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The Republican Party, as time goes by, has become less and less a fan of democracy. This is a direct result of both their policies being unpopular and their fealty to Donald Trump driving away voters who used to be in their camp. So they figure if they can't win a fair vote, they'll just change the rules.
The nation celebrated its 247th birthday this year, leaving only three more to go until the second-biggest celebration of our lifetime (as we still personally remember the ushering in the bicentennial in Washington D.C.). But since it was a short week, what with Independence Day falling on a Tuesday, we are hoping this will be a short column (for once). Well, short-ish at any rate. We are cautiously optimistic.
Cautious optimism is a good place to start, actually. We stumbled across an interesting paper from two Democratic strategists (Celinda Lake and Mike Lux) which confidently states: "All the elements are in place for a big Democratic victory in 2024," and predicts that the "trifecta" of winning the House back, holding the Senate and keeping Joe Biden in the White House is well within grasp.
One year ago, the Supreme Court overturned a right that women had been able to freely exercise for the previous half-century. Since then, the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade continues to reverberate across the political landscape. Initially it was thought by many that this would be some sort of minor and temporary political issue, as clueless pundits predicted that somehow women would just sort of forget about the fact that a freedom had been taken away from them -- that they likely wouldn't even remember it at all by the time the next election rolled around. This has been proven wrong on numerous occasions, and it will likely be proven wrong all over again in the 2024 elections as well. Losing the fundamental freedom of bodily autonomy is a lot bigger issue than many had assumed, for what are now patently obvious reasons. When has taking freedom away from people ever been popular with those affected, after all?
One year ago, Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision, which will likely go down in history alongside Dred Scott, Korematsu, and Plessy v. Ferguson as one of the worst decisions the high court has ever made. But that's a gradual process involving a consensus of legal historians, which could take years. In the meantime, the issue has become extremely politically potent. And if the next few years is anything like the first, it is going to become a gigantic albatross around the neck of the Republican Party, since they are now held captive by their most extreme wing on this particular issue.
With twelve more days left in the month of May, the debt ceiling follies continue unabated. Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy just "paused" the negotiations with President Joe Biden, which was a rather pessimistic note to close out what had otherwise been a rather optimistic week. There is speculation that both sides are using this "pause" merely as a political signal to their respective bases -- to show that they are negotiating hard and not giving away the store. If this is true, negotiations will likely resume at some point this weekend. But it's anyone's guess whether they'll agree even on a framework (much less actual legislative text) any time soon.
A small wave of primary and special elections happened yesterday, and the results were summed up in a Washington Post headline today: "Republicans Keep Having Bad Elections." This continues an 11-month streak of good showings at the ballot box for Democrats, which began immediately after the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision threw out Roe v. Wade. And while off-year primary elections and midterms aren't always a good predictor of what will happen in the next presidential race, the trendlines certainly do seem to be favoring Democrats.
Let's make sure we all get this correct. Donald Trump is now technically not a "convicted rapist." He's not a convicted anything, because the verdict handed down against him this week was in civil (not criminal) court. And the jury balked at declaring that Trump had raped E. Jean Carroll, but they did find Trump liable for sexually attacking her and defaming her publicly. To the tune of $5 million. It only took them about three hours to do so, meaning the case was pretty iron-clad to begin with. So Donald Trump is merely the first ex-president to be found liable of being a sexual predator rather than being an actual convicted rapist.
This is the big White House Correspondents Dinner weekend, but somehow our invitation was either lost in the mail or otherwise overlooked. So we'll have to watch the clips later, like everyone else.
This was a pretty momentous week in politics, as President Joe Biden announced his re-election bid, Donald Trump's rape court case got underway, and Kevin McCarthy was actually able to corral his various factions to vote for a bill that Democrats will use as fodder in the upcoming congressional campaigns. So let's get right to it all, shall we?
We admit using that subtitle dates us in a way, since we are indeed old enough to remember the popular song of the same name -- but we couldn't resist, since this week started out with Fox News caving at the last possible moment as a civil defamation trial was set to begin against them. First the trial was delayed a day and then came the bombshell news that Fox had settled with Dominion Voting Systems for a jaw-dropping $787.5 million. To state the patently obvious, you don't settle a case you fully expect to win. Fox knew it was in danger of not just losing the case (Dominion had sued for $1.6 billion, a little more than twice what Fox settled for) but having the network's dirty laundry exposed in even more painful fashion than it already had been (through releases of internal communications between executives and network personalities that were already embarrassing enough). Fox was indeed on the run, to the tune of over three-quarters of a billion dollars.
There's a new reality in American politics, and one political party is reaping the benefits of it while the other is trapped in a downward spiral of ever-increasing extremism. Some Republicans are beginning to understand the power of the sleeping giant they have awoken, but there's really no easy way out from the conundrum they have created for themselves. Abortion is going to be a potent political issue for at least the next few elections, and Republicans' only answer so far is to double down, triple down, or quadruple down on forcing the most extreme positions they can come up with on as many of the American people as they possibly can.