that no attorney general should cross.

"The attorney general is tasked with protecting citizens, not going after them without evidence on television,” she explained. “I just fear that without those of us in the bar calling [out] that kind of behavior when we see it, we lower the standards."

Two of the most respected empirical law scholars—Lee Epstein of Washington University at St. Louis School of Law and Eric Posner of the University of Chicago Law School—recently published a statistical study of the Roberts Court and constitutional protections for religion. The study was based on a dataset that included every Supreme Court case that produced an opinion relating to the First Amendment’s establishment and free exercise clauses from 1953 to the 2020 term. The data showed that the Roberts Court represents a break in the development of the two religion clauses.

“Over the entire period, the court ruled in favor of religion 59% of the time,” the authors reported. “Win rates do not differ significantly for Free Exercise Clause cases (59%) and Establishment Clause cases (57%). Across the Warren, Burger, and Rehnquist Courts the religious side prevailed about half the time, with gradually increasing success. In the Roberts Court, the win rate jumps to 83%.”

These empiricists also examined the justices in their dataset. They ranked them by their pro-religion votes and concluded:

“The top five most pro-religion justices since at least World War II are Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito Jr., Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch.”

“They are also all Christian, mostly Catholic, religiously devout (though this variable provides a weaker explanation than the others), and ideologically conservative. Amy Coney Barrett will likely advance this trend.” Barrett, who didn’t join the court until 2020, did advance the trend in last term’s religion decisions, her first full term on the court. (The least pro-religion justice was Presbyterian William Douglas who served from 1939 to 1975).

WASHINGTON, DC— House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler today announced the markup of the Assault Weapons Ban of 2021 (H.R. 1808) on July 20, 2022. In the last two months alone, four gunmen have killed a combined 42 people with assault weapons—including 19 children in Uvalde, Texas. This legislation, sponsored by Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) and cosponsored by 211 Members of the House, would ban the sale, import, manufacture or transfer of certain semi-automatic weapons.

“Over the past several decades, our country has witnessed senseless killing after senseless kill and each time one fact has remained remarkably consistent—the weapon of choice for mass slaughter is a high-powered assault weapon,” said Chairman Nadler. “It is beyond frightening and disturbing that a weapon that was designed as a tool of war has found its way into the hands of 18 year olds and onto our streets. Any weapon that allows for the quick and efficient slaughter of children in our schools has no place in our communities. This markup is another step in our efforts to make our communities safer. I look forward to moving this legislation through the Judiciary Committee next week and onto the House floor.”

“AR-15 style firearms have become the weapon of choice for shooters looking to kill as many people as possible as quickly as possible and have been used in the deadliest mass shootings in our history, from Sandy Hook to Parkland to Uvalde. Researchers estimate that if we still had a federal Assault Weapons Ban, we would see 70 percent fewer mass shooting deaths. How many more kids need to die in their schools before we finally crack down on these dangerous firearms which were designed for war?" said Congressman Cicilline. “Protecting the lives and safety of Americans is not at odds with our Second Amendment rights. We cannot rest until we ensure that our kids and families are safe in schools, houses of worship, and everywhere in our communities. I thank Chairman Nadler for moving this legislation through the Committee and hope all our colleagues will join us in voting to help save lives.”

Present at that meeting were the following, Murphy said: US Reps. Matt Gaetz*, Andy Biggs*, Brian Babin, Jody Hice, Louie Gohmert*, Andy Harris, Mo Brooks*, Paul Gosar*, Scott Perry* and Jim Jordan. Margaret Taylor Greene*, representative-elect, was there. So were Mike Pence, Mark Meadows* and Rudy Giuliani*, Murphy said. (The asterisk indicates who among them later asked Trump for a pardon.)

Murphy said it was important to explain that Eastman’s legal theory was illegal. Why? Because Republicans in the House and Senate “were looking for reasons to object.” The thinking appears to be that with a sufficient number of congressional Republicans objecting to the electoral count, which is to say, voting to overturn the results of the 2020 election, they could keep Trump in the White House.

These 10 Republicans have not gotten as much attention as they deserve. (Neither have the 137 other Republicans who voted to object.) That’s understandable. The J6 committee has uncovered a dogpile of material evidence of the walking crime scene that is the former president. But these co-conspirators deserve a moment.

Indeed, these 10 House Republicans not only voted to reject Biden and hence the democratic will of the American people. They voted to reject the president-elect after the former president had ordered his paramilitaries and armed mob to sack and loot the US Capitol.

Again, with feeling: these Republicans met with Trump to pressure Pence. When they failed, they voted to overturn the results of the 2020 election. In all, 147 Republicans in the Congress followed suit.

Were I running the House Select Committee investigating the events of January 6, 2021, and I wanted testimony from the likes of Steve Bannon or Stewart Rhodes, I would insist it be taken on videotape, preferably recorded in the old jail cells in the basement of the Capitol.

The possibility that Bannon—and Oath Keeper Rhodes—would testify lit up the news over the weekend. But the idea that either one would be allowed a public platform is sheer lunacy. Either they would demolish the great sense of dignity that has lent the committee's proceedings so much gravitas and credibility thus far, or they would concoct some wild, ruthless scheme that would blunt the momentum built up assiduously by the committee throughout the past several months. The circus most definitely need not come to town at this point.

And, significantly, this sudden change of heart from Bannon comes just as his trial for criminal contempt of Congress is about to begin. (Jury selection for that exercise is scheduled for next week.) This happy coincidence did not escape the notice of the Department of Justice, which filed a motion to exclude Bannon’s sudden change of heart from evidence in that trial on the grounds that it’s all self-serving moonshine.

In preparation for his July 18 contempt of Congress trial, Steve Bannon's lawyers are working overtime to flood the zone with shit. They're determined to make this case about everything but their client's refusal to comply with a subpoena from the House January 6 Select Committee. The strategy appears to involve lobbing a flaming sack of dog crap at US District Judge Carl J. Nichols's docket every 24 hours.

But there's a hearing this morning where some of this will get sorted out, so let's divide this doo-doo into three piles to see if we can wade through without getting too much on our shoes.

Originally the model included over 30 different factors, like poverty, income inequality, how diverse religiously or ethnically a country was. But only two factors came out again and again as highly predictive. And it wasn’t what people were expecting, even on the task force. We were surprised. The first was this variable called anocracy. There’s this nonprofit based in Virginia called the Center for Systemic Peace. And every year it measures all sorts of things related to the quality of the governments around the world. How autocratic or how democratic a country is. And it has this scale that goes from negative 10 to positive 10. Negative 10 is the most authoritarian, so think about North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain. Positive 10 are the most democratic. This, of course, is where you want to be. This would be Denmark, Switzerland, Canada. The U.S. was a positive 10 for many, many years. It’s no longer a positive 10. And then it has this middle zone between positive 5 and negative 5, which was you had features of both. If you’re a positive 5, you have more democratic features, but definitely have a few authoritarian elements. And, of course, if you’re negative 5, you have more authoritarian features and a few democratic elements. The U.S. was briefly downgraded to a 5 and is now an 8.

And what scholars found was that this anocracy variable was really predictive of a risk for civil war. That full democracies almost never have civil wars. Full autocracies rarely have civil wars. All of the instability and violence is happening in this middle zone. And there’s all sorts of theories why this middle zone is unstable, but one of the big ones is that these governments tend to be weaker. They’re transitioning to either actually becoming more democratic, and so some of the authoritarian features are loosening up. The military is giving up control. And so it’s easier to organize a challenge. Or, these are democracies that are backsliding, and there’s a sense that these governments are not that legitimate, people are unhappy with these governments. There’s infighting. There’s jockeying for power. And so they’re weak in their own ways. Anyway, that turned out to be highly predictive.

And then the second factor was whether populations in these partial democracies began to organize politically, not around ideology — so, not based on whether you’re a communist or not a communist, or you’re a liberal or a conservative — but where the parties themselves were based almost exclusively around identity: ethnic, religious or racial identity. The quintessential example of this is what happened in the former Yugoslavia.