Kimberly Wehle

Yesterday, a Michigan judge sentenced James and Jennifer Crumbley to 10 to 15 years in prison for failing to stop their son Ethan from murdering four students in 2021. The cases grabbed headlines because prosecutors aggressively charged the parents with the actual killings, as though they had pulled the trigger themselves, rather than pressing lesser offenses such as child neglect and failure to comply with gun-safety laws. Separate juries had convicted them of manslaughter.

However troubling its political implications might be, the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling on Tuesday that Donald Trump is disqualified from the state’s primary ballot for having “engaged in insurrection” demonstrates that the judicial system is still functioning in the United States. The reason is straightforward: The court applied the plain language of the Constitution, doing its job with clarity and fidelity to the rule of law.

In another historic first for a former president, Donald J. Trump testified for five hours yesterday in the trial of the civil fraud claims brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James against him, his two sons, the Trump Organization, and other related defendants. Although his testimony probably shifted little for the state’s case against him, it was a sad spectacle for the rule of law and the sanctity of the judicial system in America.

Updated at 8:09 p.m. ET on July 28, 2023Yesterday, Special Counsel Jack Smith secured a superseding indictment in the classified-documents case against Donald Trump and his aide Waltine Nauta in federal court in Florida. The revised indictment adds a new defendant, Carlos de Oliveira, a property manager at Mar-a-Lago, as well as two new obstruction-of-justice counts for attempting to “alter, destroy, mutilate, or conceal evidence.

Many people believed that a federal indictment of Donald Trump for his mishandling of classified information would never come—that the rule of law simply could not withstand the virulence and impetuousness of this one man and his cowardly enablers, that Attorney General Merrick Garland lacked the fortitude to weather the political fallout of indicting a former president, and that Trump’s signature outmaneuvering would carry the day—as if he really were a king.

The Supreme Court’s upcoming abortion- and guns-rights cases are getting much of the attention right now, but a third, relatively overlooked case could transform one of the most consequential areas of American law: the separation of Church and state.

Some Supreme Court watchers found relief in the Court’s recent decisions, many of which were narrow and stopped short of overturning major precedents. But two rulings underscore what Americans need to know about the post-Trump Court: It isn’t invested in defending the rights of American voters, the Constitution’s core demographic, with the same vigor that it applies to the interests of nonpersons, such as corporations.

Updated at 5:52 p.m. ET on May 19, 2021.Yesterday evening, New York State’s attorney general, Letitia James, announced, “We have informed the Trump Organization that … We are now actively investigating the Trump Organization in a criminal capacity.” According to The New York Times, James will be sending two of her office’s prosecutors to join the team of Cyrus Vance Jr., the Manhattan DA.