-Elise Stefanik, high-dignity person

It’s like the old saying goes: 1) Hold a vote that fails 49-51; 2) ???; 3) everyone will see Republicans are extremists. 

• Republicans did filibuster a test vote on legislation to codify Roe v. Wade Wednesday afternoon, but the truth is a filibuster wasn’t necessary. Though watered down slightly in the hope of peeling off Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), the Democratic bill somewhat headscratchingly united Republicans in opposition and lost the support of our favorite skipper, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), who says he supports codifying Roe, but not with this bill.  
   
• By its design, the bill failed to divide the GOP or expose the depths of its depraved abortion politics. But it did provide a potentially useful benchmark. To fully restore the right to abortion, Democrats will need one more pro-choice senator and, presumably, two more senators willing to change the filibuster rules. (Also, control of the House of Representatives, but the less said about that the better.)
   
• That message has filtered its way ever so slowly to the top of the Democratic Party.” A priority for all who care about this issue,” said Vice President Kamala Harris, “should be to elect pro-choice leaders, at the local, the state, and the federal level.” President Joe Biden got almost all the way to making the connection explicit. “To protect the right to choose, voters need to elect more pro-choice senators this November, and return a pro-choice majority to the House,” he said. “If they do, Congress can pass this bill in January, and put it on my desk, so I can sign it into law.”

Don’t let the vote count fool you, Republicans are extremists, and it’s making their frontline members jittery. 

• If the fifth (5th) leak from right-wing Republicans on the Supreme Court has any merit, the Samuel Alito draft opinion (which was actually the second leak) remains the only draft the justices have circulated amongst each other, and none of the Republican justices who initially aligned with Alito have switched their votes. That is, as of Wednesday, they remain primed to ban abortion in half the country, lay the groundwork for eliminating the rights to everything from contraception to same-sex marriage, and even consider criminalizing abortion nationwide, by endowing fetuses with constitutional rights.
   
• And this, rather than any Senate vote, is why you can hear some Republicans sweat. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), who’s up for re-election this year, treated the elimination of the right to abortion as a small inconvenience and all but apologized for causing it. “It might be a little messy for some people, but abortion is not going away,” he said, using words of his own choosing, which also reportedly included reminding Wisconsin women that they could drive to Illinois for their abortions. “I just don’t think this is going to be the big political issue everybody thinks it is, because it’s not going to be that big a change.” 

With just a few weeks to go before the House January 6 committee begins holding public hearings, its members remain torn over whether to subpoena House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and other Republican lawmakers who continue to conceal information about Donald Trump’s conduct during the Capitol insurrection, and their involvement in planning it. But as indecisive as they’ve been on this point, they do seem to have material that hasn’t already found its way into headlines via strategic and defensive leaks or public-records journalism. The committee may very well make public taped “excerpts of…witness depositions,” according to Politico, some of which contain explosive, damning admissions from Trump allies. And it continues to come into possession of new information, such as emails from Trump’s coup lawyer, John Eastman, coaching Republican legislators in Pennsylvania on how to throw out votes, so that they could declare Trump the winner despite the fact that he lost.

• New fascism just dropped, this time from Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), who introduced legislation to revoke Disney’s patents in retaliation for Disney’s use of its free speech rights to criticize Florida’s Don’t Say Gay law.    
   
• The SEC has joined the FTC in probing Elon Musk's shady efforts to conceal his true intention to pursue a hostile takeover of Twitter when he initially bought 9.2 percent of its shares. 
   
• The DOJ has sidelined its top antitrust enforcer from investigating Google’s monopolistic practices, pending its decision on whether he must recuse for having worked on behalf of the company’s rivals in private practice.
   
• Coinbase might go bankrupt and wipe out over $200 billion worth of its customers’ cryptocurrency holdings. 
   
• Al Jazeera correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh was shot to death, most likely by Israeli gunfire, covering a military raid in the West Bank.
   
• President Biden’s General Services Administration didn’t cancel Donald Trump’s lease on his fraudulently-gotten DC hotel, so he sold it for a ton of money, and now the sale is complete.  
   
• Seemingly humiliated by the revelation that she called the cops when she saw protesters had written a polite message in chalk on the sidewalk outside her home, Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) threw the Capitol Police under the bus: “Because Senator Collins periodically gets threatening letters and phone calls,” her spokesperson said, “we have been advised by Capitol Police to notify the local police department when there is activity directed at her [sic] around her home.” No word on whether the sidewalk chalk was sentient.  
   
• Listen to Michigan GOP gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon turn on a dime and pretend to support some abortion-ban exceptions now that the Supreme Court is poised to make abortion illegal in her state. 
   
• A federal judge’s decision to allow New York to delay its primary is probably the end of the road for the state government’s proposed partisan gerrymander; a court-appointed special master will most likely draw New York’s new maps instead. 
   
• Dinseh D’Souza’s new Big Lie movie called 2000 Mules is such sloppy trash that even Tucker Carlson and Newsmax refuse to touch it, even though Donald Trump keeps trying to spread the word.  
   
• The House voted 217-202 to grant congressional staff the right to form a collective-bargaining union.

A huge cache of documents reveals how the nation’s largest opioid manufacturer, Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals, assured that its products kept flowing through doctors to more and more patients, at higher and higher doses. The company maintained a roster of hundreds of doctors who would reliably push their products, and courted them with promises of money (through reimbursements and paid speaking gigs) to encourage them to overprescribe. One of their promotional materials included a reggae song, which implored doctors to keep increasing opioid dosages, no matter their patients’ circumstances: “You can start at the middle, you can start at the top. You can start with very little but that’s not where you should stop. Your patient needs relief, mon, so please do what you should.” More than a quarter of those doctors have since been convicted of crimes or otherwise penalized for wrongdoing, and Mallinckrodt itself had to pay $1.7 billion to a trust as part of a bankruptcy settlement to “a trust serving affected communities” according to a company spokesperson.

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A 73 year-old New Mexico abortion provider wants his clinic, which is one mile from the Texas border, to be a refuge for women in Texas who can no longer terminate their pregnancies in state. 

The Senate confirmed Lisa Cook as the first black woman to serve on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and Alvaro Bedoya to the Federal Trade Commission, in his case breaking a tie that had prevented Democratic commissioners from voting to protect consumers. All 50 Republican senators voted against both nominees. 

Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and 13 other Senate Democrats wrote to Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz to insist he recognize and negotiate a contract with the Starbucks union and stop illegally retaliating against its organizers.

Trump-endorsed candidates in Nebraska’s GOP primary faceplanted yesterday, just days after Trump hosted a red-hat rally in the state during which he defended his preferred gubernatorial candidate, Charles Herbster, from the eight women who have accused him of groping them.