It was against this backdrop that Sen. Joni Ernst appeared on Fox Business and was asked for her reaction. The Iowa Republican replied:

“I am a mom; I am a brand-new grandma. and I support life. Senate Republicans, the GOP, and President Trump really worked hard to overturn Roe v Wade. So, we returned that back to the states. That is the law of the land with that Supreme Court decision. So, the states are handling that. But again, we worked very hard to get this result.”

Right off the bat, it’s worth noting that the GOP senator didn’t exactly answer the question about Arizona's abortion ban.

What’s more, Ernst touted all the hard work she and her party did to overturn the Roe precedent, which wasn’t much of a message. For one thing, a majority of Americans wanted — and still want — the protections from Roe left intact. For another, the highly controversial Arizona ruling was the direct result of the work Ernst seemed eager to boast about.

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1777798966479872186
.....The same day, none other than Joni Ernst insisted that the likelihood of Roe being overturned was “very minimal.” The GOP senator added at the time, “I don’t see that happening.”

She conveniently neglected to mention that Senate Republicans, the GOP, and Donald Trump were “really working hard” to overturn Roe v Wade.

If Republican officials and candidates wonder why the party has a real credibility problem when it comes to reproductive rights, they need only consider their own records.

Trump also signaled an interest in seizing control of government departments and agencies that have historically operated with independence, enacting radical anti-immigrant plans, using government powers to crack down on journalists, and hiring right-wing lawyers who would be positioned to help Trump politicize federal law enforcement and exact revenge against his perceived political foes.

This authoritarian vision didn’t appear to have any meaningful effect on the former president’s support within his party, as evidenced by the fact that he easily won nearly every primary and caucus he competed in. Did Trump excel despite his desire for a radical power-grab or because of it?

The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake summarized in his latest column:

Polling on the GOP’s appetite for a more powerful chief executive has been slow in coming. But it has been coming. And the emerging picture is that Republicans are remarkably on-board with a president who isn’t answerable to Congress and the courts — significantly more so than Democrats. And perhaps as significantly, very few Republicans seem to strongly object to the idea.

The Associated Press reported this week, for example, on the latest national AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey, which found that 57% of Republicans endorsed the idea of Trump “taking action on the country’s important policy issues without waiting for Congress or the courts.”.....

The obvious problem, of course, is that too much of one of the nation’s political parties is moving away from democracy and the American system of government. But it also helps explain recent events in GOP nominating contests.

The more radical Trump became, the more his critics pointed to the former president’s authoritarian vision. It was against this backdrop that much of the Republican base effectively said in response, “Sounds good. Sign us up.”

Critics of the move accused Republican lawmakers of treating Congress’ impeachment power like a partisan toy, which the party was a little too eager to throw around as an election-season plaything.

GOP officials keep proving their critics right. NBC News reported:

House Speaker Mike Johnson will delay sending articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to the Senate until next week, his spokesman said, as Senate Republicans consider ways to inflict political pain on Democrats, including a threat to bring the upper chamber to a halt.

House GOP leaders could’ve sent the matter to the Senate in February, and if Republicans genuinely believed this was an urgent concern, they likely would’ve done just that. Instead, they waited two months and planned to advance the process today.

But those plans were delayed — not for substantive reasons, but because the party is still trying to figure out how to have the most fun with their toy. As a Washington Post report summarized:

Republican senators are widely skeptical that impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas meets the standard of high crimes and misdemeanors. But it’s an election year, after all, and Republicans have decided to rally around the border as an issue, using the impeachment trial as another cudgel against Democrats when voters are increasingly prioritizing border security as a top political issue.

......The question isn’t whether the Senate will remove Mayorkas from office. It won’t. That would require 67 votes, which is an impossibility given that (a) every member of the Democratic majority, including West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, considers this charade ridiculous; and (b) several Republican senators have also conceded that this entire exercise is meritless.

The question, rather, is whether GOP senators succeed in creating a pointless election-year spectacle, turning a serious constitutional power into a public-relations gambit]

Making matters worse, of course, is the fact that Trump’s line is being echoed by his partisan allies. The New Republic noted yesterday, for example:

North Carolina Representative Greg Murphy continued Tuesday to weave the yarn on Fox Business, telling host Maria Bartiromo that Democrats want to kill kids when they’re “coming out of the birth canal.”

The GOP congressman specifically said on the air, “[Abortion is] going to be a big issue every time, because you have folks really on both sides, really probably more Democrat, that want abortion literally when the child is coming out of the birth canal, always to force the issue.”
https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1777703033280811466

......But there’s a larger context to all of this. Republicans like Trump and Murphy seriously expect voters to believe that there are women, medical professionals, and Democratic policymakers who “want abortion literally when the child is coming out of the birth canal.” That’s insane. There are no such people.

This, in turn, helps set the stage for a debate over the future of reproductive rights in the United States, with the presumptive GOP nominee and his cohorts apparently convinced they need to peddle outrageous falsehoods, not just to smear their opponents, but also to distract from the fact that most Americans simply don’t agree with the Republican Party’s regressive position.

The problem, in other words, isn’t just that guys like Trump and Murphy are lying. The problem is made worse by the fact that they feel like they need to lie in order to prevent more election defeats.

GOP silence is intended to keep the public conversation away from good news that might interfere with Republicans’ election-year strategies.

But part of the party’s plan included attacking Democrats on the economy, which as Politico reported in February, is suddenly more difficult than GOP officials had hoped.

The U.S. economy just keeps getting better. And it’s forcing Donald Trump and his allies to contort the talking points they thought would guide them back to the White House. A remarkable run of good economic news has tripped up the Trump campaign’s initial plans to paint President Joe Biden as a disaster on the economy. Now, the GOP frontrunner is grasping for new ways to attack the administration’s increasingly robust record.

The Heritage Foundation’s Stephen Moore, who is closely aligned with the Trump campaign, told Politico, “I think that is the question of the day. You can’t blame the president when policies go wrong, and then say he’s not responsible if things are going right.”

If recent history is any guide, Republicans will simply pretend things aren’t going right, ask voters to believe their version of reality, and hope for the best, all while turning the other way as good news rolls in.

So far, that’s working: Despite the fact that Biden’s economic record far exceeds his predecessor’s, the latest NBC News poll found Trump with a 20-point advantage over the Democratic incumbent on handling the economy.

NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—Calling it the “most shocking conspiracy” he has ever unearthed, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. revealed on CNN last night that his mind is being controlled by a moron.

“I don’t know exactly how my brain is being operated remotely, by an electronic beam or microwaves or whatnot,” he told the network’s Erin Burnett. “But somehow, some way, there’s a total numbskull making me say the things I say.”

Kennedy said that he had “suspected” that his brain was being manipulated by an egregious dunce “for some time,” but when he heard himself claim that President Joe Biden was a greater threat to democracy than Donald J. Trump, “that clinched it.”

The independent presidential candidate revealed that he pinned index cards to his basement wall featuring his most ludicrous utterances about Bill Gates, Dr. Anthony Fauci, vaccines, January 6, Ukraine, and microchips, and then connected the cards with colored yarn to see if a pattern emerged.

“If I’d said one or two dumb things, I’d brush it off,” he said. “But when every time I open my mouth something irredeemably idiotic comes out, that can’t be a coincidence.”