If his impeachment inquiry noise-making gambit doesn’t work in swaying far-right House Republicans to get in line and move forward with appropriations bills that are at least passable in the Democrat-controlled Senate, then House Speaker Kevin McCarthy may have to grovel at House Democrats’ feet — again.

The defeat of Issue 1 and the win for abortion rights in Ohio last night stands as another datapoint in an ongoing trend: abortion rights have consistently prevailed when placed on the ballot — an observation that, notably, holds in red and purples states — since Roe’s overturning last year. And it emboldens ongoing efforts by pro-abortion rights and left-leaning groups to push Democrats to embrace the issue as a wedge that could help them hold the Senate and take back the House in 2024.

The far-right Christian legal group whose work you’re almost certainly familiar with is in the news today for an incredibly befuddling reason: a Trump-appointed judge in Texas ordered lawyers with Southwest Airlines to attend eight hours of “religious-liberty training” courses with the group, Alliance Defending Freedom.

While the details of and procedural developments surrounding the Big Indictment against the former president have consumed the news cycle since it came out last week, there’s still (at least) one more indictment heading toward Donald Trump that may come, if it comes, before we close out the summer.

An Arizona county run by Republicans recently voted against moving forward with plans to try to get rid of electronic ballot-counting machines and to conduct the tabulation of the 2024 election by hand. While initially propelled in part by conspiracy theories about voting machines, the all-Republican county board of supervisors determined that ultimately moving to a hand count would be too expensive and the methodology too unreliable.

In the hours since special counsel Jack Smith announced charges against Donald Trump for his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, Trump’s allies and the right-wing media have been pushing a weird theory that the special counsel wants to punish Trump with either hundreds of years in prison or … death.

Yes, death.

As my colleague Josh Marshall notes below, today’s Times/Siena Poll gives us the clearest sign yet that, if you’re a Republican candidate and you’re not named Donald Trump, your grip on the Republican Party and the minds and hearts of GOP voters is tenuous at best and barely existent at worst.

Just a few hours after we noted last night that Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL), the only Black Republican in Florida’s congressional delegation, very softly criticized one line of Florida’s new Black history curriculum, Team DeSantis responded with outsized fury.