2017 Again

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

Voters will get their first chance to react to the Supreme Court overturning the constitutional right to an abortion in less than a month.

In Kansas, during the sleepy August 2 primaries, the “Value Them Both” amendment will appear on the ballot. A yes vote means that the state constitution’s enshrinement of a right to abortion, so interpreted by the state Supreme Court in 2019, will be nullified. There will be no statewide abortion protections, the government doesn’t have to fund the procedure and the legislature is free to ban abortion outright.

A no vote means that abortion remains available in Kansas.

It feels a lot like the 2017 Georgia special election between former secretary of state Karen Handel and young documentary filmmaker Jon Ossoff.

The battle over the House seat in Georgia’s 6th district was intense, and record-breakingly expensive. Money poured in from all over the country, and the race drew much more attention than a plain old off-year House race usually does.

It was the first chance for Democrats to vent their spleen since they watched, slack-jawed, Donald Trump win the presidency and Republicans maintain their control of the House and Senate a year earlier.  

But Democrats were the decided underdogs. The party hadn’t controlled the seat since before Newt Gingrich won it in 1978. The district’s vote splits in recent presidential elections showed that it was getting more competitive, but Trump still won it in 2016. Ossoff was a first-time candidate, while Handel had served as Georgia’s secretary of state for three years.

Handel’s win launched 1,000 think pieces on the toothlessness of the Democratic response to Trump, and the weakness of the party’s backlash.

Soon after, Democrats swept back to the House majority on the back of a gigantic blue wave. Republicans retained the Senate, though the map favored them heavily.

So too in Kansas, the coalition fighting the amendment has the steeper climb. State Republican legislators purposefully scheduled the ballot vote for the primaries rather than the general election, banking on low turnout giving more power to the committed conservatives who tend to show up for primary elections. Beyond that, there are more unaffiliated voters in Kansas than there are registered Democrats — and those people usually have nothing to vote for during partisan primaries, necessitating a drastic change in voter behavior.

The text of the amendment itself has been panned as purposefully confusing — it names popular abortion ban exceptions like pregnancies born of rape or incest, while empowering the legislature to pass bans without those carveouts – and a recent law state Republicans passed over Gov. Laura Kelly’s (D) veto is stymying anti-amendment organizing efforts.

So keep your eye on Kansas, but keep the context in mind. Things do change, if not at the speed some of us want — after all, Rep. Lucy McBath (D-GA) flipped the Georgia 6th for the first time in 40 years just two years after Ossoff’s defeat. 

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

— Kate Riga

How The Fake Electors Scheme Could Give The DOJ A Way Into Trumpworld

Trump and those around him have been under near-constant criminal investigation since summer 2016. At least for the big guy, it hasn’t amounted to much, though the same can’t be said for some of his associates.

This week, a Fulton County grand jury issued subpoenas to the inner circle around Trump during the 2020 transition – lawyers and advisors that pressed Georgia officials, including Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, to toss out Biden’s win in the state. Those subpoenaed include Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Rudy Giuliani, as well as other Trump attorneys liked John Eastman, Cleta Mitchell, and Kenneth Chesebro.

The subpoenas signal not only a focus on the efforts of Trump and those around him – Graham included – to push Georgia officials to invalidate or, in Trump’s case, “find” enough votes to flip the election result. They also show that investigators are interested in the fake electors scheme – the subpoena to Chesebro asks about that directly.

— Josh Kovensky

A Deal With The Devil

As the country was reeling from the Supreme Court’s dismantling of Roe v. Wade, the Louisville Courier-Journal dropped a massive bombshell last week: Biden was set to tap a conservative, anti-abortion Federalist Society member named Chad Meredith for a lifetime appointment on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky.

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear (D) confirmed the report, and Kentucky officials suggested that Biden had made a deal with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) in which the latter wouldn’t obstruct the President’s other nominations. The existence of the alleged deal hasn’t been confirmed, but either way, news of the planned nomination left Biden’s fellow Democrats and abortion rights advocates flabbergasted and outraged. And then the fiasco somehow got even worse when it was revealed that Biden had planned on nominating Meredith on the same day the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade.

Now Beshear and other Democrats are demanding that Biden scrub Meredith’s planned nomination. The White House has repeatedly refused to comment on the matter, however.

— Cristina Cabrera

• Former White House counsel Pat Cipollone, a key advisor to then-President Trump who pushed back against some of his attempts to subvert the election results, reached a deal to sit for a transcribed interview before the Jan. 6 Select Committee on Friday. We may see some of that testimony on Tuesday, when the committee holds its next public hearing, featuring live testimony from Sarah Matthews, the Trump White House’s deputy press secretary who resigned immediately after the Capitol attack.
• Evangelical Leader Brags About Secretly Praying With SCOTUS Justices: Peggy Nienaber, an executive director at evangelical organization Liberty Counsel, was caught on a hot mic claiming that some justices “will pray with us, those that like us to pray with them,” and that “we’re the only people who do that.”
• Michigan GOP gubernatorial candidate Ryan Kelley on Thursday pleaded not guilty to four misdemeanor charges related to his alleged participation in the Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6. Kelley’s not-guilty plea comes a day after he boasted about his allegiance to former President Trump and his election fraud falsehoods during a debate against other Michigan GOP primary candidates.
• Trump Quietly Stepped Down From TRUTH Social Board Before Subpoenas Started Flying: The SEC and the DOJ are examining the company’s planned merger.
• The Internal Revenue Service commissioner has requested that the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration investigate how ex-FBI leaders James Comey and Andrew McCabe were both subjected to a very rare, intensive audit. The moves came a day after it was revealed that Comey and McCabe, some of Trump’s biggest preoccupations, were both selected for an intensive tax audit called the National Research Program in 2019 and 2021, respectively.
• And lastly, catch up on TPM investigative reporter Josh Kovensky’s reading recommendations this month: 5 Books That Get Me Unstuck.

“Them’s the breaks.”

– British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on July 7.

That was how the scandal-plagued U.K. leader capped off his announcement that he was finally resigning after months of public outrage over his lockdown-breaking parties and, most recently, over revelations that he’d lied about not knowing of the groping allegations against his deputy chief whip.

Johnson had been stubbornly ignoring demands for his resignation, but he eventually gave in after more than 50 of his ministers ditched him. Them’s the breaks! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

— Cristina Cabrera