So that was quite a day

First there was this.

Let's be clear about what has just happened. Five unelected, life-tenured men this morning declared that overt racial discrimination in the nation's voting practices is over and no longer needs all of the special federal protections it once did. They did so, without a trace of irony, by striking down as unconstitutionally outdated a key provision of a federal law that this past election cycle alone protected the franchise for tens of millions of minority citizens.

And then tonight, hundreds of thousands of people watched a YouTube feed (because all of cable news was busy running repeats of its talking heads shows) of the Texas Legislature. There Republicans decided to shut down a 10 hour filibuster of a draconian crack down on women's right to reproductive health care by arguing that comparing it to other draconian crack downs on women's right to reproductive health care isn't "germane" to the topic.

After that, it got wacky.  I'm fading right now and I'm sure you'll read about this somewhere by tomorrow anyway.  Basically the last ten minutes of the session involved legislators struggling like a hurried football team to get a vote off before the clock ran out at midnight as they were being disrupted by deafening crowd noise. Nothing could be more Texas than that, when you think about it.

As I type this nobody knows what happened.  The Senate hasn't even officially adjourned. I'm sure they'll get around to that sooner or later. And then the whole thing will be argued in some court somewhere. I'm sure this will come up at some point.  The legislative website originally recorded the vote on the abortion bill as taking place on June 26... which would mean after the deadline.



But then this was altered to read June 25.

Suffice to say the clock has been turned back in more ways than one today.  From the looks of things there are still plenty of protesters left at the capitol in Austin.  (Of course nothing on cable news about that still.) But I'm too tired to stay up and watch them get arrested so I'm turning in.

Can't wait to see what happens with DOMA tomorrow.