Deja Vu 🌻 🌻 🌻

All Over Again:  It feels early but here we are.  Election season is upon us and although the Republican field is expected to keep growing, Trump is leading his opponents and at least at this point appears likely to be the Republican Party’s 2024 candidate. Absent a catastrophe, Joe Biden will be the Democratic candidate despite the best efforts of fringe candidates RFK Jr and Marianne Williamson.  There’s nothing unusual about an incumbent seeking reelection.  Biden’s been a remarkably effective president, he’s accomplished much but unfortunately even he can’t stop the aging process. Frankly, I’d vote for a pet rock or a chia plant over Trump or any of those currently challenging him for the Republican nomination, but blue state people like me aren’t the issue, it’s all those so-called independents, soccer moms and young voters in swing states that matter.  Given that Trump is in Biden’s age group, as long as he’s the candidate the age thing is probably only an issue to the extent it impacts voter enthusiasm and turn out but that’s a big issue given how many Republicans still view another Trump presidency as an acceptable, even desirable outcome.  For a while Fox had shadow banned Trump but even though the Murdoch’s say they aren’t Team Trump, their preferred horse, Florida’s  Ron DeSantis is struggling so, desperate to keep the viewers they alienated by firing Swanson fish stick scion Tucker,  they are broadcasting Trump interviews again, letting him wax on and on about his stolen election, Hunter’s laptop, how he was the best president ever, and how no other president, including the assassinated Lincoln has suffered as many attacks as he has. He has a point but then again have any of them been as criminally inclined. Those interviews as well as Trump’s rally shtick are laughable to half of us but not to his base who applaud his every word, even finding his embrace of a January 6^th demonstrator who is still calling for the head of Mike Pence, acceptable. Though Ron DeSantis is still expected to announce his candidacy shortly, the one-time great white hope appears diminished.  His world trip didn’t go as planned due to both the monumental stupidity of his war against The Mouse and the reality that outside of his Florida domain, he can’t control  who shows up at press conferences so in Israel, where he has lots of fans, when he was asked about his participation in the torture of Guantanamo Bay prisoners, he nastily chastised the reporter for asking and while in Japan, he went full bobble head when queried about polls. Hardly the kind of performance that will take down Trump or even Nikki Haley who has offered up sunny South Carolina to Disney as an alternative should life in alligator alley prove untenable. As to Mike Pence, no one other than him and mother believe he stands a chance at becoming the Republican’s 2024 nominee but still it’s significant that he finally testified before one of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s grand juries last week because despite Trump’s assurance that he has a lot of confidence in Pence who’s he kidding, we all know he has none.  

Culture Wars:  The news on reproductive rights was mixed last week.  North Dakota’s Governor signed a law banning nearly all abortions and as a result the state now has one of the strictest anti-abortion laws in the country but news out of South Carolina and Nebraska was better, at least for now.  In South Carolina a few Republican state senators, all women, crossed party lines and voted to leave South Carolina’s abortion law intact, as a result abortion remains legal up until 22 weeks in the state and in Nebraska state legislators narrowly defeated a bill that would have restricted abortions to six weeks after fertilization.  RNC chair Ronna McDaniel says that the problem with Republican candidates’ positions on abortion and reproductive rights aren’t that they suck, it’s that they have to do a better job of articulating them upfront which may explain why presidential wannabee former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, who stands little to no chance of becoming the Republican’s candidate said on Sunday that were he to become president he would sign a federal abortion ban. Republicans also continue their transgender battles because apparently those already struggling need another strike against them.  To that end, Montana Governor ignored the pleas of his own non-binary son and signed a law barring transgender care for minors.  Why should we be surprised that the same crowd that thinks it’s okay for everyone to have a gun even an AK 47 and ignores that firearms are the leading cause of death in children is okay with turning a blind eye to high suicide rates among untreated transgender youth?  Although it’s too early to know if he’s serious, tech billionaire Peter Thiel who funded a slew of right wing Republican candidates, including JD Vance and Blake Masters in 2022, says that he will be staying out of the 2024 election, because as a gay man in a single sex marriage, whose one time marriage overlapping boyfriend recently plunged to his death from a Miami high rise, he’s had it with the culture wars or maybe just wants a lower profile. Well at least he’s had it for now. 

Justice:  The Supreme Court continues to take incoming flack.  Chief Justice John Roberts who has no intention of testifying before the Senate wants us all to believe that he and the rest of the Justices can manage their own ethical conundrums, thank you for your concern, but no one believes him maybe because his headhunter wife earned about $10 million in commissions placing attorneys with firms with many cases in front of the court, Neil Gorsuch sold a previously unsellable Colorado property to the head of law firm Greenberg Traurig just days after being confirmed to the court and Clarence Thomas has committed too many ethical violations to count. SCOTUS under Roberts has grown increasingly comfortable with partisan gerrymandering which is why more and more states with evenly split populations have state legislatures and congressional representation skewed in one direction, these days mostly red.  One more state is likely to be that way for the foreseeable future as a now Republican tilting North Carolina’s Supreme Court has overturned its own past ruling that had found partisan gerrymandering illegal and as a result the Republican controlled legislature is expected to redraw the state’s congressional lines to heavily favor the GOP.  As a result, SCOTUS which was expected to opine, not necessarily in a good way, about the power of state legislatures over federal elections, is now expected to defer because why bother when they’ve gotten what they want.  .Jim Justice, the onetime Democratic but more recently Republican popular Governor of West Virginia has announced plans to challenge Senator Joe Manchin, who is up for reelection in the Trump plus 39 state.  Say what you want about Manchin but he’s still a Democrat and frequently casts the deciding vote on Democratic legislation and Biden’s judicial nominees so losing his seat would matter, a lot.    

And: Not surprising but still somewhat unnerving, another bank hit the dust this weekend.  Unable to shake off the SVB and Signature hangover, struggling First Republic was taken over by regulators and sold to JP Morgan over the weekend. The debt ceiling still looms.