Sen. Ron Johnson’s comments on abortion today are revealing. He has the yikes quote: Abortion “might be a little messy for some people” post-Roe. But the real takeaway is his other comment, suggesting that the whole thing is no big deal because women will still be able to cross the border to Illinois and get an abortion there. That tells you very clearly that he doesn’t want to run on opposition to abortion in his state when it really matters — not just a hypothetical about what judges might do in the future or the options for women in deep red states. It’s an issue that can be used to pry that Senate seat right out of his hands.

I got this note from TPM Reader BF and I thought I’d share it with you and also share some thoughts of my own.

It would seem that trail of leaks out of the Roberts Court have not only continued but evolved into a de facto comms policy. Politico published a new story overnight which reports that in fact none of the four Justices who initially sided with Alito have changed their position and that no dissenting opinions have yet been circulated. The details are interesting (if entirely unsurprising). But what’s most notable is the continued leaking. There’s no new draft given to the Politico reporters. But we have a continued flow of information about the internal deliberations.

Sure, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), go ahead and take home the trophy for passing the most outrageous/bizarre/problematic anti-education laws of all the red state governors in the land, if that’s the distinction you’re after.

At this point, it seems that’s the governor’s goal (coupled with the, seemingly, broader party aim to distract voters so completely with such non-serious non-existent issues that they don’t remember why they decided to support GOPers in the midterms in the first place).

The latest DeSantis culture war to get legislated into law in Florida: a sidetrack focus on communism.

My post from last night has spurred some very intense responses. I don’t agree with them. In fact, they tend to confirm in my mind the points I was trying to make in my original post. But I thought I would share them with you to give a flavor of them and let you make up your own mind.

Susan Collins called the cops to investigate “defacement of public property” after an unknown person wrote a message in chalk on the sidewalk near her home asking her to codify Roe.

I’m seeing a lot of commentators saying the bill that Democrats propose to codify Roe will rapidly be rejected by this Supreme Court. If it’s not accompanied by Court expansion there’s no point. While I appreciate that these remarks are proffered in good faith and quite possibly accurate as predictions, it’s still losers’ logic.

Everything in our politics and society today seems stuck, hanging, thrusting forward in a foreboding moment of transition in which essentially nothing seems good but just where it’s all going isn’t at all clear. One of the big transitions is the shift of the tech world from its general indifference to politics in the first decade of the century, to a generally D-aligned engagement, to one that is increasingly but by no means universally aligned with the right and the hard right. In general many of us are accustomed to think of the tech high flyers as reflexively laissez-faire on economics while being cosmopolitan/libertarian on social issues. That latter stance isn’t liberalism, though it’s fairly close in the context of U.S. politics. This is changing rapidly, however, and I want to note some particulars about a development you may have heard about.

For weeks, analysts in the U.S. and across Europe speculated and worried that the May 9th Victory Day parade in Red Square would be Vladimir Putin’s moment to announce a dramatic escalation in his war against Ukraine or issue dire new threats against NATO and the U.S. for arming Ukraine. It’s been the focal point of anxiety, perceived danger, the platform for the next big thing. And yet it all happened today and almost literally nothing happened. They had the parade with the big ICBMs. Putin gave a speech. It was defiant, repeated the basic message we’ve been hearing for months — Ukraine is Nazis, it’s a replay of World War II, Russia’s fate is at stake. But that was it. No announcement of mobilization, no dire nuclear threats.

Of course, thank God, more or less. That’s good news. And yet it’s another dog in this crisis that hasn’t barked. Something’s got to give — either fold or escalate — and yet nothing does.

Just to bring us up to speed on the events of the weekend, Republicans are galloping rapidly toward a national ban on abortion (entirely predicted and predictable) and state efforts to ban birth control in the expectation that those bans will be approved by Republican-heavy federal courts operating in a post-Roe legal environment.

Along those lines, I wanted to share these thoughts sent in last week from a highly knowledgable observer of the elite appellate legal world in Washington, D.C.