No, wait... that can't be right...?

Sorry for opening with some snark, but we felt that was the appropriate tone for addressing this week's legal developments. Republicans have been swearing up and down for years now that President Joe Biden's son Hunter somehow bribed his father to use his position as vice president to do... well, something nefarious... and that all they really needed to do was dig into it all and the evidence would then appear.

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Once again, it appears Congress is not going to do its constitutional job on time. October will dawn without a federal budget in place for the next fiscal year, unless (by some miracle) everything gets done in the next two weeks. This miracle is not likely to happen -- it's on the order of wishing for both Donald Trump and Joe Biden to announce tomorrow that they're not running for president next year. It's just not going to happen, in other words.

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We hate to do this (as we suspect we'll be doing it recurringly for the next year or so), but once again the biggest political news of the week came from the legal system. Almost all the news was from the Republican side of the aisle, because of course it was. (And we promise that our subhead this week will be explained in due time, too... but not until the very end of the column.)

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Mike Pence gave a speech today in New Hampshire, and it actually made some news (I know! I'm as astonished as you probably are...). Pence devoted the whole speech to an argument for the Republican Party to return to its conservative roots and move dramatically away from economic populism. Which is rather odd, since by "populism" he basically means "all that stuff Donald Trump said and did while I was serving as his vice president." Consistency has never been conservatism's strong suit, I suppose....

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It is rare in American politics when Democrats manage to win a political "messaging" war with Republicans, but it certainly seems like they've got a doozy of an opportunity to do just that, on the issue of lowering prescription drug prices. This messaging battle really began in earnest this week, and so far Republicans are losing badly.

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Could we finally be approaching the official end to the federal "War On Weed"? That possibility now exists thanks to the Department of Health and Human Services, who just made a recommendation to the Drug Enforcement Agency. And while it is not the unconditional surrender that pro-cannabis activists have been hoping for, it certainly would be the first major retreat in this metaphorical battlefield ever. If the H.H.S. advice is adopted by the D.E.A., the federal government would scale back a position that can only be described as "Draconian," and instead adopt a position that is a whole lot closer to reality.

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In one month we may face yet another government shutdown crisis, if Congress doesn't act before then to pass some sort of federal budget. And from the vantage point of one month out, the possibility of chaos seems high no matter what eventually happens. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is going to be forced to act one way or another, and it seems every option he has is going to leave some portion of his own party very angry with him.

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We will start this column (as every public speaker is taught to) with a joke. We saw two Republican spectacles this week: the first was watching all the "not-named-Trump" presidential candidates trying to verbally mug each other onstage for two hours, and the second was Donald Trump himself scowling into a jail camera for his first-ever mugshot. You might say it's been a very muggy week all around.

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Overall, tonight's first Republican debate was pretty entertaining, at least to me. These days, the entertainment value of a debate is a lot more important than scoring any kind of ideological points, so I'm using the same scale everyone else will.

There wasn't a whole lot of actual debate about differences in ideology... some, but not a lot. It was instead more of a series of one-on-one shouting matches between two of the candidates. More on those in a moment.

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Once again, the political week was dominated by news of Donald Trump. And we can all now properly identify Trump as a "twice-impeached, four-times-indicted ex-president." Sadly, the English language stops after "once... twice... thrice..." so there is no (legitimate) snappier way to say that (although we would suggest "quad-indicted," since it does seem to have a ring to it... but we digress...).

Linguistic kidding aside, Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis finally completed Trump's quartet of indictments, adding 13 more felony charges for Trump (who has now been charged with a whopping 91 felony counts in total) as well as plenty of other felonies to go around among his 18 co-defendants. Rather than take a targeted approach by just charging Trump with the easiest-to-prove-in-court charges, Willis swung for the fences and corralled all the wrongdoing within one RICO charge covering everyone. Trump and his campaign and all his legal team and even his thugs on the ground in Georgia are all now accused of being a "racketeering-influenced and corrupt organization." Sounds about right... especially after the news broke that the grand jurors who voted for the indictment have been doxxed online and are now getting threats -- just like you'd expect to see in any mob case. Trump even attempted to tamper with a witness before he even showed up to testify for the grand jury on Monday. The witness was not cowed and did testify, and very late in the evening the indictment was made public.

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