It is such a breath of fresh air, seeing Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson say from the bench what the 14th Amendment actually says. “It’s not a race-blind remedy,” she says, in something of an understatement. But we can actually go well beyond this since so much of modern jurisprudence, mostly but not only from the right, is based not only on ignoring the context and plain text of the 14th Amendment but pretending that the real Constitution — albeit with some additions and fresh paint jobs — is the one finalized in the first Congress as the first ten amendments. The Civil War amendments are not only not race-blind. They reflect a larger realization and aim: that the whole state thing just hadn’t worked out.

Yesterday I noticed the irrepressible Josh Kraushaar’s report on the Senate campaign. He’s one of the most notorious of DC reporters, now predictably working for Axios. He was positively giddy at newly good news for Republicans hoping to retake control of the Senate. But he’s not altogether wrong. Kraushaar focuses on two races — Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Democrats’ Mandela Barnes is now running behind Ron Johnson and John Fetterman’s once huge margin over Mehmet Oz has shrunk to mid- or low single digits. Kraushaar says Republicans are making gains by switching the discussion to crime. (Generally, he goes with his perennial hobbyhorse: Democrats are too liberal to win elections.) But I don’t think crime politics is precisely it.

So we know who Perla is. She’s Perla Huerta, a former combat medic and Army counterintelligence agent who was discharged from the Army only last month after two decades in the Army. The news comes from an article in The New York Times. But the information appears to come out of the investigation being conducted by the Bexar County (San Antonio) Sheriff’s department which announced a criminal probe just days after the story broke. The Times as well as lawyers working with the Venezuelan migrants in Massachusetts showed pictures of Huerta to several migrants who had either worked with Huerta or been hustled by her and shipped to Martha’s Vineyard. All apparently confirmed that Huerta was the “Perla” at the center of the operation.

I wanted to update you with some thoughts on recent events in the Russo-Ukraine war. When I write posts like this I usually get a bundle of messages to the effect of, “No, we can’t give in to Russian threats. We see where that’s gotten us.” So let me anticipate that by saying that I agree. I don’t think we should give in to increasingly shrill and unhinged Russian threats to use nuclear weapons over (literally or figuratively) Ukraine. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a highly and increasingly dangerous situation. To bring you up to date, over the last week discussions and planning in NATO and U.S. national security circles have turned heavily toward the possibility that Russia will use nuclear weapons in the Ukraine war. You can see various efforts to quantify these risks in terms of percentage chances or the rise in the percentage chance from last month to now. But really these things are impossible to quantify. Certainly they are impossible for me to put any meaningful numbers to. So what I’d like to do here is just describe the confluence of events getting us to the point where this seems like a real possibility.

It’s interesting to step back sometimes and consider the possible big pictures of our times. These connections won’t be new to many of you. They’re not to me, as far as they go. But it’s been clarifying and helpful to me nonetheless. Today we have our ongoing battle over democracy and authoritarianism in the U.S. The UK is in its latest stage of its ongoing national self-immolation. Italy has just elected its first far-right government since Benito Mussolini’s rise to power in the early 1920s. Russia, which has made itself into the international clarion of rightist, revanchist nationalism, is stumbling through a succession of largely self-inflicted catastrophes in its war of choice in Ukraine.

A series of polls out of Wisconsin show why you simply cannot ever count Ron Johnson out, unfortunately. Johnson has been consistently unpopular with Wisconsin voters for sometime. There weren’t many polls of the reelection contest until the last month or so, after Mandela Barnes finally secured the Democratic nomination. Over that period polls have gone from showing a surprisingly robust lead for Barnes to show an almost equal advantage for Johnson.

The DC insider sheets are already buzzing about the exciting news: House Republicans plan a new round of debt limit hostage taking next year. Of course, this is all treated as somehow totally normal, as opposed to an unconstitutional form of legislative terrorism. This piece in Axios walks through the ins and outs of it, noting the following ….

The debt limit turning into a “political football” has become a “pattern in divided government,” particularly with a Democratic president, Neil Bradley, chief policy officer for the U.S. Chamber of Congress, told Axios.

This is a crock. Let’s be honest. Only Republicans do this. It only happens with Democratic presidents. Perhaps understandably, the head of the pro-business Chamber — which is, paradoxically, somewhat reviled now in the Trumpite GOP — can’t say this directly. But journalists don’t have to repeat their nonsense. The leading contender for the key committee chairmanship that would call the shots on this is already being clear on what Republicans will do. Tell the President that he has to repeal his 2021-22 legislation or the country has to declare national bankruptcy.

If you look at recent polls, there’s definitely a drift away from Democrats in a number of key races. The shifts are tiny if you look at the race averages. They may simply be the sloshing back and forth of poll numbers which is essentially noise. My best guess, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, is that Republicans have gotten back on the airwaves in a number of key races and been helped by a few weeks or ominous economic news — market declines which create a backdrop of disquiet even for people who have little or no direct exposure to equities markets. These things are mostly beyond Democrats’ and individual Senate candidates’ control. But what campaigns do control or have some real impact on is what an election is about. And it is always critical to make the election “about” whatever it is on which you have the strongest hand. In this case, for Democrats, that’s on abortion rights.

This Washington Post article paints a picture of Kevin McCarthy completely at odds with the real life Kevin McCarthy many of us has observed for years. As the piece tells it, McCarthy is backroom enforcer you don’t want to cross. Not content to relive the fates of predecessors John Boehner and Paul Ryan, McCarthy has worked behind the scenes to prune the House GOP of the kinds of bomb throwers and fame-seekers who made Boehner’s and Ryan’s jobs so thankless. Says one McCarthy insider: “He is not a guy to be trifled with. It’s like they say in the Marine Corps, ‘No better friend, no worse enemy.’ And they mean it, and they act on it.”

Over the weekend I started thinking about a hypothetical: is there anyone in the Russian national security apparatus who thinks to themselves, “Yep, decision to pull the trigger on the invasion back in February … great call!”

I emphasize “think” rather than “say” since the mood in Russia doesn’t seem like one where doubts are likely to be expressed openly, at least at the upper levels of the national security establishment. People find ways not to ask themselves these questions, even in the privacy of their thoughts. But it is hard to imagine many managing to say yes. The suffering is overwhelmingly in and to Ukraine; they are the victims. But it is hard to imagine a greater self-inflicted wound than the one Russia brought on itself back in February, entirely at a time and place of its choosing.

I raise this question because, as you likely know, President Putin recently declared a “partial mobilization” in Russia, the first since the Second World War, which gives the state power to draft about 300,000 new recruits, though there are signs on the ground that the mobilization is actually far from partial.