Hickory Dickory Dock  🌻 🌻 🌻

Still Waiting: The biggest news today is that so far there is no news.  SCOTUS hasn’t yet issued their much-anticipated Mifepristone ruling though they have promised to do so by midnight tonight.  That their decision is taking so long likely indicates that the Justices are not in agreement, alarming because even most conservative judges believe that Texas district court Judge Kacsmaryk’s Mifepristone banning ruling lacks standing, and that doesn’t even consider that it also lacks scientific merit and is no more than an anti-abortion diatribe by a long-term opponent to abortion cloaked in judicial robes.  SCOTUS has several options, the Court could continue to ensure full access to Mifepristone, stick with the onerous restrictions imposed by the conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals or suspend the pill from the market entirely while the litigation continues.  Given that the SCOTUS ruling is due to be issued after markets close, some in the pharmaceutical industry, where concerns about the impact of courts interfering in the FDA decision making process are growing, fear the worst. If it’s Mifepristone today why not HPV vaccines, AIDs prevention drugs, and even the Pill tomorrow?  We’ll know soon enough if these fears are rational or overblown.   

Tick Tock: The clock isn’t just ticking for reproductive rights, the debt ceiling is also looming.  To no one’s surprise Speaker McCarthy is trying to tie an increase in the debt ceiling to a fairly draconian, unrealistic set of budget cuts.  In exchange for only a one year “lift,” he wants to cut $4.5 trillion by limiting discretionary spending, retrieving unspent pandemic-related funds, eliminating Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan, cutting key climate plan funding, and taking a knife to funds earmarked for the IRS.  Among other things the discretionary cuts, a poor choice of words for cuts that would really hurt people, would significantly impact who gets health care and who qualifies for SNAP (food stamps).  Ironically cutting IRS spending would actually increase the deficit but the Republicans love going after the IRS. It’s not clear that McCarthy has the votes to pass his plan through Congress where he’ll need almost every member of his narrow caucus to sign on and there’s no way his plan will pass in the Senate so Kevin is also engaging in blame shifting histrionics screaming from the rafters that if President Biden, the socialist scourge who wants to unleash thousands of IRS troopers on all of America doesn’t agree and the world economy crashes, the fault will be Joe’s not his.  Some of this drama is normal, well normal for US politics, but Kevin has virtually no room to maneuver and though Biden might ultimately have to agree to some cuts during real budget negotiations, he’s unlikely to concede to anything at this point, holding firm to his position that raising the debt ceiling should not be tied to budget negotiations. President Joe’s position isn’t irrational, even his frequent critic economist Larry Summers agrees with it.  One thing’s for certain, the ride will be bumpy from here.

Guns, Guns, Bigotry:  Who would have guessed that when more and more people have guns and are allowed to carry them everywhere they actually use them to shoot people?  So it’s not just those mass shootings with AK 47s, or gang inspired shootings with illegally obtained weapons, it’s driveways and parking lots.  Just days after a young man, who by the way wasn’t a hulking 6-foot-tall body builder but a rather skinny 5’8” Black teenager, was shot for knocking on the wrong door two Texas cheerleaders have been shot, with one now in an ICU.  Their crime, they accidentally got into the wrong car in a supermarket parking lot, a mistake that has inspired more than one car ad but is now probably banished from future scripts, because GUNS. It’s not just guns, bigotry is now out in the open too.  To be honest, it never went away but now it seems so much more acceptable. How else to explain why an Oklahoma sheriff felt so comfortable kibbitzing with his colleagues about killing reporters and lynching Black people, like they used to do in the good old days?  That conversation was caught on tape by a reporter who left a voice activated recorder in a room he’d recently been booted from.  Since the recording destroys the usual “we didn’t say that defense,” the Oklahoma sheriff crowd, one of whom has already resigned, is going with the “that tape was illegal” defense.  It’s possible that the recording is illegal but so is lynching, maybe even more so.  And remember the two Justins, who were voted out of the Tennessee legislature for violating decorum rules, well one of the Republican legislators who led the charge against them was at that time under investigation for sexual harassment.  He has since been outed and as a result has resigned because just maybe sexual harassment trumps loudly protesting guns even in Tennessee, well maybe.

People and Politics:  Ron DeSantis, the 6-week abortion banner who is also working to deprive undocumented migrants from obtaining health care and pushing for the death penalty to be imposed by majority as opposed to unanimous jury votes, is still going after Disney.  That Disney fight started because the Mouse spoke out against his Don’t Say Gay bill, the bill that was only supposed to impact discussions with elementary school children.  Well despite assertions that the intent of the bill was to protect the most vulnerable ears from learning that their fellow students might have two moms or two dads, the DeSantis appointed Florida Department of Education has expanded the bill’s prohibitions to high school students because their ears are delicate too?  DeSantis may have gone too far with his efforts to win over the evangelical crowd.  They may like what he’s doing but apparently some others in the Republican Party don’t. He’s lost a few more Florida endorsements to Trump and now there’s talk that his unannounced run for the presidency may never be announced. If true, that’s not a bad thing but the part about Trump gaining more endorsements is.  That said, one group that Trump appears to have infuriated is the very anti-abortion Susan B Anthony Pro Life America group.  They’re upset with him saying that abortion restrictions should be left up to individual states, not the federal government calling that a “morally indefensible position for a self-proclaimed pro-life presidential candidate.”  Apparently, they’ve forgotten about all those anti-abortion judges that were confirmed while he was president.  Speaking of presidents, two more candidates, neither named DeSantis, have thrown their hats in the ring.   RFK Jr, the anti-vaccine Kennedy, is officially running for the Democratic nod and Larry Elder, the conservative talk show host who tried to unseat California Governor Newsom, is seeking the Republican candidacy.  And Joe Biden who everyone knows is running for reelection is expected to make it official next week.      

420: Boris Epshteyn, Trump lawyer and advisor, was interviewed yesterday by Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team.  That’s notable because Epshteyn who admitted on air to pushing Trump’s fake elector scheme is also believed to have been deeply involved in Trump’s hide the purloined documents caper.  Lastly, one of Elon Musk’s Space X rockets experienced a “rapid unscheduled disassembly” yesterday, something we laypeople call an explosion.  Maybe just a coincidence that it disassembled on the same day that most of Twitter’s blue checks went away and just a few days after NPR. PBS and Canada’s National broadcasting company stopped tweeting.