My friend Steve Clemons, now of Semafor, says that RNC officials believe the Dobbs backlash is fading and popular concern is refocusing on inflation and economic woes. That’s one strain of argument we’ve heard a lot recently and it’s what you’d expect people at the RNC to say. But it’s also potentially in line with recent polling which has showed some ebb of the Democratic momentum which started in the aftermath of Dobbs and accelerated with declining gas prices.

Meanwhile, today OPEC+ — led by Saudi Arabia — announced a substantial lowering of production which seems certain to spike gas prices. The White House had been pulling out all the stops trying to prevent that, unsuccessfully. File that away in your folder of whether Saudi Arabia is an ally of the United States or of the GOP.

All this said, the actual picture on the ground seems muddled.

From TPM Reader JS …

I think you’re spot on that climate is the underlying stressor. Since we live in such a complex society, it’s usually hard to see down to the fundamentals how easy it is to disturb. Covid showed that just a few failures can rapidly spread. We’re never that far away from a collapse.

But what impressed me about a book I recently read about the collapse of Sub-Roman Britain was a phrase the author repeated, and I’m not sure it’s his, anyway, it was “the four horseman ride together.” In other words, some natural disasters happens, say, a famine, and then disease results, then war, and so on. I’m struck that, apparently, one day, the government just stopped sending bullion to back coins, and a warlord took almost the entire army to Gaul to where they had a mint to get the soldiers their pay and just never went back. 

Because of the Holiday, no podcast this week. We’ll be back next week.

Axios reports that after 18 hours to think over a highly credible report that the abortion restriction absolutist paid a girlfriend to get an abortion, they decided he’s good to go. After the same time to evaluate his son’s claims that he abandoned his family and repeatedly threatened to kill his him and his mother, Walker’s then-estranged and now-ex-wife, Republican powerbrokers similarly decided Herschel Walker is the man to make America great after all. So it’s full speed ahead. Prominent abortion groups have also reaffirmed their support for Walker. Ronna McDaniel, Rick Scott along with family men, Newt Gingrich and Donald Trump are all vouching for Walker’s character and say it’s on to victory.

I’ve heard directly and indirectly over the last couple days from various campaigns , strategists, pols that abortion rights is the issue Democrats need to close on, how they’re shifting this or shifting that. Is it too late? I’m not sure. Of course, it’s not like abortion hasn’t figured prominently in this election cycle. But it certainly hasn’t been placed at the center of the campaign as it could have been, and perhaps still could.

It is such a breath of fresh air, seeing Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson say from the bench what the 14th Amendment actually says. “It’s not a race-blind remedy,” she says, in something of an understatement. But we can actually go well beyond this since so much of modern jurisprudence, mostly but not only from the right, is based not only on ignoring the context and plain text of the 14th Amendment but pretending that the real Constitution — albeit with some additions and fresh paint jobs — is the one finalized in the first Congress as the first ten amendments. The Civil War amendments are not only not race-blind. They reflect a larger realization and aim: that the whole state thing just hadn’t worked out.

Twitter has flagged as “sensitive content” an abortion ad from former Congressman Max Rose. (This means that if you’ve set the check box that you don’t want to see images of crime scenes and beheadings the ad won’t show up for you.) This is the always hotly contested Staten Island seat, currently held by Republican Nicole Malliotakis. The ad is about a woman dying after she was unable to receive an abortion when her life was in danger.

Here’s the video.

Yesterday I noticed the irrepressible Josh Kraushaar’s report on the Senate campaign. He’s one of the most notorious of DC reporters, now predictably working for Axios. He was positively giddy at newly good news for Republicans hoping to retake control of the Senate. But he’s not altogether wrong. Kraushaar focuses on two races — Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Democrats’ Mandela Barnes is now running behind Ron Johnson and John Fetterman’s once huge margin over Mehmet Oz has shrunk to mid- or low single digits. Kraushaar says Republicans are making gains by switching the discussion to crime. (Generally, he goes with his perennial hobbyhorse: Democrats are too liberal to win elections.) But I don’t think crime politics is precisely it.

So we know who Perla is. She’s Perla Huerta, a former combat medic and Army counterintelligence agent who was discharged from the Army only last month after two decades in the Army. The news comes from an article in The New York Times. But the information appears to come out of the investigation being conducted by the Bexar County (San Antonio) Sheriff’s department which announced a criminal probe just days after the story broke. The Times as well as lawyers working with the Venezuelan migrants in Massachusetts showed pictures of Huerta to several migrants who had either worked with Huerta or been hustled by her and shipped to Martha’s Vineyard. All apparently confirmed that Huerta was the “Perla” at the center of the operation.

I wanted to update you with some thoughts on recent events in the Russo-Ukraine war. When I write posts like this I usually get a bundle of messages to the effect of, “No, we can’t give in to Russian threats. We see where that’s gotten us.” So let me anticipate that by saying that I agree. I don’t think we should give in to increasingly shrill and unhinged Russian threats to use nuclear weapons over (literally or figuratively) Ukraine. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a highly and increasingly dangerous situation. To bring you up to date, over the last week discussions and planning in NATO and U.S. national security circles have turned heavily toward the possibility that Russia will use nuclear weapons in the Ukraine war. You can see various efforts to quantify these risks in terms of percentage chances or the rise in the percentage chance from last month to now. But really these things are impossible to quantify. Certainly they are impossible for me to put any meaningful numbers to. So what I’d like to do here is just describe the confluence of events getting us to the point where this seems like a real possibility.