“One hundred and eighty-seven minutes. It’s the more than three-hour period during which the Jan. 6 committee says then-President Donald Trump refused to call off a violent mob of his supporters who were attacking police, ransacking the Capitol and hunting down lawmakers and his own vice president.” That will be the focus on the last prime time Jan 6th hearing of the summer. And this season will not end on a cliffhanger. While the hearings have been consistently damning, they’ve mostly confirmed what we already saw with our own eyes. So now what?

+ The latest: Criminal probe opened into deletion of Secret Service Jan. 6 text messages. From 2016 to 2020, DC was one giant, active crime scene.

+ If Americans can’t agree that betraying America should, at the very least, preclude one from being elected president again, then where exactly are we headed? According to one poll, over 50 percent of Americans expect a civil war ‘in the next few years.’ That might be unlikely, but in The Atlantic, Brian Klaas has some thoughts about how democracies die. “I’ve spent the past 12 years studying the breakdown of democracy and the rise of authoritarianism around the world, in places such as Thailand, Tunisia, Belarus, and Zambia. I’ve shaken hands with many of the world’s democracy killers … American democracy is dying. There are plenty of medicines that would cure it. Unfortunately, our political dysfunction means we’re choosing not to use them, and as time passes, fewer treatments become available to us, even though the disease is becoming terminal. No major prodemocracy reforms have passed Congress. No key political figures who tried to overturn an American election have faced real accountability. The president who orchestrated the greatest threat to our democracy in modern times is free to run for reelection, and may well return to office.”