Alex Neil? Roy Hodgson? A backtracking Jurgen Klopp? Difficult to say, really - but we’re here to find out! 

Pete’s joined by Kate and Luke to wave Sunderland through to the League One play-off final and hear Mark Clattenburg’s footballing masterplan. Speaking of masterplans: we’ve got a Michael Owen NFT update! Tremendous, by the way.

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Marcus, Vish and Jim are here to rightfully scold Tottenham after they dared to execute a succinct game plan against our brave Merseyside title chasers. Some mild scorn is reserved for Watford, whose grim season comes to an inevitable end.

Elsewhere, Vish documents his stint in purgatory as Man United sink to a seemingly new low, while Peter Shilton reminds us all he’s indeed had the last laugh.

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Overturning Roe v. Wade has been a foundational purpose of Republican politics for nearly half a century. The quest to end constitutional protections for abortion rights has determined who runs for office, how they run, and what they do when they win. It’s channeled massive sums of money into remaking all three branches of government at the state and federal level and ways that reverberate far beyond the immediate issue at hand. The anti-abortion movement gave us, in different ways, George W. Bush and Donald Trump, and the world-changing chaos that entailed. But in the days since Politico published a leaked opinion from Justice Samuel Alito that would finally scrap the 1973 ruling, the response from the party has been distinctly subdued.

In the aftermath, many Republicans, such as Sen. Mitch McConnell preferred to focus on the mechanics of the story, publicly deriding the leak as a historic breach of norms. (Which it is—thank God.)

Others downplayed the significance of the ruling itself, citing the wide variance in how abortion is regulated at the state level. The conservative commentator Erick Erickson tweeted that, “Nothing is actually going to change.”

Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson told Politico’s Burgess Everett that “the political ramifications of this thing are being overstated,” and that “It’s just never been an issue for me in Wisconsin.” 

There weren’t the kind of vocal affirmations that you might expect upon achieving a goal that has galvanized and defined the conservative movement for generations. And that cautious, changing-the-subject response brought to mind the radio silence from the right last year, when the Supreme Court gave Texas permission to temporarily nullify Roe through a shadow-docket decision.

Some of this is just reflexive, for sure, but this shift in tone is also deliberate. This week Axios snagged a polling memo from the National Republican Senatorial Committee advising candidates to say that “Abortion should be avoided as much as possible” (as opposed to outlawed and criminalized) and encouraging them to “be the compassionate consensus builder on abortion policy.” 

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The people who worked the hardest to overturn the 2020 presidential election have faced few professional consequences. I don’t mean the jet-setting realtors and ex-NYPD officers and children of conservative commentators and so on who stormed the Capitol on January 6th—they’re pretty well accounted for in court filings. I mean the people in positions of power who used that power for ill: Josh Hawley is still in the Senate; Donald Trump is a 19th-century party boss; Mark Meadows is now a man of letters.

But Ken Paxton, at least, isn’t out of the woods just yet. In December of 2020, the Texas Attorney General, who I profiled for a recent issue of the magazine, sued Pennsylvania and three other states Joe Biden won, and pushed to have their electoral-college votes thrown out. The Supreme Court declined to hear the case and unanimously rejected Paxton’s argument, but the matter didn’t end there. In the aftermath, dozens of constituents—including four former presidents of the State Bar of Texas—filed formal complaints, charging that the frivolous, disingenuous, and incredibly sloppy lawsuit had violated ethics guidelines. The state bar investigated. And on Friday, it took action: the bar’s Commission for Lawyer Discipline sued Paxton’s top deputy, Brent Webster, accusing him of “professional misconduct” for his handling of the case. According to the Austin American-Statesman, Paxton himself “expects to be named in a similar lawsuit.”

I can’t speak for the commission’s case against Webster or Paxton, but the electoral-college lawsuit was about as bad of a brief as you’ll ever see from a state AG office—actually, 18 state AG offices—in the Supreme Court. It talks about Dominion voting machines. It misstates the number of electoral votes in play. It repeats this random claim from a guy in California that “the statistical improbability of Mr. Biden winning the popular vote in these four States collectively is 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000.” I would have loved to hear the Texas solicitor general walk the justices through the math on that one at oral arguments, but it didn’t go to oral arguments, and the Texas solicitor general wisely sat out this case. 

The lawsuit had little purpose beyond inflaming the Big Lie and insulating Paxton from the consequences of his various other scandals. And in that respect, even if the bar does bring suit against him, it will have been a success. He spoke before Trump on the Mall on January 6th—and he’s on pace for a third term.

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There will be no deus ex machina from the federal government when the Supreme Court strikes down Roe v. Wade, as it is now virtually guaranteed to do since Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion in a Mississippi abortion case was leaked on Monday. President Joe Biden won’t be able to stop the 22 states that are certain to ban abortion immediately—many of them using laws still on the books from before Roe was decided in 1973. Four more states will likely move fast to pass their own bans, according to the Guttmacher Institute. In total, about half of Americans are expected to live in places without legal access to the extremely common, life–saving, liberty-ensuring medical procedure.

Congress, too, looks like a dead end for attempts to undo the Supreme Court decision. Passing a federal law guaranteeing the right to abortion would require overcoming a Senate filibuster (Democrats don’t have the votes) or eliminating the filibuster entirely (Democrats don’t have the votes—thanks, Senators Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin). 

But that doesn’t mean the White House can do nothing. This week, Biden directed his team to protect abortion rights “at every aspect, in every creative way, every aspect of federal law, to try to do all that’s possible,” an anonymous senior administration official told the New York Times. So what are their options? I called up reproductive rights legal experts and advocates to brainstorm.

Use FDA powers to ease abortion pill access

The Food and Drug Administration allows the use of two medications, taken in combination, to end pregnancies in the first 10 weeks. One, misoprostol, is a common anti-ulcer drug. The other, mifepristone, has been approved for use in the United States for 22 years and has an excellent safety record. Yet “the FDA has over-regulated mifepristone from day one,” says Elisa Wells, a veteran public health expert and the co-director of Plan C, an online information clearinghouse about abortion pills. “When they did approve it, they attached special restrictions only used for a handful of drugs thought to be dangerous.”

Bucha was known as Ukraine’s Switzerland. Now it is synonymous with unimaginable horror.

I first traveled to the town five years ago to film a documentary about the country’s struggle to build a democracy enshrined in human rights after the 2013–2014 Maidan revolution swept a Russian proxy from the presidency. My protagonist had fled war in the embattled east to rebuild her life in Bucha, a comfortable commuter exurb on the northwest perimeter of the capital, Kyiv. With its coffeehouses, organic cheese stores, and villas adjoining leafy parks, Bucha reminded me of the neighborhood where I grew up in Sydney, Australia. 

When I returned recently, it was torn to pieces, the contents of plush homes splayed on sidewalks. There were survivors on nearly every corner, waiting to tell me something that would haunt me for weeks.

Bucha is normally less than an hour from Kyiv. Now, my journey took nearly three, past checkpoints, wrecked tanks, and shot-up civilian cars, some with signs on them reading “children” and bullet holes where a driver once sat. In town, body parts still littered the streets a week after the Ukrainian army liberated its remaining residents, as I joined a macabre, government-organized tour of atrocities for mobs of reporters; I watched as several journalists took selfies with a boot containing a severed foot, rumored to be booby-trapped. “In Bucha,” an American journalist said into his mobile phone’s camera, “life is cheap.”

Destroyed tanks piled up in a main street of Bucha.

Last week, the Eanes Independent School District, which encompasses part of Austin, Texas, and communities west of the city, opened up information about the status of book challenges in the district. Since March 20, 2022, over 120 books have been submitted for formal reconsideration to the district, which has a single high school, two middle schools, and six elementary schools. Every single book challenge comes from the continually-circulating Moms For Liberty hit list.

All of the challenges come from fewer than ten individuals and the collective Eanes chapter of Moms For Liberty/Eanes Kids First. They come in the weeks prior to school board elections across the state of Texas, including Eanes, where more than one board seat will be determined on Saturday, May 7 (tomorrow). Only Granbury Independent School District and North East Independent School District have seen more challenges this school year.

Eanes Kids First is a “parents rights” group that has developed a thorough collection of books deemed inappropriate, noting not only where those books are in the district but the “issues” within them. Among the reasons the books are a problem? LGBTQ topics, race and diversity topics, and stories tackling mental health. For groups like this claiming that these book challenges are simply about obscenity and vulgarity, the transparency in these lists for why the books are problematic says otherwise. It’s a blatant attack on marginalized people and stories.

Eanes ISD published the slate of book challenges on their website in late April, including the titles, challenger, date, and status of each title, affording transparency to the entire process. Book challengers, who have demanded transparency about the materials being used and available in schools, were appalled by the district’s decision to give them just that.

At the most recent school board meeting, Aaron Silva, partner of one of the book challengers named, used his three minutes during the open comment (beginning at 1:57) to bash the board’s decision to do this. He called it a failure of the board to make such a decision “at the worst possible time.” In the next breath, Silva emphasizes how he and others have demanded clear, transparent communication. He claims parents with good reputations have been strung up and fed to social media over this decision–apparently ignoring the same behaviors advocated for and promoted within the Eanes Kids First/Moms For Liberty groups. Silva is the founder and spearheads the Eanes Parents United podcast, which, according to Franklin Strong’s documentation, “while Eanes Kids First sponsors the podcast, “EKF has absolutely no editorial input into my podcast.  It is me and me only.  The podcast is not an organ for their views and if there are similarities it is only coincidental.”