The irony is delicious, we cannot deny it. A man who rose to power by leading chants of: "Lock her up!" against his political opponent (for mishandling classified documents -- a man who later signed a law making the offense a felony with up to five years' prison time) is now in the process of being hoist by his own petard. So it's been a rather schadenfreude-y kind of week.

We have to admit we were a little taken aback at what seemed to be an invasion into the regularly-scheduled start of the August "Silly Season" in politics (where Congress scarpers off to sunny shores while political reporters are left scraping the bottom of the barrel to come up with something to write about) by a week that seems to have been taken straight from the middle of Donald Trump's presidency and plonked down now, just to liven up August of 2022. Remember those agonizingly-long four years? When one week's news contained so many revelations and outrages that it was just hard to keep up with it all? That's what this week felt like, at least, to us. More than a little déjà-vu-esque in other words.

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Sorry, there will be no column today. Our power was off from 8:30 in the morning until the end of the day, so I had no internet access at all. I'll be spending tonight getting tomorrow's column ready (by raking through the week's news) so check back tomorrow when (hopefully) regular service will resume. My apologies for the interruption....

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant

As we head into the dog days of August, Democrats have finally gotten some good news to spread, out on the campaign trail. Legislatively, things are definitely looking up, after Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema finally relented and allowed major portions of President Joe Biden's agenda to head to his desk. But it wasn't just the reconciliation bill, there has been a flurry of bills passing, from allowing Sweden and Finland into NATO to helping America's veterans who were exposed to toxic burn pits during their service. Democrats in Congress are showing that they can indeed get things done, with or without the help of the obstructionist Republicans. But the good news doesn't end there, because the economic picture is getting better as well.

You wouldn't know this from listening to the news on television (although, not having seen it today, perhaps they'll prove me wrong this evening, who knows?). When gas prices shot up to just over $5 a gallon, the nightly news ran with it as a lead story for weeks on end. "Gas is expensive!" they reminded everyone, just in case you had missed that story the day before. They've also been leaning in to "Inflation is soaring!" with the same fervor.

But now? The price of gas has fallen over a dollar a gallon. Nationwide it now stands either just at or just below $4 a gallon (depending on which figures you track). The price of crude oil continues to fall, so this downward slide at the pump can be expected to continue for at least the near future. Before Russia invaded Ukraine (which caused prices to shoot up so quickly), gas had been fluctuating between about $3.25 to about $3.45 a gallon, so prices still have a ways to go to get back to where they were. Prices have fallen by a dollar or perhaps $1.05, but they've still got 60 or 70 cents more to go, to put this another way.

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After hearing the bombshell news that the Federal Bureau of Investigation just executed a search warrant at Donald Trump's residence in Florida, my immediate reaction was to wonder whether this will be the trigger that prompts Trump to immediately declare his candidacy for the 2024 presidential race. Will Trump jump in the race now? It seems likelier than not, and certainly likelier than it did a day ago.

For four years, Trump relied upon the fact that the Department of Justice would always refuse to prosecute a sitting president -- for just about any crime under the sun. Trump revelled in this, and went on to blatantly commit what seems to a legal layperson to be a whole lot of crimes, in a vast range from the picayune to the extremely serious.

Trump now seems to think that if he is a declared candidate for the presidency, the same sort of legal immunity will apply to him. Which, obviously, would be the biggest reason why he would jump into the race early -- before the midterm elections even happen. He sees it as some sort of "get out of jail free" card, or at the least "get out of any investigations."

It's not, though. It's just not. Far from it. If there is clear and overwhelming evidence a crime was committed and probable cause to believe that Trump was the one who committed it, then he will face an investigation into that crime. That's what the Justice Department signalled yesterday, loud and clear.

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The day many of us thought would never happen is here. Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema finally allowed President Joe Biden and the entire rest of the Democratic Party to actually get some good things done. A budget reconciliation bill has -- almost miraculously and at the last possible second -- passed the United States Senate. The House is on vacation, but they're being forced to come back to Washington anyway for a vote this Friday on the Inflation Reduction Act. It should be on Biden's desk in time for a triumphant signing ceremony by the weekend. Victory is at hand.

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There were two major events in politics this week which will have a profound effect on the upcoming midterm campaigns. The first was the stunning victory in the Kansas primary of the anti-forced-birth position on an abortion referendum -- which passed with a jaw-dropping 59-41 percent margin in a very red state. The second was Senate Democrats finally achieving unity by all agreeing to the "Inflation Reduction Act" budget reconciliation bill. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has refused to let the Senate begin their month-long August vacation and is planning the first vote on the bill tomorrow, with all the other arcane floor events to follow, so the final passage could come early next week.

Both of these events will resonate throughout the campaign and upcoming elections, but at this point nobody really knows how big a factor either will actually be. Passing the reconciliation bill will mean that Democrats can now tout a rather impressive list of accomplishments they have been able to rack up during their time in power in Congress, which will now include: "capping Medicare drug costs for seniors at $2,000 per year," "allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices with the big prescription drug corporations to finally start to bring the cost of prescriptions down," "finally making gigantic corporations pay a minimum tax so we can stop hearing about Amazon or any other big company paying zero taxes each year," and "making the biggest commitment to fight climate change ever made." All of these are wildly popular with the public, and all of them are impressive achievements to brag about. And that's just from the new reconciliation bill alone -- there are plenty of other wins Democrats have put on the board since Joe Biden was sworn in as president.

The abortion issue is likely to resonate more with the voters, however, and the Kansas vote already has Republicans running scared. It's easy to see why. The New York Times ran the data to figure out how the rest of the country would vote, if the demographic trends from the Kansas vote were replicated in each state across the country. They found that nationwide, a whopping 65 percent of voters would vote a referendum down that was intended to deny women reproductive rights. The state-level data was even more unforgiving to the absolutist position many Republican politicians have been taking -- such a referendum would fail in 43 out of 50 states. The only states where a majority of voters would back a forced-birth ballot initiative are: Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Utah, and Wyoming. If this analysis played out, a whole lot of deep-red states would actually vote such a measure down, though, including: Idaho, South Carolina, West Virginia, and even Texas. That is why Republicans are hastily rethinking the advisability of taking the hardest line on abortion laws. Again: the measure in Kansas was voted down by 59 percent of a very red electorate.

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Kansas is not generally known for its earthquakes, but what happened there Tuesday night has had that effect on politics -- because it truly has shaken things to their core. For the first time since Roe v. Wade was overturned, people actually got to vote on the issue of abortion and women's rights. And the results were nothing short of astounding.

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Jon Stewart, a television comedian, just did an amazing and powerful thing. He actually caused Senate Republicans to feel shame.

In this day and age, that is a rarity. The Republican Party has been taught many bad habits by Donald Trump, but one of the worst of all is utter shamelessness, which I would describe (politically) as the inability of your fellow citizens' opinions to sway yours in the least. Trump's "come Hell or high water" attitude and his absolute refusal to ever admit he was wrong about the slightest thing (see: Sharpiegate, et al) has caused Republicans like Ted Cruz (a shameless politician if there ever was one, even before Trump appeared on the scene) to completely divorce themselves from public opinion. They will just insist that down is up, that black is white, and that everyone else in the world is wrong while they have a secret line to the absolute truth (with zero evidence to back it up, of course).

This was on full display over the past week or so. A bill which should really have passed so quietly that only the people directly affected by it even noticed was suddenly in the midst of a gigantic partisan mudfight. Jon Stewart relentlessly reminded America how deeply shameful this display of naked partisanship was, and in the end, he won. The Republicans backed down. Stewart proved it is still possible to use this previously-potent political tool to effect real change. Which is why I say we could use a few more like him, slugging it out in the trenches of politics.

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Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is visiting Taiwan, considered by many to be a highly provocative act. Mostly because it openly highlights the diplomatic fiction that has existed in one form or another for 73 years (and counting). The fiction is that there is "only one China." Now, there was indeed one China in the past -- and there may also be one China in the future. But for almost three-quarters of a century, there have been two Chinese governments, both of them claiming exactly the same thing: that they are the real and legitimate government of all of China. But this is not true (no matter which one of them sits at the United Nations) -- it is fictional. The Chinese Communist Party (C.C.P.), which governs the mainland it calls the Peoples' Republic of China (P.R.C.), also claims the island and territories of Taiwan as its own. The Republic Of China (R.O.C.), which governs Taiwan, also claims all of mainland China as its own. Neither is right -- their saying so is fiction, pure and simple.

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The conventional political wisdom all year has been that the Republicans were going to have a big "red wave" midterm election, which would mean Democrats would lose lots of seats pretty much everywhere -- the House, the Senate, and governors' offices. This idea was formulated back when the voters were worried about different things than they are now, however, because life (and politics) is not static -- constant change is the only thing that stays the same. We are just under 100 days until this year's election, which means there is still time for the public's focal point to change even further, as unforeseen events pop up. But it's worth taking a look at how things have shifted over the past few months, because things are looking decidedly better for the Democrats.

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