Three significant things have happened (so far!) today, and I’ll list them in reverse order of how unexpected they were.

The first is that, on the opening day of the RNC, the Republican party formally nominated Trump for President. We’ve seen this train coming down the tracks for a long time, so it’s no longer surprising in an immediate sense.

But stepping back: one of the two major parties has, with little controversy within the party, nominated (a) a former President (this hasn’t happened since Cleveland in 1892, although T. Roosevelt ran on a third-party platform in 1912 after his own party wouldn’t nominate him), who (b) is widely considered by historians to have been one of the very worst Presidents in history, and who since leaving office has (c) been convicted of state felonies arising out of conduct in his original Presidential election campaign, (d) been indicted at the both the federal and state level for felonies relating to conduct in his re-election campaign, (e) been indicted for federal crimes relating to alleged non-compliance with the Presidential Records Act and alleged obstruction with the investigation into those allegations, (f) been assessed an 8-digit monetary fine for defamation relating to his having committed sexual assault, and (g) been assessed a 9-digit monetary fine relating to his business. Regardless of how one feels about Trump, that is a truly astonishing litany.

The second is that Trump announced that his Vice-Presidential candidate will be Ohio Senator J.D. Vance. Vance, a 39-year-old white male, was an ex-Marine and Yale Law graduate who came to prominence in 2016 when his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” because a surprise bestseller. He only turned to politics in 2022, running in the Republican primary to replace the retiring Senator Portman. He was running 5th in the polls when Trump endorsed him, less than three weeks before the primary. He won comfortably with 32% of the vote, then beat Democratic Representative Tim Ryan 53-47. And now, less than two years later, he is poised to become the youngest VP since Nixon (if inaugurated, Vance will be about four months older than Nixon was when he assumed the #2 job in 1953 at the age of 40). Nixon, like Vance, was only two years into his first Senate term when nominated, but at least he had spent 4 years in the House prior to that.

I’m old enough to remember when the Republican Party attacked Senator Obama for being too inexperienced, running for President in the fourth year of his freshman term in the U.S. Senate, after having previously served 8 years in the Illinois Senate. Today’s Republican Party is nominating a ticket whose cumulative time spent in elected politics, at any level, is less than 6 years.

The third is that Judge Cannon issued a bombshell ruling today in U.S. v. Trump (Florida edition), the Mar-A-Lago documents case: She dismissed the indictment on the grounds that Special Counsel Smith was not appointed in a manner consistent with the Appointments Clause of the U.S. Constitution and therefore lacks the ability to prosecute anybody.

As I had previously noted, this argument had been raised at a couple different phases of the other U.S. v. Trump case, largely by Federalist Society co-chair Steven Calabresi, on occasion by pulling the strings behind former Attorney General Meese as an amicus. Two weeks ago, when SCOTUS finally ruled in Trump v. U.S., Justice Thomas had authored a solo concurrence expressing sympathy for this argument. At the very end of its February opinion in that case, the D.C. Circuit declined in a footnote to entertain this argument on the grounds that it had not been raised at the District Court level. However down in Florida, Judge Cannon had in June taken the unusual step of holding a hearing with witness testimony from amici on both sides about this Appointments Clause issue.

One imagines the government will appeal forthwith to the 11th Circuit, but we shall see.