Yesterday, after I suggested on Twitter that I was trick-or-treating to reach 5,000 followers, my old friend and lefty agitator Armando Llorens said he’d follow if I wrote about the Georgia-Florida football game tomorrow (Armando is a big Florida Gators fan).

So yeah, even though both teams are out of the Top 25 and are long shots to win their SEC division, and even though my football fandom is getting more tenuous every time I hear new information about head injuries, I will be hunkered down tomorrow afternoon with my wife to watch this very fierce, almost primitive rivalry. I’ve watched these teams play from St. Kitts, from a cruise ship in the Mediterranean, from a row house in Baltimore, and just last year, from a fake British pub in Half Moon Bay. The most famous moment (for Georgia fans, anyway) in the rivalry, the Buck Belue to Linsday Scott pass in 1980 that paved the way for the Dawgs’ most recent national championship, I missed entirely because I couldn’t stand to watch and instead took a restroom break. So yeah, Armando, I won’t miss this game, God willing.

Here are some remains of the day:

* A TSA officer is confirmed as dead, with six other people injured (not counting the shooter, who was himself shot and is in policy custody) in LAX shooting, which occurred just past the TSA security screening point. Surprise, surprise: the shooter was a 23-year-old man with an assault weapon.

* Leader of Pakistani Taliban apparently killed in drone strike.

* In the new issue of the Washington Monthly, Center for a New American Security’s Shawn Brimley reviews a disturbing new book about the steady migration of guerrilla warfare from remote areas to cities.

* At Ten Miles Square, the ever-fascinating Colin Woodward notes that U.S. geographical areas with the most violence—private or state-sponsored—are generally southern and Appalachian Tea Party hotbeds.

* Also at Ten Miles Square, Rachel Cohen interviews George Mason University professor Zach Schrag on institutional review boards and their inhibiting effect on valuable social science research.

And in non-political news:

* News you can use: 9-11 AM best time to call Customer Service lines, which I wish I’d known when I spent serious time on hold with my bank this afternoon.

Okay, let’s call it a day. Martin Longman will be in for Weekend Blogging. Sorry I didn’t post more songs about saints, but here’s one of the most enduring: Louis Armstrong’s version of “St. James Infirmary Blues.”

Selah.

Our good friend Jonathan Bernstein makes an important point today at the Plum Line that most of us have just missed in all the hysteria about Obamacare implementation: whether the new law works or doesn’t, and whether Republicans gain control of the federal government in the next three years or don’t, the idea of just repealing the Affordable Care Act and trying to go back to the status quo ante is increasingly unfeasible:

[I]n practical terms, implementation of the health law (along with changes that happen over time no matter what the government does) mean that the system-that-was just is no more. Insurance plans have been cancelled, and new ones initiated. People have shifted coverage. Businesses have made new plans with ACA implementation in mind. That includes hospitals and doctors, and the rest of the health care industry.

No one is ever going to kick young adults off their parents’ insurance (or change the law so that insurance companies are allowed to do it). No one is going to bring back the various limitations in pre-ACA insurance policies. Some trimming of the new Medicaid rolls might be possible. But no one — no politician who has to face reelection, at least - is going to just toss all those people off their insurance with nothing to replace it.

Beyond all this is simply the Humpty Dumpty-ness of the situation: The old system has been slowly pushed off the wall for three years now, and by this point it’s really beyond repair, whatever the merits or politics of the situation.

Now I won’t go as far as Jonathan and say that the idea of repealing Obamacare is “dead.” His recitation of what no politician with a brain would do reminds me a lot of all those confident predictions (not by him, but by many others) that no state political leadership would be stupid or benighted or ideological enough to turn down the Medicaid expansion. And there’s also the possibility that Republicans, if they were in a position to do so, would repeal Obamacare and then quickly re-enact some of the easier and more popular provisions, like the provision allowing young adults to stay on their parents’ policies.

But yes, it’s true, the more Obamacare puts paid to the old system the harder it would be, mechanically, to resurrect it. So Republicans had better get it in gear in designing and agreeing upon a “replacement” agenda for health care, even if they know in their hearts it will be wildly unpopular in practice.

If you’re wondering if it really matters whether Barack Obama gets to appoint some new members to the D.C. Court of Appeals, you might want to be aware of its latest decision (actually, a three-judge panel, composed of one W. appointee, one Poppy appointee, and one Carter appointee). Here’s Lyle Denniston’s quick analysis at SCOTUSBlog:

Taking a split approach, the D.C. Circuit ruled on Friday that profit-making corporations cannot make a religious challenge to the new health care law’s mandate that workers get birth-control and related medical coverage; however, if the firm is owned by only a few individuals, they can challenge it to defend their own religious objections, and they may well win. The two major parts of the ruling split the three judges in differing ways.

The Supreme Court already has three cases awaiting its attention on the Affordable Care Act’s contraception coverage mandate — with differing outcomes in lower courts — and the somewhat unusual approach taken by the D.C. Circuit on Friday may simply add an additional impetus for the Court to take on the issue in the current Term.

The “unusual approach” involves both the ruling—for-profit corporations can’t claim a religious exemption, but their owners, if it’s a closely-held company, can for their own corporate activities—and the remedy—a remand to the D.C. District Court to reconsider whether an injunction halting enforcement of the contraception coverage mandate in this or similar cases might not be appropriate after all.

The author of the majority opinion, Judge Janice Rogers Brown (which some of you may remember as a name on various Supreme Court lists during W.’s administration) may have disappointed corporations-are-people-too advocates (like the management of Hobby Lobby, which obtained a temporary exemption from compliance with the mandate via the Tenth Circuit), but her rebuke to the Obama administration’s underlying rationale for the contraception mandate, as reported by The Hill’s Julian Hattem, was pretty strident,:

Brown wrote that “it is clear the government has failed to demonstrate how such a right — whether described as noninterference, privacy, or autonomy — can extend to the compelled subsidization of a woman’s procreative practices.”

She added that denying coverage of contraception would not undermine the Affordable Care Act’s requirements that health insurance provide preventative care.

As Denniston noted, the Supremes will be sorting through the lower-court decisions directly. If that were not the case, today’s decision would be a cause for particular alarm because of the traditional deference lower courts pay to the D.C. Circuit.

One of the biggest questions in American politics today is whether the ongoing radicalization of the Republican Party will at some point lose it some previously loyal voters. So it’s not surprising some Democrats (and even Republicans) seize on evidence of disgruntlement leading to future defections.

Today’s new revelations from the latest NBC/WSJ survey on favorable/unfavorable ratings for the GOP among its rank-and-file will doubtless fan speculation about a potential split. They show GOP favorability among self-identified Republicans dropping to 49/26 (as compared to 73/7 among Democrats). Moreover, non-Tea Party Republicans are exhibiting significantly more disgruntlement (41/32) than Tea Party Republicans (56/21). On top of that, in a hypothetical three-way generic congressional contest involving a Democrat, and Republican, and a third party/independent candidate, non-Tea GOPer are more likely to go indie (32% as opposed to 25% for Tea Folk). Chuck Todd and his colleagues at NBC’s First Read place a lot of stock in these latter numbers indicating that threats of defection from the GOP are now graver from “the center” than “the right.”

Maybe, but maybe not. When you stare at all these numbers, some problems emerge.

For one thing, while Republicans are broken down into Tea and Non-Tea factions, independents are not. Given the past tendency of Tea Folk to disproportionately identify as indies even though they almost all vote overwhelmingly Republican, Republican identifiers within the Tea Nation are obviously going to be relatively quite loyal.

More importantly, happiness and unhappiness with the current condition of the GOP is likely to have different meanings for different Republicans. If one stipulates that the GOP is dangerously right-wing these days, the numbers look a little different: add together the 56% of Tea Folk who feel good about it with the 21% who likely think the party should be more conservative, plus the 41% of non-Tea GOPers who are happy with the party’s direction, and you don’t exactly have a mandate for moderation, do you? (And this is totally aside from the reality that Tea Folk are significantly more likely to participate in Republican primaries).

As for the third-party support findings, they are indeed interesting, but in the absence of any identification of what kind of ideology an indie/third-party would stand for, it’s really just an indication of party loyalty, which brings us full circle. Fully 61% of self-identified indies in the survey say they’d support an indie/third-party candidate, but it’s hard to know what if anything that means if you don’t know whether we’re talking about a hard-core Tea Party candidate or some sort of Michael Bloomberg “centrist.”

So while pursuing a split in the GOP is obviously an important Grand Strategy goal for Democrats—it’s been a big part of Obama’s Grand Strategy from the get-go—and while Democrats are much happier with their party than Republicans, it’s a bit early for the Donkey Party to declare any kind of victory or even a major advance. If you add in the fact that elected officials are massively less likely to defy party discipline than the rank-and-file, perhaps the most we can say is that the preconditions for a GOP split are coming into view, but still at a great distance until such time as we see more evidence.

Trying to avoid dipping into the Halloween treat basket which went untouched last night. Like I said, not a lot of kids in my neighborhood, though lots of folks fully into their second childhoods.

Here are some midday news/views treats from various baskets:

* Here we go again: man with rifle shooting people—including TSA agents—at LAX. He’s been apprehended, but no clear news on casualties or motive.

* Pew reports big split between Tea- and Non-Tea Republicans on existence of global warming.

* NBC/WSJ survey finds Tea Party Republicans more favorable towards party than non-Tea GOpers. More about that later.

* Second Circuit Court of Appeals stays district court ruling banning NYPD’s Stop-and-Frisk policy, orders new hearing with different district court judge because of alleged partiality of judge involved.

* Initial numbers show vast majority of October Obamacare enrollees signed up for Medicaid.

And in sorta non-political news:

* Yelp reviewers sue for compensation. Scribblers of all nations, unite!

As we break for lunch, here’s another “saintly” song from Tom Waits (as suggested this morning by commenter Eric Wilde): “Hang on St. Christopher,” recorded in 1987.

As you may have heard, a reduction in food stamp (a.k.a. SNAP) benefits goes into effect today from sea to shining sea, affecting 47 million Americans, including 21 million children (1 of 4 of all children). According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

A household of three, such as a mother with two children, will lose $29 a month — a total of $319 for November 2013 through September 2014, the remaining 11 months of fiscal year 2014 (see chart). That equals about 16 meals a month for a family of three based on the cost of U.S. Agriculture Department’s “Thrifty Food Plan.”

No one in Congress voted explicitly for this benefit cut. It results from the expiration of a benefit boost that was part of the 2009 stimulus legislation (remember that?). Now that the economy is rolling along nicely and we need to worry more about budget deficits, it makes sense that this temporary help for needy people is being withdrawn. Oh, wait….

Politically, the interesting thing is that this benefit cut is overlapping with a long-stalled effort to enact a new five-year farm bill that will either cut SNAP funding a little (the Senate version) or a whole lot (the House version), above and beyond what’s happening today. Logically, those Republicans who have bought into the popular conservative theory that increased SNAP enrollment is the product not of a bad economy and intensifying income inequality but of a liberal conspiracy to buy votes through dependence on government should cheer today’s benefit cut, and perhaps hold press availabilities at grocery stores to congratulate SNAP beneficiaries for this marginal enhancement of their independence. I’m sure they’ll be very receptive.

The underlying reality of the “abortion wars” over the last four decades has been that the constitutional status quo requires a “right to choose” within much-debated and occasionally eroded boundaries for state intervention. Indeed, until recently many reproductive rights advocates have been reluctant to litigate state legislation designed to harass providers and their patients on grounds that it might give a shaky Supreme Court the opportunity to do more damage to the basic constitutional framework.

With yesterday’s Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals action overturning a district court judge’s “stay” on implementation of Texas’ sweeping new anti-abortion law, the status quo may have decisively begun to shift. With a major closure of abortion clinics in Texas—which may spread elsewhere if similar state laws escape judicial restraint—not only is a SCOTUS review of the reigning constitutional law inevitable, but is now essential for pro-choicers.

The alarming thing is that the Fifth Circuit ruling indicates states will be allowed to drive large trucks through the loophole created by Justice Kennedy in the Carhart v. Gonzales decision (the one that upheld the federal “partial-birth abortion” law) giving lawmakers leeway to restrict abortion opportunities on broadly paternalistic “health of the mother” grounds. Kennedy effectively inverted the original meaning of the Court’s insistence on a “health exception” to late-term abortion restrictions, and raised fears that states would see the handwriting on the wall and justify additional restrictions on Father Knows Best grounds dishonestly framed as solicitude for the health and safety of women seeking abortions.

Buttressed by their 2010 state-level landslide, Republicans are now rising—or falling—to the occasion, with remarkably little internal dissension. And so now we will soon find out if the judicial dike that has for so long held back a tide of attacks on the right to choose will stand or crumble.

As you probably know, the latest round of Benghazi! fever—leading, among other things, to the taking of Janet Yellen’s confirmation as Fed Chairman as a hostage—was touched off by a dramatic 60 Minutes feature on the saga, heavily based on the account provided by a British contractor pseudonymously identified as “Morgan Jones.”

Now it seems the contractor—whose actual name is Dylan Davies—filed a contemporaneous report of his activities on the fateful period in question with his employer that totally contradicts the account he gave to 60 Minutes. WaPo’s Karen DeYoung has the story:

In Davies’s 2 1/2-page incident report to Blue Mountain, the Britain-based contractor hired by the State Department to handle perimeter security at the compound, he wrote that he spent most of that night at his Benghazi beach-side villa. Although he attempted to get to the compound, he wrote in the report, “we could not get anywhere near . . . as roadblocks had been set up.”

He learned of [Ambassador Chris] Stevens’s death, Davies wrote, when a Libyan colleague who had been at the hospital came to the villa to show him a cellphone picture of the ambassador’s blackened corpse. Davies wrote that he visited the still-smoking compound the next day to view and photograph the destruction.

The State Department and GOP congressional aides confirmed that Davies’s Sept. 14, 2012, report, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post, was included among tens of thousands of documents turned over to lawmakers by the State Department this year.

Well, clearly, Davies was either prevaricating to his superiors then or is prevaricating to the rest of us now (not only via 60 Minutes, but in a book under his pseudonymous byline published this very week, in a nice media parlay).

I don’t know which it is, but this obviously raises questions about the man’s credibility. It doesn’t, however, seem to trouble a spokesman for Rep. Darrell Issa’s House Oversight Committee, the locus of much of the Benghazi! agitation over the last year:

“Outside his narrative of his own individual actions that night, [Davies’s] information about key Benghazi events appeared consistent with a well-established consensus of an inadequate security posture,” said Frederick Hill, a spokesman for House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.). Hill said the committee had not spoken to Davies and had not requested an interview with him, though administration officials confirmed that the FBI has interviewed him.

Translation: Davies’ account reinforces our lurid account of what happened that night, so he cares what he said at the time?

The worst thing, though, is that the apparent implosion of this sensational new Benghazi! “report” will just become another conservative excuse for obsessing about it even more, even if that means taking hostages and giving Lindsey Graham a fresh opportunity to prance and posture for the benefit of Republican primary voters in South Carolina.

UPDATE: A number of hours have gone by, so I don’t know if commenter JoyousMN will see this or not, but I was not consciously alluding to anything about Lindsey Graham’s alleged sexual orientation in using the word “prance” for his egregious pandering to the SC conservatives who might soon considered purging him. I would have likely used the same verb if I had been talking about Ted Cruz, not that he needs to pander to anybody on the Right. As it happens, I agree with JoyousMN’s discomfort with the gay-baiting that seems to go on with respect to Graham, and I guess I’ll be more careful next time to avoid even the slight appearance of participating in it.

Greg Sargent is right to draw attention this morning to the latest Kaiser Family Foundation survey on the future of the Affordable Care Act, which takes us a solid level deeper than the usual “support” or “oppose” surveys. Taken at a time when hysteria over health.gov’s problems was beginning to dominate the news, the survey asks which of four options respondents favor: expanding the law, keeping it as is, replacing it with an (undefined) Republican alternative, or repealing it altogether. And even though the same survey shows generally negative assessments of Obamacare implementation (only 26% of Democrats give the federal government “good” or “excellent” marks), the overall landscape of opinion remains favorable to Obamacare as it is or as it might be if expanded.

Overall, 22% want to see Obamacare expanded, 25% like it as is, 24% want to repeal and not replace it, and 13% favor a Republican alternative. Only 29% of self-identified Republicans favor a “repeal and replace” strategy, which helps explain why congressional GOPers haven’t been terribly active in promoting more than the bare bones of an alternative. Meanwhile, among self-identified Democrats, more favor an expanded Obamacare (40%) than the one we actually have (39%).

At a time when Republicans are stressing the terrible, terrible loss of existing insurance policies under Obamacare, it’s interesting that in this survey at least, support for the status quo ante amounts to only 24%, as opposed to 60% favoring some alternative. Perhaps the current furor over canceled policies is boosting support for the old system a bit, but it’s clear the reasons the public support health reform to begin with haven’t gone away. And at some point—say before the 2014 elections—Republicans as a party are going to have to decide whether they want to defend the unpopular Good Old System or go whole-hog with an “alternative” that at this point has very little public support.

Democrats need to stare at their own numbers here—not in order to lurch to the abandon-Obamacare-and-take-up-single-payer position urged by a few lefty pundits, but to argue that “fixing” Obamacare means strengthening it, perhaps by finding ways around state obstruction of the Medicaid expansion, perhaps by bringing back some version of the public option. The bottom line is that there is still a hunger for reform, and little support for conservative alternatives (indeed, I suspect it might actually shrink if people were more aware of the atavistic nature of such alternatives, which would kill off employer-based coverage without reforming the individual insurance market into which most Americans would be driven). So progressives need to get out of their defensive crouch on health reform.

Well, nobody can say senators didn’t have the time to think it all through. Three-and-a-half months after the temporary deal that enabled Senate Democrats to quickly confirm five executive-branch nominations, Republicans are blocking another such nomination—former congressman Mel Watt for director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency—along with the first of several nominations to the highly influential D.C. Court of Appeals.

The pairing means that any re-establishment of the earlier deal would involve an implicit if not explicit Democratic acceptance of the filibuster as a legitimate weapon in judicial nominations. In the past (most notably during the Bush administration), many Senate Democrats and liberal activists have argued that the lifetime appointments at issue in judicial nominations justify a right to filibuster.

But short of a Supreme Court opening, the impending battle over D.C. Circuit nominations is about a high-stakes as judicial nominations can be. The GOP’s aggressively idiotic “court-packing” argument for stopping these nominations, which very thinly disguises a Federalist Society-bred determination to keep Obama from “getting control” of the second most influential court in the country, has to be tempting Democrats to “go nuclear.” Could Democrats “go nuclear” on one kind of judicial filibuster but not another?

One of the reigning experts on this subject, Sarah Binder of George Washingon University and Brookings, has a WaPo op-ed expressing doubt that 51 Democratic senators can be held together for a direct assault on judicial filibusters. I agree, but hope fury at Republican obstructionism soon makes radical filibuster reform more realistic.

Regular readers know how I feel (filibuster delenda est!), but let me raise this in a broader context than is usual. All the endless and interminable and redundant whining we hear these days (sometimes in our own voices!) about partisan gridlock in Washington invariably revolves around demands for “deals” and “compromise”—which is actually music to the ears of the least compromising elements in Washington (hint, hint: the ones who shut down the federal government), who know that this false-equivalency framing of the problem gives them a huge advantage in ultimately getting their way. Indeed, when such folk have no plausible way to achieve their goals via elections, the obstruct-then-compromise-on-favorable-terms approach may seem the best and maybe the only way to win.

So what if all the people upset about “gridlock” took the different route of making it easier for majorities to govern? Might not that improve the horribly eroded concept of democratic accountability, while also making all the disruptive tools of minority obstruction, including filibusters, government shutdowns, debt default threats, and deliberate sabotage of existing legislation, less powerful and less tempting?

I’m not holding my breath for the grand poohbahs of bipartisanship in pundit-land to move en masse towards forceful advocacy of filibuster reform; for the most part, they seem to cherish the hoary and disreputable tradition and even ignore that today’s Republicans have transformed the Senate by making it semi-routine. But anyone who wrung his or her hands over the government shutdown needs to reflect once again that we will never transcend dysfunction in Washington without one of three things happening: (1) perpetual surrender to the obstructionists and hostage-takers; (2) more regular electoral landslides; or (3) radical filibuster reform, perhaps combined with steps to make it easier for legislation supported by majorities in the House to get to the floor.

Those are the issues that Harry Reid and indeed, the president, ought to be raising in developing their strategy for dealing with the next wave of filibusters, if only to increase their own leverage in securing a “deal” short of radical filibuster reform.

UPDATE: While my post is mainly intended to challenge the self-styled enemies of “gridlock” to stop supporting “traditions” like the filibuster that encourage election-losers to obstruct government and take hostages, I’d also add that the many observers (mostly on the Left) who have criticized our basic constitutional framework for making gridlock inevitable have a special responsibility to support radical filibuster reform. The United States is not going to adopt a parliamentary system of government, now or at any time in the future. As Ryan Cooper argued recently at the Plum Line, filibustering and other methods of obstruction have become central to the ongoing disability of the system we actually have. We can imagine alternative utopias, or resign ourselves to dysfunction, or fix the problem. So Harry Reid and the Senate Democratic Caucus’ decision on how to proceed on filibuster reform is a high-stakes decision for all of us.

It’s the Solemnity of All Saihts, or All Saints Day. So we’ll feature some songs referring to saints or sainthood. Let’s start with the Grateful Dead performing “Saint of Circumstance” in Pittsburgh in 1985.

Snakes alive, Halloween has become a much bigger deal than it was in my own days of trick-or-treating. Not that it needed a lot of help, but zombie-fever’s added another kick to the festival. Last weekend I was in Reno, and a reported 20,000 folks participated in a “Zombie Crawl” through the bars that lasted until 6:00 AM. Probably a sign of the End Times, eh?

Here are some final news items of the day:

* Senate Republicans block vote on first of three D.C. Court of Appeals nominees, apparently happy to provoke another “nuclear threat” crisis.

* Study shows “Cash for Clunkers” wasn’t the best stimulus idea around.

* NYC raises minimum tobacco purchase age to 21.

* At Ten Miles Square, Jonathan Bernstein warns that trickle of House Republicans favoring vote on comprehensive immigration reform not enough to make the bill “undead” just yet.

* At College Guide, Seth Masket suggests new models for higher education won’t take off so long as people doing the country’s hiring are products of the old models.

And in sorta-non-political news:

* Stumbled across a fascinating account from 2010 of a conservative evangelical Halloween “Hellhouse” in my home state of Georgia. Seems the Antichrist sounds a lot like Barack Obama.

So that’s it for Halloween 2013. The day isn’t complete without a tribute to our pointy-hatted witchy friends (no offense to genuine Wiccans, who mostly have a good sense of humor about it all). So here’s Donovan with “Season of the Witch.”

Ah well, let’s have dessert: David Bowie performing “Scary Monsters.”

Selah.

There is no power on earth that can convince me to read a 816 page book about the relationship of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. But Eleanor Clift’s review of Peter Baker’s tome on the U.S. Supreme Court’s most famous beneficiaries, published in our November-December issue, is entirely digestible and perfectly timed for Halloween.

I somehow did not know until now that Cheney’s estrangement from W. began with a wild collision between Mary Matlin and the White House press office over how to spin the Veep’s famous shot-in-the-face incident. Some events, of course, are unspinnable, unless one is willing to embrace the popular image of one’s boss as, well, evil (“I’m always a bit shy around evil people,” said comedian Craig Ferguson of an encounter with Cheney).

While Clift provides a good sample of the book’s tone, depth and sourcing, I remain a bit unclear about the exact pace of the downward trajectory that reduced Cheney from the all-powerful brooding presence behind every decision to the time-server whining endlessly about a pardon for his loyal retainer Scooter. Maybe there was a quick descent after the shot-in-the-face incident; becoming a self-parody can take a lot out of a public figure. But the general sense I get from Clift’s review is that Bush, like Richard Nixon, benefitted from having a running-mate who made millions of people pray for his good health each day.

If you really want to understand a political party’s actual agenda, it’s useful to take a look at jurisdictions where its lawmakers can basically do whatever they want. That’s what Irin Carmon does in a heart-wrenching essay at MSNBC by looking at the antichoice playground of Oklahoma, where conservative Republicans walk very tall.

She looks at the Sooner State and its abortion politics through the experience of an economically struggling couple (which already had three kids), Eric and Jessica Davis, who discovered their unborn child had a lethal abnormality. Thanks to the Oklahoma legislature’s enactment of a post-20-weeks abortion ban with no exceptions for such circumstances, they had to travel out of state to terminate a pregnancy the mother desperately wished she could have in conscience carried to term. And even then, thanks to Republican legislation in adjoining states, it was difficult, and may soon be impossible, for a couple like this one to find anywhere to obtain an abortion that could in no way be attributed to parental convenience or even to doubts about the “personhood” of the fetus.

Carmon’s main point is that in places like Oklahoma, the dominant GOP policymakers are entirely indifferent to any sort of nuance, and are following a strict party line aimed eventually at the prohibition of all abortions. The only limitation being placed on extremist abortion legislation is by a state judiciary in which past Democratic appointments have left a fading stamp. And in that respect, the state is a bit of a microcosm of the country, where Oklahoma’s laws are among those provoking an eventual Supreme Court review that could lead to a repudiation of the right to choose nationally.

So this story might not be so unusual soon:

The Davises, who are both unemployed and live on Jessica’s $700 a month in disability payments and food stamps, came home to unpaid bills. The electricity was slated to be turned off the next day. Eric sold off scrap metal he found to pay the bill, but there was no money left for gas and water.

Oklahoma law had barred Jessica from using state Medicaid to cover the cost, so the couple had borrowed some money from relatives to cover the $2,800 procedure. In total, the trip set them back $3,500. “It took everything we had so that our son would not suffer,” Jessica said.

“It was never something that I had to worry about-the politics,” she said. “I just let women make their own decisions. But I would hate for another woman to have to be in my position.”