With all the bombs bursting in air and rockets' red glare emanating continuously from the White House, other important political news sometimes gets buried. Which is my way of apologizing for not noticing a very important change which is likely to come soon to the Democratic National Committee. On the same day Anthony Kennedy announced he would be stepping down from the Supreme Court, the D.N.C.'s Rules and Bylaws Committee held a very important vote. They voted (almost unanimously, with only one holdout) to adopt a modified version of a proposal to dramatically reduce the importance of superdelegates in selecting a presidential nominee at the party's quadrennial convention. But the way they chose to do so was actually pretty elegant, because while it does reduce their power, it will also guarantee that the superdelegates get to take part in the process, one way or another. Senator Bernie Sanders is happy with the way things worked out, which is important since he and his followers were the ones pushing to make changes in the first place. Sanders released a statement right after the committee voted, in which he said: "This decision will ensure that delegates elected by voters in primaries and caucuses will have the primary role in selecting the Democratic Party's nominee at the 2020 convention. This is a major step forward in making the Democratic Party more open and transparent, and I applaud their action."

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In the midst of the opening salvos in Trump's worldwide trade war, Axios just uncovered a very interesting story. Apparently, President Trump is now considering backing out of the World Trade Organization, one way or another. He feels constrained by its restrictions, he (of course) feels it is unfair to America, and he would much prefer realigning all of America's trade into bilateral agreements that he will personally negotiate with each country on the planet. But what was most amusing was one of the ways the White House is considering achieving this. They've drafted a piece of legislation that would give Trump full control over tariffs (removing Congress completely from the equation) and also allow Trump to essentially ignore the W.T.O. and all their pesky rules. Pretty much par for the "I alone can fix this country" course, really. But whichever Trump policy flunky put this legislation together needs a quick refresher course on creative acronyms, because the proposed bill is currently named the "United States Fair and Reciprocal Trade Act." Yep, that's right, the "U.S. FART Act" (or, if you want to be pedantic, the "U.S. FaRT Act"). Either way, it's a ripe and fetid stinker of a proposal.

The Trump White House is certainly already known for its noxious emissions of gaseous offensiveness. So it was perhaps inevitable that sooner or later they would just start bragging about it. Even so, it's notable that almost a year and a half into Trump's presidency, they are still so clueless about the basics of political branding. The rule of thumb is to start with an acronym you like, and then work backwards to torture a phrase into fitting your chosen acronym (see: the USA PATRIOT Act, for example, or perhaps the DREAM Act). Working it the other way around means occasionally falling flat on your face (as when George W. Bush announced the military campaign to invade Iraq would be called "Operation Iraqi Liberation," which then had to be quickly renamed). But no White House has, to the best of my knowledge, ever come up with anything quite as laughable as the U.S. FART Act. Indeed, if the bill had any chance of passing Congress, Democrats might be tempted to have some fun by introducing competing legislation called something along the lines of the "HE WHO SMELT IT DEALT IT Act."

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Liberals had a very bad week at the Supreme Court last week. There's no denying it. Almost all of the final decisions of the year went against them, and that was before the news of Justice Anthony Kennedy's impending retirement hit Washington like a bombshell. Fears that President Donald Trump will pick an ultra-conservative to replace him mean that bedrock decisions such as Roe v. Wade are now hanging in the balance. Democrats are vowing to fight hard against the next justice's confirmation, but this is quite likely a fight they are going to lose.

Mitch McConnell's naked hypocrisy is on full display in the middle of this fight. McConnell once swore fealty to the notion that the voters should weigh in on such an important manner (when Obama was in the Oval Office), but now he's singing a different tune, swearing he will act so hastily that the voters will not be able to weigh in on the matter. And since he abolished the filibuster for Supreme Court justices, the Republicans could indeed confirm someone before November -- or, at the very least, before January (even if the Democrats pull off a miracle and take back control of the Senate, the new Congress won't be seated until after the first of the year, leaving the lame duck Senate two final months to act).

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There will be no new column today, sorry. I'm taking the day off and will instead devote my writing time to answering some recent comments, on which I have admittedly fallen woefully behind, of late.

Also, there will be no new column next Thursday, as I have to drive a friend to a medical appointment far from home. However, next Wednesday is Independence Day, so hopefully I'll be able to post a new column for the Fourth, in part to make up for the lack of Thursday columns.

If I had written today, it would have basically been a message to those of a religious bent to pray for the continued health of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and to likewise pray that at least one Republican senator (Susan Collins? Lisa Murkowski? With John McCain being incapable of traveling to Washington to cast a vote, it would only take one defection...) gets worried enough about the future of Roe v. Wade to block confirmation through both the midterms and the lame-duck period. Those of the Catholic persuasion might want to direct their prayers to St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes. Sigh.

So anyway, since we're getting all religious, I'll end by saying mea culpa for there being no new column today, and mea culpa maxima for not attending to the comments before now.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant

I realize there is bigger news from the Supreme Court today, but since I wrote about them yesterday I'm not going to address Anthony Kennedy's retirement yet. Instead, I'd like to focus today on the latest round of primary election results, specifically from New York, Maryland, and Colorado. Because some big news was made within the Democratic Party last night.

New York's 14th congressional district generated the biggest news, as a 28-year-old newcomer beat a longtime Democratic Party bigwig in a stunning primary upset. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was outspent by incumbent Joe Crowley something like 17-to-1, but she still beat him by a comfortable margin. The district is majority-minority, so perhaps it was merely a matter of time before a person of color replaced an older white male, but nobody really expected it to happen this time around, least of all Crowley. He was fourth in line in the House Democratic leadership, and was even being talked about as a possible replacement for Nancy Pelosi, should she fail to get enough support to become speaker again.

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Gerald R. Ford once famously pointed out that the practical definition of what constituted grounds for impeaching a president (since it is only vaguely defined in the Constitution itself) consisted of whatever a majority of the House of Representatives decided were valid grounds for impeachment (Ford, on the House floor, before he became Nixon's vice president: "The only honest answer is that an impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history"). Likewise, it almost appears self-evident that defining what is constitutional and what is not can be similarly reduced to whatever a majority of the Supreme Court decides is constitutional, at the present time. Dred Scott was constitutional -- right up until it wasn't -- because a Supreme Court had determined it was. It took a shift of opinion on the highest court to reverse this. Again, this should all be pretty obvious to even the most causal observer of American history. Which is why, in fact, the conservative movement has focused so intently on the judicial branch for the past three decades and more. This began at the height of the anti-abortion movement during Ronald Reagan's time in office, and it continues today on the right side of the spectrum. But for some unfathomable reason, liberals have never matched this level of political fervor about judicial appointments. But now the stakes are higher than ever.

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President Trump probably thought that a decisive move from him would end all the fuss over his "zero tolerance" policy on immigration. He signed an executive order, therefore the problem would thus go away. But this isn't how things work in the real world, where the fallout is going to continue for the foreseeable future. There will be two major arenas where this is going to play out: in the courtroom, and on the political stage.

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For a change, we're not going to have much to say in this introduction. The reason is that the talking points section is taken up by a lengthy rant this week, because it seemed timely to offer one up. It is a rare week of the Trump presidency where there is really only one overriding issue in the political world to comment on, but this was indeed that kind of week.

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Well, we're almost to the end of the glorious Republican Immigration Reform Week. That was the original plan, at any rate -- Paul Ryan's House was supposed to pass an immigration reform bill containing all four pillars of Trump's stated immigration goals, and then the bill would then be sent over to the Senate, where Democrats would block it. This was supposed to give political cover for House Republicans on the midterm campaign trail, allowing them to claim "We tried to fix the problem!" all the while knowing that the entire thing was nothing short of a pointless political stunt.

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Today, Donald Trump signed an executive order to end his own policy of forcing the separation of children from families seeking asylum in America, because his initial position had become so untenable (indeed, downright unbelievable) that his political allies were fleeing like rats from a sinking ship. By this afternoon, there were plenty of other metaphors flying fast and thick: Trump blinked; he waved the white flag; he surrendered; he caved; he backed down; he threw in the towel; he bent to reality. Whichever you choose, the underlying reality is the same: President Donald Trump, in a rare occurrence, was forced today to take an action that proves both he and his aides have been flat-out lying to the American public for days on end. There's just no other way to look at it, and in fact it may be unprecedented for Trump. He's been telling anyone who would listen that he alone could not do anything, and that his hands were tied -- Congress would need to act. Now he has proved himself wrong on that front. He acted, which means he could have done so at any point if he truly had cared about the issue at all. What forced him to act was the overwhelmingly negative and relentless coverage he was receiving in the media, and the flight of his allies in the Republican Party. Today, this all became too much for Trump, so he did what he could have done all along, thus putting the lie to his voluminous statements to the contrary.

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