Such talk has been particularly vigorous among key advisers to Donald Trump as he begins what he hopes will be his transition back to the White House. Of course, talk of mandated national service is one step away from that dreaded term — the draft.

But before any of my younger readers dash away to pack up for Canada, relax, at least for now. It would take an act of Congress to bring back the draft and we’re a long way from that happening. Yet, as crazy as our national politics sometimes is these days, it pays to be prepared for anything.

As The Washington Post reported this week, Christopher Miller, who led the Pentagon during the last tumultuous days of Donald Trump’s presidency, thinks a national service requirement should be “strongly considered.”  He detailed his vision for military and civilian readiness as part of Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s latest book of federal policy recommendations that they have been publishing for presumptive Republican presidential nominees since Ronald Reagan.

Miller, a retired Green Beret, is among the most outspoken about mandating national service and taking other steps to improve military readiness. He sees a “crisis” facing our all-volunteer military. Although Trump has not formally endorsed this latest Heritage strategy document, he eagerly embraced the organization’s proposals in his first term.

At a time when just 1% of the nation’s population serves in the armed services, according to the Post, the big readiness challenge continues to be recruitment. The Pentagon fell short of its recruiting goal by about 41,000 last year, the Post reports. Only the Marines and the Space Force met their objectives.

In one startling explanation for the shortfall, the Army cited internal data indicating some 71% of Americans do not qualify for military service for reasons that include obesity, drug use and aptitude.

Yet, as one of the last draftees during the Vietnam War, I know that Washington and the Pentagon don’t want to go back to the days of draft cards except as a very last resort. Besides the problems of physical readiness, there are the morale issues tied to soldiers who don’t want to be there. Any commander, as I learned firsthand, would rather lead a platoon of willing recruits than resentful and begrudging draftees.

And the political impact back home can be a very real headache for local politicians, as I learned from some of Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley’s constituents in the Vietnam era. No politician wants to deal with the anguish of constituents’ sons and daughters coming home in body bags from a war hardly anyone understands.

Among Miller’s recommendations, he would like to see the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, or ASVAB, taken in every high school. It’s a multiple-aptitude exam that helps predict future academic and occupational success in the military. More than a million military applicants take it every year.

I can also speak from personal experience about the personal value of the military experience. Besides the physical fitness — that has faded for me over time — I remain impressed and inspired by the level of personal sacrifice my fellow troops were willing to make without giving it a second thought.

The draft ended for Americans in 1973, two years before the war ended, after Congress cut off its funding. No one seems to have been in a hurry to bring it back ever since.

Still, there are some gung-ho MAGA Republicans who suggest a draft could toughen up a seemingly pampered generation of video game-playing softies. Maybe so, but let’s not press our luck. We’re better off with an all-volunteer military.

The irony of having a possible return of President Trump took on an ironic twist with the recent 80th anniversary of the D-Day landing. It brought back memories of how Trump’s role of commander in chief was compromised at times by his multiple deferrals from military service during the Vietnam era thanks to questionable medical claims. The controversy led Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois — who lost both legs in combat — to rechristen Trump “Cadet Bone Spurs.”

Somehow I don’t think, despite the entreaties of those on the right who fret about the state of our military, that Trump would endorse something as politically unpopular as a return of the draft. But he’s not the most predictable of candidates.

The trial by political fire was on full display last week as the entire Democratic Party establishment seemed to rise up and pile on Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida, whom multiple news outlets have put on Trump’s short list of possible running mates.

His offense? He expressed what sounded to many ears, including mine, like nostalgia for the bad old days of Jim Crow segregation.

“During Jim Crow the Black family was together,” Donalds said during a Black GOP outreach event in Philadelphia on Tuesday, according to Politico. “More Black people were — not just conservative, because Black people always have always been conservative-minded — but more Black people voted conservatively.”

He also took a few shots at decades-old poverty-fighting policies from the days of Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson, saying they promoted a culture of dependence, a defining critique for many of today’s conservatives.

Not surprisingly, media reports of his remarks were followed by blowback from allies of President Joe Biden, including the Congressional Black Caucus and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York.

“It has come to my attention that a so-called leader has made the factually inaccurate statement that Black folks were better off during Jim Crow,” he said in a posting on X, formerly Twitter, of his stinging remarks from the House floor Wednesday,

After listing some of the tragic aspects of that era — from lynching to the suppression of the Black vote — he concluded, “How dare you make such an ignorant observation?”

Devastating. But was he right? Different ears will hear his remarks through their varied experiences.

I’m old enough to remember the last days of Jim Crow as a Black child visiting relatives in the South and, take it from me, we’re better off now. I see nothing in the Jim Crow period to which I wish to return.

Yet, I know Donalds is right to extol the conservative values of family, faith and hard work that enabled Black American families to survive and succeed in that period — and the danger of excessive dependency on government programs.

Such dependency is easier to avoid when you also have the jobs and income that come with economic prosperity. (Affordable college tuition quickly comes to mind when I compare my generation with that of my son.)

Studies show there has been a slight closing of the racial income gap but there also has been a persistent class gap that crosses racial lines. I have long called for more attention to be paid to that gap through policies that recognize the economic struggles we all experience, regardless of race.

Unfortunately, some political leaders see short-term gains in using the gap to stir resentments between the classes instead of working together for mutual benefit.

For the young voters now rising, the memories of us old-timers have limited impact. They have concerns of their own that the veteran politicians must address.

That may help to explain why Joe Biden has been losing support among younger African Americans. Polls run by The New York Times and Siena College consistently have found support for Trump among more than 20% of Black voters in six critical battleground states.

That’s striking because Trump won only 8% of the Black vote nationally in 2020 and 6% in 2016, according to the Pew Research Center. A Republican presidential candidate has not won more than 12% of the Black vote in nearly half a century.

Those polls were before Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts, and Democrats predict their voters will return to the fold by November.

In the meantime, I am encouraged to see both parties actively competing for the Black vote, which I think is still largely waiting to be energized in the post-Obama era. Choices are what democracy is all about or, at least, should be.

We can do without the nostalgia unless it helps us to deal with the challenges of today’s world.

The dueling scandals of Trump’s hush-money trial in New York, where he was found guilty on all 34 felony counts, and the beginning of Hunter Biden’s trial on three felony gun charges in Delaware provide ample material for fear and anger, rational or otherwise, on both political sides.

But hardly anyone’s life and reputation have been buffeted by conspiracy theories more than 83-year-old Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who later joined the White House Coronavirus Task Force in January 2020 before stepping down in 2022.

Appearing voluntarily at a House subcommittee on the very serious topic of the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Fauci knew he would be fielding every controversial question that rose up during and after that fraught period. After all, the pandemic was a plague that affected all Americans in one way or another — and everyone seemed to have a pet theory about where it came from, what to do about it and, quite often, whom to blame for it.

For example, whenever rules for mask mandates and social distancing were changed, which seemed too often in my humble view, our patience was tested as we tried to keep up — or persuade people who don’t like to be told what to do. All of that doubt and frustration fell on whoever had the highest profile, which often was Fauci, a familiar face for many of us ever since he rose to prominence during the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. Depending on how much patience we had left, we reasonably wondered whether anybody in charge knew what they were doing.

But how ready was he, one wonders, for interrogation by the Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, an attention-loving Georgia Republican who, once news cameras are turned on, seems to pursue drama more than facts?

During Greene’s turn to question him, she refused to call Fauci “doctor” and instead insisted on referring to him as “Mr. Fauci” as she pressed him on requiring children to wear masks in schools during the pandemic and also on the 6-foot social distancing guidelines put in place in many public spaces to reduce the spread of COVID-19.

Democrats objected to Greene’s discourtesy. She was reprimanded by the Republican committee chairman and instructed to recognize Fauci as a doctor.

Later, as Fauci responded to the claim by Republicans that the 6-foot social distancing rule closing many businesses and schools in the first years of the pandemic was not based on science, he cited his own closed-door testimony before the panel in January, when he said the standard “just appeared” from a number of sources.

Greene and some other Republicans interpreted that to mean he just “made it up.” No, he said, he was referring to the lack of a clinical trial demonstrating its validity.

But things became poignantly serious when Fauci was asked about death threats he and his family received from crackpots who blame him for the pandemic. After Fauci choked up while describing the threats, Greene piped up again, saying she thought he belonged in prison.

When Democratic Rep. Debbie Dingell of Michigan asked if he was still receiving threats, he replied: “Yes, I do every time someone gets up and says I’m responsible for the death of people throughout the world, the threats go up.”

Fauci said there have been “credible death threats,” leading to the arrests of two individuals, “and it’s required my having protective services essentially all the time.”

As Fauci testified, it turned out, a convicted Jan. 6 rioter identified as Brandon Fellows, 30, was sitting directly behind him, making what appeared to be sarcastic faces visible on TV over Fauci’s left shoulder.

That’s how paranoid politics work. As the old saying goes, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean somebody’s not out to get you.

Americans have a long tradition of offering reparations for slavery, only to see them clawed back.

During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln signed the District of Columbia Emancipation Act bill on April 16, 1862, which freed enslaved people in the nation’s capital and paid their former owners who were loyal to the Union up to $300 in compensation for every individual freed.

But little was offered to the freed individuals except their freedom, which was no small matter. Lincoln’s bill signing continues to be celebrated with an annual holiday and parades in Washington, D.C., on April 16.

The issue of reparations for slavery endures, especially among African Americans, with such questions as, what happened to our “40 acres and a mule?”

That’s a phrase that grew out of Union Gen. William T. Sherman’s order to reserve tillable land seized from the Confederates and give it to the formerly enslaved. But Lincoln was assassinated before that was implemented, and Lincoln’s successor Andrew Johnson worked to reverse the initiative.

Fast forward. As a descendant of freed American slaves, I have long felt the chances of anything like reparations actually happening for me and my family were too remote to care much about. But in more recent years, the reparations movement has lowered its sights to local actions.

Evanston’s City Council approved a program in 2021 which already has disbursed more than $3 million and has plans to distribute at least $11 million more. It’s aimed at compensating Black descendants of people who lived in the North Shore suburb between 1919 and 1969, when racial discrimination and neighborhood segregation were rampant.

Now, in a self-styled blow against what’s often called “reverse discrimination,” Judicial Watch, a conservative Washington, D.C.-based legal foundation, in a lawsuit accuses the anti-discrimination program of discriminating against non-Blacks by providing money only to African American households. It’s filed suit against the city, arguing the program is discriminatory. Against non-Blacks.

Under the program, qualified recipients must have forebears who identified as Black and lived in Evanston during the specified half century. Of course, those who are Black and lived in Evanston as adults during that period qualify. And Black adults who lived in Evanston after 1969 and can show they were victims of housing discrimination also qualify. Judicial Watch calls the program “nothing more than a ploy to redistribute tax dollars to individuals based on race.”

The city government set up the program, using mainly funds from legalized marijuana, to help atone for what the city said was a system that prevented Black residents from building wealth through homeownership and segregated Black families in a small enclave on the city’s western edge.

Judicial Watch’s lawsuit, filed Thursday in federal court, names as plaintiffs six people whose relatives once lived in Evanston during that 50-year period. None of the plaintiffs or their relatives identify as Black, the lawsuit says. Plaintiffs’ attorneys argue that the program awards applicants up to $25,000 based on their race, without having to prove they or their relatives faced housing discrimination. It’s a purported class-action suit that, among other things, demands $25,000 for non-Black Evanstonians who are members of the class Judicial Watch defines.

The city declined to comment on the suit, but Kamm Howard, national co-chair of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, expressed confidence in an interview that the program will survive this legal challenge if judged not as a discrimination case but as a human rights case, using international standards for crimes against humanity.

“We do not take these avenues of redress because of discrimination but because human rights have been abused,” said Howard, who has worked with Evanston. Therefore, he argued, the legality of reparations should be subject to international standards that outlaw apartheid, slavery and other crimes against humanity.

We’ll see. Howard has spoken at international conferences about a “new paradigm of reparations activism.” This may be an example of it. But international standards of human rights have had limited impact in the United States.

Other local governments across the nation are watching to see what happens in Evanston. But, judging by similar civil rights cases in the past — for example, affirmative action litigation — the more narrowly they can tailor the remedies the better their chances of success.

Calls went out from the marching masses for a nationwide reckoning on racism, police violence and all manner of historical root causes that had led up to that horrible moment on May 25, 2020.

Four years later, we’re now trying to reckon with what’s happened to the reckoning.

That point came through in a stunning surprise for two knowledgeable reporters, Robert Samuels, now at The New Yorker, and Toluse Olorunnipa of The Washington Post, authors of “His Name Is George Floyd.”

They were preparing to speak at Christian Brothers University in Memphis last year about their book, which tells the story of how Floyd’s life and legacy had been shaped by systemic racism. But a few days before the event, they were notified that they would be unable to read from their book or distribute it because of Tennesee’s “CRT/Age Appropriate Materials law.”

As Samuels put it, “It appeared that our book had been banned.”

Indeed. In today’s sociopolitical times, politically correct “cancellations” are not limited to the left, as if they ever were. Sad. But this is what happens in these times when you venture into what often has been called America’s original sin, racism.

How, I have to ask, are we supposed to reckon with a subject that so many Americans are too uncomfortable to discuss?

No wonder that after Floyd’s killing and several other high-profile deaths of Black individuals at the hands of police, the drive for comprehensive police reform has persistently run up against backlash in various forms.

Last week Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a Texas Democrat, reintroduced the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act that seeks to address the racial profiling and use-of-force issues that too often have resulted in deadly police encounters.

Yet, the legislation, which was initially introduced 2021, still faces roadblocks in Congress and has yet to move forward.

Sadly, the lack of progress reminds me of an old sarcastic saying: Expect the worst and you won’t be disappointed.

Worse, the nation is in the midst of a police officer shortage that many in law enforcement blame on the double hit to officers in 2020: intense criticism and the pandemic. Across the country, small towns unable to fill their employment rolls are eliminating their departments and turning their work over to county sheriffs, state police or some neighboring town’s police. Big cities like Chicago are struggling to recruit officers and have hundreds if not of thousands of job openings.

It’s important to point out here that the “Defund the Police” slogan wasn’t meant by most using it to mean eliminating police departments entirely. Yet the poor wording of the slogan was easily seized upon by those who wanted to defund and demobilize policing reforms by any means necessary.

Still, some reforms have been implemented at the state or local levels. Colorado, for example, now bans the use of deadly force to apprehend or arrest a person suspected only of minor or nonviolent offenses.

And although many states permit the use of deadly force to prevent “escape,” five states imposed restrictions or prohibitions on shooting at fleeing vehicles or suspects, a policy aimed at preventing deaths like that of Chicago’s Adam Toledo, a 13-year-old shot by Chicago police during a foot chase.

Also, nine states and the District of Columbia approved complete bans on chokeholds and other neck restraints while eight states passed legislation to restrict their use of instances in which officers are legally justified to use deadly force.

All of the news isn’t bad, but it will be, if reasonable people fail to get their heads together. Community policing programs, which ally police with the neighborhoods they serve, work very well to reduce tensions and help solve crimes at the local level. We need more of that spirit on the national level, if we can stop arguing with each other long enough.

Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email letters@chicagotribune.com.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, who has continuously called for tighter ethics legislation regarding the high court, decried the controversy as adding “to the court’s ongoing ethical crisis.”

First there was the American flag photographed hanging upside down at the Alitos’ Virginia house in January 2020, days after the failed attempt to overturn the election.

Since my Boy Scout days, I have known the upside-down flag to be an international signal of distress. In the Jan. 6 uprising, those sympathetic to the bid to keep Donald Trump in office flew the flag upside down to show their support. For the rest of us, it became a symbol of how the nation was in distress based on Trump’s lie that the election had been stolen by President Joe Biden.

With the Supreme Court about to take on multiple cases involving Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, one wonders what Alito was trying to say in those chaotic days. His response when questioned was to blame his wife for flying this new version of a “revolutionary” flag and to say she had acted in a moment of anger when some neighbors put up anti-Trump signs that offended her.

The flag, he said, had been “briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”

He also reportedly told Fox News’ Shannon Bream that the neighbor had blamed his wife for the Capitol riot, yet still did not comment on the intended meaning of the display.

We had just gotten past several days of Alito being lampooned for throwing his wife under the bus when The New York Times, which broke the earlier story, reported that Alito was flying an “Appeal to Heaven flag” at his New Jersey beach house this past summer. That Revolutionary War-era flag, with its prominent pine-tree symbol and the words “”Appeal to Heaven” on it, has been adopted by far-right Christian nationalists and the “Stop the Steal movement” and was seen being carried by some of the rioters in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

Questions still abound, but that’s hardly surprising to anyone who has followed the court accountability “crisis,” as Durbin calls it. Durbin sent his first letter to Chief Justice John Roberts on the matter of recusal in the Jan. 6 cases more than two years ago.

With this latest series of highly questionable actions by the most conservative member of the court, Durbin has called for the immediate passage in Congress of the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency, or SCERT, Act, which  Durbin’s Judiciary Committee advanced last July.

It would require Supreme Court justices to adopt a binding code of conduct and create a mechanism to investigate alleged violations of the code of conduct, among other provisions. It would also tighten up disclosure and transparency requirements when a justice has a connection to a party or business before the court, and require justices to explain their recusal decisions to the public — in the sort of English, one hopes, that the public understands.

But will this legislation pass? Even Durbin was not sounding as optimistic as I remember him in past years. Meanwhile, the public’s confidence in the high court has taken a beating in polls.

Small wonder. We, the public, have seen a series of high-profile ethical lapses, beginning with the unprecedented leak of Alito’s Dobbs opinion, which the court later approved and which overturned the constitutional right to abortion. An investigation failed to find the leaker.

Later, there was Alito’s callous view of Dobbs that rankled liberals, in particular, as he sounded like he was gloating about taking away a fundamental right to privacy and reproductive freedom.

Chief Justice Roberts follows his office’s long-standing tradition of trying to sound reasonable while resisting any intrusions on the court’s ability to govern themselves, even after episodes that look to outsiders like conflicts of interest — or worse.

For example, all nine justices signed a new ethics code last year in which each pledged to step aside from a case when “impartiality might be reasonably questioned” or when a justice or a spouse has a financial interest in the dispute. That pledge was made on the heels of ethics questions that involved Justice Clarence Thomas and some of his colleagues. But it is not independently enforced. Instead, it charges the court with policing itself.

All of these controversies are likely only to burn brighter as the cases involving Trump finally are in the hands of the Supreme Court. Durbin, Roberts and other institutionalists, who currently appear unable to rise to the moment this crisis point seems to require, haven’t seen anything yet.

I’m so accustomed to headline-making controversies touched off by commencement speakers whose views tilt to the left that the Harrison Butker dustup caught me by surprise.

Until now, the public has known Butker, 28, as simply a kicker for the Kansas City Chiefs, helping them to Super Bowl wins in recent years. But in recent weeks his profile has grown thanks to his May 11 address at Benedictine College, a private Catholic institution in Kansas, in which he took on a range of hot-button issues, including Pride Month, abortion access and the Biden administration’s pandemic positions.

I appreciated his candor. He is a faithful Catholic known in those circles for being an outspoken conservative and was speaking at a Catholic institution to a polite audience that gave him a standing ovation at the end of his 20-minute speech.

He warned us at the beginning that he intended to say the “difficult stuff out loud” and that he had “gained quite the reputation for speaking my mind.” Indeed. As a fatherly talk show host once advised me, “When you have the microphone, Page, use it!”

Butker did. His wide-ranging address also took on birth control, “dangerous gender ideologies” and a number of Catholic principles which have been subjects of vigorous debates between liberals and conservatives in the denomination.

On the topic of birth control, he said, “There is nothing good about playing God with having children — whether that be your ideal number or the perfect time to conceive.” He called out abortion, in-vitro fertilization and surrogacy as symptoms of “disorder.”

He also urged the men in the graduating class to be “unapologetic in your masculinity, fighting against the cultural emasculation of men.” I’ve heard this before. Manhood movements of all sorts have been gaining more attention in these political times. Butker is known to be close to Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, who has spoken and written extensively on subjects like the cultural emasculation of men, which also has become a popular theme in mobilizing Republican voters.

Other parts of the speech were specific to the Catholic Church, including his “love” for traditional Latin mass and the state of the priesthood: “Sadly, many priests we are looking to for leadership are the same ones who prioritize their hobbies or even photos with their dogs and matching outfits for the parish directory.”

And, perhaps most memorably, he directly addressed “the women” among the graduates as he argued against “most diabolical lies” they have been told.

Using his wife, Isabelle, as an example, he advised women to be excited to take on the “vocation” of wife and mother. “Isabelle’s dream of having a career might not have come true, but if you asked her today if she has any regrets on her decision, she would laugh out loud, without hesitation, and say, ‘Heck, no.’”

I’d like to have heard Isabelle’s take on that.

Alas, she and her husband made themselves unavailable for comment after the commencement went viral. Others, including the Benedictine Sisters of Mount St. Scholastica, a founding institution and sponsor of Benedictine College, condemned it.

“Instead of promoting unity in our church, our nation, and the world, his comments seem to have fostered division,” said their statement posted online.

In response to the assertion that homemaker is the highest calling for a woman, the statement said. “We sisters have dedicated our lives to God and God’s people, including the many women whom we have taught and influenced during the past 160 years. These women have made a tremendous difference in the world in their roles as wives and mothers and through their God-given gifts in leadership, scholarship, and their careers.”

The National Football League also distanced itself from Butker’s comments, noting that “his views are not those of the NFL as an organization. The NFL is steadfast in our commitment to inclusion, which only makes our league stronger.”

Debates on these social issues hardly are limited to Catholics — or even to arguments between the left and the right.

For example, Butker’s jab at IVF, in-vitro fertilization, touches on an issue that has divided conservatives. Some lawmakers who urged outlawing the practice as “anti-family” have reevaluated their position as more families tell their own stories about how IVF enabled them to have children, which is about as pro-family as one can get.

That’s why I hope Butker’s mind isn’t completely closed. Times change and people are complicated. Sometimes kickers get their field goal attempts blocked and have to pick up the ball and run with it.

Yes, you may have heard that old joke about a hockey game. But the partisan eruptions in Congress these days sometimes make it hard to tell the difference.

At least Congress has not devolved to the level of the near-fatal caning in 1856 of Sen. Charles Sumner, an abolitionist Republican from Massachusetts, by Rep. Preston Brooks, a pro-slavery Democrat from South Carolina.

But, in terms of sheer heat, the House Oversight Committee appeared to come close in Thursday’s meeting to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt. The charge: refusing to comply with a subpoena to hand over an audio recording of President Joe Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur late last year.

Things began peacefully enough, then went off the rails after Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican who loves the spotlight, asked an out-of-nowhere question: Were any of the Democrats on the panel employing the daughter of New York Supreme Court Judge Juan Merchan, who is overseeing former President Donald Trump’s hush-money trial in New York.

After an awkward silence, Rep. Jasmine Crockett, a freshman Democrat from Texas, asked the understandable question. “Do you know what we’re here for?”

Why was Greene raising this issue that the hearing wasn’t about? Perhaps Greene — just like other Republicans seeking to curry favor with Trump by trolling the judge — Greene was signaling her credentials.

But Crockett was not about to play along. “Please tell me what that has to do with Merrick Garland,” Crockett asked. “Do you know what we’re here for?”

Good question. “I don’t think you know what you’re here for,” Greene responded. “I think your fake eyelashes are messing up what you’re reading.”

Suddenly the nonsensical topic of fake eyelashes took center stage, igniting outrage from Democrats.

“That’s beneath even you, Ms. Greene,” scolded Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the committee.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., chimed in, “That’s disgusting” and “absolutely unacceptable.”

This led to nearly an hour of lawmakers screaming over one another and trading insults, as Chairman James Comer, a Kentucky Republican, struggled mightily to restore order.

“How dare you attack the physical appearance of another person,” AOC added.

After a vote to decide whether Greene should be allowed to continue to speak narrowly passed, Crockett asked the chair what she called a “hypothetical question” about his ruling on Greene’s comments.

“I’m just curious, just to better understand your ruling,” Crockett said, “If someone on this committee then starts talking about somebody’s bleach blonde bad built butch body, that would not be engaging in personalities, correct?”

Oh, no, she didn’t. Things flew so far off the rails that it was left to Lauren Boebert, a Colorado Republican and anything but a shrinking violet, to “personally apologize to the American people for the disorder.”

Right. Which brings us back to the original question of what the meeting was supposed to be about.

Republicans were voting on whether to hold Garland in contempt for refusing to hand over the audio recording of Biden’s session with Hur, even though they already had received the transcript of the conversation. Predictably, the panel voted to hold Garland in contempt along party lines, hours after the House Judiciary Committee did the same, and the measure was sent to the full House.

As you may recall, the special counsel’s yearlong investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents ended with no criminal charges being recommended because the special counsel concluded there wasn’t sufficient evidence to support a conviction.

However, Hur’s report sparked a political firestorm as the report described Biden as someone who could appeal to a jury as an “elderly man with a poor memory” and detailed instances where Hur said Biden couldn’t remember when his son died or what years he was vice president.

So, even after the transcripts have been released, it’s not surprising that Biden’s campaign might worry about soundbites turning up in attack ads.

I wish I could say I am reassured by the way House Republicans have handled this very sensitive debate about the Biden tapes, but I’m not.

Such are the thoughts that come to me as I witness the spread of militantly anti-Zionist protests across campuses similar to anti-war protests in the Vietnam War era.

Whether or not the volume, rage and heated rhetoric of the protests in signs, songs and chants is overtly antisemitic or not, it is not hard for me as a Black man to empathize when I hear some of my Jewish friends tell me the horror they feel at hearing their kids speak of feeling under siege for their Jewish identity. That it’s an election year only adds to their unease.

As a secondary debate swirls up around free speech and how much of it should be allowed — and in what fashion — I see reactions as rude as the walk-out by protesting students before Jerry Seinfeld’s commencement speech at Duke and as violent as the mass arrests at the University of Texas.

As civil libertarians have said, the best response to objectionable speech is more speech. But it helps to have speakers who know what they’re talking about.

As a student who remembers an earlier generation of campus protests, I was pleased to hear that some campuses have brought back the “teach-ins.” Teach-ins began at the University of Michigan in 1965 to protest the Vietnam War and expanded to colleges and universities across the country.

So did “literature tables” and sign-up sheets for anti-war petitions and other causes in a decade known for its abundance of causes.

Now, there are many differences between the Vietnam War-era activism, particularly in its early stages, and the Gaza protests. There was more of an educational component to those teach-ins, and not everyone who spoke at them shared exactly the same viewpoint. But eventually as the war dragged on the protests of that era took on the stridency of what we see today on campus.

In that way, looking back, I can see the teach-ins of those days as our version of today’s encampments.

Whether the protests ended the Vietnam War any sooner than it would have otherwise remains a subject for vigorous debate. But at least they helped a lot of us to make better arguments.

I went to Ohio University, where anti-war protests transformed our school’s reputation from “the Harvard on the Hocking” River, to the “Antioch of Appalachia” and “the Berkeley of the Backwoods.”

As projects such as Ken Burns’ excellent 10-part PBS series would make clear in more recent times, we and the Vietnamese were not even fighting the same war.

We were fighting, in accordance with the prevailing wisdom, a war against the global spread of communism. But our enemy was fighting what to to them was only the latest stage of more than a century of battles for independence from outside invaders, who by the time I was dragged into it as an Army draftee, had become us.

Americans called it the “Vietnam War” but to the Vietnamese, it was — and is — remembered as “the American War.”

Looking back, I can see the mistakes we made and, more recently, mistakes that this generation of protesters is making. I have spoken to too many young people who jumped in too quickly to lambast Israel for fighting Hamas as if Israel had not been attacked in the worst massacre of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust.

At the same time, I’m frustrated like many other Americans to see President Joe Biden fail to put more pressure on Israel to move toward a cease-fire and reduce the slaughter of innocents of all ages.

Sorry, I don’t have any more easy answers than anyone else for the complex troubles in that part of the world. But, before we can find the right answers, we need to know enough to ask the right questions.

House Speaker Mike Johnson easily blocked an ill-planned attempt by his Georgia GOP colleague to oust him from his position.

And that’s a good thing, too, if you believe Congress has a bigger job to do than help grandstanders such as Greene, a star in Donald Trump’s MAGA movement, cash in on what has become known widely as the “attention economy.”

Although Johnson’s conservatism is solid enough to cause alarm in Democratic circles, Greene has found him not right-wing enough.

Greene called for his ouster if he did not meet her list of policy demands. Reports from behind closed doors in their talks revealed that she and her less camera-hungry ally Rep. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, presented a list of policy demands on some very important issues

They included a cutoff in aid to Ukraine, a defunding of the special counsel probes of Trump and a return to the Hastert rule, named for disgraced former House Speaker Dennis Hastert of Illinois.

Hastert, you may recall, was sentenced to 15 months in prison in a hush money case that revealed he was being accused of sexually abusing young boys while he was a teacher in Yorkville, Illinois.

His “rule,” which was never a formal rule, as much as Republicans often have followed it like one, means no legislation can be voted on without support from a majority of the House majority. That “majority of the majority” works for you if you hold the majority, which Republican, at present, do not.

So, on Wednesday, for a second time, Democrats joined most Republicans to block Greene and other GOP hard-liners from taking the speaker’s gavel from their own party’s leader. The vote was a landslide: 359 to 43 and seven voting “present.” All but 39 Democrats voted with Republicans to save Johnson’s speakership.

Only 11 Republicans voted to let Greene’s motion move forward.

Triumphant, Johnson told reporters that he hoped this vote would mark “the end of the personality politics and the frivolous character assassination that has defined the 118th Congress.”

“The end”? That might be too much to ask in this era of deep divides, partisan gridlock and relentless showboating by those who seem to seek a monopoly on the attention economy.

But those of us who share the pragmatic belief that Congress should seek ways to find common ground and “get things done” could derive hope in Greene’s failed lurch toward autocracy.

Ever since Republicans narrowly retook control of the House in 2022, energized by Trumpist disdain for the Washington “swamp,” such necessary tasks as avoiding a government shutdown or preventing a catastrophic default on the nation’s debt have had to work around a dedicated hardcore far-right opposition to pass the needed legislation.

As a result, Democrats have gained more clout at the expense of the hard right, much to the chagrin of the GOP’s outrage caucus, of which Greene is a loud leader.

Miffed that her outrage failed to prevent Johnson’s victory, she notably drew boos from some of her colleagues when she unleashed her fury on the House floor against the speaker and the “uniparty” she claimed he empowered.

But I cheered. I don’t always agree with Johnson, by any means, but he did the right thing in refusing to be encumbered by his own party’s internal politics.

Our Congress has too much serious work to do for its members to waste time and attention on a minority of members who don’t want to do the hard work of building a majority the old-fashioned way —- with persuasion, negotiation and counting votes.

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