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Alright, thanks very much and now this week's episode.

Episode

Welcome to Talking Feds, a round table that brings together prominent former federal officials and special guests for a dynamic discussion of the most important political and legal topics of the day. I'm Harry Littman.

By the end of a week in which the virus numbers seem perhaps to be stabilizing, though at horrendous rates that still top the world, it felt as if the wheels might be falling off civil society as a whole.

The protests in Portland continued and then proliferated as federal agents stormed in, uninvited, ostensibly to safeguard the Portland Post Office only to engage in a series of over-the-top conduct toward the protesters that inflamed everyone.

The weekend announcement that the feds were pulling out restored a relative calm, but the president and attorney general promised to take the head-banging act on the road to other cities governed by Democrats.

Bill Barr appeared for long to lay testimony in the house and left a little doubt that under his stewardship, the Department of Justice's primary lookout is the interest of the president and the Republican party.

That there is effectively no check on this corruption of purpose and that he stands ready to pull believers at his disposal to further the president's re-election.

And the president trailing badly in the polls and firmly tagged, despite his best efforts with responsibility, for the country's abysmal record with the virus, floated the idea of delaying the election for the first time in the country's history, prompting a swift rebuke from Mitch McConnell and others who have spent the last three years in lockstep with him.

What really brought the week crashing down though was an economic reported week send that showed that the US economy contracted in the last quarter at the fastest rate in nearly a century.

It was the worst quarter in the economy on record and the three-month plunge erased nearly five years of growth.

With jobless benefits due to expire and no consensus among the two parties for extending them, the economy and the virus were braided together in a miserable lash with no cogent plan from the national government for either of them.

And of course, August's arrival means that the fall is accelerating toward us with school re-opening completely uncertain and an election pondering bedlim and new levels of ruthlessness from the president.

To take stock of these developments and their social and political implications, we have an awesome panel assembled.

First, EJ Dion, appearing for the first time on Talking Feds, he is a Hillman award-winning Washington Post columnist as well as a senior Brookings Fellow.

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