Politics

There’s a saying in Florida: “the further south you go, the more north you get.” Those familiar with the state’s geography know this reflects the reality that most of the southern regions of the state — Palm Beach, Miami, Naples, Fort Myers — have large cohorts of migrants from up north. There is even a logic to who moves where. Northerners from New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and the other New England states come down Interstate 95 and end up in southeast Florida while Midwesterners from Illinois, Ohio and Michigan travel down I-75 and settle in the southwest part of the state. This migration is not a new phenomenon. Over the past twenty-five years, Florida’s population has boomed unlike anywhere else in the country.

You must have seen the horrific story reported out of Ohio. A 10-year-old child became pregnant through sexual abuse. Under the new post-Roe abortion laws in Ohio, she is ineligible for a termination because she was found to be six weeks and three days pregnant. Her unnamed doctor called a named abortionist in next-door Indiana where terminations can currently be performed past six weeks and began the process of arranging the out-of-state procedure. Someone took the story to the press, where it quickly became a Handmaid's Tale-level news item, the near-perfect example of everything wrong with overturning Roe v. Wade. It was almost too good (or too evil?) to be true. The victim was very young, below the average age of menses.

Biden stuck in no-man’s land on Ukraine How long should Americans expect to pay sky-high prices at the gas station, Joe Biden was asked at the NATO summit in Madrid last week. “As long as it takes so Russia cannot, in fact, defeat Ukraine,” the president replied. With the economic situation deteriorating, even if gas prices have eased somewhat, Americans are not likely to find that answer especially encouraging. By Saturday, the scapegoat had changed, with Big Oil in the president’s crosshairs. “Bring down the price you are charging at the pump to reflect the cost you’re paying for the product. And do it now,” Biden demanded on Twitter, prompting a sharp rebuke from Jeff Bezos.

Thursday’s decision by the Supreme Court that the Clean Air Act does not give the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) authority to proceed with President Obama’s Clean Power Plan is much more significant than the narrow grounds on which it was decided. The Clean Power Plan was already dead. It had been repealed and replaced by the Trump administration, decisions that were later struck down by a court of appeals. Moreover, there is history between the EPA and the Supreme Court. In 2014, the Court ruled against the EPA’s rewriting of the Clean Air Act to facilitate its use as a tool of climate policy, which was already seen as “poor and probably unworkable” by officials in the Obama administration.

Now that America’s focus has zeroed in (for the time being) on the Supreme Court’s controversial decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Democrats are hoping the predictions of a midterm red wave will dissipate. It’s possible. But it’s worth noting that whenever Democrats think they have a winning hand, they almost always overplay it. Will this time be any different? On Thursday, President Biden — who clearly does not abide by Senator Arthur Vandenberg’s aphorism about politics stopping at the water’s edge — blasted the Supreme Court’s “mistake” while speaking at a NATO summit in Madrid.

Liz Cheney made two interesting moves last week. One, she was among the fourteen House Republican who voted to pass the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act that her Wyoming colleagues in the Senate, John Barrasso and Cynthia Lummis, refused to support. Two, she offered publicly to instruct her Democratic constituents in the state of Wyoming how to register to vote in the Republican primary election on August 16, thus allowing them to support her against Harriet Hageman, her Trump-endorsed opponent. For decades Wyoming Democrats have taken advantage of the Wyoming Republican Party’s idiotic policy of allowing cross-over voting in the primaries, thus virtually guaranteeing that the most conservative candidate will be eliminated at the beginning of any electoral proceeding.

The January 6 Committee geared up to deliver a potential bombshell on Tuesday with emergency testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to chief of staff Mark Meadows. But like most of the attempts to take down former president Donald Trump — from Russian collusion hoaxes to slimy porn lawyers — Hutchinson's testimony quickly revealed itself as too good to be true. It quickly became clear that one of Hutchinson's most shocking claims was either misremembered or an outright lie. She claimed that Tony Ornato, White House deputy chief of staff for operations, and Bobby Engel, who headed Trump's security detail, told her that Trump had attempted to grab the steering wheel of a Secret Service vehicle to redirect it to the Capitol on January 6.