There is no doubt that the law passed by the Texas State Legislature and signed into law by a courageous Governor Greg Abbott that has essentially stopped abortions in Texas of babies in the first six weeks of life has really stirred up a hornet’s nest on the left. The response has been a virtual cornucopia of the most outrageous, inaccurate, apocalyptic nonsense. In a nutshell, what the Texas legislature did was both brilliant and simple. It applied the doctrine of qui tam lawsuits that are widespread in anti-fraud legislation to abortion. Instead of the state acting as the enforcement agent, private citizens were allowed to pursue civil damages against violators. When the Supreme Court allowed the law to go into effect, that, like Donald Trump’s election, broke a non-trivial number of people. One of those sad victims is MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace.

By way of introduction, Wallace was George Bush’s (43) communications director. She rose to fame on John McCain’s campaign to be the Graceful Loser to the first Black candidate for president. However, when McCain’s choice to be vice president, Alaska governor Sarah Palin, began acting like she wanted to win, Wallace started sandbagging her with the media. This led to her starring role in former RedState managing editor Erick Erickson’s Operation Leper.

This is the clip from yesterday.

MSNBC’s Wallace: “Maybe Mueller will look into” whether Republican states are “colluding” with the Supreme Court against abortion pic.twitter.com/MgAiMKcV5g

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) September 7, 2021

WALLACE: Let’s deal with the elephant in the room. Obviously, I’m acutely aware of my complicity in the current state of the United States Supreme Court. That said, I’ve voted straight party-line Democratic ticket since 2016, and my only hope, my only wish is they freakin’ win. That they win elections. And what I don’t understand is the Republicans have revealed themselves over and over and over and over and over again, and if you wanna know how radical today’s GOP is, it’s so radical that the man picked by my old boss, Chief Justice John Roberts, sided with the liberals on the court in the Texas abortion ban. And what Joyce just described, I don’t know the legal term but it sounds a whole lot like collusion, between Republican dominated rightwing-centric legislatures and the far right members of the United States Supreme Court, whether it’s a crime and whether it’s real, maybe Mueller will look into it. But tell me where we go from here.

HEILEMANN: Ahhh…where do we go from here? Well…I don’t know if it’s collusion in the sense that…uh…that…I think the states…the…the..the state legislatures are listening to…this is public, right?…the…these people…ah…that…on the United States Supreme Court went through confirmation hearings and many of them in their public comments prior to being nominated in their confirmation hearings and subsequently made it pretty clear what their position was on Roe v. Wade. So, I don’t think you need to do a lot of colluding for state…state Republican legislatures to have confidence in the Court…what they think…not…not to have certainty but to have confidence to make it…make it worthwhile…and I think to Joyce’s point about…it’s obviously unprincipled to pass laws that are prima facie unconstitutional…when has that ever stopped anybody? I mean…the whole…there have been legislatures down through history who have passed laws to try and test a principle, to try to get the Supreme Court to make new law.

Some people are defending Wallace by saying she was joking. If so, the joke was missed by her panelist, John Heilemann, who treats the comment as a serious one. So, I’m dismissing that deflection out-of-hand. If your own panel takes a joke as a serious point, it isn’t a joke…you are.

What Wallace appears to propose is some sort of investigation into conservative state legislatures creating laws to a) win Supreme Court approval of conservative policies and b) deliberately setting up test cases to try and overturn existing Supreme Court precedent. The evidence for this is that the Supreme Court is upholding conservative legislation raising the grim specter of…COLLUSION. And who better to deal with this scourge of the republic than a doddering, somnolent Bob Mueller. This is just batsh** crazy. As Heilemann points out, legislatures passing laws to modify or remove precedents is not new.

There is no mystery why Wallace is acting unhinged or the GOP is pushing the envelope with conservative and pro-life legislation.

Wallace’s program is floundering.

In May, just a little over 147,000 people in this all-important demo tuned in every day to watch Wallace’s two-hour MSNBC program. In contrast, her program, which launched in 2017, averaged 543,000 viewers in the 25-54 demographic in January, 297,000 in February, 177,000 in March, and 215,000 in April.

It was only a matter of time before lousy ratings caught up to cable news’ patron saint of mediocrity . Wallace’s particularly ignorant brand of analysis and her unrelenting cheerleading for the Democratic Party may have served their purpose when the Republican Party held the White House and the U.S. Senate, but now? Who needs analysis from a know-nothing, washed-up GOP operative? Very few people, apparently.

The collapse couldn’t have happened to a more deserving anchor. She tied her success directly to Trump, and now she is living with the consequences of having centered her program entirely around opposing the former president. And make no mistake, few on cable television opposed Trump in a more laughable, ludicrous, and audacious manner than Wallace.

In the key 25-54 viewing demographic, she is being chased by Newsmax television.

Cable News Ratings Fri Sep 3

Primetime Avg Demo | Total Viewers
1⃣@FoxNews 373,333 | 2,373,333
2⃣@MSNBC 84,333 | 936,333
3⃣@CNN 160,000 | 683,667
4⃣@Newsmax 28,667 | 166,333
5⃣@NewsNationNow 6,667 | 29,000 pic.twitter.com/wf9K1cfjBb

— RoadMN 📈 (@RoadMN) September 7, 2021

Wallace has to do something to get her minuscule audience fired up, or she’s going to be working for the Lincoln Project…possibly driving the van as John Weaver cruises playgrounds. Unfortunately, the fact that she’s not terribly bright makes her choice of gambits more likely to result in head-scratchers than calls-to-action.

The aggressive legislation is not the result of collusion or coordination (not that it would be illegal or improper if true) or much of anything. The old go-along-get-along GOP establishment types are being flushed out of state capitols and, ever so slowly, out of the US Congress. They are being supplanted by people who believe in conservative principles, and they are willing to fight, particularly regarding the suppression of abortion. They aren’t going to be told “no,” and they aren’t afraid of losing in court if it moves the so-called Overton Window.  A working majority on the US Supreme Court is also in favor of rolling back the sacred status of abortion in America, all they need is the right set of facts, and states like Texas, like Mississippi, are working hard to create those facts. And not even Mueller is going to stop that.