Just dropped · Trial Balloon · Ep. 187
Bad Instincts
“I don’t think they were being honest. Most of them said they were going to go with past precedent and that simply wasn’t the case.”
— Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT), when asked by CNN, whether Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett were truthful on respecting precedent over Roe v. Wade.
“In early 2020, many companies said the pandemic would change everything for consumers. And it did—for a while,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Now many Americans are resuming their prepandemic habits: rocking out at crowded concerts, doing deadlifts next to strangers at the gym and stocking a standard supply of toilet paper. Airlines, restaurants and child-care centers, which relied on government loans to stay afloat during Covid-19’s peak, can now hardly keep up with demand.”
“The resiliency of the American consumer has been a hallmark of modern history. After events such as Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans or the attacks of 9/11, people have shown they will snap back to doing many of their favorite things, given time. Rarely has it happened so broadly and rapidly as now, two years after a devastating global pandemic began.”
“President Joe Biden on Wednesday said that the federal government will pay down the national debt this quarter for the first time in six years,” ABC News reports.
“His remarks on economic growth came ahead of the Federal Reserve announcing a hike in interest rates Wednesday afternoon in an attempt to manage soaring inflation.”
Said Biden: “Bringing down the deficit is one way to ease inflationary pressures in an economy, where a consequence of a war and gas prices and oil, food, and it all – it’s just a different world right this moment because of Ukraine and Russia.”
Motherboard: “SafeGraph, a location data broker, has stopped offering data related to Planned Parenthood and other similar family planning centers after Motherboard found it was possible to buy information on how many people were visiting the facilities, where they came from, and where they went afterwards, something that experts saw as highly concerning in the wake of the Supreme Court’s potential plan to repeal Roe v. Wade.”
Philip Bump: “We do have some new information that can help answer the what-ifs: the actual results of the election. Granted, it’s still early; not every county has completed its vote count. But we can already pick out one pattern that boosted Vance: His support was uniform across the state in a way that it wasn’t for his opponents.”
“We are going back through all the things we have — we had meetings with him — to find out what he said and how it was actually presented to us.”
— Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), who was lone Democrat to vote to confirm Justice Brett Kavanaugh, when asked by CNN if he believed Kavanaugh was telling truth on Roe v. Wade in 2018.
Jonathan Chait: “Let me state my thesis directly. Politicians who wish to defend democracy ought to draw a line at supporting allies who pose a threat to democracy. J.D. Vance is an authoritarian. Granted, this charge is difficult to prove without first handing him power, but the authoritarian nature of his beliefs is established as clearly as it can be without a pile of corpses. That said, the evidence of Vance anti-democratic inclination is about as clear as it can be for a figure in his current position.”
Sen. Ben Ray Lujan (D-NM) talked to ABC News about recovering from a stroke.
“The freshman senator would soon learn that he had suffered a stroke in the cerebellum, the part of the brain that controls balance. Extreme dizziness hitting him to such a degree that he would find himself crawling on his hands and knees. This ambitious former longtime House member once on a track potentially to the speakership, would have his life turned upside-down by a potentially deadly medical event, a moment that has sparked new meaning and new focus for the rising political star.”
Bret Stephens: “A half-century is a long time. America is a different place, with most of its population born after Roe was decided. And a decision to overturn Roe — which the court seems poised to do, according to the leak of a draft of a majority opinion from Justice Samuel Alito — would do more to replicate Roe’s damage than to reverse it.”
“It would be a radical, not conservative, choice.”
“What is conservative? It is, above all, the conviction that abrupt and profound changes to established laws and common expectations are utterly destructive to respect for the law and the institutions established to uphold it — especially when those changes are instigated from above, with neither democratic consent nor broad consensus.”
“This is partly a matter of stare decisis, but not just that. As conservatives, you are philosophically bound to give considerable weight to judicial precedents, especially when they have been ratified and refined — as Roe was by the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision — over a long period. The fact that Casey somewhat altered the original scheme of Roe, a point Justice Alito makes much of in his draft opinion, doesn’t change the fact that the court broadly upheld the right to an abortion. ‘Casey is precedent on precedent,’ as Justice Kavanaugh aptly put it in his confirmation hearing.”
A Newsmax host suggested — without evidence or logic — that future Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson may be responsible for the leak of a draft ruling that would dismantle abortion rights even though she isn’t on the Supreme Court yet, the HuffPost reports.
“The rate of plastic waste recycling in the United States fell to between 5%-6% in 2021 as some countries stopped accepting U.S. waste exports and as plastic waste generation surged to new highs,” Reuters reports.
Sara Goddard: Is plastic recycling a red herring to our waste problem?
Mark Barabak: “The Supreme Court may be arguably the country’s most important branch of government… The Supreme Court is also inarguably the least democratic of the three branches, and not just because its members enjoy lifetime tenure and never have to face voters.”
“By the narrowest of margins, five justices appear ready to overlook nearly 50 years of precedent and reverse the court’s landmark Roe vs. Wade decision legalizing abortion nationwide — a ruling, polls have consistently shown, favored by a majority of Americans.”
“Three of those justices were nominated by President Trump, who failed to win the popular vote. Each was then approved by a Senate that Republicans controlled, despite the fact the party has represented only a minority of the population for the past quarter-century.”
Texas Democratic House candidate Jessica Cisneros (D) is demanding her party’s congressional leaders drop their support of her primary opponent, Rep. Henry Cuellar (D), over his opposition to abortion, NBC News reports.
Sarah Longwell: “Mr. Vance’s win will likely come as a disappointment to some Republicans who have been quietly hoping that Mr. Trump’s grip on the party is slipping. They see the midterms as an existential moment for the party. They are acutely aware that if the candidates he endorsed do well, the feeling of inevitability that he will be the party’s nominee in 2024 increases, annihilating any hope of reconstituting a political coalition around anything other than fealty to Mr. Trump…”
“Yet conservatives must be honest. At this time, there is no moving past Mr. Trump. He has remade the Republican Party in his image, and many Republican voters now crave his particular brand of combative politics.”
“In races across the country, Republicans who have won Mr. Trump’s endorsement mention it constantly. Even those who didn’t win his endorsement still mention him constantly. Mr. Trump might not have endorsed them, but they all endorse him.”
A new University of Texas at Austin poll finds Gov. Greg Abbott (R) crushing challenger Beto O’Rourke (D) in the Texas governor’s race, 48% to 37%.
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) pledged to call a special legislative session if Roe v. Wade is overturned in order to “bolster” the state’s trigger law, including helping “make sure pregnant mothers are protected from being pressured or coerced across state lines to have their babies’ lives terminated,” the Helena Independent Record reports.
“The Iowa Democratic Party is promising to rework its caucuses as party leaders begin a formal application process that will determine whether it can continue holding an early presidential nominating contest,” the Des Moines Register reports.
“A top Trump political appointee delayed a report on Russian election interference in the 2020 election in a way that created the perception that intelligence was politicized, according to a new report by the Department of Homeland Security watchdog,” NBC News reports.
The probe also found that employees made changes to the analysis “that appear to be based in part on political considerations.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.