The Supreme Court began its new year today. This could wind up being the most consequential term for the high court since they decided Bush v. Gore. Because unless Donald Trump scores a clear win in November -- winning so many of the battleground states that challenging the result would be pointless -- we are likely to see the election results wind up before the Supreme Court in one way or another. Which will give them the power, once again, of determining who will be president for the next four years.

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There were two major events in the presidential race this week, but we are left wondering if either one of them is going to make much of a difference one way or the other. Perhaps we're getting a bit jaded by it all....

The first was the one-and-only vice-presidential debate, held on CBS this Tuesday. Republican JD Vance faced off with Democrat Tim Walz, and it was watched by 43 million people as it aired. The second was the public release of a document prosecutor Jack Smith had previously filed with the court in Donald Trump's January 6th case. It laid out Smith's basic case, in great detail (165 pages' worth).

In a normal campaign season, either one of these would have been impactful, perhaps shifting the polling in significant ways. But in our hunkered-down tribalistic politics, the needle barely quivered. Maybe we're all getting a bit jaded?

There were two other rather large events that could affect politics this week: the massive damage Hurricane Helene did -- especially in the Appalachian Mountain region -- and an East Coast dockworkers' strike. The first shouldn't really have been political, and the second was over almost before anyone was aware it was happening.

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The makeup of next year's incoming Senate is anybody's guess, at this point. Republicans could wind up winning control, Democrats could wind up maintaining their control, and it all might come down to who wins the White House (since the vice president would break a 50-50 tie for control). From the way things look, there are a handful of states which will determine who winds up with a majority.

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After what were arguably the two most consequential presidential debates since at least the Nixon-Kennedy debate (which launched the era of televised debates), last night's vice-presidential debate was pretty... well, normal. It harkened back to the age before Donald Trump entered the political scene, when two candidates would debate political issues without getting overly vicious or personal in their attacks, in the hopes of presenting themselves to the public as acceptable leaders of the country. That was really the striking takeaway from last night -- a return to normalcy, in the midst of yet another Trumpian rollercoaster of a presidential campaign. In fact, this normalcy stuck out as completely abnormal to the bizarre political landscape Trump has dragged us all into for the past nine years.

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While waiting for tonight's vice-presidential debate I find myself reflecting on a question I've been occasionally wondering about over the past few years: what will a post-Trump Republican Party look like? We'll all be seeing one possibility tonight, as JD Vance takes the stage to debate Tim Walz. Because whether Donald Trump wins or loses the presidential race this time around, Vance seems poised to perhaps move into a sort of "MAGA heir apparent" role within his party. After all, Trump picked him to put on the ticket, which is more than anyone else can say (other than Mike Pence, of course, but the less said about him the better). But he'll likely have some challengers for the mantle of party leader once Trump somehow exits the scene.

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Tomorrow night might be the last big television event of the 2024 presidential race. JD Vance and Tim Walz will debate each other, and since Donald Trump is so far resisting the idea of having a third presidential debate, this may be it for face-to-face encounters between the two campaigns. So I found myself wondering what I would ask the two candidates, if I had the chance.

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Donald Trump got his start in politics by infamously pushing the "birtherism" lie about Barack Obama. Now he's pushing what might be called a "burgerism" lie about Kamala Harris -- that she somehow just made up the fact that she worked at McDonald's back when she was a student. It's all a measure of the desperation Trump finds himself now wallowing in, since to date none of his attacks against Harris have even come close to landing.

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As we near the finish line of the 2024 presidential race, we're going to start doing these columns more frequently. Sooner or later I will have to write one each week for the final sprint, but I'm not committing to that quite yet. In any case, it has been two weeks since our last look the state of the Electoral Math, so let's take a look at what has changed since the big debate.

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Thanks to the decision of one man, Nebraska will not be making an eleventh-hour change to the way they apportion their Electoral College votes. This is a very obscure sort of thing, but in one particular scenario it could be key to the entire presidential election. This makes the news that one Republican in Nebraska's state government has decided not to go along with the last-minute change rather important.

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Donald Trump (rather infamously) never admits he's wrong. Even on things that are easy to disprove with incontrovertible evidence, Trump will still insist he is right. He will construct an alternate reality inside his own head where he is proven to be right and all those who disagree are proven to be in some giant conspiracy against him, and he will go right on insisting that up is down, or that night is actually day. He never backs down and certainly never apologizes -- no matter how much harm his lies may cause.

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