Vox Sentences: “An extraordinary display of Republican chaos”

The GOP will not go gentle into that Trump night; what it means that a Clinton staffer got immunity in the email case; the beating of Rodney King.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

Super Smash Bros., GOP edition

George Frey/Getty Images

• 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney gave a speech today for the sole and express purpose of attacking likely 2016 Republican nominee Donald Trump, in what even the Associated Press calls "an extraordinary display of Republican chaos."

  [Associated Press / Steve Peoples and Brady McCombs]

• 2008 Republican nominee John McCain also got in on the action; while Romney's criticisms focused on Trump's temperament, McCain focued on his heterodox foreign policy ideas.

  [USA Today / Bill Theobald]

• This is also the critique leveled by a group of Republican (largely neoconservative) foreign policy experts who published an open letter to Trump today (and in doing so reminded a lot of liberals that they don't like anti-Trump Republicans either).

  [Poliico / Michael Crowley]

• These critics don't really have a prayer of stopping Trump from getting a plurality of delegates before this summer's Republican convention.

  [NBC News / Mark Murray]

• Instead, they're shooting for a deadlocked convention, which will force party leaders to broker a deal.

  [Vox / Sarah Frostenson]

• And in the case of a brokered convention, Trump would be at a serious disadvantage: Many of his delegates are "ghost delegates" who are ultimately loyal to the party over Trump, and could defect to keep the GOP together.

  [Brookings / Elaine Kamarck]

• The GOP would have to turn to someone who didn't run in 2016 to save them. Someone, perhaps, like … Mitt Romney.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

On immunity

Andrew Renneisen/Getty Images

• The Justice Department has granted immunity to a former Hillary Clinton aide in exchange for testimony about that aide's role in setting up Clinton's private email server.

  [Washington Post / Adam Goldman]

• The immunity grant comes as the DOJ has finished reviewing Clinton's emails and is now trying to sort out whether any of them were classified before closing the investigation, probably in the next couple of months.

  [CNN / Evan Perez]

• Republicans shouldn't get too excited. Granting immunity could be a DOJ ploy to get the aide to offer evidence that incriminates people higher up the chain. Or it could just be a way for the DOJ to ensure it's covered all its bases in an investigation it wasn't planning to file charges in anyway.

  [Washington Post / Matt Zapotosky]

• Furthermore, even if there were criminal wrongdoing, DOJ guidelines discourage filing charges at a time when it could affect an election — which, um, charging Hillary Clinton certainly would.

• All of this is probably relieving but disappointing news for Mike Bloomberg, who has been floating himself as a replacement if Clinton is forced to leave the race.

  [NYMag / Gabriel Sherman]

Rodney King, 25 years later

Douglas Burrows/Liaison/Getty Images

• Today marks the 25th anniversary of the beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers — a moment that arguably launched the current era in American race relations.

  [Frontline]

• This is a terrific personal essay about King by MTV's Carvell Wallace: "It made you start shoplifting. It made you start smoking cigarettes. It made you switch to Bad Brains because N.W.A weren’t angry enough."

  [MTV / Carvell Wallace]

• Arguably, it ruined King's life for good. This profile from the Los Angeles Times was written shortly before King's death in an apparent drowning.

  [LA Times / Kurt Streeter]

• King's legacy can be seen in the current era of the "viral cop video." You can see that as a good thing for democracy, or as evidence that a lot of people still don't believe in bias until they see it documented.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• LA journalist Jill Leovy (whose book Ghettoside is an absolute must-read) argues that we certainly haven't learned enough in the past quarter-century about how policing, race, and public safety influence one another.

  [The Marshall Project / Bill Keller and Jill Leovy]

MISCELLANEOUS

Is it time for Twitter/Facebook wills, which tell our social networks what to do with our accounts when we're gone? [Fusion / Caroline Sinders]

• When Americans get married, in one interactive.

  [Flowing Data / Nathan Yau]

• You remember that study from last year claiming most psychological research is wrong? Well, that study appears to have been wrong too.

  [Slate / Rachel Gross]

• College students are more likely than the average American to experience severe hunger.

  [Chronicle of Higher Education / Clare Cady]

• Which is more religious: the Midwest or the South? It's complicated.

  [Andrew Gelman]

VERBATIM

"Hating meetings might be akin to hating traffic, families or parties — just another way to express our deep ambivalence about that hard fact of existence: other people." [NYT Mag / Virginia Heffernan]

• "I am waiting for Anna to finish her violin lesson now. In the middle of writing this letter she emerged from her lesson and needed help blowing her nose. You can contemplate existence all you want, at the end of the day someone needs to blow their nose and hand you a dirty tissue."

  [Berfrois / Sarah Ruhl]

• "Those who claim the mantle of civil rights should not forget that crime victims — not just defendants — are disproportionately black, and that they suffer unspeakably."

  [Jill Leovy to The Marshall Project / Bill Keller]

• "A full 9% of black Americans are immigrants, according to a Pew Research Center study published last year. That’s nearly triple what it was in 1980."

  [Fusion / Daniel Rivero]

• "Kids can plunge their hands in mud for no reason at all, but when adults play with mud, we pretend it’s to tighten our pores."

  [Washington City Paper / Sadie Dingfelder]

WATCH THIS

The R-rated Oregon Trail [YouTube / Phil Edwards]

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