There was activity in three separate court cases against Donald Trump today: two major courtroom events, as well as a ruling in an older case. The big ones were the continuation of Trump's current criminal trial in New York for another day of testimony (which ended with the start of the first cross-examination of a witness by the defense), and the Supreme Court finally (after a pointless two-month delay) hearing Trump's sweeping claims to presidential immunity. The ruling was from a judge in New York who just rejected Trump's move to hold a new trial or at least reduce the damages in the $83 million civil judgment against him for defaming E. Jean Carroll. The judge shot down both notions, so Trump's still on the hook for the full amount. But it was the two other courtrooms which were splashed across the headlines.

It can be tough to read the Supreme Court tea leaves and guess how each justice is going to rule on any particular case, but the consensus that seems to be emerging among court-watchers today is that Trump's breathtakingly-broad claim to presidential immunity (which included his lawyers struggling to justify how a president could order SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political opponent, or even to stage a coup, without facing any sort of legal risk for doing so) will almost certainly not survive intact. However, the consensus also seems to be that the appellate court decision that denied all of Trump's claims might be amended by the high court.

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Arizona Republicans (a few of them, at any rate) just pushed back against the extremist forced-birth movement within their party, in a big way. The lower house in the Arizona legislature just passed a measure that will repeal the state's Draconian abortion law. This is the law that was written during the Civil War and only had one exception in it: abortions were permitted to save the life of the mother. Rape and incest victims weren't included. Abortions were prohibited -- complete with a jail sentence for the doctor -- from Week Zero. This is precisely the type of law the most extreme forced-birthers want to see nationwide, it bears mentioning. If your position is that abortion equals murder, then there is no justification for any abortion that isn't done to save the mother's life, period. So to have Republicans cast the deciding votes to repeal such a measure is a very big deal, because it is the first time since the Dobbs decision was handed down that a Republican-run legislature has voted to relax forced-birth laws.

The motives behind such a move are pretty transparent. The three Republicans who voted with all of the Democrats did so for reasons of self-preservation. They thought (quite rightly) that their chances of being re-elected in their moderate districts would improve if they supported getting rid of this law. In fact, they may have improved the chances of the Republican Party at large in the state, although the Republicans who voted to keep the Civil War law in place probably don't see it that way.

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Today I found myself -- while reading the liveblogging from the lucky reporters who are covering the criminal trial of Donald Trump this week -- wondering how everything would be different if television cameras were allowed inside the courtroom. The reporters themselves occasionally lapse into petulant complaining about the restraints put on them by not having access to modern devices, and so their reporting has a kind of old-timey flavor to it (in a way). You can even picture one of them in a dapper hat with a "PRESS" card shoved in the hatband racing to a bank of pay phones to diligently phone in their copy and scoop their competitors. Well, you might have to try hard to picture that (depending on how old you are), but it's at least fun to contemplate while waiting for the next update from the courtroom. But how would this all be different if the whole trial were being carried gavel-to-gavel on cable news? And would this be a good thing or a bad thing, in general?

Many commented, after the death of O. J. Simpson, how his murder trial changed American courtrooms -- and television -- forever. Not having personally watched a single minute of it when it took place, I cannot attest to the truth of this, but I guess it is a fair point to make. So how would The People of New York v. Donald Trump be different if he were getting the full O. J. treatment right now?

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Republicans in the House of Representatives truly are their own worst enemy. It has been this way since the Tea Party revolt, more than a decade ago. And it shows no signs of changing or abating any time soon.

Here is the basic dynamic: House Republicans want to accomplish things, but most of the time they can't even get their own act together enough to get bills passed through their own chamber. The hardliner faction among them takes a "my way or the highway" approach and demands 100 percent of everything on their agenda. A lot of this is seriously radical stuff, so the more-moderate Republicans balk at voting for it. The speaker makes a choice and either puts the totally radical bill on the floor or he strips their stuff out and puts a more-reasonable bill on the floor. Either way leads to furious infighting among the GOP. For the radical bills, no (or very few) Democrats vote for them. Any radical bills that pass (most of them fail because some Republicans from swing districts refuse to vote for them) then go over to the Senate, where they immediately die. For the reasonable bills, Democrats vote for them en masse (as long as there aren't any deal-breaking "poison pills" in the bill). Reasonable bills pass with all (or almost all) Democrats voting for them and the reasonable Republicans (about half of them, give or take) also voting for them. But this inevitably leads to the hardliners trying to force out their own speaker. This already happened to John Boehner, Paul Ryan, and Kevin McCarthy -- and now Mike Johnson is threatened by the same fate. The infighting is fierce during these challenges to the party leadership. Some Republicans enjoy fighting with fellow Republicans more than they enjoy sparring with Democrats, it seems.

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We begin today with some rather sad breaking news. Outside the trial of Donald Trump in New York City, a man lit himself on fire in the protest area. However, from initial reports, this act of self-immolation was not actually political in nature, instead it appears to be the act of a man suffering from serious mental problems. From live reports from the scene:

A person familiar with the investigation into the man who set himself on fire said that one of the fliers that the man threw in the park referred to [New York University] as a mob, and another talked about the CIA and called the entire government a criminal operation.

A witness who saw the entire thing from a very short distance away said the man: "had a sign saying something about Trump and Biden working together to orchestrate a 'coup'," which clearly shows the act can't really be classified as partisan in any way. Anyone thinking that President Joe Biden and Donald Trump are "working together" on anything is obviously not in his right mind, to state the obvious. The man was still alive when taken to the hospital, but was said to be in critical condition. As of this writing, that's all the news there is on the subject.

Inside the trial room, the week ended with both a full jury and six alternate jurors being successfully seated, so everything is now on track for opening arguments to begin Monday morning. This is a faster schedule than some had anticipated, but the trial itself may take over a month to complete.

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We haven't done one of these for a while, but the disparate nature of the political news today seemed to suggest it was time for another "three-dot Thursday," where we follow in the footsteps of journalists of days of yore and heavily lean on our ellipses.

Today we have one serious story which could have very large political ramifications this November, as well as two monumentally silly stories to report from the Republican side of the aisle... but first...

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It has already been both a pioneering and superlative week at the crossover between the political and legal worlds (and it's only Wednesday!). Pioneering because this week saw both the opening of the first criminal trial of an American ex-president as well as the first Senate trial of a sitting cabinet member (after impeachment by the House of Representatives). The superlative part just happened today as well, as the "trial" of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas was undoubtedly the fastest impeachment proceedings ever to occur in the Senate. The senators were sworn in as jurors, and then (after a few hours of Republicans blathering in a failed attempt to delay the inevitable) the whole body voted on motions to dismiss the two charges contained in the impeachment. Both were strict party-line votes, so the Mayorkas impeachment trial is now over before it even began.

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The first criminal trial of Donald Trump leapt forward today in New York City, making more progress than some had predicted after yesterday's rather slow start. Seven jurors have now been seated, which is more than one-third of the total needed (there will be a dozen jurors and six alternates in total). Nothing will happen tomorrow (the judge has ruled that the trial will take a break on every Wednesday), but it's not out of the question that a full panel of jurors could be seated by the end of the week.

Trump's legal team has been busy digging into all the prospective jurors' online presences, and several were challenged today "for cause." Lawyers from both sides -- the prosecution and the defense -- can challenge jurors for a valid reason (showing bias, mostly) and they also have a limited number (10 each) of "peremptory challenges," where they can dismiss jurors for essentially no reason at all (other than: "I don't want that person on the jury"). As of this writing, Trump's lawyers have used up six of theirs and the prosecution has used up four. Of the jurors challenged by Trump's team, some were dismissed for cause, but not all of them (the judge has to agree that there is a valid cause, and he didn't for at least one juror).

Whether it happens by the end of the week or not, at some point the full jury will be seated and the trial itself will actually get underway. Trump has tried delaying this inevitability in pretty much every way he and his lawyers could think up, but finally the delays will be over and opening arguments will begin.

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I was reminded recently (by a reader who tweeted it to me) that the "People v. Donald Trump" trial which began today is not so much: "the porn-star hush-money case," but rather more properly: "the 2016 election-interference case." Because when all the tawdry details are stripped away (so to speak... ahem...) this is indeed what remains: Trump gamed the system to suppress bad news about him which could have influenced how people voted. And since a relative handful of votes in a few key swing states provided him with his victory, if he hadn't done so things could easily have gone the other way. To put it differently, we might now be in a frenzy of horserace speculation about which Democratic candidate would be the nominee to succeed President Hillary Clinton, at the end of her second term.

I know I'm not alone in thinking that the entire planet slipped into some sort of alternate universe in 2016 -- the "Bizarro World" of the Trump era. If this cosmic shift hadn't happened, America (and the rest of the world) would be in a very different place indeed right now, and that's putting it mildly.

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If Democrats have their way, the 2024 election will be a one-issue election for many voters (enough to win, hopefully). And conservative Republicans just keep making it easier and easier for that to actually happen.

In the half-century that Roe v. Wade was the law of the land, Republicans made a lot of political hay out of being what they called "pro-life," but what is now more accurately referred to as "forced-birth." They want to force every woman who ever gets pregnant -- no matter the circumstances, no matter the consequences -- to give birth, no matter what. American women (and men, it should be noted) do not support these radical restrictions of their rights. And they're now going to get to vote on it, in the clearest way since Roe was overturned. The 2024 election may well go down in history as being "the abortion election," to put this another way.

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