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.

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Because it is a slow political news week (and for the salacious nature of it all), the mainstream media is currently digging into every aspect of the "Cocaine Found At White House" story. News articles are being written summarizing all possible past rumors or actual instances of drug use at the White House. My favorite came at the end of a Washington Post article on this theme, under the heading: "Rocker Grace Slick." But I found their rundown of what happened awfully sparse, so as a public service today I am going to run an extended excerpt from Grace Slick's autobiography Somebody To Love, of which (of course) I have my own copy (signed and personalized, even...).

Anyway, this all comes from Chapter 29, and uses the same title as the chapter. Enjoy....

[Context note: "Grace Wing" is Grace Slick's birth name]

-- Chris Weigant

Dosing Tricky Dick

Another grandiose "Get Nixon" idea we came up with was the "Let's Dose Dickie" trick. That one wasn't carried through to conclusion either, which was probably fortunate since the repercussions might have been more than we bargained for. But the planning stages were pretty exciting.

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It has long been a Hollywood maxim: "There is no such thing as bad press." To movie stars, it doesn't really matter why you get your name in the papers, because it puts your name in front of the public, whether for good or bad. The worst tragedy for a Hollywood star is being forgotten by the public, to put this another way. So it doesn't matter what gets you in the news -- a scandal, a real stinkeroo of a movie, whatever -- it reminds everyone who you are and creates the magical "buzz," which means you stand a higher chance of getting better roles in the future.

We seem now to have reached the point where this maxim is true in politics as well, at least for some people. News that would previously have been not just bad but downright disqualifying in the past now boosts your name recognition and actually builds support among your party's base. This is becoming more and more frequent in the age of Trump, as more and more politicians learn how to capitalize on the phenomenon.

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Program Note: For the next two weeks, I will be on semi-vacation. Or "two vacations," really. The first of these starts today and will continue tomorrow during our national holiday. So I will be re-running columns to start this week, but then I'll be back for the end of the week as usual. Next week, I may (or may not) get a column out on Monday and/or Tuesday (we'll see how things go), but then after that point it'll be re-run columns for the rest of the week. By Monday the 17th, everything will return to normal and new columns will appear with regularity once again. I apologize in advance for the gaps in service.

Today's column was (obviously) written to be run yesterday, July 2nd. However, since the 2nd fell on a Sunday this year, I thought it'd be a good bridge column between the weekend and the actual Fourth of July. In any case, enjoy, and have fun celebrating our independence no matter which actual day you decide to celebrate it on.

Originally published July 2, 2012

Happy Second of July, everyone! Happy Independence Day!

Now, you may be thinking: "Has Chris gone bonkers? Why is he jumping the gun, two days early?" The answers to these important queries are: No, Chris has not gone any more bonkers than usual; and, in fact, the rest of you are celebrating a fictitious event on a fictitious anniversary date. So there.

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It is "Supreme Court Decision Week" in the world of politics, and while a few earlier SCOTUS decisions of this term turned out surprisingly liberal, the court saved its most radically-restrictive rulings for the very end. Three big rulings this week will have the effect of: (1) removing race from college admissions processes and all but killing affirmative action, (2) halting President Joe Biden's student loan forgiveness program before it starts, and (3) making it allowable -- as long as you cite religious reasons -- for businesses to discriminate against and refuse to serve gay people. This was a pretty grim end to the court's legal term, obviously.

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Will the public see any meaningful debates during the 2024 presidential election cycle? That is an open question at this point. By "meaningful," I mean a primary debate with at least one of the frontrunners for the two major parties' nominations on the stage, or a general election debate between the two parties' nominees. Right now, there is no guarantee any of this will happen.

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President Joe Biden launched an interesting campaign strategy today -- one that wouldn't be all that remarkable for a Republican, but one that has proven somewhat tough for Democratic presidents to manage. He is going to take credit for the economy and make it a centerpiece of his efforts to convince the American electorate to give him four more years in office. And he's not doing this by halves, either, he is jumping in with both feet by embracing the term: "Bidenomics."

I have no idea how effective this will be out on the campaign trail, but it certainly is refreshing to see a Democrat at least make the attempt. Democrats generally shy away from bragging about the economy, because they are always perpetually worried about people whose situations haven't improved thinking they are "out of touch." This leads to being overly shy and too cautious about touting anything good that has been happening. Biden is looking to break out of this mold and completely own the economy, for better or for worse.

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The Supreme Court released another decision today, one that could have led to upending the entire process of American presidential elections. Thankfully, the court decided (6-3) not to go down such a dangerous path. Instead, checks and balances will remain at the state level when it comes to elections. The alternative would have been to open the doors to exactly what Donald Trump wanted to see happen after the 2020 presidential election -- partisans in state legislatures overturning the will of the voters of their states and just unilaterally declaring a winner. This is what Trump wanted Mike Pence to facilitate. What the Supreme Court just did was to slam the door on any speculation that such a thing could actually happen.

At the heart of the case, Moore v. Harper, was a radical concept called "the Independent State Legislature Theory." This stems from one clause in the Constitution which states: "The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof." In practice, this has meant that state legislatures have set up elections laws, created elections departments and officials, and empowered them to conduct elections. It also means that any of this can be challenged in court, just like any other law subject to judicial review.

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It is "Infrastructure-Touting Week" again at the White House. I say this, of course, to draw a stark distinction between President Joe Biden launching a media blitz (to boast of his ongoing achievements in improving America's infrastructure) and the former president, for whom "Infrastructure Week" became the punchline to a long-running and rather sad joke.

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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?

Poll after poll after poll continue to show that the public is moving in one direction on the issue -- towards supporting abortion rights and away from the forced-birth laws the Republicans are passing everywhere they can. Democrats are not completely united on the issue, but their differences are minor (whether to support only what Roe guaranteed or whether to go even further). Republicans, however, are much more divided on what exactly they should support and how exactly they should go about taking the next political steps. This leaves them arguing about how harshly they want to take away women's freedoms, which is not exactly a winning issue for them. Some of them have realized this already, which is what is at the heart of their argument. Some Republicans want a national abortion ban to be enacted by Congress, some want it to remain at the state level, and there are disagreements about what week to allow abortions up to and what exceptions should be built into new laws. This leaves them to choose between positions that are somewhat objectionable to most of the public or positions that a vast majority of the public considers far too extreme. Which is why a lot of Republican politicians just don't want to talk about it at all.

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