The Florida supreme court just sent a very mixed message on abortion rights. In two decisions released today, the high court will allow a very strict abortion ban to take effect, but they also decided to allow an abortion-rights ballot initiative (which would enshrine the right to an abortion in the state's constitution) to appear on this November's ballot. Conservatives in the state government had been hoping that the ballot measure would just get tossed out, but the court allowed it to go forward. As I said, this was a very mixed message from the court.

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From the "stop me if you've heard this one" file, we suppose: An old man is running for president who is saying increasingly bizarre things... except that you might not know about it because the mainstream media only goes into a frenzy of breathless reporting when his opponent misspeaks.

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For once, big things are actually happening in Congress. No, really!

As we write this, the House has passed the final budget bill for this fiscal year (by a vote of 286-134) and sent it over to the Senate. The Senate may pass it tonight, if senators like Rand Paul can restrain their natural urge to be total [insert favorite plural derogatory expletive here]. If they do throw a monkey wrench into the works, we could have a very short-lived partial government shutdown, but if it gets resolved before the weekend is over then it won't do much damage at all. Either way, the bill's got the votes to pass the Senate, so it's now only a matter of time until President Joe Biden can sign it and the budget that was supposed to be in place on the first of October last year will finally be finished.

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Congress is -- finally -- about to finish the most basic of their constitutional duties: funding the federal government by passing a budget for the current fiscal year. This comes almost six months from when they were supposed to have achieved this feat (the federal fiscal year starts at the beginning of October). And what is happening on Capitol Hill right now should be familiar to anyone who knows how the process has worked in recent years -- a huge bill that wraps multiple individual spending bills together is released at the last possible minute, with no time for any floor debate or even for many people to dig through the enormous length of the bill, and with a deadline in sight tomorrow night at midnight that may or may not be met (although any partial government shutdown will likely be brief and happen over the weekend when its impacts would be minimal, at least). This is all pretty much par for the budgetary course, these days. Six months late is an outlier -- usually the budget is wrapped up (at the latest) by December or January -- but budgets nowadays are never passed on time.

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Because this year's primary season has pretty much been a foregone conclusion on both sides of the aisle, political pundits have been denied their usual "who is up, who is down" frenzy of horserace reporting. Both President Joe Biden and Donald Trump have already clinched their respective parties' nominations (and very early on), so there's really not all that much to write about when more states' primary returns come in. However, this hasn't stopped the pundits from pushing a story about how Democrats should be worried because of all the "protest votes" cast on their side. Biden is getting pushback from younger and more progressive voters on his backing of Israel in the Gaza war, as well as Democrats who are just not all that enthused about him running again. But there haven't been a lot of stories exploring the protest votes being cast on the Republican side, which is odd because there were actually more of them this week than on the Democratic side.

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This week President Joe Biden and Donald Trump both secured their respective parties' 2024 presidential nominations. Most Americans, if the pollsters can be believed (and they do all seem to be telling the same story), are not exactly thrilled with this rematch and would have preferred different choices. But we are where we are, so that's not going to happen for another four years.

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Tonight will be the (unofficial) end of the presidential primary season. If everything goes as expected (and it will), both President Joe Biden and Donald Trump will secure the necessary majorities of delegates to their respective parties' national conventions, and will thus start to be described in the media as "the designated nominee" (or other similar words which convey both the unofficial nature of the milestone as well as the de facto end to the primary races). Neither man will officially become their parties' nominees until the conventions themselves, but nothing that happens between tonight and then is going to matter -- they'll already both have won.

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President Joe Biden's White House released their budget proposal document today, which only serves as a nagging reminder that Congress still hasn't finished last year's budget process and still needs to pass roughly 70 percent of the current year's budget -- a task they were supposed to accomplish last September. They've let it slip so long that the process is now lapping itself, in other words. Biden's new proposal is for the budget that is theoretically supposed to be in place by this October (but will almost certainly be delayed at least until after the election).

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President Joe Biden gave his third "State Of The Union" speech last night to a joint session of Congress, and he more than exceeded expectations, in multiple ways. Ol' Joe had a very good night, to put it another way.

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It may be impossible to tease out of the exit-polling data in November, but Nikki Haley's voters may be the key to the whole presidential election. Haley bowed out of the race this morning while refusing to endorse Donald Trump, and her voters are very much up for grabs at this point (if primary election exit polling is any indication). So, to wax poetic: whither go the Haley voters, come November? To Biden? To Trump? To third-party candidates? Or to sit on the couch and refuse to vote? The answer is almost certainly going to be a mix of those options, and it may decide the whole contest.

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