A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss new data points on the Dobbs leak and the shifting prognostications of the midterm elections.

You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.

In case you didn’t notice I wanted to draw your attention to one thing. While Senator Schumer and the White House were trying to revive some skinny version of the BBB and climate legislation with Joe Manchin, Senator McConnell tried to scuttle those talks with a threat. He would pull GOP support from the China competition/CHIPs bill if the Democrats did not drop those negotiations. As it happened, Manchin scuttled the deal so the threat became moot. Then the CHIPs bill passed the Senate yesterday and then within like an hour — voila — the Manchin deal was back and somehow finalized. Senate Republicans were clearly pissed but the bill had already passed the Senate.

It certainly seems like Senate Democrats pulled a fast one on their Republican colleagues. As surprising as it may seem, it’s hard to see how Manchin wasn’t in on it at some level. House Republicans certainly seem to think so. They’ve now switched to whipping members to vote against the bill. Notwithstanding the fact that it actually has broad bipartisan support, as well as strong support from the semiconductor industry and the foreign policy and national security community. But the House isn’t the Senate. Democrats don’t need Republicans to break a filibuster. They probably don’t need Republicans at all. The question is whether enough House progressives will take the lead of Senator Bernie Sanders and vote against the bill as a giveaway to corporate America. But the administration seems to have members of the House Progressive Caucus broadly on board. Adding to the complexity and the fun, voting against the bill probably represents an electoral liability for Republicans in a number of key districts.

I guess he’ll have to come for the rest of us, too.

Donald Trump said today that he plans to sue CNN for defamation, claiming the network and digital news outlet has been defaming him since the 2016 election. And he takes specific and particular issue with use of the term “Big Lie,” a phrase which nearly every mainstream news outlet in America has used as short hand for his attempted coup since the 2020 election.

New Georgia Senate poll out this morning from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Warnock 46%, Walker 43%. This is in line with other recent polls which show a modest but consistent Warnock lead. Meanwhile, three new congressional generic polls have come out over the last 24 hours, two of which give the Democrats a six point advantage and one of which gives a 4 point margin. One of those 6 point margins is actually a Republican Party poll. Why they chose to release it I’m really not sure.

Various other midterm metrics continue to move slowly but perceptibly in Democrats’ direction. As we’ve discussed at various points over the last few weeks, the House especially is still very much an uphill battle for Democrats. But this trend makes me think Democrats holding the House in November is definitely possible and getting more likely. Not remotely a lost cause.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told reporters today that he has no plans to weigh in on the bill to codify same-sex marriage into federal law until the measure is brought to the Senate floor.

“I’m not going to make an observation about that until the issue is actually brought up in the Senate,” he said.  

It’s a standard delay tactic that other Republicans have used in recent days as Democrats push to pass crucial privacy-related protections into law after the Supreme Court overturned Roe — and to get their Republican colleagues on the record about their stances on important and long-established American rights, like same-sex marriage and access to contraceptive care.

TPM Reader PT notes — and rightly so — that it’s actually remarkable that there are only four Democratic senators expressing any real level of resistance to changing the filibuster rules. That’s a massive sea change from as little as four or five years ago. As I’ve noted, I fully expect Warner and King to give way in short order if their constituents press them. Its really just the two odd men (people) out: Manchin and Sinema. Today and going forward it is impossible for a Democratic candidate to be elected to the Senate anywhere in the United States while supporting the filibuster. It’s anathema among Democrats. But in this post I wanted to step back from the immediate necessity and partisan advantages of ditching or scaling back the filibuster to note how important it is for the future of civic democracy in the United States for the filibuster to be abolished.

Filibuster defenders now usually argue some future advantage. Senator King says that what seems like an obstacle today will be needed as a shield in the future. Filibuster opponents correctly respond that it is folly to believe that the current Republican Party would hesitate for a moment to ditch the filibuster if it represented any meaningful obstacle to getting anything they wanted. They took the wildly unprecedented step of refusing to entertain a Supreme Court nomination for an entire year to steal the seat left vacant by Antonin Scalia. They ditched the filibuster for Supreme Court appointments as soon as they had the chance to pack the Court under Trump. Everything we know about the current GOP tells us it’s folly to believe they’d hesitate.

We’ve got our first “Roe and Reform” score change. The office of Sen. Duckworth reached out to Kate Riga this morning to inform her of Senator Duckworth’s position change on Friday. She’s now in the Yes column. That means the “Keeping It Vague” group goes from 11 to 10 members.

Our new and revised “Roe and Reform” list has just been published. A new, cleaner format. Details on where all 50 Democratic senators currently stand on passing a Roe law and committing to suspending the filibuster rules to guarantee an up or down vote. I’ll be honest. This isn’t moving fast enough. It’s frustrating. If Democrats can line up commitments to pass a Roe law in January 2023 if they hold the House and add two additional senators, their chances of holding Congress will increase substantially. I really think it’s likely the make-or-break thing. But Democrats across the country need to pressure their senators to get on board, make the clear and public commitment. The problem is that senators living in Senateworld have their own instinctive resistance to committing, even to things they support. When you live in Senateworld, the importance of these kinds of things can be lost on you. The tens of millions of people who are devastated, angry, outraged, afraid don’t necessarily focus on the admittedly kind of obscure issue of legislative vote counts and how they interact with election messages in a topsy turvy midterm. But there’s this big, big opportunity that just requires getting all the wires connected so the machine can really move. That’s why this list is so important. It’s a guide that can help ordinary voters actually put Roe on the ballot in November, not just as a vague slogan but for real.

A former leader of a religious right activist group recently admitted on a podcast that the language that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito used in his damning majority opinion overturning Roe v. Wade mirrored rhetoric the Christian group has been pushing on Supreme Court justices for decades.

Rev. Rob Schenck recently appeared on an episode of the State of Belief podcast to discuss his efforts as a former member of the group Faith and Action to, essentially, sway justices’ views on social issues through prayer sessions. The interview is from earlier this month, but Politico surfaced it here. It’s worth a listen if you want to get a better understanding of how these unofficial evangelical lobbying-via-prayer efforts work, but it reinforces a theme we covered earlier this summer when an official at the evangelical organization, Liberty Counsel, was caught on a hot mic bragging about secretly praying with Supreme Court justices.

On Saturday, in a post about the current state of and future of Trumpism, I said that a key reason for the slow deterioration of Trump’s 2024 support is his relentlessly backward-looking and self-centered focus. In other words, it’s the Big Lie and the ways in which the Big Lie has incorporated the Mueller probe, his impeachments and all of his other first term wounds and grievances. TPM Reader TS wrote in to say that while he agreed with my argument he wondered whether Jon Chait’s related piece modified or changed my view of this. Chait argued that the conventional wisdom, which holds that Trump needs to give up his fixation on the 2020 election, is plainly wrong. Not only does he not need to drop the Big Lie — in fact, it’s his best strategy for getting the 2024 nomination.

So who’s right?