Good morning. 
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of forty-one. Sunrise is 7:08 AM and sunset 4:21 PM, for 9h 12m 52s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 42.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand one hundred twentieth day.
On this day in 1947, WTMJ-TV in Milwaukee becomes Wisconsin’s first television station.
Recommended for reading in full:
Bob Bauer writes Trump Is the Founders’ Worst Nightmare (‘Once in the Oval Office, a demagogue can easily stay there’):
Donald Trump’s Republican congressional allies are throwing up different defenses against impeachment and hoping that something may sell. They say that he didn’t seek a corrupt political bargain with Ukraine, but that if he did, he failed, and the mere attempt is not impeachable. Or that it is not clear that he did it, because the evidence against him is unreliable “hearsay.”
It’s all been very confusing. But the larger story — the crucial constitutional story — is not the incoherence of the president’s defense. It is more that he and his party are exposing limits of impeachment as a response to the presidency of a demagogue.
The founders feared the demagogue, who figures prominently in the Federalist Papers as the politician who, possessing “perverted ambition,” pursues relentless self-aggrandizement “by the confusions of their country.” The last of the papers, Federalist No. 85, linked demagogy to its threat to the constitutional order — to the “despotism” that may be expected from the “victorious demagogue.” This “despotism” is achieved through systematic lying to the public, vilification of the opposition and, as James Fenimore Cooper wrote in an essay on demagogues, a claimed right to disregard “the Constitution and the laws” in pursuing what the demagogue judges to be the “interests of the people.”
Should the demagogue succeed in winning the presidency, impeachment in theory provides the fail-safe protection. And yet the demagogue’s political tool kit, it turns out, may be his most effective defense. It is a constitutional paradox: The very behaviors that necessitate impeachment supply the means for the demagogue to escape it.
Catherine Rampell writes The more love Always Trumpers show, the more dangerous Trump becomes:
You’ve heard of the Never Trumpers. That’s the president’s catchall slur for anyone who criticizes him or at least accurately attests to something unsavory he’s done.
But let’s talk instead for a moment about the true risk to our democracy: the Always Trumpers. These are people such as Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.) and even the once-reasonable-sounding Rep. Will Hurd (R-Tex.), who excuse away any evidence of impeachment-worthy misdeeds no matter how damning.
The Always Trumpers represent a sprawling group of lackeys and co-conspirators, willing to aid, abet and (most importantly) adore President Trump no matter what he’s credibly accused of. Come hell or high crimes, Always Trumpers always truckle to Trump.
It doesn’t matter whether he’s extorting a desperate ally into announcing a fake investigation into a domestic political rival, compromising both that ally’s national security and ours. The Always Trumpers, many of whom were once Russia hawks, will stand by their man.