I have been so pleased by the way TPM Readers have allowed me to expand on the complexities of the Musk/Ukraine/Starlink question. As TPM Reader JS explains, it’s actually not true that the US military doesn’t need Starlink or isn’t using it. It’s true that the US military has a whole system of secure satellite communications. The US wouldn’t have found itself in the situation the Ukrainian military did when Musk blocked the use of his satellites over the Crimean coastline. But that’s not the whole story.

Faced with what looks like a near certainty that a newly liberal-controlled state Supreme Court will toss out their notorious 2011 gerrymander, Wisconsin Republicans have threatened to impeach and remove newly elected Justice Janet Protasiewicz before she even rules on her first case. But today Republican leaders in the state House and Senate came forward with a new plan to workaround the lawsuits and controversies over the 2011 gerrymander and adopt new maps created by at least nominally nonpartisan staff.

Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, who’d have to sign the new bill, quickly shot down the whole idea. “Republicans are making a last-ditch effort to retain legislative control by having someone Legislature-picked and Legislature-approved draw Wisconsin’s maps,” said Evers. “That is bogus.”

Predictably, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), trying to avoid a shutdown and hold on to his gavel, has now endorsed an impeachment inquiry against President Biden. But I wanted to flag how the inside D.C. sheets manage to carry water for House Republicans even when they are notionally highlighting the oddity of a full blown impeachment inquiry based on literally nothing.

Note this graf in a morning newsletter from Punchbowl…

I want to return to the topic Nicole LaFond wrote about in yesterday’s column. Senate Republicans spent the day last week getting a detailed polling brief explaining (and searching for a solution to) how it is the public got the idea that “pro-life” politicians want to ban abortion. Who is responsible for this terrible misunderstanding?

I hesitate to use the term “gaslighting” because it’s become so ubiquitous and overused in our culture. Even that phrase doesn’t quite capture it, a shift that is somehow both instant and glacial — a kind of policy moonwalk in which the evacuees are so stunned and disoriented it’s not always clear whether they’re fooling their marks or themselves. It now seems clear that the only thing that will be at all memorable about the GOP’s first presidential debate of the 2024 cycle on August 23rd will be that brief speech from Mike Pence in which he staked his campaign on his bible-rooted, evangelical, pro-life record and endorsed a 15-week national ban.