“President Biden’s nominee to lead Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Ed Gonzalez, said Monday that he was withdrawing himself from consideration after his nomination hit roadblocks following domestic violence allegations,” The Hill reports.
Pelosi Signals Votes to Protect Abortion
“Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) on Monday said she’s preparing votes on a number of bills protecting abortion as well as codifying landmark Supreme Court decisions as a response to the court overturning Roe v. Wade,” Axios reports.
Judge Blocks Louisiana Abortion Ban
“As the fight over abortion rights shifted to courthouses around the country on Monday, Louisiana took center stage, when abortion providers successfully won a temporary injunction by challenging the state’s ‘trigger’ ban and clinics announced they would resume procedures in the coming days,” the New Orleans Times Picayune reports.
“The clinics in New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Shreveport shut their doors on Friday after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark case that established the constitutional right to abortion. The high court’s ruling paved the way for Louisiana to immediately enact a dormant set of laws banning both surgical and medication abortions, without exception for cases of rape or incest.”
Roe Is the New Prohibition
David Frum: “The culture war raged most hotly from the ’70s to the next century’s ’20s. It polarized American society, dividing men from women, rural from urban, religious from secular, Anglo-Americans from more recent immigrant groups. At length, but only after a titanic constitutional struggle, the rural and religious side of the culture imposed its will on the urban and secular side. A decisive victory had been won, or so it seemed.”
“The culture war I’m talking about is the culture war over alcohol prohibition. From the end of Reconstruction to the First World War, probably more state and local elections turned on that one issue than on any other. The long struggle seemingly culminated in 1919, with the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment and enactment by Congress of the National Prohibition Act, or the Volstead Act (as it became known). The amendment and the act together outlawed the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages in the United States and all its subject territories. Many urban and secular Americans experienced those events with the same feeling of doom as pro-choice Americans may feel today after the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.”
“Only, it turns out that the Volstead Act was not the end of the story. As Prohibition became a nationwide reality, Americans rapidly changed their mind about the idea. Support for Prohibition declined, then collapsed. Not only was the Volstead Act repealed, in 1933, but the Constitution was further amended so that nobody could ever try such a thing ever again.”
Ravnsborg Presses Ethics Case Against Kristi Noem
“Former South Dakota Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg, in his first public comments since being removed from office last week, appeared before a state ethics board Monday to press for an investigation of fellow Republican Gov. Kristi Noem, the person he blames for his impeachment over his conduct surrounding a 2020 fatal car crash,” the AP reports.
Abortion Could Shake Up Midterm Elections
Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball: “The president’s party often struggles in midterms, although extraordinary circumstances can save them from losses. The Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe vs. Wade could be 2022’s extraordinary circumstance.”
Key takeaway: “Public opinion is very complicated — the public’s nuanced position on abortion is a good example, which we will explore later on — but one thing that can get a party in trouble is challenging or changing the status quo on an issue where the party is also on the wrong side of public sentiment.”
January 6 Committee Calls Special Hearing
The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol on Monday abruptly scheduled a hearing for Tuesday afternoon to hear what the panel called “recently obtained evidence” and take witness testimony, the New York Times reports.
The hearing is scheduled for 1 p.m., according to a news release issued by the committee, in which it provided no other details about the surprise session.
Punchbowl News: “The last-minute nature of this hearing signals that the committee has material that it needs to get into the public domain before next month. Sources close to the panel tell us that there were numerous new developments over the weekend, forcing this last-minute schedule shift.”
The Right Isn’t Ready
David French: “Through it all, I was guided by two burning convictions—that Roe represented a grave moral and constitutional wrong and that I belonged to a national Christian community that loved its fellow citizens, believed in a holistic ethic of life, and was ready, willing, and able to rise to the challenge of creating a truly pro-life culture.”
“I believe only one of those things today.”
“In deep-red America, a wave of performative and punitive legislation is sweeping the land. In the abortion context, bounty-hunting laws in Texas, Idaho, and Oklahoma turn citizens against each other, incentivizing lawsuits even by people who haven’t been harmed by abortion. The pro-life movement, once solidly against prosecuting women who obtain abortions, is now split by an ‘abolitionist’ wing that would not only impose criminal penalties on mothers, it even calls into questions legal protections for the life of the mother when a pregnancy is physically perilous.”
The GOP’s False Assurances That Roe v. Wade Was Safe
Aaron Blake: “The overturning of Roe v. Wade has long occupied an unusual space in conservative politics. On the one hand, the Republican Party has pushed for it for decades; on the other, even as it has done so, plenty within its ranks have assured that it wasn’t happening.”
“The party seemed to want the benefits of the push with its base, without the consequences of the unpopular prospect with the broader electorate. It also knew that overturning Roe was a red line for some key abortion-rights-supporting GOP senators whose votes were needed to confirm the justices who would eventually overturn Roe.“
“So it — and, crucially, those senators themselves — shrugged off the notion as if it were some kind of manufactured political issue.”
“All of those assurances have now proven foolhardy, at best, and cynical, at worst.”
Brace for a Backlash Against Abortion Decision
First Read: “Big, abrupt change doesn’t happen that often in this country. Yet when it does, it usually produces a political backlash for the side that’s most responsible for that change.”
“Think of the Civil Rights Era (which led to the Nixon and Reagan presidencies). Or Barack Obama and a diversifying America (which led to Trump). Or Trump’s presidency (which led to Joe Biden and a Democratic Congress).”
“But in addition to being abrupt, what makes Friday’s Supreme Court decision overturning a nationwide right to abortion especially susceptible to the political boomerang is that it’s swimming against the tide of public opinion.”
White House Warns of GOP Efforts to Strip Women of Rights
“The Biden administration is promising to fight Republican efforts in the House of Representatives to pass a nationwide abortion ban at 15 weeks following the Supreme Court’s historic decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, calling it an attempt to strip away women’s rights,” CNN reports.
“After the Supreme Court overturned the landmark ruling and upheld the Mississippi law banning abortion after 15 weeks, some House Republicans who oppose abortion rights are pushing legislation to implement a similar abortion ban nationwide. Such legislation does not currently have the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster in the Senate, but the push for such a ban is a notable effort given that Republicans have a strong chance to take back control of the House in this year’s midterms.”
Clarence Thomas Wants to Revisit Media Libel Standard
“Justice Clarence Thomas on Monday indicated that he believes the Supreme Court should reconsider a ruling that makes it more difficult to sue media organizations, saying he disagreed with the court’s decision to turn away an appeal in a defamation case,” Axios reports.
Trump’s Social Network Under Grand Jury Scrutiny
“The public listing of former President Donald Trump’s social media company took a fresh blow on Monday when the cash-rich shell company merging with Mr. Trump’s company disclosed in a regulatory filing that a federal grand jury in New York recently issued subpoenas to the company and its directors,” the New York Times reports.
“The grand jury subpoenas were issued within the past week.”
Supreme Court Sides With Coach Over Prayers
“The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that a high school football coach had a constitutional right to pray at the 50-yard line after his team’s games,” the New York Times reports.
“The vote was 6 to 3, with the court’s three liberal members in dissent.”
“The case pitted the rights of government workers to free speech and the free exercise of their faith against the Constitution’s prohibition of government endorsement of religion and the ability of public employers to regulate speech in the workplace. The decision was in tension with decades of Supreme Court precedents that forbade pressuring students to participate in religious activities.”
Majority Opposed to Supreme Court Abortion Ruling
A new poll from NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist finds Americans opposed to the Supreme Court decision to overturn Row v. Wade by a 56% to 40% margin, with a plurality strongly opposed and Democrats getting more energized to vote.
Also interesting: “There is a massive split by education — 69% of college graduates oppose the decision while those without degrees are split. Half of whites without degrees support the decision, while two-thirds of whites with college degrees oppose it.”
Both Sides Mobilize Over Abortion
The Supreme Court’s abortion decision Friday “has unleashed a frenzy of activity on both sides of the abortion fight, with anti-abortion forces vowing to push for near-total bans in every state in the nation, and abortion rights groups insisting they would harness rage over the decision to take to the streets, fight back in the courts and push the Biden administration to do more to protect abortion rights,” the New York Times reports.
Vox: Why Democrats keep saying “Roe is on the ballot.”
Some GOP Donors Sick of the ‘Shitshow’
“As the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riots lays out Donald Trump’s obsessive efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, Trump allies have responded with the political equivalent of a collective eye roll,” Politico reports.
“But elsewhere in the party, operatives are taking notice. The former president is being damaged, they say — perhaps not fatally, but notably so.”
Said an adviser to Gov. Ron DeSantis (R): “I think the January 6 hearings are continuation of the exhausting circus that surrounds Trump. There are of course the lunchbox Republicans who think this is a ‘mass conspiracy,’ but among the donor class many are just tired of this.”
He added: “It’s a shitshow. Some donors are getting sick of the shitshow.”
Groundhog Day at the White House
CNN: “For Biden’s economic team, the process is a continuation of more than a year of all-hands-on-deck approaches to confront pop-up crises — ‘basically whack-a-mole’ was how one senior White House official referred to it — only to immediately confront another challenge.”
