Domestic news round-up, April 14
There's more going on than the Ukraine war
Let's start with DeSantis' Florida abortion law, Jared Kushner (again, somehow), and Texas pulling a Belarus and shipping its migrants.
Florida 15-week abortion ban is part of a wave of state abortion bans anticipating a Supreme Court ruling on Roe. Quoting Alanna Vagianos in Huffington Post:
Although a 15-week ban isn’t as extreme as Texas’ vigilante abortion law, which bans the procedure at about six weeks, many advocates and pro-choice lawmakers caution against viewing a 15-week ban as any less harmful.
“The vast majority of abortions in the United States do occur before 15 weeks, but the ones that occur after 15 weeks are the most compelling cases,” Florida state Sen. Lori Berman (D) told HuffPost in January.
“You’ve got individuals who want the pregnancy but are then told about some kind of problem that will occur with the pregnancy that might not fall into these limited exceptions [the law] has given you. You have 14-year-old girls who are in denial that they’re even pregnant,” she said. “Now, because of COVID, you have people who aren’t even able to get into a doctor before 15 weeks of pregnancy. You also have women who are saving money who don’t have the funds to be able to afford an abortion, so it might be 15 weeks before they get the money together.”
So far, Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, Oklahoma, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming have similar bans on the books. Quoting Sophie Kasakove's summary in The New York Times today:
Near-total abortion bans have been introduced in 30 states this year, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights. Bans have passed at least one legislative chamber in seven states: Arizona, Idaho, Wyoming, Florida, Kentucky, Oklahoma and West Virginia. They have been enacted in four of those states: Oklahoma, Arizona, Idaho and Wyoming.
Meanwhile, Jared Kushner is back in the news, under scrutiny because of yet another seemingly un-earned, undeserved reward he's getting, this time from Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund, which expressed reservations about giving $2 billion to someone as irresponsible as... well, Jared Kushner.
The New York Times simply states that "Before Giving Billions to Jared Kushner, Saudi Investment Fund Had Big Doubts", which is a mild understatement. MSNBC has perhaps a clearer headline for this:
The issue is that the complete lack of reasonably expectable return on investment makes this $2 billion from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia look like a payoff, either for favors done or yet to be done. As Aaron Blake points out in the Post on the 11th of April, this fits into a fairly extensive timeline of Trump flip-flops and his relationship with the Saudis that was at first troubled, then surprisingly cozy.
Two plus two isn't exactly very hard work to do on this Kushner thing.
It's impossible to let pass unmentioned Greg Abbott's stunt of "shipping migrants to DC to make a political point". That happened today, according to multiple sources (see: NBC, CNN, The Hill).
This fits into his increased border restrictions as well, a fairly stupid-seeming political move that required a relatively quiet economic understanding to be reached today with the governor of Nuevo Laredo, the Mexican state adjoining Texas, per ABC 13 from El Paso.
These border restrictions - and their economic impact - are being seized on by Beto O'Rourke, per AZ Central on April 12th; trucks are waiting up to 16 hours for inspections. This is a particular issue for truckers, who are paid by the mile, not by the hour, as John Oliver's recent show explains (helpfully, it's entitled "Trucks"). This not only means that there's a severe shortage of people willing to drive trucks for a living, it means that it gets worse every time a systemic delay is introduced, like Texas has.
It's a rather natural shift to go from discussing regional idiocy with regard to abortion and immigration to discussing the '22 midterms, from the Republican side of the hill. Herschel Walker's candidacy, as Elie Mystal explains in The Nation today, says a lot about how the midterms are going to go in terms of Black folks, and for that matter key states like Georgia. It's not on white people's radar as much as, say, the Ukraine war - probably because it requires an uncomfortably nuanced understanding of race and representation, rather than feel-good jingoism about a country that isn't yours, I'd guess, but this is about to be in media res once summer hits and the political ads really start in earnest. Quoting Mystal (at length, because it's so readable):
Georgia Republicans want Walker because he’s Black and Warnock is Black, and they think they can defeat Warnock in November if they can shave just a little of the Black vote from his base.
To be clear, I don’t begrudge Republicans their cynical political calculus. I’m offended at their racist belief that any old Black person is sufficient for their race-based strategy to work. It is easy to contrast Walker with other Black Republican candidates for Senate. Take, for instance, South Carolina’s Tim Scott (R–Sunken Place). I find Scott to be a mediocrity, and a coward. He’s a grinning stuffed suit who is more interested in pleasing his donors than serving his constituents. But that makes Scott no different than 60 to 70 other US senators. I, more or less, support the right of Black people to be as banal and craven as white folks have been for centuries while enjoying electoral success. That’s equality too, after a fashion: the right to be useless and unimpressive yet powerful while Black...
...Fast-forward two years, and white suburbanites are back on their bullshit, Republicans have consolidated and deepened their voter suppression efforts, and the Black voters who ran through walls to give Democrats a majority in the Senate have been told, repeatedly, by Democrats, that their efforts don’t matter because of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. Instead of stopping Republican voter suppression, Democrats have basically told Black voters to “vote harder.” Warnock could lose despite being an excellent and well-liked Senator these past two years, just as Doug Jones lost in Alabama to semiliterate coaching whistle Tommy Tuberville in 2020. Most white people in the South vote “R” like their entire white supremacist project depends on it, and it takes herculean efforts and near perfect conditions for everybody else to stop them.
If Walker is the nominee and somehow beats Warnock, it won’t be because Black people in Georgia were bedazzled by the Dallas Cowboys. Black people can spot the okey-doke. But Black turnout could be depressed—because of both voter suppression by Republicans and lack of political victories byDemocrats—and that would mean that the Black people who show up every election to vote Republican will be a higher proportion of the Black electorate. It will look like Walker “made gains” with Black voters, when all he would have done is get the same Black conservatives who would show up to vote for Walker, or David Perdue, or Stonewall Jackson in a midterm election.
It’s infuriating because the entire raison d’être of the Walker Senate campaign is the belief that Black people are easily manipulable children who will vote for other Black people like clapping seals, eager to perform tricks for the promise of treats. Anything other than abject and overwhelming rejection of Walker by all Black voters will be spun to fit that racist narrative, notwithstanding all of the other factors in play. If the Democratic Party blows Georgia, people will blame it on Black people voting for a fool instead of Republicans suppressing or outright discarding the votes of most Black people in Georgia.
Walker's status as a candidate is part of how the larger slate of Trump endorsees is doing. Frank Luntz says that Republicans are laughing at Trump behind his back and mocking him as "crazy" like New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu.
“I don’t know a single Republican who was surprised by what Sununu said. He said what they were thinking,” Republican pollster and media maven Frank Luntz told The Daily Beast. “They won’t say it [in public], but behind his back, they think he’s a child. They’re laughing at him. That’s what made it [Sununu’s comments] significant.”
When the mockery begins, the fear falls away. “Trump isn’t the same man he was a year ago,” Luntz says. “Even many Republicans are tired of going back and rehashing the 2020 election. Everybody else has moved on and in Washington everyone believes he lost the election.”
Meanwhile, the G.O.P.'s avowed focus on crime as a campaign message for the midterms appears to be hampering actual work on criminal justice reform in the Senate, per Marianne Levine in Politico on the 14th of April.
In other news:
An unnamed lawmaker (I'm guessing the other California Senator, Alex Padilla) claims, in an exclusive to the SF Chronicle, that Dianne Feinstein is mentally unwell and her short-term memory appears to be going; they had to reintroduce themselves multiple times to her during a recent interaction.
Increasing case counts have the White House still worried about COVID, according to White House officials talking to Adam Cancryn at Politico, despite the new CDC guidelines that also factor in death counts, hospitalization rates and hospital carrying capacity; new cases may be severely underreported, and there is still risk of another outbreak.