Prime

You can never understand national politics without understanding the elite mores of Washington, DC. People toss around the word “elite.” But here I mean it in a more specific sense of the mix of journalists, staffers, elected officials, lobbyists, activists and more who have power in and essentially run the political town of Washington, DC. (The actual place where most of the population lives is a different thing.) As I’ve written in various contexts over the years that strata of the city remains heavily wired for the GOP, even though there are lots of people from that world who certainly aren’t conservatives and by definition many are Democrats. I wanted to flag something to you that kind of captures it.

Republicans are falling over each other to tell us as clearly as they can that the reversal of Roe is a massive electoral liability. You have longtime “pro-life” diehards running towards TV cameras insisting the whole thing is totally no big deal. In fact, you’ll barely notice anything happened. Lots of states will still have abortion. Abortions will be so easy to get you’ll be getting abortions right and left. Or at least that seems to be what virtually every Republican senator is saying.

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.

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.

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.

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.