A full week

Good Sunday morning to all.  Hope you're having a good weekend.

It's a gross understatement that last week was a very full week indeed, with events of all types influencing how things will go from here.  So let's touch on some of the more important events worth mentioning.

The Select Subcommittee on January 6 continued their public hearings last week, this time showcasing some powerful witnesses who spoke to the Trump Campaign's concerted efforts to disrupt and invalidate the electoral processes in multiple states in 2020.  The most powerful witness, in my view, was a state representative from Arizona named Rusty Bowers.  He is a Republican, and serves as the Speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives, and was and is a supporter for former President Donald Trump.

Bowers spoke at length from a prepared statement and then answered questions from committee members, primarily Illinois Congressman Adam Kinzinger.  Bowers outlined events in Arizona that occurred after the initial votes were counted and determined that Joe Biden was the rightful winner of that state.  He was appalled when he was approached by Rudy Guiliani, the former President's attorney, and others about helping them to appoint fake alternate electors who would then vote in the Electoral College for Trump.

He would not do it.  He stated flatly that he would be violating the oath he took, and that it would be wrong to do so.  And that he could not do that, it would be "foreign to my very being," as he so eloquently put it.

The hearing also featured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and deputy Gabriel Sterling.  Worth noting that Raffensperger won the GOP primary election over a rival hand-picked by former President Trump, who decided that the incumbent had to go after refusing to simply "find" enough ballots for Trump to win Georgia.

The most damning testimony was delivered by an election worker named Shaye Moss.  She and her mother, Ruby Freeman, also a longtime election worker, were identified by Trump during his infamous phone call with Raffensperger as having run "suitcases full of ballots" for eventual winner Joe Biden through counting machines again and again.  This led to Moss and Freeman being vilified publicly in Atlanta by Trump loyalists to the point where their safety was in question and they could not stay in their homes for fear of reprisals.

As if that weren't enough, the Supreme Court was busy again last week, first decreeing that American citizens have the right to carry firearms for personal protection in virtually any setting.  This while the Senate was hammering out the first notable legislation to enhance background checks and add other controls to gun ownership in the wake of the most recent mass shootings in Buffalo, Uvalde and other locations.  Polling shows that a little more than half of Americans disagree with expansion of gun rights, so the Court is again out of step with the citizens of this country.

And the week was brought to a tumultuous close by the Court's decision, as telegraphed by a recent leak of the opinion, to set aside the protections guaranteed by Roe V. Wade and its accompanying precedents.  This, in turn, set into motion trigger laws in multiple states, including my home state of Kentucky, wherein the laws were written in the vein if "if Roe is ever overturned our state law will now include ___."

This is really dark stuff.  As someone who is an expert in the Supreme Court and its workings stated, this is the first time that the Supreme Court rendered an original decision granting a right to Americans, upheld it multiple times with various corresponding cases, and then ruled in such a way as to take away that right.

A political pundit put it best...the conservative right, which has argued for the elimination of the Roe V. Wade approval of abortion rights for nearly 50 years, is now a dog that caught a car and doesn't quite know what to do with it.  Republicans were poised to make substantial gains in the midterm elections by hammering their Democratic opponents with the current scenario of high prices for gas, food and so many other products and services and what they see as the inferiority of President Biden.  Instead, now, there will be an energized base of Democratic voters who likely will engage in this midterm in an effort to elect additional Congressional members who could very well codify the rights that Roe V. Wade granted in the first place.

Oh, and publicly the "former guy," as President Biden often refers to his predecessor, is publicly taking a victory lap on the Roe decision (after all, he appointed three of the justices who voted for it) but privately worries that "suburban women" will ruin the chances for an across the board victory in the midterms and potentially the 2024 Presidential election.

Guess we'll see who's right.  But I honestly can't remember a week quite like the one we just experienced.