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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Trump has lost a series of major legal battles in the last week, where courts have ruled that key executive orders of his are unconstitutional. But what happens if Trump defies the courts? David Cole comments—he recently stepped down as national legal director of the ACLU to return to teaching law at Georgetown University.
Also: “One of the most important lawsuits in the history of the United States” (The American Prospect): the suit brought by Public Citizen to stop Elon Musk’s attempted takeover of the Treasury Department’s payment system. Robert Weissman explains—he’s co-president of Public Citizen.
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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.