Deadly serious

A circus of events, in D.C. and abroad, are too threatening for amusement

This stuff would be entertaining if it weren’t a threat to American democracy and potentially lethal to some Americans.

On Thursday morning, in downtown Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, in front of a major hotel, Denis Voronenkov, a former member of the Russian parliament, was gunned down by an assassin, despite having a bodyguard.

Mr. Voronenkov had fled Russia as an opponent of President Vladimir V. Putin last year. He had been about to testify in an investigation organized by current Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko into the political and financial affairs of former, pro-Putin Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. Instead, he ended up dead on the sidewalk.

It is no secret that Paul Manafort, Donald J. Trump’s campaign manager from March to August 2016, was also a close associate of Mr. Yanukovych, and that Mr. Manafort is one of the witnesses in the investigation into Russian intervention in America’s 2016 electoral campaign, to be questioned under oath by the House of Representatives’ Intelligence Committee.

Now, unless one is prepared to believe that Mr. Putin would not dare order an assassination to be carried out on a relatively prominent American — such as Mr. Manafort or any of the other Americans who appear to be tangled up in the Russian affair — the report of the fate of Mr. Voronenkov would have raised the hackles on the back of one’s neck. These guys play for keeps.

Other names that will be on the Intelligence Committee’s investigation list will include fired National Security Adviser and retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, Carter Page, Roger Stone, Jared Kushner, Michael Cohen, possibly Attorney General Jefferson B. Sessions and others “whose names we do not know,” in the words of the Episcopal prayer. Those people are likely not to have missed the warning assassination of Mr. Voronenkov and will thus be reflecting on the contents of their upcoming testimony before the committee, searching for a safe line between truth and peril.

Protecting them is no reason for the committee not to continue to probe closely the role of Mr. Putin and his sometimes-homicidal team in America’s elections. Nor is the colossal pettifoggery of some members of Congress and the White House in their efforts to keep such an investigation from taking place, for the edification of the curious American public. We know already that the Republicans and Democrats don’t like each other and do not accept that fact as any reason not to carry out what is truly a vital national probe into this matter.

There are other unsavory elements that have already been introduced to the government-and-people policy dialogue by some of the senior officials of the victorious Republican Party and the Trump administration. One of these gems came from Scott G. Perry, a Republican congressman from Pennsylvania. In defending radical Trump-proposed cuts to the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency, Mr. Perry suggested at a meeting March 18 that God had been “one of the violators” of the Chesapeake Bay “because the forests were providing a certain amount of nitrates and phosphates to the Chesapeake Bay.” Killer trees.

Education Secretary and billionaire Betsy DeVos has plunged right into her expected crusade to transform American education into as profitable an enterprise as possible for people like her. For-profit higher education is one of her first fields of endeavor. She has appointed as her special assistant an official who formerly was associated with a company that settled with the federal government for $30 million for “deceptive student lending.” Ms. DeVos is now reportedly preparing to roll back regulations governing for-profit institutions that require them to report on the post-graduation employment records of their students, to see that they didn’t get cheated.

Then, for continuing comic relief, we have Energy Secretary and former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who published a piece in the Houston Chronicle alleging that the student elections at Texas A&M University had erred in electing an openly gay student as president. This is the same man who bombed out of the 2012 Republican primary election when he couldn’t remember the name of a government department he would abolish if he were elected president. (It was Energy, which Mr. Trump gave him as a doggy bone for his support in the 2016 campaign.) Mr. Perry said the student election was a “mockery of due process and transparency.” The loser of the university’s elections was the son of a Republican fundraiser, which could explain the zeal of Mr. Perry’s riposte.

All of this preceded Friday’s devastating defeat administered to Mr. Trump and the supposed Republican majority in Congress in the area of health care. There were, first of all, the major flaws in the Republican bill put forward to replace the Affordable Care Act. It gave a major tax break to America’s rich and would take insurance coverage away from an estimated 24 million Americans, just what we — and especially Mr. Trump’s “forgotten people” voters — didn’t need.

Second came the chaotic Republican approach to passing the bill, resembling Gen. Custer at Little Bighorn more than Teddy Roosevelt at San Juan Hill. There was Mr. Trump, the vaunted deal-maker, and Paul Ryan, who tries to pass as reasonable among Republican legislators, and then the Freedom Caucus, the party’s Darth Vader squad.

Third is the terrifying thought that Mr. Trump is now going to try to pass tax reform instead. The prospect of that is a little like watching a 2-year-old who has just smeared birthday cake all over his face moving on to the ice cream bowl. We may survive. Try to laugh.