This week began with conservatives and liberals upset because the women of Afghanistan will now lose their freedoms under a tyrannical extremist government. It ended with liberals upset that the women of Texas have now lost freedoms under a tyrannical extremist government. Conservatives were notably silent, which is understandable since they were the ones instituting this unconstitutional denial of rights from the women of the Lone Star State.

Women everywhere in America used to have the right to terminate their pregnancies up to the point when the fetus was viable outside their bodies -- anywhere from about 22 to 26 weeks after they get pregnant. Now, only women outside Texas have this right, since by a Machiavellian scheme it is now functionally illegal for Texas women to get an abortion beyond six weeks of pregnancy -- a time when most women aren't even aware they are pregnant. Laws like this (although decidedly less Draconian and Machiavellian) have passed state legislatures before, but they have always been struck down by the federal courts. This time, however, the Supreme Court refused to issue an emergency stay which would have barred the law from taking effect. So until further legal rulings happen, if you are a woman in Texas and want to exercise your constitutional rights, you will have to leave the state to do so.

Roe v. Wade isn't completely dead yet, but as we wrote earlier in the week, it is surely on life support. Now that the Supreme Court has given their imprimatur, there will be quick movement in other Republican-controlled state legislatures to pass identical laws. Within a very short period, abortion could be effectively outlawed in over 20 states. No, Roe isn't quite dead yet -- as long as you live in a blue state, that is. But the era of universally-legal abortion in America may be at an end.

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The anti-abortion movement finally got what it wanted all along: a pliant Supreme Court that would overturn Roe v. Wade. It took them a long time and a lot of effort to accomplish this -- this movement truly started in the Reagan years with the self-titled "Moral Majority," after all -- but they've finally reached the end of the road. Maybe this will finally get Democrats to pay a little more attention to the importance of Supreme Court picks when voting in presidential races, because the rightwingers have known this for decades now. And it has finally paid off for them.

We all kind of knew this was coming, after Mitch McConnell blatantly stole away a Supreme Court pick from Barack Obama. We knew it was imminent when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died while a Republican was president and McConnell was still Senate majority leader. And now, here we are.

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The lead Republican in the House of Representatives just channelled his inner mob thug. Publicly. This is what the party has sunk to, folks. Overt threats of retaliation, should Republicans take back control of the chamber.

Kevin McCarthy recently responded in an awfully threatening manner to the news that the House January 6th Select Committee has asked dozens of telecommunications companies to preserve some specific records which might pertain to the insurrection and riot at the U.S. Capitol. There is nothing unusual in such a request -- again, all the companies are being asked to do at this point is to make sure any pertinent data does not get erased. That's it. Entirely legal, and perhaps a precursor to the committee issuing subpoenas for any or all of these records. Which would also be perfectly legal, under federal law. In fact, the subpoenas would be an exercise of federal law.

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President Joe Biden announced to the American people today: "The war in Afghanistan is now over." As he put it: "I was not going to extend this Forever War." One day after the last military plane carried the last soldiers, the commanding general, and the U.S. ambassador out of the country, Biden took the occasion to not only proclaim the war over but also to defend his handling of the end of it.

Biden was far more animated and emotional than he has been over the past few weeks. This is entirely understandable, as during the airlift operation he must have been constantly updated on the status on the ground at Kabul's airport. With the military now finally completely out, Biden must have finally been able to get a decent night's sleep. He was forceful in his address, he strongly defended his position on both the war itself and the withdrawal, and he obviously hopes this speech will be a pivot point to getting back to his domestic agenda and dealing with Hurricane Ida's aftermath.

Whether he will be successful at doing so depends largely (at this point) on what the Taliban does next, and how much the American media loses interest in the story. If a wave of reprisals and atrocities begins on a wide scale in Afghanistan, neither the media nor Biden will likely be able to move on. But if things stay relatively quiet and if all the foreign policy and war reporters eventually move on to different worldwide hotspots, then today may indeed be seen as a political turning point in public opinion.

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Next month could wind up being a very productive one for Congress, although since we are talking about Congress we have to include the standard disclaimer: "but of course there is no guarantee." But the fact that there are several deadlines looming may actually prod them into action. The big question is whether they can manage to walk and chew gum at the same time, since there is so much on their "to do" list and so little time to accomplish it all.

This is all in addition to all the other work Congress does, I should point out. The investigation into January 6th will likely make significant progress, as they have requested an enormous amount of records from multiple federal agencies and departments. They could also schedule hearings, both private and public. This may not even be the only congressional investigation to make news, as it is quite likely a new investigation into the end of the American military presence in Afghanistan will get underway as well.

There are also deadlines that won't explicitly force Congress to act, but may politically become imperative. The additional COVID-19 unemployment benefits will end the first week in September (they already have ended, in many Republican-controlled states), right in the midst of the fourth Delta-driven wave of the pandemic. Congress could act to extend these benefits, but at this point that outcome has to be seen as doubtful at best.

There are four big areas, however, that Congress needs to act upon next month. All have deadlines of one sort or another. So let's take a look at what will be on deck for Congress when it returns from its monthlong vacation.

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This was never going to be a good week for President Joe Biden. The ongoing crisis in Afghanistan pretty much guaranteed that. But although the week started out with signs of optimism -- more and more people being airlifted out of Kabul, to top 100,000 by week's end -- it ended in disaster. A suicide bomber exploded his vest right at the gate to the airport, which killed at least 13 American servicemembers and over 100 Afghans (as of this writing the official death toll for Afghans had hit 169). So while this week could have been perhaps tense but slightly optimistic, by week's end that was no longer possible. It was disastrous; there's just no other way to put it. One grim way to measure it is Biden has now made his first addition to the number he always carries around with him in his jacket pocket -- the number of fallen U.S. servicemembers from both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Of course, not all of it is Biden's fault, but all of it is definitely now his responsibility. We were attacked by the Afghanistan branch of the Islamic State ("ISIS-K"), many of whom were in prison but then either freed in the wave of 5,000 prisoners the Afghans had to let go when Donald Trump struck his deal with the Taliban (back when Trump thought inviting the Taliban to Camp David right around the anniversary of 9/11 was a good idea), or freed as the conquering Taliban emptied all the prisons as they took over. And there was also such a massive failure of intelligence that nobody apparently plotted out what the absolute worst-case scenario would look like (the Afghan government flees and collapses, the military refuses to fight and either deserts or surrenders en masse). So there's plenty of blame to go around. But Biden still bears all the responsibility, for it happening on his watch and under his orders. Which, to his credit, he has been acknowledging -- rather than the finger-pointing frenzy of denial that would have happened under the previous president. Biden keeps saying the buck stops with him, and he has acknowledged his own full responsibility for everything that has happened. He has stuck to his goal throughout -- he still insists we're leaving on the last day of this month -- and he also still insists history will judge this to be the correct move for him to have made.

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[Program Note: This column was prepared in advance, because I had prior commitments today which prevented me from writing a fresh column. I realize that it is a grim day for America with the news out of Kabul, so I would like to apologize in advance for running one of my frivolous "Silly Season" columns today. But it was this or nothing, so I decided to just add this disclaimer and go ahead and run it anyway. Fair warning: if you are looking for Afghanistan commentary today, please look elsewhere, as you won't find it here.]

Today we are going to set aside politics and Washington and all the rest of what I normally write about and instead do some pedantic navel-gazing. Yes, it is the dog days of summer, the tail end of the Silly Season, and so I felt it was time to do a column on grammar and style preferences.

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When future historians look back on President Joe Biden's legacy, one major part of it will be the end he has brought to American troops fighting in Afghanistan. Exactly how these future historians will deem it is still uncertain, at this point. It could go down as an absolute fiasco -- a textbook example of "how not to end a war." But if the rest of the airlift goes as smoothly as it seems to be running now, perhaps history's judges will be a little kinder to Biden. Again, this is still very much up in the air.

The White House is now claiming at least a limited amount of success for the airlift operation. What they have accomplished in a very short time is impressive indeed -- we are now airlifting out something like 20,000 people per day, which in and of itself is a logistical nightmare. These figures are updated constantly, and they now stand at over 80,000 people evacuated since August 14. That is indeed impressive, especially when you consider how slow the start of this process was. But will even 20,000 a day be enough?

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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi just pulled off a very big win. The House just voted (220-212) to advance the $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation bill, which will allow both houses of Congress to begin hashing out the actual details and draft the language into a final bill. This was accomplished by cutting a deal with the Mod Squad -- the nine conservative House Democrats who balked at voting for the reconciliation bill before the final vote on the bipartisan infrastructure deal. In the end, Pelosi convinced them to do what they had sworn they wouldn't -- vote to move the reconciliation bill forward. To get them on board, Pelosi gave them an iron-clad promise to put the infrastructure bill up for a vote on September 27. Pelosi has always said she was going to schedule a vote on it "before October 1" (when transportation funding runs out, making it a hard deadline), so this wasn't all that big a concession for her to make.

Of course, there's still no guarantee Pelosi's "two-track" strategy will work, in the end. But she just moved a big step towards making it work. There are really only three important votes left in the process: the House infrastructure bill vote, and both houses passing the same version of a budget reconciliation bill. And since the infrastructure bill's clock is now ticking (with a hard deadline), it means the Senate and the House only have a little over a month to make the other two votes happen.

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I have to begin by clearly stating I did not personally come up with that new moniker on my own, but I am indeed going to start using it from this point on. I think I saw it first in a Politico article over the weekend, but I have to say as a snappy reference "Mod Squad" works on a number of different levels. First, baby boomer nostalgia. For those of you who are too young to remember, this was the name of a tragically-hip television show from way back. Second, it creates a nice counterbalance to "The Squad" (of progressive House Democrats). And third, it coins a new usage for "Mod," in this case a shortening of "moderate." All around, that's pretty good for a new political label, so my hat is indeed off to whomever came up with it.

Pedantic praise aside, though, the Mod Squad of nine conservative Democrats ("moderate" is a misnomer, really) is threatening to destroy any chances Democrats have of passing a huge swath of President Joe Biden's political agenda. Completely tanking any progress would almost certainly guarantee Republicans take back control of the House (and perhaps the Senate too) in next year's midterm election. So it would be partisan suicide to blow everything up. But the Mod Squad does not seem to care. This could be a rather large problem for all Democrats.

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