Check out our slate of Daily Kos-endorsed candidates

Today’s comic by Tom Tomorrow is Sunday Talking About Stuff Show:

What you may have missed on Sunday Kos …

• Should we ban parents from kids sporting events, by Mark E Andersen
• He holds my heart: Frederick Douglass, by Denise Oliver Velez
• U.S. military to assess and manage risks of climate change, by Susan Grigsby
• Only fundamental change, not micromanagement, will prevent more lead poisoning after Flint, by David Akadjian
• Big corporations will always cheat (yep, I said cheat) on their taxes. Here's how to deal with it, by Ian Reifowitz
• If only Lavoy Finicum had not been a white man ... by Frank Vyan Walton
• How Bernie Sanders lost me ... and Hillary Clinton won me over, by Laura Clawson
• Presidents and cartoons: You think Obama gets dissed? Look what Abe Lincoln faced, by Sher Watts Spooner
• A rose by any other name, by DarkSyde
• Sanders, Trump, the Horatio Alger myth, and the lie of American meritocracy, by Chauncey DeVega
• Is it time for grassroots movements to coalesce around The Bernie Sanders Revolution, by Egberto Willies

• Obama administration okays first U.S. factory in Cuba since the revolution there: The two-man Alabama company will build up to 1,000 small tractors and other heavy equipment annually to sell to private farmers in Cuban. The Treasury Department gave partners Horace Clemmons and Saul Berenthal they are legally good to build their factory in a special economic zone that Cuba established to lure foreign investment: 

"Everybody wants to go to Cuba to sell something and that's not what we're trying to do. We're looking at the problem and how do we help Cuba solve the problems that they consider are the most important problems for them to solve," Clemmons said. "It's our belief that in the long run we both win if we do things that are beneficial to both countries."

• Here’s how two writers at Grist explain how President Obama went from “coal’s top cheerleader to its No. 1 enemy.”

• New study shows worldwide water scarcity is a lot worse than previously thought.

• Ed Rampell interviews Michael Moore about his new film, and other stuff:

Moore has returned with his first documentary in six years. The droll conceit of Where to Invade Next is that the Joint Chiefs of Staff “summon” Michael to the Pentagon and deploy him to “invade” countries around the world. But instead of looting them of their natural resources, such as oil, Moore brings their best ideas—including free university education, expanded leisure time, worker representation on boards of directors, school reform, punishment of bankers for recklessly wrecking economies, prison reform, and increased female involvement in government—back to the United States for Americans to put into practice. 

Resistance: Thousands rallied in Raleigh, N.C., over the weekend: 

Thousands of people marched and rallied in the frigid streets of Raleigh, North Carolina on Saturday morning to demand a restoration of voting rights and voice broad support for a new progressive agenda to counter the current policies of Gov. Pat McCrory and the Republican-controlled state legislature.

“The right to vote is at the heart of our democracy,” Rev. Barber told the crowd.Organized by the Move Forward Together Movement and the North Carolina Chapter of the NAACP, led by Rev. William Barber III, the demonstration attracted a diverse coalition of individuals and organizations who say the systematic attack on state services—including healthcare and education—along with eroded democratic control and new voting restrictions, have disempowered and further marginalized the state’s most vulnerable populations.

You can see some photos of the march and rally via Doc Dawg here.

• On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, it’s the most KITM of KITM shows ever. Greg Dworkin gives his whole segment over to the dumpster fire of a Republican debate, and Armando & David Waldman give the next hour over to the issues swirling around Scalia’s passing and succession.

Find us on iTunes | Find us on Stitcher | RSS | Donate to support the show!

If you missed Saturday’s GOP debate, you essentially missed the opportunity for a band of raucous 2016 rivals to make your family holidays look unbelievably sane. As conservative commentator David Frum noted:

Between 15 mentions in some form or another of the words "lie," "liar," or "lying" being bandied about the stage and boisterous audience bouts of boos and cheers, the only thing missing was the actual issues.

Trump, of course, was the main attraction: saying George W. Bush and the Bush family more generally lied about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction; then calling Ted Cruz the "single biggest liar" on the stage for his campaign's assertion that Ben Carson was suspending his campaign before the Iowa caucuses.

Marco Rubio quickly jumped on the Cruz = liar bandwagon, noting that he not only lied about Carson, but also his own immigration stance and Rubio's positions on abortion and same-sex marriage (which Rubio opposes).

But the cacophonous antics weren't confined to the stage, the crowd was just as crazy, directing most of its ire at Trump and Cruz. That's probably because there were more diehard supporters in the room than in previous debates, reports Igor Bobic:

According to RNC spokesman Sean Spicer, 600 tickets -- of the available 1,600 seats in the Peace Center -- were reserved for the candidates' supporters and friends. That number is more generous than in previous debates. The RNC got 367 tickets, and 550 seats went to state GOP and local officials.

Moreover, local party officials apparently decided to forgo a lottery system in favor of giving loyal supporters tickets due to the venue size, according to Chad Groover, chairman of the Greenville County Republican party.

All this made for a GOP debate that felt less presidential and far more Jerry Springer-esque. Hey, that’s a voting bloc unto itself.  

The unexpected death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was a political earthquake that will dramatically shake up our nation’s highest court. President Obama will now have an opportunity to appoint a liberal-leaning justice, but even if Republicans refuse to confirm a replacement, as they’ve threatened, the conservative bloc has nevertheless lost its five-to-four majority.

Going forward, if the court deadlocks at four votes apiece in future cases, such ties would either affirm the lower court rulings under review without setting precedent, or be scheduled for reargument for after a new justice can be seated. What you might not realize, for all the Republican bluster, is that this stalemate favors Democrats, thanks to the decisive advantage Obama has racked up after seven years of appointments to other federal courts nationwide.

As a result, Scalia’s passing will prevent the Supreme Court’s conservatives from overturning lower court decisions they don’t like in many high-profile cases on the docket this year. That includes a number of key cases in the crucial areas of redistricting and voting rights.

Perhaps the most consequential election case that has now apparently been rendered moot is Evenwel v. Abbott, where a conservative victory would have radically shifted legislative power toward Republicans nationwide. The Evenwel plaintiffs want to require state lawmakers to only count eligible voters rather than all residents when crafting election districts, which would reduce the political strength of areas with large concentrations of non-citizens, children, and prisoners.

Doing so would undermine urban Democrats and bolster rural Republicans—and do away with the very concept of “one person, one vote.” But while there was no guarantee that all five conservatives would have sided with the plaintiffs, all four liberals were opposed, and now the lower court’s ruling against the plaintiffs will almost certainly survive without Scalia.

Donald Trump does a lot of name calling that's disgraceful, frankly. But when he targets Ted Cruz, that's a silver lining we may as well revel in. After calling Cruz the "single biggest liar" during the GOP debate Saturday night, he expanded on the the theme Sunday on CBS's Face the Nation, reports Sara Jerde.

[John] Dickerson asked Trump if his attacks on Cruz's religious beliefs were a "Christian thing to do to another Christian."

"No, I say this. I say this. You can't lie and then hold up the bible, OK?" Trump replied. "He consistently lies. What he did to Ben Carson was a disgrace. What he did with the voter violation form - which is a fraud - is a disgrace. And you can't do that. You can't hold up all of these values and hold up the bible and then lie."

Ted Cruz, a hypocrite and “a disgrace.” Fair points. And one other thing is for sure, on Saturday Trump solidified his reputation as an equal opportunity destroyer. 

Seems that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's opposition to a president nominating any person of his or her choice to the Supreme Court is a newish thing. Because back in 1970, writing for a law review, McConnell was all about the proper constitutional roles for the president and the Senate when it comes to the Supreme Court.

At the outset, the Senate should discount the philosophy of the nominee. […] Political and philosophical considerations were often a factor in the nineteenth century […] but this in not proper and tends to degrade the Court and dilute the constitutionally proper authority of the Executive in this area. The President is presumably elected by the people to carry out a program and altering the ideological directions of the Supreme Court would seem to be a perfectly legitimate part of a Presidential platform. […] The proper role of the Senate is to advise and consent to the particular nomination.

Of course, it could be that McConnell reserves these constitutional rights just for Republican presidents. Because he sure has changed his tune in the intervening decades.

Nothing demonstrates how critical elections are like the sudden death of a conservative Supreme Court Justice, and nothing demonstrates just how critical it is to get the Senate back in Democratic hands. Let's start with Wisconsin, where an already embattled Republican—Ron Johnson—is jumping on the obstruction bandwagon with both feet.

"I strongly agree that the American people should decide the future direction of the Supreme Court by their votes for president and the majority party in the U.S. Senate," Johnson said in a statement released Sunday. "America needs Supreme Court justices who share Justice Scalia's commitment to applying the Constitution as written and to the freedom it secures."

Which again demonstrates that Ron Johnson might just be the dimmest bulb in the Senate seeing as how he’s running in Wisconsin, against a seasoned former senator, in a presidential election year. (Just to prove how dumb he is, Johnson actually tweeted out a condolence that included a picture not of Scalia, but of an actor who portrayed him in a play.) 

Johnson is just asking to be booted by his opponent, that former senator Russ Feingold, who was quick to respond.

"The Supreme Court plays a unique role applying the Constitution to important questions of American life and business, and I expect the president to nominate a new justice, as the Constitution requires," Feingold said in a statement. "The Senate must then do its job by working in a bipartisan way to vote on the nominee."

The Senate must do its job, but we know that that's not going to happen as long as it's in Mitch McConnell's hands. It's not going to happen with tools like Johnson holding seats that should be held by Democrats. Taking back the Senate now means more than than it ever has, and Wisconsin is the first seat that should fall.

 Help make it happen. Help get Russ Feingold back where he belongs. Even $3 makes a difference.

Here's an irony: Republicans dearly loved Nino Scalia's strict construction of the Constitution, but now that he's gone, they've creatively re-interpreted Article II, section 1 to conclude that "four" actually means "three" and therefore the final year of Barack Obama's term doesn't count. But while Mitch McConnell can refuse to allow a vote on a replacement for Scalia for as long as the GOP holds a majority in the Senate, he can't protect his fellow party members who are up for re-election this year from the political assault that's about to engulf them if they embrace their leader's unprecedented obstructionism.

That's why several of the most vulnerable Republican senators have so far kept their mouths shut about the whole thing, including Rob Portman (Ohio), Pat Toomey (Pennsylvania), and Mark Kirk (Illinois), who's usually awful when it comes to staying on message. They're going to have to say something substantive at some point, though.

But at least a couple of Republicans aren't waiting and have already decided to lash themselves to McConnell's mast, whatever hell may come their way. Wisconsin's Ron Johnson, one of the dimmest senators in the GOP caucus, is leading the way, declaring that "the American people should decide the future direction of the Supreme Court by their votes for president and the majority party in the U.S. Senate." Johnson has never seemed to grasp that he represents a blue-tilting swing state, and he often sounds more like a senator from the Deep South. His decision to embrace maximum recalcitrance is therefore unsurprising, and it only gives his Democratic challenger, former Sen. Russ Feingold, another juicy line of attack.

New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte, though, is not someone you'd expect to blindly follow McConnell and Johnson, since she's long tried to cultivate a more moderate image. But while most of her efforts in service of this goal have been decidedly small beer, she's nevertheless infuriated conservatives, for whom a single apostasy is rarely forgivable. If she's still concerned about a threatened primary challenge on her right, perhaps that's why she's now saying that "the Senate should not move forward with the confirmation process until the American people have spoken by electing a new president."

That stance, however, can only hurt her in the general election, when she'll face live fire from her Democratic opponent. Gov. Maggie Hassan actually beat Ayotte to the punch with a statement saying that it would be "completely unacceptable, and a clear sign of Washington's dysfunction" if the Senate left Scalia's seat vacant for an entire year. That's a much more potent message than Ayotte's process-based argle-bargle, and it’s ready-made for attack ads.

There are still a number of other Republicans in hotly contested Senate races we need to hear from—including John McCain—and we'll be keeping close track of whatever they have to say about filling Scalia's seat on the Supreme Court. The Republicans' Senate majority was already at risk this year; now, the party's slavish devotion to maximizing its own partisan advantage is only going to place the GOP in further jeopardy.

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is betting that blocking President Obama's Supreme Court nominee will turn into a net-plus for him at the polls because it will gin up a GOP base that, frankly, isn't particularly fond of him. But Democrats have as much, if not more, at stake and not just in terms of the crucial cases on the docket this year and in years to come, writes James Hohmann.

Just imagine a nominee who is African American, Asian American, or Hispanic and/or a woman as the poster child for everything Republicans stand against. That person could become the rallying cry for the Obama coalition of voters that twice delivered the presidency to Democrats. She or he could be the human embodiment of where the country is headed even more so than perhaps the Democratic nominee will be. Not to mention the Supreme Court docket alone, which includes cases on climate change, immigration, and abortion, among other galvanizing issues on the left.

And then there’s the independent voters or leaners.

More broadly, this could also undermine efforts by Senate Republicans to show that they are capable of governing and not just “the party of no.” Make no mistake: The upper chamber will grind to a standstill if the GOP follows through on this threat. Democrats who are inclined to work with them promise to stop doing so if Republicans play hardball.

Even though the GOP base is diminishing in numbers, it has proven to be a particularly reliable cohort of voters. Democrats, on the other hand, increasingly have the numbers to win if they can just get their voters to the polls. That's why having Republicans actively stonewall an Obama nominee potentially has far bigger upsides for Democrats. Usually, a presidential nominee gets one chance at a running mate to help energize voters. But in this case, with the election so close, Democrats could essentially have a third candidate on the ballot—and one that would almost surely have more longevity than a one- or two-term president. 

 Sen. Elizabeth Warren has skewered Republican arguments that President Obama should wait for the next president to pick a replacement for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia so that the American people can speak. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell "is right that the American people should have a voice in the selection of the next Supreme Court justice," Warren wrote in a Facebook post Sunday. "In fact, they did—when President Obama won the 2012 election by five million votes." She continues:

Article II Section 2 of the Constitution says the President of the United States nominates justices to the Supreme Court, with the advice and consent of the Senate. I can't find a clause that says "...except when there's a year left in the term of a Democratic President."

Senate Republicans took an oath just like Senate Democrats did. Abandoning the duties they swore to uphold would threaten both the Constitution and our democracy itself. It would also prove that all the Republican talk about loving the Constitution is just that—empty talk.

Sen. Chuck Schumer, expected to become Senate Democratic leader when Harry Reid retires next year, joined in blasting McConnell for his obstruction, predicting he wouldn't be able to sustain it. He told ABC's "This Week" that McConnell "doesn't even know who the president is going to propose. And he says, 'No, we're not having hearings, we're not going to go forward. [Leaving] the Supreme Court vacant for 300 days in a divided time? This kind of obstructionism isn't going to last."

It's going to last as long as McConnell has Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio running for president on the issue of a replacement and blocking a nomination. But leaving a vacancy on the Supreme Court for what could be as long as 13 or 14 months is not going to be a great talking point for all his senators seeking re-election this year, and Democrats are clearly going to make the most of it, with the extremely popular Warren leading the way.

Be sure to visit TT's Emporium of Shopping Fun!

Leading Off:

● MT-AL, UT-04: Are you a Republican congressional candidate who wants to look like a fantastic fundraiser without actually doing any of that pesky fundraising? Well, I know someone you should talk to. No, it's not that woman at the liquor store who keeps urging you to buy 300 lottery tickets. No, it's not that prince in your spam folder. No, it's not that political consultant who tells you if you plant these three beans and water them daily, they'll eventually sprout into a magic beanstalk that leads directly to an FEC account in the clouds that's already loaded with $3,000,000 for you to spend. And whatever you do, don't talk to New Hampshire GOP Rep. Frank Guinta, who will just say, "Get a loan from your parents!" No, Marco Rubio is the guy to ask!

You see, before Rubio was frustrating everyone from his debate coach to his dentist, he was the clear underdog against Florida Gov. Charlie Crist in the GOP Senate primary. As the Tampa Bay Times' Adam Smith explains in a great 2010 article, in the summer of 2009, Rubio resisted calls to just get out of Crist's way and run for attorney general, but his stubbornness could only take him so far. Rubio had only raised $340,000 from April to June, and he knew if he turned in another weak quarter, he'd lose any hope of looking like a viable candidate.

So Rubio took a big risk on direct mail to temporarily augment his fundraising. Direct mail brings in tons of money from small donors, but it costs so much to implement that candidates end up netting very little moola. Rubio and his team knew full well that they wouldn't be keeping most of his cash, but that wasn't the point: By turning in an eye-popping quarter, Rubio could draw lots of attention and endorsements from Crist-hating Republicans, who would send money to him that he could actually use later.

And it worked like a charm. In October, Rubio reported that he'd raised $1 million for the quarter. The well-funded Club for Growth quickly endorsed him and suddenly, Rubio's once-hopeless campaign had momentum. People eventually found out that Rubio had burned through most of the cash that he'd brought in, but by then, it didn't matter. As one of Rubio's advisors later put it, his direct mail stunt "was one-third confidence in our long-term prospects, one-third rolling of the dice, and one-third smoke and mirrors."

For all of Rubio's problems in 2016, his 2009 move worked out pretty damn well for him. So it's no surprise to see that some Republican candidates are still utilizing direct mail, even though they undoubtedly know how much it'll cost them.

A truly remarkable thing happened Saturday night at the Republican debate in South Carolina. Donald Trump told Marco Rubio that George W Bush was responsible for 9/11 and didn’t keep us safe. Oh, and by the way, he told Jeb! that W lied about getting us into Iraq. And if people decide to impeach him, that’s okay with the Donald.

MR. DONALD TRUMP: You do whatever you want. You call it whatever you want. I wanna tell you. They lied.  

JOHN DICKERSON: Okay.  

Mr. Donald Trump: They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none. And they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction.

(BOOING)

That was Donald Trump speaking on network television to a Republican audience.