Washington CNN  — 

Here are the stories our panel of top political reporters will be watching for in the week ahead, in this week’s “Inside Politics” forecast.

1. Border wall loses another round in court

A federal judge in California is blocking President Donald Trump’s plan to use Pentagon funds to build his border wall. New York Times reporter Michael Shear says it’s the 38th time a federal court has blocked one of Trump’s policies.

Shear said what’s particularly galling to the President is that a single district court judge has the power to block his plans everywhere, through a nationwide injunction.

“Attorney General Bill Barr complained about it last week, saying that this practice is a violation of Constitutional principles,” Shear said. “So the Trump Administration will be going to the Supreme Court to ask the justices to stop this practice. Legal scholars say that’s highly unlikely, but there’s more than a little bit of irony here – during eight years of Barack Obama’s administration, a favorite tool of Republicans was, you guessed it, going to federal judges asking them to block policies they didn’t like.”

2. Democrats gear up for election-year fight over abortion

Missouri Republican Gov. Mike Parson signed one of the nation’s most restrictive abortion laws last week, barring the procedure beyond the eighth week of pregnancy, without exceptions for rape or incest.

Missouri joins a growing list of red states seeking to all but ban the vast majority of abortions. Time’s Molly Ball says Democrats want to make the future of Roe v. Wade a signature 2020 issue.

“Thousands of women and others all over the country came out to protest these laws, and you have all of the 2020 Democratic candidates coming out against them,” Ball said. “Even some Republicans say some of these laws go too far. So this is an issue that’s going to continue to simmer. You can expect it to still be going on when we get to next year, and you’ll hear the candidates talking about this a lot.”

3. Saudi weapons sales fight

President Trump said on Friday he’s bypassing Congress to sell more than $8 billion worth of arms to Saudi Arabia – an announcement that drew condemnation from lawmakers in both parties who want to punish the Saudis for the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and other human rights abuses.

“This is something Congress had been blocking for months, and now they have gone around Congress to complete the sales,” CNN’s Phil Mattingly said, and that’s something lawmakers never like.

“Saudi Arabia’s support on Capitol Hill has really wilted over the course of the last 10 or 11 months, and that is bipartisan,” Mattingly said. “You’re going to see lawmakers consider a number of ways to try and stop this from happening in the future.”

4. Congress & Iran

And that’s not the only foreign policy flashpoint on Capitol Hill. Lawmakers are also concerned about the President’s plan for Iran – last week he approved sending an additional 1,500 troops to the region.

“You’ve seen steps be taken in the last week where the administration finally came down to Capitol Hill to explain the escalation and the movement of a combat strike group and everything else that’s been going on in the Persian Gulf,” Washington Post reporter Karoun Demirjian said.

One question, Demirjian said, is whether some lawmakers will push for a new Authorization for the Use of Military Force – known as an AUMF – rather than relying on the one passed soon after 9/11 that’s been used as the legal justification for military action in the region ever since.

5. Recession worries in 2020

And from CNN Chief National Correspondent John King:

This weekend’s presidential trip to Japan is more style than substance. The next one will be far more important – for the global economy and for Trump’s reelection hopes.

The Dow was down last week, and it was the fifth losing week in a row. That hasn’t happened since 2011.

Trade tensions are the biggest factor, and specifically trade tensions with China.

It is easy to find analysts who say the market selloff would be even worse were it not for the anticipation that Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping will strike a deal – or at least the outlines of an agreement – when they meet next month at the annual G-20 summit in Osaka.

But there are also a growing number of market watchers, or US-China relations experts, who look back at the last week and see steps by both countries that suggest longer-term nationalist instincts are trumping shorter-term economic concerns.

Here in the states, the Trump administration’s new restrictions on Chinese tech giant Huawei complicate any effort to resolve major trade differences.

And those watching President Xi this past week as he traveled and focused on economic issues at home also see a leader digging in for a longer-term showdown.

“Huawei is very iconic to the Chinese, kind of like Apple to us, so putting them on the entity list is a real slap in the face and threatens to take the trade war from economics to war over nationalistic pride,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “It makes it very difficult to stand down.”

Trump says standing up to China’s unfair trade and other economic policies is long overdue, and he continually voices the belief that the American economy is strong enough to absorb the pain of a trade war.

But he also wants that humming economy as his re-election calling card, and a prolonged trade war could put that at risk.

Zandi pegs the odds of 2020 recession at 30 percent if nothing changes in the current economic climate. And Zandi says, in his view, the odds of a pre-election recession jump to 50 percent or more if the US-China feud escalates and additional tariffs are added.