The Week Magazine September 30, 2022

At the end of a recent vacation trip to the Virginia and Maryland shore, my wife, Karla, and I made a brief detour to Washington, D.C. I felt an urge to make a pilgrimage to the National Archives to see the original copies of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. These blueprints for self-rule, liberty, and human flourishing created a flawed but resilient democracy that has endured through 246 years of sharp, often bloody disagreement, evolution, and struggle. The fragile parchments are now encased in inert argon gas under protective glass in a darkened room, where people file by in the hushed silence of a secular cathedral. It is with some awe that you inspect the familiar words in handwritten script and the signatures of…

What happened Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis faced possible legal repercussions this week for flying some 50 asylum-seeking migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard in a political stunt, as the migrants filed a lawsuit and a U.S. attorney looked into possible crimes. DeSantis set off a political firestorm when two planes carrying the mostly Venezuelan migrants, recruited for the journey from San Antonio, landed unannounced in Martha’s Vineyard, a Massachusetts island with a wealthy summer population. Local residents scrambled to care for the disoriented migrants, who said a woman named “Perla” offered to fly them to Boston and gave them fliers saying they’d be eligible for benefits including housing assistance, job training, and “8 months cash assistance.” The stunt builds on an ongoing campaign by Republican Govs. Greg Abbott of…

What happened Faced with Russian battlefield losses in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin escalated the war this week by announcing an expansion of the Russian army and implicitly threatening to use nuclear weapons. In a rare taped address to the nation, Putin did not declare a general draft but called for “partial mobilization” of some 300,000 reservists who previously served in the armed forces. The announcement prompted an immediate exodus of Russians trying to avoid being called up. Flights to Armenia and Turkey, two of the few international destinations that remain open to Russians since Western countries canceled flights months ago, sold out within hours of Putin’s speech. Later that day, several thousand Russians protested the mobilization, risking 15-year prison sentences, and more than 1,200 people from 38 cities…

What happened A tense hearing with court-appointed special master Judge Raymond Dearie this week appeared to diminish Donald Trump’s chances of succeeding with efforts to keep the Justice Department from using documents seized from Mar-a-Lago in a criminal investigation. Dearie, whom U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon charged with evaluating executive and attorney-client privilege claims over the documents, criticized the lawyers’ refusal to present evidence that would show that Trump ordered the declassification of the 100 or so documents marked classified. Without such evidence, Dearie said, he’d have no reason to second-guess their classification markings, and “that’s the end of it.” The semi-retired district judge also estimated he needed only until Oct. 7 to finish his evaluation of the 11,000-plus documents. That’s far sooner than the Nov. 30 deadline…

For a seasoned Senate veteran like Lindsey Graham, this was “quite a step on the ol’ rake,” said Jason Linkins in The New Republic. In recent months, the sheer scale of the voter backlash to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade had worried Republicans frantically scrubbing pro-life rhetoric from their websites and trying to shift the national conversation away from abortion. But then South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham shocked members of his own party by introducing a bill that would ban abortion nationwide after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Graham’s bill won’t even get a vote in the Democratic-controlled Senate, said Erin Gloria Ryan in The Daily Beast. All it achieves is ensuring that “abortion stays in the headlines,” while confirming Democratic warnings that with Roe gone, the GOP…

Good week for: Stoners, with new British research suggesting that regular marijuana users are no more “lazy” or “unmotivated” than the general population. The belief that cannabis users are apathetic couch potatoes, researchers said, “is itself a lazy stereotype.” Following the evidence, after customs officials at Germany’s Duesseldorf Airport found an 8-inch-long snail on an airport baggage truck and followed its slime-trail to a sack containing 93 other giant snails being shipped from Nigeria for sale as meat. Afternoon activities, after a Taiwanese nursing home admitted it had hired an exotic dancer dressed in skimpy lingerie to entertain wheelchair-bound veterans. A spokesperson for the home said the staff had no idea the dancer would be so “enthusiastic and fiery.” Bad week for: Tourism, after Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist at the…