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Trains were at the heart of the political scene this week. Internationally, President Joe Biden took a 10-hour train ride to get to Kyiv in person (which he must have thoroughly enjoyed, knowing his general love of trains). Domestically, the trainwreck in Ohio became sidetracked into a political circus.
The overturning of Roe v. Wade was seen, by Republicans, as the end of a very long road. Democrats, however, saw it as a call to action and just the start of their own long road, back to full rights for all American women. And the backlash to the Supreme Court removing rights from women continues to drive turnout at the ballot box. A primary election in Wisconsin last night showed how powerful the issue still is for voters, and it may have bigger repercussions than most elections since the office at stake is a state supreme court justice. Currently the court has a 4-3 conservative majority, so if a liberal were to be elected it would change the balance of judicial power in the state.
Nikki Haley became the second officially-announced presidential candidate from either of the two major American political parties yesterday. Initially she had teased that her big announcement would be today, but she must have been overcome with the Valentine's Day spirit or something, so she jumped the gun. Haley and Donald Trump are now the entire "officially-announced" field for 2024. Which immediately leads me to wonder: "Who's next?"
It is always amusing when the Republican Party is forced to perform a whiplash-inducing 180-degree turn on an issue that they've solidly been on the other side of for a very long time. The previous notable instance of this was likely during their whole "repeal and replace Obamacare" fiasco, when they suddenly realized en masse that one of the most popular things about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was the protection of people with pre-existing conditions who had previously been categorically denied even the chance to purchase health insurance. All of a sudden, Republicans started swearing up and down that they would also protect people with pre-existing conditions -- usually without a hint of how they were going to accomplish this fact. But they all started singing from Obamacare's playbook and praising it to the skies as a good thing (where previously they had tried to convince everyone that everything in Obamacare was bad and downright evil). In Tuesday's State Of The Union speech, President Joe Biden forced another major ideological U-turn of this magnitude upon the GOP, ironically aligning himself (!) with Donald Trump in the process. That's got a certain "through the looking glass" quality to it, you have to admit.
Tomorrow night, President Joe Biden will mark the halfway point of his first term in office by delivering a State Of The Union speech. He will remind Americans of all the things he has accomplished so far, and he will likely have a pared-down list of things he thinks he might still accomplish even with a divided Congress. All of which is traditional and expected. But what we can all also expect is a "soft launch" of Biden's re-election campaign.
Next Tuesday night, President Joe Biden will deliver his State Of The Union speech to a joint session of Congress. Today, he got some good news he will without doubt be touting in this speech -- the unemployment rate is not just low, not just "lower than it ever hit under Donald Trump," but historically low. The last time the unemployment rate was a mere 3.4 percent was in 1969, before we sent any men to the moon. If it falls any further, we'll have to go back to 1953 to find a similar number. So we certainly expect this to be prominently featured next Tuesday night.
That headline is somewhat of a misnomer, of course, since when the phrase "...and then there were [number]..." is usually used, it conveys a shrinking of the field -- a Hunger Games style announcement-in-the-sky to mark when a tribute (contender) dies (literally in the stories, metaphorically when it comes to politics). In this case, though, it refers to the fact that there will soon be two official major-party candidates for president of the United States, not just one: Donald Trump and Nikki Haley (both Republicans). Haley has not formally announced, but has scheduled an official announcement event for February 15th. Trump, of course, announced about twelve seconds after the midterm elections, in an effort to distract from the storyline that he backed a whole bunch of losing candidates and quite possibly cost the Republican Party control of the Senate (once again). President Joe Biden is widely expected to announce on the Democratic side, but this may not happen for weeks or even, conceivably, months, because being the sitting president gives you the luxury of choosing your own timing.
Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy is in a bind, quite obviously. He's got one member of his caucus who is not just politically toxic but politically radioactive. George Santos is currently being hounded by packs of reporters -- which is not exactly normal for a freshman congressman -- because there are just so many questions that remain unanswered about all his various lies and fabrications. Some of which may wind Santos up in some legal trouble, so he's keeping mum for the most part. And it doesn't seem like a day goes by without some further revelations of his pathological lying, which means those reporters aren't going to get bored with the story any time soon.
Remember the midterm election campaign last year? Remember what Republicans ran on? Apparently they're counting on everyone just conveniently forgetting, and pulling their usual "bait and switch" trick by loudly proclaiming they have a sweeping "mandate" on all sorts of stuff they barely (if ever) mentioned while running for office while largely ignoring the things they did actually run on. With the House of Representatives in Republican hands now, we will all get to see their real agenda, as opposed to the agenda they sold to the voters last year. The open question is what the public will think of it all.
President Joe Biden gave a speech this week on the state of the American economy. On his watch, the economy has greatly improved as we all dug ourselves out of the pandemic recession together. So Biden deserves a victory lap. He also used the speech to draw a stark comparison between Democrats responsibly steering the economy and Republicans who apparently are salivating at the prospect of blowing it all up.