On Thursday, the Russian leader dismissed new U.S. sanctions against his country passed the previous day by the Senate, suggesting that they were motivated by “domestic political problems in the U.S.,” rather than Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. However, the overwhelming show of bipartisan support for the amendment—it passed on a vote of 97-2—suggests that Putin may be protesting too much. (The full bill, which also contains new sanctions on Iran, passed the Senate, 98-2, on Thursday.)

Another person unhappy with the bill? Secretary of State Tillerson, who objected to a provision that will permit Congress to review, or even block, any unilateral changes Donald Trump might make to the sanctions. In a hearing before the House on Wednesday, Tillerson urged Congress to “ensure any legislation allows the president to have the flexibility to adjust sanctions to meet the needs of what is always an evolving diplomatic situation.”

Robbing Trump of this flexibility is, of course, the point. Tillerson attempted to reassure lawmakers that he agrees that “Russia must be held accountable,” but given how Trump cozied up to Putin on the campaign trail, and how quickly his administration has floated the removal of sanctions, it is refreshing that Congress is exerting its constitutional authority to serve as a check on the executive branch, one that has a troublesome track record when it comes to Russia.

The Senate’s nearly unanimous support for the measure should send Putin a clear message: The American electoral system cannot be treated as a mere marionette in Russia’s global cyberwarfare puppet show. What remains to be seen is whether the Trump administration agrees.

Earlier this week, numerous outlets reported that Republican senators were getting dangerously close to reaching an agreement on Obamacare repeal. The GOP’s strategy is to draft the bill in complete secrecy, like a bunch of goblins in a cave, to minimize publicity of the fact that they are working on a highly unpopular effort to take away insurance from 20 million-plus Americans. But if the GOP is being secretive about their bill, they certainly are not about their plan. On Monday, Senator Orrin Hatch neatly outlined the totally undemocratic nature of his party’s strategy to Talking Points Memo:

So far, the GOP’s strategy seems to be working. Over the past few days, health care reform has failed to appear on any of the front pages of the country’s biggest newspapers. While Senate Democrats are working to raise publicity, they have no plans to go “nuclear” by withholding consent, a parliamentary stalling tactic that would shine a huge light on the Republicans’ schemes. According to reporting by Jeff Stein at Vox, activists are scrambling to ramp up constituent calls to Congress over the bill.

While no one knows what exactly is in the bill, some details have emerged over the past week and they are not pretty. A new report by the Center for American Progress shows that up to 27 million Americans could face annual limits on their coverage, meaning that the House-passed AHCA (which is expected to look similar to the Senate bill) would even affect people with employer-sponsored health insurance. Another report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows that the AHCA would uninsure a huge number of children: three million, a 50 percent increase. Unsurprisingly, the CBPP report shows that almost 15 million adults living below 200 percent of the poverty line would become uninsured. But, five million adults living above 200 percent of the poverty line would also lose their insurance.

Children, adults, workers, unemployed, poor, not-poor—the bottom line is that everyone could lose from the Republican health care plan. We all deserve to see what’s in it.

It’s not unusual for the former House speaker to carry water for the president—he’s been doing it for months. This morning was no different.

What’s different is that this time, reporters felt taken aback that the self-professed scholar would stoop to such low depths.

Let’s take quick stock of who Newt Gingrich is. He led an impeachment crusade against President Bill Clinton for having an affair, while he was having an affair himself. He broached the topic of divorce with his ailing wife while she was hospitalized because their marriage was inconvenient to his extramarital affair. He called President Barack Obama the “food-stamp president,” and said his conduct in office was explicable “only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior.”

Gingrich has moments of unusual clarity, such as when he admitted that whites in America “instinctively underestimate the level of discrimination and the level of additional risk” that black Americans face. But clarity is not the norm for him, especially now that he is hawking a book about Trump.

I’m sympathetic to the fact that this puts reporters in a tough spot, but at some point everyone objective needs to come to terms with the fact that the president and the people in his orbit are, nearly to a person, bad actors. One can work a full career in American politics and never encounter an assemblage of such low overall moral character. Newt Gingrich is desperate to be part of that crew.

In an editorial published online last night, the paper linked the shooting of Republican Congressman Steve Scalise to a long-debunked claim. “Was this attack evidence of how vicious American politics has become?” the Times asked. “Probably. In 2011, when Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a 9-year-old girl, the link to political incitement was clear. Before the shooting, Sarah Palin’s political action committee circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs.”

But as Jonathan Chait wrote in The New Republic at the time, there was never any merit in connecting the Giffords shooting to Palin. Both Republicans and Democrats have used bullseyes and crosshairs to depict political targets, he noted, adding, “The mania of Giffords’s would-be assassin may be slightly more right-wing than left-wing, but, on the whole, it is largely disconnected from even loosely organized extreme right-wing politics.... This was not a right-wing militia member taking apocalyptic right-wing rhetoric about watering the tree of liberty too seriously. It was a random act.” The Times’ editorial was criticized across the political spectrum, and the paper has since added a correction:

But this wasn’t the paper’s only regrettable response to Wednesday’s attack. Apropos of the revelation that shooter James Hodgkinson was anti-Trump, and had volunteered on Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, reporter Yamiche Alcindor wrote that Sanders fans now “have something concrete to grapple with.” They may face “an unexpected test for a movement born out of Mr. Sanders’s left-wing, populist politics and a moment for liberals to figure out how to balance anger at Mr. Trump with inciting violence.”

Police have not determined a motive in the shooting, and more important, Sanders has never said anything that could be interpreted as advocating violence against his political opponents. As Alcindor herself notes, Sanders, who immediately condemned the shooting, “has advocated what he has called a peaceful political revolution.” The most damning quotes Alcindor can find are of Sanders calling the president a “demagogue” who is “perhaps the worst and most dangerous president in the history of our country”—words that only become truer by the day.

In fact, for all the hand-wringing on cable TV today about our toxic political discourse, few politicians could fairly be accused of inciting violence—but the greatest exception to this truism occupies the White House. “To be sure,” Alcindor wrote, in a false equivalence for the record books, “supporters of Mr. Trump, as well as Mr. Trump himself, have assailed opponents and the news media.” No, Trump’s supporters have assaulted opponents and called for the murder of both Hillary Clinton and journalists, while Trump himself egged them on.

Amidst the FBI’s investigation into Russia’s involvement in the 2016 campaign, the president has long clung to the claim that he himself was not under investigation and thus had done nothing wrong. This defense inevitably buckled under the weight that Trump himself put on it.

Ironically, it was Trump’s obsession with the question of his own personal guilt that may have led the obstruction of justice probe that is currently being led by special prosecutor Robert Mueller. Among other attempts to influence the Russia investigation, he asked James Comey to publicly declare that he was not under investigation, which Comey declined to do. Then Trump fired Comey and admitted he did it because of the Russia investigation, setting in motion a chain of events that resulted in him being ... investigated personally for obstruction of justice.

Furthermore, the obstruction of justice probe was likely made public after reports were leaked to the press that Trump was considering firing Mueller.

Trump characteristically seems to have learned nothing from any of this. On Thursday he took to Twitter and stuck to his usual script.

Trump’s argument here, if I’m following it correctly, is that he couldn’t obstruct justice because the thing he was obstructing wasn’t justice at all. But Trump takes it a step further, latching on to a right-wing media talking point that the Mueller probe is full of partisans set on bringing down Trump’s presidency. Raising the stakes in this way is part of what got Trump into this mess in the first place. Unsurprisingly, the allies he has left are playing along. Here’s Newt Gingrich echoing the president this morning:

This is especially rich coming from Gingrich, who cheered on Kenneth Starr’s investigation into Bill Clinton, which morphed from being about Whitewater and Vince Foster to being about Monica Lewinsky.

But really it’s yet more proof that Trump is Richard Nixon on steroids. Backed into a corner, his only argument is that he is one man against the world.

The 45-year old poet and Princeton professor was named the U.S. poet laureate on Wednesday. Smith succeeds previous laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, and assumes an office once occupied by Louise Glück, Donald Hall, and Rita Dove.

In her memoir Ordinary Light, Smith states that her literary career began in earnest following a childhood discovery of Emily Dickinson’s work in a fifth-grade textbook. It isn’t hard to draw commonalities between the two: Both are Massachusetts natives who were raised in bookish families, and both draw heavily from metaphysics in their work. However, it is impossible to reduce Smith to a set of influences. Her best works deliberately defy easy compartmentalization, and her verse draws on everything from the Old Testament to David Bowie, who Smith elegantly mythologized in “Don’t You Wonder, Sometimes?”, a 2011 poem that unwittingly became a kind of elegy following Bowie’s death last year. And when Smith wrote an actual elegy—for her father, a Hubble telescope engineer—she chose to draw on the unlikely source of science fiction for inspiration.

Smith’s poetry, however, is just as concerned with the concrete as it is with the cosmic. Her current projects—two operas about development in New York and the legacy of American slavery—are deeply urgent works that reflect the author’s upbringing as the child of black, Southern parents in overwhelmingly white neighborhoods, as well as her constant struggle with her “sense of what it is to be American.” Her epic “They May Love All That He Has Chosen and Hate All That He Has Rejected” centers on five real-life hate crimes all committed in a one-month period in 2009, and the relevance of its harrowing verses has only grown sharper since its release six years ago.

While it may be tempting to label Smith a “political poet,” especially in today’s climate, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden put it best when she referred to Smith as “poet of searching” in her official nomination statement. Smith’s poetry is about the shared human search—for justice, for remembrance, for national identity, or for the perfect Bowie song—amidst the cruelties of history and life’s unforgiving absurdities. For Smith, such human searching is fruitless more often than not, but it is a task that should be pursued regardless. As she puts it herself, “one day I’ll touch the world with bare hands / Even if it burns.”

Representative Steve Scalise and four others were shot early Wednesday at a congressional baseball practice in Alexandria, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C. While Scalise is in stable condition, two others are critically wounded, according to police. President Donald Trump announced to the nation that the shooter, 66-year-old James T. Hodgkinson, had died after a shootout with Scalise’s protective detail.

“Everyone on that field is a public servant—our courageous police, our congressional aides who work so tirelessly behind the scenes with enormous devotion, and our dedicated members of Congress who represent our people,” Trump said. “We may have our differences, but we do well in times like these to remember that everyone who serves in our nation’s capital is here because, above all, they love our country. We can all agree that we are blessed to be Americans, that our children deserve to grow up in a nation of safety and piece, and that we are strongest when we are unified and when we work together for the common good.”

In the House of Representatives, Speaker Paul Ryan drew a bipartisan standing ovation with rousing remarks about how he and his colleagues stood united in the face of violence. “An attack on one of us,” he said, “is an attack on all of us.”

But other Republicans have pounced on the fact that Hodgkinson volunteered on Senator Bernie Sanders presidential campaign last year.

“It’s part of a pattern,” Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and a Trump loyalist, said on Fox News. “An increasing intensity of hostility on the left.” He cited comedian Kathy Griffin’s unfunny Trump-decapitation video and a recent staging in New York City of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, in which a Trump-like Caesar is slain. “The intensity is very real, whether it’s a so-called comedian holding up the president’s head covered in blood, or right here in New York City, a play that shows the president being assassinated, or it’s Democratic leading national politicians using vulgarity because they can’t find any common language to talk.”

“I can only hope that the Democrats do tone down the rhetoric,” Representative Chris Collins of New York said on WBEN radio. “The rhetoric has been outrageous – the finger-pointing, just the tone and the angst and the anger directed at Donald Trump, his supporters. Really, then, you know, some people react to things like that. They get angry as well. And then you fuel the fires.”

Right-wing commentators, meanwhile, have accused the mainstream media of eliding Hodgkinson’s apparent political sympathies.

Senator Bernie Sanders, by unfortunate political necessaity, took to the Senate floor to condemn the alleged shooter. “I am sickened by this despicable act,” he said, “and let me be as clear as I can be: Violence of any kind is unacceptable in our society, and I condemn this actions in the strongest possible terms.”

Ryan and Pelosi confirmed that Thursday’s Congressional Baseball Game for charity is still on—though presumably with heightened security.

Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette charged five current and former officials with involuntary manslaughter on Wednesday, alleging that their failure to act on Flint’s water crisis caused at least one death. Nick Lyon, head of the state Department of Health and Human Services, “deliberately failed to inform the public” about an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease in 2014, Schuette alleged, and he participated in a cover-up “by repeatedly attempting to prevent an independent researcher from looking into the cause of the outbreak.” The Legionnaires’ outbreak killed a dozen people—including 85-year-old Robert Skidmore, the victim cited in the charges, and sickened more than 70. If convicted, Lyon and the four other officials each could face up to 15 years in prison.

Both lead poisoning and Legionnaires’ disease began plaguing Flint residents after the city’s water supply was switched to the Flint River in April 2014. Scientists are still working to prove that the city’s water caused the Legionnaires’ outbreak, a link that Lyon and others are alleged to have covered up. Multiple Flint officials have been criminally charged with attempting to cover up the lead contamination.

Jonathan Masur, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School who teaches both criminal and environmental law, told me the involuntary manslaughter charges are important are because they indicate the length Schuette is willing to go to hold public officials accountable for the water crisis. “People should draw from this that the issue is being taken enormously seriously, and standard remedies like firing the officials or even fining them was insufficient,” he said. Indeed, if it’s proven that Flint’s lead contamination caused any deaths, it’s possible that public officials who ignored or tried to cover up the crisis could face similar charges.

A gunman opened fire early this morning at a park in Alexandria, Virginia, where Republican lawmakers and aides were practicing for an upcoming charity baseball game. Scalise, the House majority whip and the third-highest ranking Republican in the lower chamber, is among those who were shot. Another victim was identified as a staffer for Texas Rep. Roger Williams. Two people are reportedly in critical condition; early reports suggest that a total of five people were injured in the shooting.

Because of his position in the House of Representatives, Scalise has a security detail. Early reports indicate that the Capitol Police officers accompanying Scalise were essential in stopping this attack. “My understanding [is] that’s where our security detail ... still defending us, took him down,” Congressman Mo Brooks told CNN. “Once we got the all-clear that the shooter was down, we went out to the outfield for Steve Scalise, he had crawled out in the outfield leaving a trail of blood.”

“Had they not been there, it would have been a massacre. ... We had no weapons and no place to hide,” Senator Rand Paul told MSNBC. Both Brooks and Paul reported that over 50 shots were fired.