Trump subpoenaed

Yesterday, at the end of the House select committee’s latest hearing on the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, the panel unanimously voted to subpoena Donald Trump. So far, his response has been to belittle the committee and double-down on his disproven claims of election fraud, without indicating whether or not he will testify. As we know, Trump doesn’t shy away from a spectacle and loves the chance to perform. I suspect he is deeply tempted by the unprecedented nature of such an event, so don’t count out the possibility that he chooses to show up. Time will tell. Yesterday’s hearing may not have had the most viewers or the most new information, but it may well have been the most significant hearing of the series, because the committee met its mandate. The panel answered the questions of why Jan. 6 happened, how it happened, and who was responsible. They did it very compellingly, making it abundantly clear that Donald Trump was the central player in all of it. The number of Republicans who believe Trump’s “Big Lie” has fallen since the hearings began. That’s no small feat. Kudos to the panel for its diligent, serious, and persistent work throughout the investigation. —Miles Taylor, Executive Director, Renew America Foundation

• A juvenile suspect is in custody after a shooting leaves 5 dead, at least 2 wounded in Raleigh, North Carolina, police say —CNN

• Alex Jones was ordered to pay Sandy Hook families. Will they ever see money? —NPR

• Trump Organization assets should be frozen, New York attorney general asks court —Politico

• Two former Trump Administration officials seen at federal courthouse where Jan. 6 grand jury meets —CNN

• Durham’s Steele dossier case hits hurdles from his own FBI witnesses —The Wall Street Journal

Donald Trump…come on down!

Wow, did you see it? The House select committee’s last public hearing, held yesterday afternoon, was more of a summation of its work than a source of many new revelations. And yet, it was no less riveting than previous hearings. A big reason for that was the behind-the-scenes video recorded on Jan. 6 that was presented for the first time. As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and elected leaders from both parties sought to end the violence at the Capitol, what was conspicuously absent was the President of the United States. The hearing ended with the panel voting unanimously to subpoena the ex-president to account for his actions—and inaction—that fateful day. —The New York Times

• Trump knew about the violence. Donald Trump was reportedly ashamed to admit that he had lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden—even though he admitted as much behind closed doors. As he kept up his public insistence that he won the election, and that Biden was “stealing” it through widespread voter fraud, he was repeatedly alerted to brewing violence. Instead of working to quell the violence, however, he sought to stoke conflict. —The Washington Post

• So did the Secret Service. The Secret Service has turned over to committee investigators more than 1 million electronic communications exchanged by agents before and on Jan. 6. They were well aware of concerns about violence leading up to that day, and they knew some in the crowd were armed. Worse, the committee found evidence of multiple phone calls in 2020 between an agent in the Secret Service’s protective intelligence division and members of the Oath Keepers, a far-right militia group that actively participated in the insurrection. —CNBC

• And the FBI might have sympathetic agents. A week after the Capitol attack, a top FBI official, Paul Abbate, received an email from an unidentified but credible source expressing concern that some bureau employees might not be motivated to help bring the rioters to justice. “There’s no good way to say it, so I’ll just be direct: from my first-hand and second-hand information from conversations since January 6th there is, at best, a sizable percentage of the employee population that felt sympathetic to the group that stormed the Capitol," they wrote. —NBC News

MORE: Jesse Wegman: Donald Trump has told Americans exactly who he is —The New York Times

Milligan: Red or blue, we’re all worried about democracy

“Inflation continues to be the top issue cited by voters as they consider their choices in next month’s midterm elections. But the threat to democracy is now running second—ahead of abortion rights, crime, immigration, and other issues candidates in both parties are repeating in their ad campaigns. And while the worry is higher among Democrats than Republicans in polls, the trend is not limited to blue states. In a poll of Texas voters released Wednesday by the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, concerns about the threat to democracy ranked second among Lone Star State respondents, with 21% citing it as a top concern.” —Susan Milligan in U.S. News & World Report

Susan Milligan is a senior political writer at U.S. News & World Report.

MORE: Midterm elections as democracy’s renewal —The Christian Science Monitor

SCOTUS to Trump: Get lost

On the heels of the Jan. 6 hearing, the Supreme Court yesterday denied Donald Trump’s request to vacate a lower appeals court ruling in the ongoing case of the stolen classified documents. Trump had asked the SCOTUS to allow the special master in the case to review about 100 classified documents of the more than 11,000 government records seized by FBI agents from his Mar-a-Lago resort. An appeals court said that subset of records could only be reviewed by the Department of Justice, and that ruling will stand. Today, the DOJ asked a federal appeals court to shut down the work of the independent arbiter altogether and allow its investigative work to continue in full. —CNBC

MORE: Trump employee tells FBI that Trump directed boxes to be moved at Mar-a-Lago after subpoena served —CNN

DeScandals for DeSantis

Here’s a surprise: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is trying to make it easier to vote for Floridians affected by Hurricane Ian. Yes, you read that right. But naturally there’s a catch: he’s only taking those steps in Republican-leaning Florida counties. DeSantis signed an executive order yesterday that eases voting rules for about 1 million voters in Lee, Charlotte, and Sarasota counties, all areas that were battered by Ian and reliably vote red. Meanwhile, Democratic-leaning Orange County, which experienced historic flooding from the storm, received no voting exceptions. Oh and by the way, a Treasury Department watchdog will investigate whether DeSantis improperly used COVID-19 relief funds to pay for those controversial migrant flights. Stay tuned.  —The Guardian

MORE: Florida's rapid rise of No Party Affiliation voters —Florida Trend

Cleaver: We can fix our democracy

“The ability to vote is the most crucial component of a functioning democracy. Yet voting rights are under constant attack—more than 440 restrictive bills were introduced during the 2021 legislative session alone—and the integrity of election results are being called into question by some of the very people we elected into public office. In order to ensure that US democracy doesn’t just survive, but thrives, we need first to rebuild trust in the electoral process itself to increase voter turnout. We can easily remove many of the existing barriers which have been built to impede one’s ability to vote by implementing modern, proven, common sense solutions.” —Debra Cleaver on CNN

Debra Cleaver is the founder and CEO of VoteAmerica, a nonprofit that builds technology to simplify political engagement, increase voter turnout, and strengthen American democracy.

MORE: Build your democracy toolkit to prepare for the 2022 midterm elections —The Washington Post

Meacham: Abraham Lincoln showed us the way  

“The work of a democracy is to lead a sufficient number of individuals to share a moral vision about power, liberty, justice, security, and opportunity in the hope that people—and peoples—might be in closer harmony with the good. As a multitude of individuals, a nation possesses a collective conscience—one that is manifest in how that nation chooses, through the means of politics, to view rights and responsibilities.” —Jon Meacham in Time

Jon Meacham is a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, professor at Vanderbilt University, and author of “And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle.”

MORE: Independent candidates test how fed up Northwest voters are with both parties —KUOW

In order to deal with a problem, we must first accurately define it. The war in Ukraine is the result of the megalomania of a man who probably would be in an asylum for the criminally insane if he were not the president of Russia. My greatest concern is that strategizing by NATO leaders on the assumption that Putin is a rational man, may not be realistic. I suspect that he is a psychopath, who having been backed into a corner by his own delusional thinking, will not hesitate to use Russia's nuclear arsenal to take the rest of the world down with him as revenge for having treated him so cruelly. Former President Trump once described him as a genius. —Bill M., Pennsylvania

The views expressed in "What's Your Take?" are submitted by readers and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff or the Renew America Foundation.