Saturday, August 22

The Chamber of Deputies of Chile voted 81 to 47 on August 22, 1973. The resolution stated that President Salvador Allende’s Marxist government sought to establish a totalitarian dictatorship. It declared Allende in violation of the constitution. The document concluded by urging the military to restore constitutional order. It was a legislative invitation for a coup.

Allende’s Popular Unity coalition had won the presidency in 1970 with 36.6% of the vote. His program of nationalizing industries and accelerating land reform created profound economic crisis and political polarization. The Nixon administration, through the CIA, actively destabilized the government. Strikes, inflation, and shortages paralyzed the country. The congressional resolution, drafted by the opposition Christian Democrats and National Party, provided a veneer of legality for what followed.

This was not a routine vote of no confidence. Chile’s constitution provided no mechanism for Congress to remove a sitting president. The resolution carried no legal force. Its power was political and symbolic. It signaled to General Augusto Pinochet and other military commanders that the political class would support armed intervention. The armed forces attacked the presidential palace nineteen days later. Allende died in the assault.

The vote demonstrated how democratic institutions can be weaponized to end democracy. It transformed a military conspiracy into a constitutional crisis in the public record. The document became a key exhibit for the junta’s claim of saving the republic, and for historians documenting its collapse.

The first inning ended with the Texas Rangers leading the Baltimore Orioles 5-3. It was a hint. By the top of the fourth inning, the score was 14-3. By the end of the sixth, it was 24-3. The final out of the ninth inning recorded the score as Texas 30, Baltimore 3. The Rangers used 29 hits and six Baltimore errors to set the modern-era record for runs in a game.

The game was the first of a doubleheader at Camden Yards. The humidity was thick. Orioles pitchers Daniel Cabrera, Brian Burres, and Rob Bell offered no resistance. Every Rangers starter had at least two hits and scored at least two runs. Ramon Vazquez hit two home runs. Jarrod Saltalamacchia hit two more. The Rangers scored in seven of the nine innings, with a ten-run fourth and a nine-run sixth. The Orioles’ position player, utility infielder Chris Gomez, pitched the eighth and gave up six runs.

Such a score distorts the sport’s logic. Baseball is designed for low-run differentials. The previous modern record was 29, set by the Boston Red Sox in 1955 and the Chicago White Sox in 1950. The Rangers’ feat was not a display of strategic brilliance but a systemic failure. It was less a contest than a demonstration of statistical extremity.

The record stands as a monument to offensive absurdity. It rendered the second game of the doubleheader, a 9-7 Orioles loss, a footnote. The 30-run game is a statistical outlier so severe it exists more as a trivia answer than a sporting event, a reminder that the mechanisms of a game can occasionally produce a result that breaks its own scale.

Vicki Weaver stood in the kitchen doorway of her family’s cabin on Ruby Ridge, holding her ten-month-old daughter. A single shot from an FBI sniper’s rifle struck her in the head. She died instantly. The bullet was fired by Lon Horiuchi, a member of the Hostage Rescue Team. He later testified he was targeting Kevin Harris, a family friend armed with a rifle who stood behind Weaver. The shot missed Harris. It killed a woman who was not the subject of the original arrest warrant.

The siege began eleven days earlier when U.S. Marshals attempted to serve a warrant on Vicki’s husband, Randy Weaver, for failing to appear on a firearms charge. A firefight erupted. Deputy U.S. Marshal William Degan and the Weavers’ 14-year-old son, Samuel, were killed. The FBI then implemented unprecedented rules of engagement. Agents were authorized to shoot any armed adult male on sight. Horiuchi had earlier fired a shot that wounded Randy Weaver and killed Harris’s dog. The shot that killed Vicki Weaver occurred under these rules.

The event became a foundational myth for the American militia movement and a scandal for federal law enforcement. It demonstrated lethal mission creep. The original warrant was for a minor bail violation. It ended with three people dead over a constitutionalist’s refusal to appear in court. A subsequent Department of Justice investigation found the rules of engagement unconstitutional. Lon Horiuchi was charged with manslaughter by Idaho authorities, but the charges were dismissed after the case was moved to federal court.

Ruby Ridge, along with the Waco siege five months later, directly fueled anti-government sentiment that culminated in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. It forced a permanent and uncomfortable examination of the use of force, proportionality, and ideology within federal agencies tasked with policing American citizens.

The District of Columbia Voting Rights Amendment passed the United States Senate on August 22, 1978. The House had approved it six months earlier. The proposed amendment stated, “For purposes of representation in the Congress, election of the President and Vice President, and article V of this Constitution, the District constituting the seat of government of the United States shall be treated as though it were a State.” It required ratification by 38 states within seven years. Only 16 states ratified it. The amendment expired in 1985.

This was the closest the nation came to granting the District’s residents full voting rights in Congress. The 23rd Amendment in 1961 had given D.C. electoral votes for president, but its representation in Congress remained limited to a single non-voting delegate. The 1978 amendment emerged from a civil rights push, framing the issue as one of basic democratic equality for the District’s majority Black population. Proponents argued that over half a million American citizens were taxed without representation.

Opposition was not solely partisan, though it solidified along Republican lines as the deadline neared. Critics argued the amendment was a backdoor method for granting statehood without the name, that the Founding Fathers intentionally created a federal district outside any state, and that it would grant disproportionate power to a single city. The ratification effort failed in state legislatures, particularly in the South and Midwest.

The amendment’s failure cemented the political limbo of D.C. It demonstrated the extreme difficulty of using the Article V amendment process to address a specific locality’s political rights. The issue persists, now channeled into a statehood movement for Washington, D.C. The 1978 amendment remains a historical footnote, a near-miss that defined the boundaries of a perennial American argument.