You may not have noticed it, what with all the other distractions in Washington, but we're fast approaching the possibility of another government shutdown. The federal fiscal year begins in October, and there is no budget in place yet. The two parties in Congress aren't even talking to each other yet about what to do about it, and they don't have a whole lot of time to get something passed. For Democrats, the question is whether they should shut the government down in what essentially would be an act of political protest, or whether they should just bargain for a few of their issues and accept pretty much everything else Republicans want to do.

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Donald Trump is driving the American economy straight into a ditch. That's a pretty simple concept, and it's (just barely) short enough to fit on a bumpersticker. Which makes it a dandy political slogan for Democrats to start hammering out relentlessly.

Doing so is pretty easy, since you can connect all sorts of dots to it: A soft jobs market. Inflation rising. Hamburger prices up. Electricity prices way up. Trump's tariff war, which has created a "Trump tax" on a whole bunch of products. Trump took hold of an economy that had achieved a "soft landing," and now he's driving us all right into a ditch. Everything he does seems to make things worse. See how easy that is to do?

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Will Democrats ever pull back from examining the individual political trees and grasp the nature of the whole forest before them? I wonder this because I see time after time the Democratic Party being shown exactly how they can win elections -- and then time after time they just flat-out ignore it. Or downplay it. Or attempt to come up with a solution that doesn't address the core problem but instead merely tinkers around the edges of it. Or bury it in wonk-speak. I have to admit, it is frustrating to watch.

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Congress is back in town, and so is the pressure to release the Epstein files. Immediately after the House of Representatives convened, Representatives Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna filed their discharge petition, which could soon force the speaker to hold a floor vote on their measure to force the Justice Department to release all its files on Jeffery Epstein.

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The Democratic Party has been worried (with good reason) about their chances in the midterm congressional elections and beyond. Their brand has suffered, and voters aren't exactly flocking to their banner. But there are signs of life here and there, and a big one just happened in Iowa. Yesterday, a Democrat won a special election to the state senate, which will deny the Republicans a two-thirds supermajority in the chamber.

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After Donald Trump held two back-to-back summits, in an effort to get a quick ceasefire and peace agreement in Ukraine, not much of anything has actually changed. Unless you count the rest of the world either laughing at America's president or gingerly trying to not bruise his all-too-fragile ego. Both of those things have increased, sadly.

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Donald Trump has ushered in a period of political shamelessness. Things that politicians used to do very quietly or in secret are now done right out in the open. There is no longer any pretense about such moves, the politicians now brag about what they're doing. This is evident in too many ways to even list, but the most prominent example right now is the mid-decade redistricting battles being waged in the states. Led by Texas and California, this could soon spread to other states as well, as Republicans jockey to avoid losing control of the House of Representatives next year and Democrats move to counterbalance these efforts.

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If they want to win the midterms next year, Democrats should really return in a big way to that old chestnut from the Bill Clinton era: "It's the economy, stupid." Because that is where both Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans are the weakest, and the economy is almost always either at or very near the top of the list of issues voters care the most about.

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Two stories dominated the political headlines this week: Texas Democrats fleeing the state to halt the Republican-dominated legislature's efforts to redraw their U.S. House district lines to hand Republicans five more safe seats, and Donald Trump letting incredibly high tariffs begin against over 90 countries worldwide.

We'll get to them in a moment, but what's more interesting is the dog that didn't bark today. Russia was supposed to have a "10-day deadline" to end its invasion of Ukraine, and steep tariffs were supposed to be slapped on them if Vladimir Putin hadn't manage to do so by today. However, nary a headline is talking about the tariffs that were supposed to appear, because once again Putin played Trump like a violin.

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There's a slogan used by those who support redistricting reform that is worth starting with today: "Voters should pick their politicians; the politicians shouldn't be able to pick their voters." But the process of designing districts -- for U.S. House of Representatives seats as well as state legislative seats -- has long been a political process. The word "gerrymandering" was coined to describe a Massachusetts governor (Elbridge Gerry) who, while serving in office in 1812, approved a district so convoluted that a newspaper drew it as a mythical lizard with the name "the gerrymander." The name stuck, which shows you this sort of thing has been going on for over two centuries now.

Usually these battles are fought immediately after the decennial Census, as states have to adjust to a new number of House members (whether fewer or more). But it's not illegal for a state to redistrict mid-decade, which has been happening more and more frequently over the past couple of decades.

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