Just when we think the political movers and shakers of our time have run out of ways to shock our senses and awaken our fury, we find ourselves swiftly corrected….

Within the last seven days, a gunman from California allegedly attempted to assassinate President Trump and other Republicans at the start of an event this journalist found head scratching in the first place. (Why would journalists want to dine with and be the brunt of jokes for one who is constantly trying to silence and prosecute them for reporting on the misdeeds and illegal acts of his administration?) Though there was a moment’s talk about whether the Secret Service is perpetually falling down on the job, somehow the more important conversation was that the alleged attempt justified building a ballroom in the White House.

By Tuesday, the governmental department that once had justice as its overriding objective knocked the indictment of an alleged attempted presidential assassin off the front page with a shameful political indictment of former FBI Director James Comey. It was the second time that Mr. Trump’s minions with bar cards indicted the nation’s former top cop for a social media post it claims also endangered Donald Trump’s life. The post with the picture of seashells that arranged to say, “86 47,” under which Mr. Comey wrote the caption, “Cool,” was supposed to be some kind of incitement to violence against the president.

The picture had seashells as the medium. Seashells. It used restaurant language that means something is sold out or has an issue, so take it off the menu. It does not mean the dish should never be seen again. But the DOJ has nothing better to do than run up the legal bills of a longtime public servant, since the firing of Attorney General Pam Bondi made clear that the Justice Department is supposed to be Trump’s personal law firm, in business to settle the wannabe mobster’s personal scores.

They filed the case in North Carolina, a presumably favorable jurisdiction. I would like to think it, like the first indictment, will be dismissed with ease, but my faith in the courts, the branch that is currently holding the democratic republic together with loose and crisscrossed stitches, has been weakened. Dramatically.

Those who work in and around Constitutional law knew it was likely, but that did not make what some call the gutting of a landmark piece of legislation, for which so many people literally shed blood, any less devastating. In a 6-3 vote along ideological lines, the Supreme Court decided that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, first signed into law in 1965, five months after the Bloody Sunday march across the Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, was designed to protect voters from intentional discrimination, not discriminatory effects. The conservative-majority Court decided that it was not designed to prevent vote dilution, though Congress in 1982 amended section 2 to prevent just that. The Supreme Court’s new interpretation and new test for determining if Section 2 has been violated is not good.

Gerrymandering is about to become a sport of Olympic proportions, at every conceivable level of government in the nation. The only upside is that we can probably stop worrying about whether the president and congressional Republicans are going to try to cancel the midterms. Now, they may have more confidence they can keep control of the House, despite the president’s cratering poll numbers in several categories, including the war with Iran. Any growing congressional GOP confidence is reason enough to keep control of our collective wits through all the shocks to come and start getting out the vote right now.