Girding Our Loins

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

With one Supreme Court term in the books, we can look ahead to the fall, where the Court is poised to act on everything from guns to consumer protections to taxing the wealthy.

In perhaps the most well publicized case of the upcoming term, the right-wing justices will have the chance to expand gun access even more, albeit with a case featuring a spectacularly flawed poster child. The question — presented by a Texas drug dealer who has, per court documents, threatened multiple women with his guns, shot at a driver after getting in a car crash and fired into the air at a Whataburger when his friend’s credit card was declined — is whether it’s constitutional to prohibit people under domestic violence orders from having guns.

Perversely, some gun control advocates hope that the case will force the Court to somewhat narrow the vast allowances of its landmark gun decision last year, if the justices are ultimately too queasy to legally arm people who have demonstrated violence.

The docket so far includes other cases that are less headline grabby, but also carry serious weight. Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, created in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, is under existential threat. The Court is poised to further weaken executive branch agencies with opportunities to overturn the Chevron doctrine, and to expand the use of right-wing doctrines they’ve been employing as cover to knock down agency regulation and authority. And the increasingly popular ideas within the Democratic caucus to tax the very wealthy may ultimately be killed before they were even passed.  

Gird your loins here, with my look at what’s coming. 

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

— Kate Riga

We Did It, You Did It

To those of you who contributed to the TPM Journalism Fund, whether because I asked you to or because one of my smarter/better/cooler colleagues convinced you to give, thank you <3 

It’s been really, really wild to witness how many people were willing to donate their hard-earned cash to TPM simply because they like reading the stuff that we like writing about. I’m not sure I could ask for a better gig or better readers.

My colleague Josh Marshall unpacks here what all of this means to TPM far more eloquently than I can. 

— Nicole Lafond

Mamma Mia

Last week, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis stopped by TPM’s local pizzeria, Grimaldi’s. It was part of a pizza freedom culture war fight that the right had been brewing, in which a series of right-wing news outlets and politicians claimed that NYC liberals had passed a regulation that would ban coal pizza ovens in the Five Boroughs.

That story was untrue: there’s a proposed rule which would mandate restaurants that have solid fuel-burning ovens to install a device that removes particulate matter from the exhaust. DeSantis, however, ran with it, visiting Grimaldi’s to make a point about pizza and oven freedom, saying that the libs “want control,” its latest manifestation being in the NYC pizza wars.

We at TPM put our money where our mouth was this week and ordered Grimaldi’s. It was tasty! Coal-fired, authentic, New York City. Unlike DeSantis, we actually live here.

— Josh Kovensky

One Step Forward, One Step Back

With this week came major abortion news, both on restricting and expanding the procedure.

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) –  steamed that the state Supreme Court deadlocked on a six-week gestational ban, keeping abortion legal in the state – is calling the legislature back for a special session next week to pass abortion restrictions.

Earlier this year, the court tied 3-3 on whether to nix a four-year-old injunction blocking that ban from springing to life. While the court is composed entirely of appointees of Republican governors, the partisan lean is less apparent than at other judicial venues (see: the justice who wrote for the three blocking the ban expressing concern about a “woman’s interest in autonomy and dominion over her own body.”)

But the fate of a new restriction would be less clear. Much of the decision of the three to block the ban stemmed from the sheer judicial weirdness of the legislators trying to fight a ruling they didn’t challenge at the time four years later. A new law wouldn’t have those bizarre circumstances.

Over in Ohio, pushing in the opposite direction, abortion-rights groups announced that they had nearly twice the number of signatures needed to put abortion protections on the ballot in November. Should they ultimately prevail, the procedure will be protected in a state governed by a Republican governor and legislature, along with a conservative-majority Supreme Court.

But the fight isn’t quite over. State Republicans, squarely trying to sink the abortion amendment, have whipped up their own ballot proposal to go before voters in an oddly timed August election, coincidentally, a few months before the abortion question goes live. That proposal would raise the threshold for citizen-initiated proposals — but not legislature-initiated ones — to 60 percent from a simple majority.

“For those who wonder can this be done, can we defeat the anti-democracy efforts in August and can we pass this amendment in November, let me tell you something — this coalition has been up against the full force of the corrupt government in Columbus for a decade and we still have abortion access in every corner of the state,” Kellie Copeland, executive director of Pro-Choice Ohio, said at a press briefing for the submission of the signatures. “We will win in August when we vote no and we will win in November when we vote yes.”

— Kate Riga

“Don’t be such a political whore. I have no ide [sic] who you really are but TPM is a propaganda outfit for the Left who hate America. Here’s your quote: ‘Talking Points Memo are whores for the DNC.’”

That’s former Trump White House official Sebastian Gorka responding to TPM investigative reporter Hunter Walker’s request for comment on if he approves of the Republican National Committee’s new initiative encouraging early voting and mailed ballots.

The new initiative — named “Bank Your Vote” — got staunch criticism and pushback from some of the right-wingers within the Republican Party, especially ones who have made the Big Lie and stolen election conspiracy theories their entire personality.

Call me a “political whore” but this quote makes all the hard work worth it ❤️❤️❤️

— Emine Yücel