It is just another day in America where a mass shooting occurs.  This last mass shooting took place in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24th.  Americans were faced with the grim reality that the local police delayed its response to the gunman.  Inquiry comes amid anger over why officers waited over an hour outside the classroom where the gunman killed twenty-one people.

Justice Thomas ruled on election cases.  Should his wife’s texts have precluded him?  The nature of the text messages was enough to require his recusal.  But, the Supreme Court has traditionally left such decisions to the discretion of the justice in question.  Herein lies the problem.  Judges cannot be left to judge themselves—it’s human nature for anyone to deny his or her bias.  This is why we so desperately need all judges—and certainly Supreme Court judges—to be regulated by a neutral third party.  But will it ever happen?  I won’t hold my breath.

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), similar to other institutions under the current administration, is unsettled, adrift, and no longer composed of the most upstanding people.  Like heads of other executive branch agencies, DOJ leaders have repeatedly violated long-standing norms, abandoned traditional priorities, and demoralized the DOJ’s workforce over the past few years.  But the DOJ is also fundamentally unlike other institutions of government.

On April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.  An hour later he died.  For nearly fifty years, the federal government has maintained that James Earl Ray was the gunman who assassinated King that day.  But within Martin Luther King’s family, there remains a strong belief that Ray is innocent, and was set up to take the fall.

Corruption is the rule.  This week marks twenty-eight years since George H.W. Bush pardoned six defendants as part of the Iran-Contra cover up.  One of whom, confessed criminal Elliot Abrams, was brought back into government by George W. Bush, and now serves as Trump’s Iran/Valenzuela envoy.  Trump is not just using the pardon power as other presidents have, but pardoning people to send a clear signal to witnesses and prosecutors.  Each of the pardoned miscreants was convicted of crimes that may have been committed by witnesses against Trump or by the president himself.

Can voters bring guns into polling places?  In most states, the answer is: it depends.  Only about a dozen states—including California, Arizona, Florida and Georgia—explicitly ban open and/or concealed carry in voting sites.  In much of the country, voters may bring firearms into polling places, as long as the buildings and churches do.  Those rules vary at the state and local level.

Many people do not understand that the legal system can strike anyone at any time.  Regarding criminal matters, some hold the misconception that only the guilty get arrested, tried, and convicted.  Our corrupt judicial system has become a self-aggrandizing industry that feeds itself at the expense of Americans.