Pew Research: “The vast majority of the regular and special Senate elections held since 2012 – 122 of 139 – have been won by candidates who belonged to or were aligned with the party that won that state’s most recent presidential race.”

The grandson of President Warren G. Harding and his lover, Nan Britton, went to court in an effort to get the Republican’s remains exhumed from the presidential memorial where they have lain since 1927, the AP reports.

James Blaesing told an Ohio court that he is seeking Harding’s disinterment as a way “to establish with scientific certainty” that he is the 29th president’s blood relation.

The innocence of the front page of the New York Times on September 11, 2001 is heartbreaking.

I was in New York City that morning and saw the twin towers burn and then fall. I’ll never forget the sadness and anger I felt that day.

But I’ll forever be energized by the resilience of New Yorkers in the aftermath of that attack.

From Harper’s Magazine in August 1941:

“It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times—in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.”

“The English colonists who settled the so-called Lost Colony before disappearing from history simply went to live with their native friends — the Croatoans of Hatteras, according to a new book,” the Virginian-Pilot reports.

Said author Scott Dawson, who researched records and dug up artifacts where the colonists lived with the Indians in the 16th century: “They were never lost. It was made up. The mystery is over.”

“Teams have found thousands of artifacts 4-6 feet below the surface that show a mix of English and Indian life. Parts of swords and guns are in the same layer of soil as Indian pottery and arrowheads.”

Sale

The Lost Colony and Hatteras Island

• Dawson, Scott (Author)
• English (Publication Language)
• 160 Pages - 06/15/2020 (Publication Date) - The History Press (Publisher)

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Ron Brownstein: “Though Republican nominees have won the popular vote only once in the five presidential elections since 2000, the GOP has controlled the White House for 12 of the 20 years since then. Similarly, Republicans have controlled the Senate more than half the time since 2000 even though GOP senators, when attributing half of each state’s population to each senator, have never represented more people than their Democratic colleagues.”

“The American political system has long contained features designed to constrain the ability of majorities to impose their will — what John Adams, among other founders, called ‘the tyranny of the majority.’ But the current situation is unusual in that it has consistently empowered a minority to drive the nation’s agenda.”

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) told the Arkansas Democrat Gazette that slavery was a “necessary evil” for the United States.

Said Cotton: “We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise we can’t understand our country. As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction.”

The body of the late Rep. John Lewis will be escorted Sunday across the famous Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where the civil rights icon first helped lead a march for voting rights in 1965, CNN reports.

David Remnick: “Too often in this country, seeming progress is derailed, reversed, or overwhelmed. Bloody Sunday led directly to the passage of the Voting Rights Act––and yet suppressing the Black vote is a pillar of today’s Republican Party strategy. The election of the first African-American President was followed by a bigot running for election, and now reelection, on a platform of racism and resentment. The murder of Jesse Thornton has its echoes in the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many others. Indeed, to this day, the bridge where Lewis nearly lost his life is named in honor of Edmund Pettus, a U.S. senator who was a Confederate officer and a Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan.”

“And so there were times when Lewis, who died on Friday, at the age of eighty, might have felt the temptation at times to give up, to give way. But it was probably his most salient characteristic that he always refused despair; with open eyes, he acknowledged the darkest chapters of American history yet insisted that change was always possible.”

“President Trump has said he learned lessons from President Richard M. Nixon’s fall from grace, but in using the power of his office to keep his friend and adviser Roger J. Stone Jr. out of prison he has now crossed a line that even Mr. Nixon in the depths of Watergate dared not cross,” the New York Times reports.

“For months, some of Mr. Trump’s senior White House advisers warned him that it would be politically self-destructive if not ethically inappropriate to use his clemency power to help Mr. Stone, who was convicted of lying to protect the president. But in casting aside their counsel on Friday, Mr. Trump indulged his own sense of grievance over precedent and restraint to reward an ally for his silence.”

Jeffrey Toobin: The Roger Stone case shows why Trump is worse than Nixon.

Stuart Rothenberg recalls the 1996 election when Republican campaigns to adopted a last-minute, new strategy to deny a re-elected Bill Clinton a “blank check.”

“To the dismay of Dole campaign strategists (who understood the new message amounted to an admission that their candidate had no chance), Republican operatives did embrace that ‘no blank check’ message… That strategy helped the GOP limit its losses to only three House seats and maintain control of the chamber. The party even gained two Senate seats, increasing its majority from 53-47 to 55-45.”

“With President Trump trailing badly now, it’s at least reasonable to ask whether a ‘no blank check’ strategy option is available to Republicans once again this year.”