I love this story. Lauren Boebert has apparently seen the writing on the wall and now realizes she can’t be elected in her congressional district, Colorado’s 3rd. Too much interrupting Joe Biden’s State of the Unions, too many Beetlejuice handies, too many bonkers TV appearances. So she’s decided to run not in her own district but in the neighboring 4th district, which unlike the 3rd is solidly Republican. That district is available because incumbent Ken Buck is retiring.

She just announced the move in a Facebook video post this evening.

Responding to yesterday’s Backchannel …

I read your post and have to say, I share some of your optimism. Not because things are good or getting better—they’re not!—but because for the first time in what feels like forever, I see potential for the coming year to bring some extremely dark chapters in world history to a close.

First, the Trump-Biden rematch. Like you, I’m not discounting the possibility that Trump wins. But if he doesn’t, that’s the end of him as an active political figure. He’s too old to run again, too criminally liable, too spent. He’ll have a second political life after he dies, I’m sure, like Ronald Reagan had until Trump displaced him with a new cult of personality, but the man himself will be really and truly gone from our politics. Phew!

Responding to yesterday’s Backchannel …

You asked for our thoughts RE: Can Any Centers Hold?

Like you, I seem to have had a revelation (somewhere around 2022 but continuing this year) that the good people of America will be fighting Trumpist authoritarianism for decades to come. It’s become the new American sin – not the original sin, but the adopted sin. A sin that was completely avoidable yet irresistible to the power-hungry and to the ignorant. One thing that makes it so dispiriting is that broad swaths of the American public either don’t take it seriously, or they actively (think they) desire it. Life since 2016 has resembled a horror movie where people become zombies not because they are bitten, but because they go down the wrong internet rabbit holes. The mainstream press isn’t immune, either, having developed an insatiable thirst for “Forgotten Man” blood long ago.

The first of several responses from TPM Readers to yesterday’s Backchannel …

FWIW – I keep finding myself wondering whether, in terms of American politics, we are experiencing something of a rerun of Reagan’s reelection.  The current situation, of course, differs in all kinds of ways from the situation around New Years, 1984.  The geopolitical realities are very, very different.  American society has become much more polarized since then, and much more unequal.  Climate change did not loom in anything like the same way.  Gerrymandering had not become an art form, and neither major political party included millions of people who had explicitly soured on democracy and lived within an epistemic bubble.

Josh Kovensky looks at the “day one” executive orders ex-President Trump is planning if he returns to the White House.

It’s not unexpected. In many ways it was inevitable after Republicans (technically the races are non-partisan) lost their state Supreme Court majority with the election of Janet Protasiewicz back in April. But it’s still a very big deal. The Wisconsin state Supreme Court has ruled that the state’s GOP gerrymander is unconstitutional and ordered the legislature to draw new maps for the 2024 general election. If the current gerrymandered legislature can’t agree on a plan with Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, the court said it’s prepared to create its own.

The Court deciding to slow roll Trump’s appeal when it often happily fast rolls topics it’s eager to make law on speaks for itself. It’s also important to remember that the arguments themselves, by any standard of existing legal understanding, are wholly specious. It’s been DOJ policy and conventional understanding for half a century that a sitting president cannot face criminal charges. The president isn’t above the law, the argument goes, but for a mix of practical and separation-of-powers reasons, charges have to wait for after the president leaves office. Trump is arguing that a president can’t ever be charged with a crime. Call it neo-Nixonian reasoning: If the president does it, it can’t be a crime. He’s further arguing, among other things, that if you get acquitted at your impeachment trial you have legal immunity for those acts going forward.

Justice delayed is justice denied. The American republic is waiting for justice. There’s no rationale for this decision other than assisting Trump’s strategy of delay which he hopes, and which may, allow him to end the whole prosecution if he wins the 2024 election.

I very much doubt a majority on the Court has the stomach to actually entertain these arguments. But giving Trump an assist on the calendar? Sure. Absolutely.

I wanted to flag your attention to two articles on Hamas and the Israel-Hamas War generally.

On the fate of the hostages, the Times of Israel reports that senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad tells Al Jazeera that his group is not interested in releasing any more hostages, even for a ceasefire lasting multiple weeks. I take this as more confirmation of the point we discussed yesterday, which is that the remaining hostages, or at least a substantial number of them, are the sole remaining strategic asset Hamas has. Hamas’ leadership rightly see itself as in a war to the death with Israel. So they’re not going to give those hostages up.