On this episode of Start Making Sense, John Nichols analyzes Tuesday’s elections, and Fintan O’Toole considers Gaza’s past and future.
Voting signage outside a polling location in Toledo, Ohio, on Tuesday, November 7, 2023. Ohioans are considering a proposed amendment, called Issue 1, to prevent the state from interfering with reproductive decisions, including contraception, while allowing abortion bans with exceptions after fetal viability. (Photographer: Emily Elconin / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Tuesday’s vote tested the potency of abortion rights as an issue for Democrats, with a referendum in Ohio and the election of a new state legislature in Virginia. John Nichols has our analysis of those elections, and some others.
Also on this episode: What is Israel’s endgame in its war with Hamas? Over the past 50 years, it has tried two radically different strategies in Gaza, and neither succeeded. Fintan O’Toole explains that history. He teaches at Princeton and is an advising editor at The New York Review of Books, where he’s been writing about Israel, Hamas, and Gaza.
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The Supreme Court ruled against Trump last week in the first test of his refusal to release money appropriated by Congress, and more than a dozen more similar cases are likely to come before the court –– probably including a challenge to his withholding hundreds of millions from research universities on the grounds that they have failed to protect Jewish students from antisemitism. But what if Trump defies court decisions that go against him? Erwin Chemerinsky comments –– he’s dean of the Law School at UC Berkeley.
Also: The man in charge of Trump’s plan to deport ten million undocumented people is Stephen Miller, who has a “seething, visceral, unquenchable hatred” for immigrants –– that’s what Nation columnist David Klion says, as he examines a life that “defies any easy explanation.”
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Jon WienerTwitterJon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and co-author (with Mike Davis) of Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.