From TPM Reader JS on the Idaho abortion decision which was unofficially released today.
Don’t miss the big issue here: There were four votes to decide the case on the merits, Justice Jackson along with Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch. Jackson says she’d vote in favor of abortion rights and the latter say they’d vote against. Five Justices, however, voted to dismiss the case altogether and essentially punt for another day (but dissolve the stay on the district court’s injunction). Among those five are Justices Kagan and Sotomayor. Had just one of them voted in favor of deciding the case, the Court would HAVE to reach the merits. So that tells us that Kagan and Sotomayor believed the merits would have gone against abortion rights. While I understand their decision, I have to say I strongly disagree with it. They should have forced the Court to decide the issue, rather than let Roberts push it off to a non-election year. Sure, this will temporarily help women in Idaho, but allowing Roberts and his colleagues to gut further abortion rights AFTER the election is a long-term bad thing. I commend Justice Jackson for recognizing this.
A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh prepare for the first debate and the flood of Supreme Court decisions amid which it’ll happen.
You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
One of the things I’ve enjoyed — one of the many — about your lists of your favorite Editors’ Blog posts is being reminded of ones I’d mostly forgotten about. Your favorites and mine too tend not to be about political news. They’re more about ideas about politics or history. That makes sense since the pieces about political news are the most ephemeral. The ones about broader observations or theories and commentary retain some relevance over time. This morning TPM Reader RL — the same one who wrote in about NY-16 — followed up and pointed to this 2017 piece on Bob Dylan’s three Christian albums — 1979–1981. I enjoyed writing that and and reading it again going on a decade later.
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We got the result that vibes, conventional wisdom and limited polling — always questionable in a low-turnout primary — led us to expect in NY-16: Rep. Jamaal Bowman went down to a decisive bordering on overwhelming defeat. Current results give County Executive George Latimer 58% of the vote to Rep. Jamaal Bowman’s 42%. “Current” isn’t a throwaway line. The results I’m looking at say that is 88% of the vote. New York is notoriously, verging on comically, slow to count votes. You don’t hear about it as much as you should because we don’t have a lot of high-profile national races, though last cycle and this one we will have a handful of House races that could well determine who controls the House.