Two Weeks of Chaos

Hello! It’s the weekend, this is The Weekender. ☕

The tenants of my apartment building in southwest Washington D.C. had a patio party a few days ago. We gathered under a too-small cabana, a wide swath of people who’d been in the building for decades and those of us who moved in recently. Drinks sweated on the table under the blistering summer sun.

Whenever a new person joined the crowd, a similar exchange would ensue.

“How’s it going?” a member of the group would ask.

“Good. Well, good considering,” the newcomer would respond.

Cue wry chuckling around the group.

An air of unfurling disaster has clouded the liberal enclave of D.C. in the last two weeks, as the Supreme Court moved faster than even the most pessimistic court watchers imagined to reverse the right to abortion we’ve (theoretically) enjoyed for 50 years, to knock down a century-old New York gun licensing law and to shackle the EPA’s ability to regulate power plant pollution even while the devastating effects of climate change become ever clearer.

Reactions are big — hundreds swarming the Supreme Court building, raising their voices to compensate for the soaring fencing keeping protesters well back — and small — a young woman I passed by on my run worriedly agreeing with someone on the phone that “gay marriage is definitely next.”

And the hits will keep coming. In a final salvo, the Court revealed that it will take up a case based on the independent legislature theory next term, which has the potential to completely undermine American elections.

There’s no way around it: it’s a bleak moment for a corroding democracy.

During the protests over the murder of George Floyd, I remember hearing a common refrain from activists in person and online. Rest, they’d say, is a necessary part of resistance. Eating, sleeping, going on walks, hugging the people you love — those things make you whole enough to return to the fight against the unjust and the cruel. Weariness is hopelessness; despair is giving up.

The same goes for all of us who are invested in a better America than the one we have now. We can’t afford to look away, even when the last few weeks have been painful and upsetting. So instead we take a breath. We take a step back. We fill our cup with love, however that looks.

It’s going to be a long slog. And the only chance we have will ride on the backs of a thoughtful and engaged citizenry.

Rest. Revive. You’re not alone. 

More on other news below. Let’s dig in. 

— Kate Riga

Was Hutchinson’s Testimony News To The DOJ?

When this week began, few knew who Cassidy Hutchinson was. Her testimony on Tuesday changed that, and much else: she offered the first detailed, first-hand account of how Trump and his senior lieutenants behaved in the run-up to Jan. 6, and of how they reacted to the violence of that day. She revealed that Meadows and others anticipated violence before Jan. 6, that Trump cheered it on privately as well as publicly and that, critically, he may have taken concrete steps to facilitate the attack on Congress.

That last point about facilitating – or, inciting – the attack comes down to a few lines of Hutchinson’s testimony. Before the speech on the Ellipse, Hutchinson told Congress, Trump was informed by security officials that there may be a threat in the crowd beyond the metal detectors: men with weapons that included spears and AR-15s. In the Trumpiest possible reaction, Hutchinson said that the former President was having a meltdown about the crowd size for the speech. He exhorted the Secret Service to get rid of the metal detectors, saying that the armed men wouldn’t hurt him, and that they should march onwards from the speech to the Capitol.

That series of statements stunned a political and legal world that, by this point, is pretty deeply inured to Trump’s wrongdoing. To some legal scholars I spoke with, who had been previously skeptical that Trump was exposed to criminal charges by his actions on Jan. 6, that portion of Hutchinson’s testimony changed their minds, making Trump potentially chargeable on incitement or obstruction of Congress. That’s not to say that we should expect the DOJ to charge Trump; only that Hutchinson’s testimony has changed the minds of people who understand this issue deeply and follow the facts of Jan. 6 closely. 

As Alan Rozenshtein, a former Obama DOJ official told me, “it’s the single greatest betrayal of American democratic principles since the civil war.”

— Josh Kovensky

The Fight Over Abortion Begins To Take New Forms

It’s been a grim first week without Roe. The magnitude of the loss of the 50-year-old constitutional right has been felt in every pocket of this nation. As Republicans cheers-ed the overturning, abortion advocates and Democratic officials in red states scrambled to make sense of the options in front of them.

The pathway back from Dobbs will be long and grueling, and much of it is still unmapped. President Biden on Thursday officially announced his support for a filibuster carveout that would allow the Senate to codify abortion rights into federal law – if only all 50 Democrats get on board. The usual two aren’t budging. But it was a meaningful move from the President after a week of demands for him to use his bully pulpit to at least advocate for substantial action. 

At the state level, we’ve seen a flurry of legal challenges to a bunch of the new bans and restrictions in red and purple states. Florida and Kentucky’s abortion bans were blocked this week at least temporarily – meaning those seeking abortions after 15 weeks in Florida and those seeking them, in general, in Kentucky, can still access the procedure, for now. The 15-week ban in Florida was scheduled to go into effect this week, but Leon County Circuit Court Judge John Cooper ruled that it violates the privacy provisions in the Florida State Constitution. In Kentucky, Jefferson County Circuit Court Judge Mitch Perry temporarily blocked the state’s 2019 trigger law from going into effect by issuing a restraining order at the request of two abortion clinics. 

As Josh Marshall has been saying for weeks, Democrats have one clear and necessary option they need to act on sooner rather than later if they hope to protect abortion rights and salvage their dismal midterm prospects: “I continue to believe — in fact it’s all but a certainty — that continued Democratic control of Congress and any near-term restoration of abortion rights across the country rests almost entirely on Democrats making a firm commitment to pass such a law in January 2023,” he wrote Friday. 

— Nicole Lafond

• The biggest story in Kentucky politics this week is the baffling so-called “deal” between President Joe Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) over a soon-to-be vacant seat on the federal bench. Matt Shuham has more here.
• Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was sworn in as the first Black woman to sit on the Supreme Court on Thursday, making history as she succeeds retiring Justice Stephen Breyer. In her speech shortly after her Senate confirmation, Jackson said that in her family “it took just one generation to go from segregation to the Supreme Court of the United States.”
• Colorado Election Deniers Had A Bad GOP Primary Night: Though their claims may have been popular among the Steve Bannon set, from Colorado’s secretary of state candidates down to county-level contenders, Republicans apparently weren’t willing to give the candidates the power to count votes.
• Todd Akin 2.0: Rep. Abigail Spanberger’s (D-VA) GOP challenger, Yesli Vega, suggested that it was unlikely that a person would become pregnant after being raped when asked about it at a campaign stop last month.
• And one more great read, in TPM Prime: Big Lie Millionaires Played A Key Role In Colorado Voting Machine Breach.

Wisecracks about schools having in-house drag performers? Not on GOP Michigan gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon’s watch!

When Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel (D) jokingly proposed having “a drag queen for every school,” Tudor and several state House Republicans knew something more sinister was afoot – and that’s why the gubernatorial hopeful is supporting their bill to ban schools from holding drag shows.

“She said she was joking, but we take this as a trial balloon,” Tudor said of Nessel.

Sure, neither she nor the bill’s co-sponsors could point to an actual existence of a school drag show and sure, they’re perfectly proving Nessel’s point about Republicans coming up with “fake issues,” but, uh, drag queen bad and trans bad, so get mad and vote for us!

— Cristina Cabrera