Evening Wrap

How about we talk about elections? Specifically, let’s talk about the 2020 election. But we already talked about that, you say? Right, but it’s the gift that just keeps giving. In Arizona, at least four current or former state legislators have been ordered to travel to Washington, D.C. to give testimony before a grand jury looking into efforts to overturn the 2020 election. (Spoiler: Joe Biden won, Donald Trump didn’t, but that didn’t prevent a lot of people from pretending otherwise.)

You can’t discuss criminal justice in America without talking about guns, especially in the aftermath of (yet another) high-profile mass shooting — so let’s start in Michigan, where students from Michigan State University traveled to the state capitol to demand action on gun reform two days after three of their classmates were killed and five more were injured when a gunman opened fire before taking his own life.

Mass shootings are so endemic to America that I could write about them daily without ever running out of material. As of Wednesday morning, there had been 81 mass shootings in the United States this year. Four of those have occurred since Monday, when three students were murdered and another five were injured in a shooting at Michigan State University. The political aftermath of that tragedy followed a predictable script that opened with Democrats once again renewing their oft-renewed pleas for the most basic of gun control measures.

I was shocked this morning when I checked the ol’ bigotry tracker and saw that the number of anti-LGBTQ+ bills filed by state lawmakers was unchanged from Friday. This isn’t good — the total is 299, a preposterously large number — but it’s the first time this year the tracker hasn’t jumped multiple spots in a matter of hours, which I guess makes the situation “not actively bad.” It’s the tiniest of moral victories, but in these terrible times, we take the wins where we can get them, you know? (Update: It is now 310. The moral victory was fleeting.)

I’d thought we were focusing on health care today, but it turns out we’re really focusing on abortion — which is fine, because abortion is health care. (Say it with me: Abortion is health care.)

The only thing that seems to change in the bigoted hellscape of 2023 is the number of anti-LGBTQ+ bills filed by state lawmakers. Last week, it was 234. Two days ago, it was 272. As of Friday afternoon, it was 299. (Thirty-four of those have been defeated; the most microscopic of victories.) It’s like one of those horrible word problems about multiplying bacteria: The growth is exponential. The petri dish is ever more disgusting.

Let’s start in the place where everything is always snarled: Congress. House Republicans gathered there on Wednesday to unveil what they described as “innovative solutions” to the super pressing problems plaguing the nation’s public education system. Those solutions? Funneling public money to private schools, banning transgender athletes and ensuring that parents can complain about everything that happens in their child’s classroom, our D.C. bureau reported.

The last time we talked about the GOP’s nationwide assault on LGBTQ+ equality, I told you that state lawmakers had filed at least 234 bills taking aim at the basic (and hard-won) rights afforded to gay and transgender citizens. That was a week ago, and that number is much higher now. As of Wednesday, advocacy groups were tracking at least 272 anti-LBGTQ+ bills, well above the number of similar proposals filed in all of 2021 and just 68 shy of the record-breaking 340 introduced last year.

The double take is a mainstay of modern American politics, where the absurdity is so ubiquitous that “Wait, what?” might as well be our national slogan. Congress is spending its time dissing socialism! State Republicans are weirdly obsessed with drag shows! Chinese spy balloons are just drifting around our airspace, waiting to be shot down! It is hard to keep track of the ridiculousness (these stories are all from the last five days)! I lost my train of thought like 14 times in this paragraph alone!

A quick recap to start us off: In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Congress approved a sweeping relief bill to shore up the sizable gaps in the American health-care system. Among the bill’s provisions was the so-called “continuous coverage” rule, which allocated extra funding to state-administered Medicaid programs in exchange for ensuring uninterrupted enrollment for recipients until the conclusion of the federal public health emergency.

Some background, for anyone living under a rock (a prescient choice, in these nefarious inflatable times): Federal officials confirmed Thursday that the military had been monitoring a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon hovering over Montana, home to more than 100 intercontinental ballistic missile silos. Defense leaders said they had considered shooting it down, but opted against it for fear that the resulting debris could injure people on the ground.

Scientists generally describe the opioid crisis in three waves: Prescription opioids, heroin, and synthetic alternatives like fentanyl. Addiction to the pain-relieving drugs began to surge in the late 1990s, thanks in large part to Purdue Pharma, the family-owned pharmaceutical company that developed and aggressively (and dishonestly) marketed OxyContin. The steadily rising rates of overdose and addiction eventually prompted the company to release an “abuse-deterrent” version of the drug featuring a special coating that was designed to limit patients’ ability to take more than their prescribed doses.