Abortion Monkey’s Paw

Hello it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕

For years, abortion served as a critical electoral carrot for Republicans, helping them juice turnout even for flawed candidates based on the driving imperative to a) overturn Roe and b) ban the procedure.

The chickens have come home to roost.

As election after election proves that voters are punishing Republicans for their extreme stances on abortion, 2024 candidates are facing an extremely difficult dilemma. They have to find a way to appease their anti-abortion stalwarts, while positioning themselves on the issue in a way that’s palatable to a more moderate general election audience.

So far, they’ve struggled.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) finally made mention of the six-week ban he just signed at a Heritage Foundation speech Friday — after signing the bill behind closed doors and avoiding mentioning it even before a friendly Liberty University crowd.

Former President Donald Trump tried to thread the needle on the issue this week, his campaign telling the Washington Post that the Supreme Court got it right when it left the issue to the states. Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, a major anti-abortion organization, was … not happy. The group said it would oppose any presidential candidate that didn’t support a 15-week national ban.

This difficulty is even evident in elected Republicans’ resounding silence after recent anti-abortion decisions on mifepristone, which Democrats are yelling about from the rooftops.

For years, Republicans have worked to craft a judiciary that would deliver on their anti-abortion aims. Well, now they’ve got it. 

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

— Kate Riga

An Infinite Loop of Bad Faith

At Fox News, it’s always the week after the 2020 election, the day Clinton email fever was at its highest pitch, the hour when the left stumbles over itself in corruption and incompetence and the right remains the bastion of sturdy old values.

It’s an editorial stance which has been incredibly effective in forming an alternate reality for millions of Americans, stoking real, deep emotions that keep its audience oriented towards the GOP’s priorities. But over the past decades, Fox News has typically been able to walk the line between the kind of mendacity that serves as a particularly effective messaging wing of the Republican party and the makings of a massive defamation case.

But Donald Trump becoming the ringmaster of the Republican Party — and, by extension, — Fox News’ base, flipped that equation. Instead of Fox News leading its viewers, the audience, led by Trump’s ego, could exert enough pressure to guide Fox News into, let’s say, a series of multi-billion dollar lawsuits with aggrieved voting machine companies.

That’s what happened after the 2020 election when, messages obtained and released by Dominion Voting Systems in its defamation lawsuit against Fox show, the news network boosted claims about Dominion’s involvement in comically absurd claims of voter fraud in order to retain market share among its Trump-loving base.

Fox and Dominion agreed to settle this week for $787.5 million. But by all indications, the underlying relationship between Fox, its content, and its audience has not changed. And it’s far from clear that the settlement itself — while enormous — will cause any change, or push any of Fox’s investors to change.

What might effect that, some have noted, is the prospect of these kinds of defamation suits becoming a regular expense for right-wing news networks — the prospect of having to regularly fund nine-figure defamation settlements could cause some investors to push for change. Less optimistically, as the Dominion records showed, those within Fox understood the bargain between them, Trump, and their audience perfectly clearly. The lies, and the $787.5 million, are just the cost of business.

— Josh Kovensky

Will GOP Obstruction Continue In Feinstein Saga?

The saga around longtime Sen. Diane Feinstein’s (D-CA) Judiciary Committee seat put Republicans in the spotlight this week, forcing some of them to make a commitment not to break from established procedures.

It all started when Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) set off alarm bells around the Capitol on Wednesday when he said there’s a strong possibility Senate Republicans would refuse to fill the vacancy on the Judiciary Committee even if Feinstein (D-CA) were to resign. Tester’s suggestion that Republicans might try to block Democrats from getting back their majority on the Senate Judiciary Committee — and block them from confirming Biden’s judicial nominees — ricocheted around the Capitol like a heat-seeking missile this week, according to a Democratic senator’s senior aide who talked to TPM.

But top Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans — including Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and John Cornyn (R-TX) —  have been insisting they would not go that far – likely because blocking a replacement for a retiring senator would be a dramatic break from precedent and could very well come back to bite them in the ass in the future. So Republican Senators, at least for now, are saying they will let Democrats fill Feinstein’s seat on the Judiciary Committee if she decides to retire. But as always best to take that with a grain of salt.

— Emine Yücel

Ron’s Terrible, Horrible, No-Good Very Bad Week

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) had a pretty bad week. Florida House Republicans, like Reps. Anna Paulina Luna and Byron Donalds, were lining up to endorse Donald Trump for president in 2024, so his team reached out to a handful of their compatriots in Florida’s Republican congressional delegation to delay their endorsements in the near future.

It (mostly) didn’t work. Rep. Laurel Lee, who used to be his secretary of state, announced that she would endorse him, but the week saw a steady parade of congress members opting for Trump instead. Since Monday, the former president has been collecting endorsements from Florida’s congressional delegation like Infinity Stones: Reps. Brian Mast, Michael Waltz, Gus Bilirakids, Greg Steube, Carlos Gimenez, and more all announced their intentions to support the Trump campaign. They even had a celebratory dinner.

DeSantis, meanwhile, has been losing favorability on his home turf: Politico reported on Thursday that Republicans in the state legislature have grown tired of acting like “the party of cancel culture” for the governor’s developing campaign. So far, #DeSantis2024 is looking real Jeb!-ish.

— Kaila Philo

“I don’t want to break all expectations. I want you to follow it. I want you to be on the floor. I want the anticipation. I want you to see. I want you to see as the clock goes up. I want you to write stories like I’m teetering, whether I can win or not. The whole world hangs in the balance and then I want you to write a story after it passes with the President sit down and negotiate.” 

That’s House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) this week when a reporter asked him if he has the votes to pass the spending cuts bill — which he finally released on Thursday after months of yelling about amorphous “CUTS” and disingenuously tying the debt ceiling to spending — and to free the debt ceiling from his own hostage taking.

If you were reluctant to take our word for it the past couple of months, here is — in McCarthy’s own words — why he and House Republicans manufactured this fake crisis around the debt ceiling.

They want the attention. They want to be able to claim Democrats are unreasonable and unwilling to negotiate on something they don’t have to negotiate on. He wants the headlines and the fake pressure campaign and the drama. All while risking economic damage around the globe. 

— Emine Yücel 

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