Did The Arizona Supreme Court Hand Biden Another Term?
Let's not go crazy here, but Arizona just gave Biden a big boost in his reelection bid. Also, is NPR biased against conservatives and RFK Jr's mishegas.
I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality. If you were sent this email or are a free subscriber and would like to become a paid subscriber, you can sign up here.
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Arizona’s Abortion Earthquake
Remember how I wrote earlier in the week that Donald Trump’s statement calling on states to decide their abortion policies was a savvy move and a potential path to navigating the minefield that is modern abortion politics?
The Arizona Supreme Court gave the go-ahead Tuesday to prepare to enforce a long-dormant law that bans nearly all abortions, drastically altering the legal landscape for terminating pregnancies in a state likely to have a key role in the presidential election.
The law predating Arizona’s statehood provides no exceptions for rape or incest and allows abortions only if the mother’s life is in jeopardy. Arizona’s highest court suggested doctors can be prosecuted under the 1864 law, though the opinion written by the court’s majority didn’t explicitly say that.
The Tuesday decision threw out an earlier lower-court decision that concluded doctors couldn’t be charged for performing abortions in the first 15 weeks of pregnancy.
Republican politicians want to avoid, at all costs, talking about abortion.
Meanwhile, GOP-appointed judges are all like …
However, let's be careful when discussing this decision's political impact. It’s certainly possible for voters to favor abortion rights and still vote for Donald Trump next November. Over the past two years, we’ve seen this phenomenon repeatedly play out in red states. For example, in 2023, Ohio voters supported a ballot referendum upholding abortion rights, but that didn’t stop them in 2022 from overwhelmingly reelecting their anti-abortion governor and electing an anti-abortion Senator.
Having said that, Arizona is not a red state. It’s a true swing state, with probably a slight Democratic lean. Democrats did well there in 2022—winning a gubernatorial and several other statewide races, and Senator Mark Kelly won a full term in office. Biden narrowly won the state in 2020 — the first Democrat to do so since Bill Clinton. Moreover, with Area Crazy Woman Kari Lake as the likely GOP nominee for Senate, Democrats had good reason to feel good about their chances this November.
The state Supreme Court’s abortion decision will almost certainly energize pro-choice voters and drive them to the polls — and since pro-choice voters overwhelmingly lean Democratic, well, suffice it to say, this is good news for Democrats. If the abortion issue pumps up turnout by just a few points or moves even a few thousand Trump voters to Biden in a state that the president won by less than 11,000 votes in 2020, it could be decisive.
And if recent polling is any indication, abortion is a major issue for Arizona voters.
An October New York Times-Siena College poll found that 59 percent of Arizona registered voters said abortion should be mostly or always legal; 34 percent said it should be mostly or always illegal. In a March Fox News poll, 39 percent of Arizona voters said abortion would be extremely important in deciding their vote for president, and 32 percent said it would be very important. Those who supported Biden in 2020 were nearly twice as likely to say the issue would be extremely important in their vote, 51 percent to 27 percent.
I’m not saying this puts Arizona out of reach for Republicans. Still, it probably moves it ever slightly in Biden’s direction, and considering Trump’s already low ceiling, that might be enough. If Biden wins Arizona, he could win Pennsylvania and Michigan while losing Georgia, Nevada, and Wisconsin and still capture reelection.
The bottom line is that if this abortion decision in Arizona moves that state toward Biden, he will have several viable paths to reelection, all the while significantly narrowing Trump’s path to 270.
Beyond Arizona, the state’s Supreme Court decision also plays directly into the hands of the Biden campaign’s national messaging on abortion. It’s increasingly clear that the president wants to make abortion the centerpiece of his reelection bid. It’s the one issue that has the power to energize Democratic voters, put Republicans on the defensive, and even persuade GOP voters to consider switching sides. And since 2022, we have a track record of abortion playing a decisive role in close elections. The Arizona Supreme Court upholding a 160-year-old abortion law — and then the GOP-controlled Arizona state legislature blockin an effort to repeal the law — is practically an in-kind campaign contribution to the Biden campaign.
Is NPR Biased Against Republicans?
Uri Berliner, a business editor at NPR, has written a piece for Bari Weiss’s Free Press newspaper that alleges the newspaper has lost its way by shifting its politics to the left and ignoring conservative viewpoints.
But it doesn’t take long to see that Berliner’s argument is unconvincing.
Like many unfortunate things, the rise of advocacy took off with Donald Trump. As in many newsrooms, his election in 2016 was greeted at NPR with a mixture of disbelief, anger, and despair. (Just to note, I eagerly voted against Trump twice but felt we were obliged to cover him fairly.) But what began as tough, straightforward coverage of a belligerent, truth-impaired president veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency.
Persistent rumors that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia over the election became the catnip that drove reporting. At NPR, we hitched our wagon to Trump’s most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff.
Schiff, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, became NPR’s guiding hand, its ever-present muse. By my count, NPR hosts interviewed Schiff 25 times about Trump and Russia. During many of those conversations, Schiff alluded to purported evidence of collusion. The Schiff talking points became the drumbeat of NPR news reports.
But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming.
Few things piss me off more than this bullshit argument.
In Mueller’s final report, he did not address the issue of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia because collusion is not a crime. However, his report provides a mountain of evidence that Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia — and even more evidence that he repeatedly obstructed justice. As I wrote several months ago:
According to Mueller, the Trump team openly “welcomed” Russian interference and even put together a “messaging strategy” around e-mails from Clinton’s aides that had been published by WikiLeaks and hacked by the Russians. According to testimony from former campaign aide Rick Gates, Trump most likely knew in advance that those leaks were coming. Perhaps the most obvious example of the Trump campaign’s collusion with Russian officials was his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who shared internal polling data with people who had ties to Russian intelligence. Shortly before he left office, Trump pardoned Manafort and two other members of his campaign named in the Mueller probe.
As Kevin Drum points out, Berliner’s other arguments, that NPR ignored the Hunter Biden laptop story and failed to look closely at the COVID lab leak story, are also inaccurate.
Now, I’d be first to acknowledge that major media organizations often have a liberal bias, though I’d say that is not so much an ideological decision and has more to do with facts having a liberal bias. But, if this is your best argument for NPR having a liberal bias, you need to try harder. Berliner claims he’s a liberal, anti-Trump voter, but he sounds more like a whining conservative too lazy to study an issue in detail.
Speaking Of Intellectual Laziness …
I have a new piece at MSNBC on Robert F. Kennedy Jr. … and I’m not messing around here.
Some will argue that he is an iconoclastic thinker willing to challenge conventional wisdom. Certainly, there is nothing wrong with challenging authority and accepted truths. It can often be a laudable pursuit. But as is the case with another know-nothing presidential candidate, in Kennedy’s hands, it’s little more than oppositional hardheadedness with which the parents of young children are all too familiar.
Kennedy’s worldview — and that of those who embrace his campaign for president — is emblematic of a strain of pseudointellectualism that confuses a refusal to accept facts with intellectual courage. In reality, moronic conspiracy theories are often just that: moronic conspiracy theories.
But it’s also a byproduct of extreme privilege and arrogance. Being the son of Robert F. Kennedy and nephew of President John F. Kennedy has gifted him a platform, resources and prominence. If his last name were Johnson or Smith, he’d just be another crank with a dozen followers on Twitter and a YouTube channel that nobody watches.
I can’t make this point clearly enough: RFK Jr. is more than just a crank. He’s not smart and has a childlike need to challenge conventional wisdom. The only thing more embarrassing than his campaign for the White House is the fact that so many Americans are currently supporting it.
What’s Going On
Dahlia Lithwick has written a fantastic piece on the inhumanity of the Associated Press winning a photography prize for what amounts to terrorism porn.
Eric Levitz does a deep dive into the “Are smartphones destroying children?” debate.
Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman fire back at the critics of their book on white rural rage … and they bring receipts.
The GOP’s Montana Senate candidate appears to have a lying problem.
Musical Interlude
Those of you who know me well likely know that I hate the Eagles … but every dog has a day, and this is a great song (though, not surprisingly, it was written by Jackson Browne).
If I post an Eagles song, I am contractually required to post this Mojo Nixon song.
NPR is biased against Republican propaganda. How can you not favor that which is factual?