Trumped: Former Vice President Mike Pence announced that he’s not going to fight the subpoena calling him to testify before a federal grand jury investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The presumption is that Pence has a lot of inside knowledge.

  Pence had previously cited the Constitutional separation of powers and his role as President of the Senate as shields against being forced to testify.

  But it’s one thing to go in front of the grand jury and another as to whether Pence will answer the questions. Instead of fighting it off from outside the room, he could do it from the inside.

  In the aftermath of Trump’s arrest and indictment in New York, a lot of people from the former president to his lawyers and even liberal legal analysts have said the indictment is weak. Karen Friedman Agnifilo, a former Manhattan and Norman Eisen at the Brookings Institution, write in The NY Times that the case against Trump is strong.

  The pair says business records fraud is the “bread and butter” of the Manhattan DA’s financial crimes unit. They lay out that there’s a clear case to be made about fraudulent invoices, checks, and ledger entries to cover the hush money payments to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal.

  And they say that because Trump made the payoffs with the intent of protecting his reputation and ability to get elected president, the money amounts to an illegal and unreported campaign contribution. They point out that “intent to defraud” includes circumstances in which a defendant acts ‘for the purpose of frustrating the state’s power’ to ‘faithfully carry out its own law.’”

Bang of the Gavel: Wisconsin voters on Tuesday reversed the political/judicial direction of their state, electing liberal candidate Janet Protasiewicz to the State Supreme Court, giving majority control to liberals. That means the Wisconsin high court is likely in the next year to reverse the state’s abortion ban and end the use of gerrymandered legislative maps drawn by Republicans to bolster their power.

  Abortion was made illegal in Wisconsin back in 1849, and the law was re-instated when the Supreme Court revered Roe v. Wade last spring.

  Protasiewicz is a liberal Milwaukee County judge. She trounced Daniel Kelly, a conservative former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice who sought a return to the bench. 

  Parting from judicial custom, Protasiewicz was outspoken in declaring her views while campaigning. She was explicit about her support for abortion rights and called the district maps that gave Republicans a near-supermajority in the Legislature, “rigged” and “unfair.”

  “Our state is taking a step forward to a better and brighter future where our rights and freedoms will be protected,” she told celebrating supporters at her victory party in Milwaukee.

In the Fox House: Fox News says it’s preparing for the Dominion Voting Systems trial with plans to put some of its major stars on the stand, including Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Maria Bartiromo.

  In just one example of how Fox’s false reports of vote fraud damaged Dominion Voting Systems, the Shasta County Board of Supervisors in California voted to get rid Dominion machines and find another voting system. It’ll cost $2-3 million. The board members did not say they had found any actual flaws in the Dominion system, just that confidence had been undermined. What they did not say is that confidence was undermined by false claims. They were all elected themselves with Dominion voting machines and don’t seem to doubt their own legitimacy.

  A spokesman for Dominion told Vice News, “This is yet another example of how lies about Dominion have damaged our company.” They’re suing Fox for $1.6 billion which Fox has called an unprecedented assault on the first amendment.

The Obit Page: Keith Reid, whose poetic lyrics for the progressive rock band Procol Harum helped create some of the lasting sounds of the 1960s, most notably  with “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” died on March 23 in London. He was 76.

  Reid told Melody Maker, the British music magazine, that he wrote songs as poems first and the music came later. The opening of Whiter Shade of Pale:

We skipped the light fandango
Turned cartwheels ‘cross the floor
I was feeling kinda seasick
The crowd called out for more
The room was humming harder
As the ceiling flew away
When we called out for another drink
The waiter brought a tray

And so it was that later
As the miller told his tale
That her face, at first just ghostly
Turned a whiter shade of pale

Ramadan Confrontation: Israeli police yesterday clashed with Palestinians inside Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque, eventually arresting and removing 350 people.  Al-Aqsa is the third most holy site in Islam and there was a second clash hours later.

  Israel said their police raided the mosque to try to remove what they said were masked agitators who locked themselves inside. The targets of the raid fought back with fireworks while the cops used stun grenades and firing rubber bullets. Video shows officers beating people with batons.

The Spin Rack:  A powerful tornado in southeastern Missouri yesterday killed at least five people. — China is in a snit because House Speaker Kevin McCarthy met yesterday in California with the president of Taiwan.

Below the Fold: Environmentalist  and anti-vaccination crackpot Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has filed paperwork to run for president as a Democrat.

  As an environmental lawyer Kennedy did effective work in the Hudson River cleanup, but members of his own family have denounced his position against vaccination.

  The 69-year-old is the son of Robert F. Kennedy, the former New York senator and US attorney general who was assassinated campaigning for president in 1968.

  Bobby Junior campaigned against the Covid vaccine, saying it will make you a slave to government whim. He once said, “The minute they hand you that vaccine passport, every right that you have is transformed into a privilege contingent upon your obedience to arbitrary government dictates.”

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