There were supposed to be three big political stories this week, but in the end two of them turned out to be duds. Donald Trump testified at his New York fraud trial, but without video or audio recordings of him answering questions under oath, the impact was significantly lessened. The other Republican presidential candidates (the five who qualified, at any rate) met for their third Republican debate, but it mostly turned out to be a snoozefest.

Tuesday night, however, more than lived up to expectations. The off-year elections which were held ended up as a big night for Democrats almost across the board. Put quite simply: abortion rights won. Big time. Everywhere.

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What was previously merely obvious has now become downright undeniable: the right to have an abortion is the most potent political issue around right now. When women's reproductive rights are on the ballot, it is a winning issue. Every time. This is going to help Democrats and continue to hurt Republicans for as long as women's rights are not universally protected in every state in the Union.

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This week is going to be chock full of big political stories, including Donald Trump testifying in his fraud trial in New York today and the third Republican debate on Wednesday. But today I thought it was worth taking a look at the other big political story of the week, since tomorrow's elections have several interesting possibilities that could reverberate beyond the borders of the states where they are held. Three states in particular are going to be impactful, no matter what the outcomes may be: Mississippi, Virginia, and Ohio.

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Republicans are in disarray. Let's start with that this week, shall we?

This week in the Senate, Republicans spent five whole hours ripping into one of their own. A group of GOP senators tried to force the hand of Senator Tommy Tuberville over his petulant hold on fast-tracking all military promotions, but to no avail.

The House, meanwhile, voted for an Israel military aid bill that is going nowhere in the Senate because (among other reasons) Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is diametrically opposed to the strategy.

The House also took the time to vote down a censure of a Democrat that drew Marjorie Taylor Greene's wrath, but also voted to let George Santos keep his seat. On both votes, there were significant numbers of Republicans crossing the aisle to vote with the Democrats.

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Senator Tommy Tuberville has never worn a uniform (unless you count a football jersey). And yet he feels he knows the United States military better than those who are serving or have served. In particular, he feels that his blanket hold on military promotions is an acceptable political-theater tactic, no matter the impact on people's lives or on the readiness of our military. Last night, members of his own party publicly took him to task for his tantrum, but they didn't succeed in changing his mind. The next step would be for the Senate to vote to essentially ignore Tuberville's parliamentary tactic and get on with what used to be a routine and non-controversial duty of the Senate: approving high-level military promotions. But to achieve this would require 60 votes, meaning at least nine Republicans would have to vote to shut down Tuberville's obstructionism.

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Mike Pence surprised everyone this weekend, when he abruptly announced he was ending his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination during a speech Pence gave in Las Vegas. The surprise wasn't that Pence's presidential ambitions were doomed -- anyone with half a brain could see that from the get-go -- but that Pence had actually realized it himself, this early in the process. Personally, I knew from the day he announced that Mike Pence was never going to win the Republican nomination -- not even if Donald Trump had suddenly decided not to run. Even without Trump in the race, Pence would still have been doomed. His flavor of Republicanism is a thing of the past, he has an incredibly bland and smarmy personality (he really deserves to have Trump hit him for being "sanctimonious," much more than Ron DeSantis), and he enraged the MAGA crowd by not following the Dear Leader's order to somehow wave a magic wand and overturn the results of the 2020 election on January 6th. Add all of that up and it equals a big defeat from the Republican voting base, plain and simple. So watching the coverage of the development on yesterday's morning political-chatfest shows wasn't any real surprise (other than the early timing of it). What was a surprise (for me, at least) this Sunday morning was to see Arnold Schwarzenegger being interviewed (for some unfathomable reason) on NBC's Meet The Press.

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After three weeks of junior-high-school levels of adolescent slap-fighting, Republicans in the House of Representatives finally (!) chose a speaker. Was this largely due to fatigue at how tawdry the whole clown show was, or was it the fear that some moderate members were actually considering working with Democrats to come up with a solution? We'll never know, but we certainly are glad it's over. For now, that is. The rule on the "motion to vacate" hasn't changed, so while Speaker Mike Johnson seems to be enjoying something of a honeymoon period with even the furthest-right of his caucus, things could always go south for him, since all it would take would be five disgruntled Republicans to kick him out too. And disgruntled is what MAGA extremists do best, so we'll have to see whether this comes to pass or not in the weeks ahead.

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Last night, at the Republican shrine of Saint Ronald of Reagan, seven Republican presidential candidates appeared on the same stage to debate each other. Of course, the real winner of the debate was the candidate who didn't show up: Donald Trump. Even the moderator, at the very start, had to get a little snarky about this, beginning with: "Let's meet the candidates who have qualified -- and chosen -- to be on the stage tonight...."

Not too surprisingly, the second debate shared one glaring similarity with the first: utter chaos. The networks hosting these debates have a hard choice to make -- they can either cut off (or heavily dial the volume down) the microphones of all the candidates who did not just get asked a question, or they can just succumb to the fact that Donald Trump has changed debate rules forever (by not having a shred of decorum or respect for the rules). This was made obvious once again, last night.

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It's almost time for the second Republican debate, although we're still waiting to hear who exactly will be allowed on the stage Wednesday night. Just as in the first debate, frontrunner Donald Trump will not be on the stage, not through being disqualified in some way but because he has decided (once again) to stage his own event in an effort to "counterprogram" the Fox debate. Trump has a big problem with the Ronald Reagan presidential library where the debate will be held, but even without that dynamic he still likely would have skipped this one as well. He is -- quite accurately -- figuring that there isn't a whole lot of upside for him showing up, since he is already so dominant in the polling at the moment. So once again we're going to see all the candidates who have yet to truly challenge Trump's standing with Republican voters bickering among themselves.

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Program Note: As I mentioned last week, I am playing hooky today. So I went looking for a column to re-run and came across this one, from almost exactly eight years ago. It's stunning in the sense of plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, since it wouldn't take much more than changing a few names to be almost perfectly relevant today. It was written the week that John Boehner announced he was stepping down from being speaker and retiring from politics. At the time (as you'll see), Kevin McCarthy's name was being bandied about as a replacement, but ultimately Paul Ryan was chosen as a sort of sacrificial lamb instead.

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