Say what you want about Donald Trump, but he's got Ted Cruz pegged.
Say what you want about Donald Trump, but he's got Ted Cruz pegged.
It should come as no surprise that Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz, in particular, wants to effectively shut down the Supreme Court for a year. Shutting down government is after all his trademark thing.
By the way, the Senate's duty is to advise and consent. You know what? The Senate is advising right now. We're advising that a lame-duck president in an election year is not going to be able to tip the balance of the Supreme Court.
That we're going to have an election, and if liberals are so confident that the American people want unlimited abortion on demand, want religious liberty torn down, want the Second Amendment taken away, want veterans' memorials torn down, want the crosses and stars of David sandblasted off of the tombstones of our fallen veterans, then go and make the case to the people.
I don't think the American people want that.
Helpful tip: We had an election. We keep having them, every four years, and we had one in 2012 when it was very clear that the result might "tip the balance of the Supreme Court," and the result was America electing Barack Obama as president by a healthy margin. It was in the papers. Ted Cruz, one presumes, was there, and "the American people" had their say. There's no addendum to the Constitution saying the black president has to give up his enumerated powers a year early because Republicans don't like the outcome of that election and instead insist we wait for one that's more to their liking.
As for the rest of that hooey—the stars of David bit is especially noteworthy since, of course, one of Justice Antonin Scalia's memorable episodes of "legal brilliance" was supposing that Jewish and other non-Christian soldiers should be just fine with crosses on their memorials because the Christian cross isn't a religious symbol after all—I think this may be one of the few areas where Donald Trump can handle Ted Cruz's public orgasm of fibbing better than we can.
So we're really having the conversation, then, about whether to keep the Supreme Court in effective limbo for an entire session because Senate Republicans simply don't want Barack Obama to execute that particular duty. It's going to be a thing. The Republicans are unanimous—the sitting president, the one that they subjected to birtherism, to "You Lie!" outbursts by southern politicians, to constant public suppositions that he was secretly working for the benefit of Kenya and/or Muslims, the president who has supposedly been just about to take everyone's guns and/or let the furriners take over each and every month from his inauguration onwards, and not a bit of it having anything to do with the president being black, we are told, those same folks are now quite insistent that the president must simply give up this power, too, because of a brand-new but deeply held tradition that says he just should, that's why.
And at least two thirds of the pundit corps are going to run with this like it's a serious argument, because they are stupid, stupid people who simply repeat whatever their preferred candidates say and don't give a damn if it makes a lick of sense. Sure, why not. Presidential terms only last three years now. Everybody knows that.
Every time I think our nation's politics couldn't possibly get more dysfunctional or our politicians less capable of actual governing, they prove me wrong. This, too, is part of Scalia's legacy. He was a great fan of reading into the Constitution whatever he wanted to read, and then pooh-poohing anyone who thought he ought to hold himself to the same reasoning the next time he read it. The hallmark of modern conservatism is praising the Constitution while explaining why this or that portion of it doesn't apply, after all. Is the president really commander in chief during election years? Golly, Mr. News Person, it's hard to say.
Marco Rubio has now made one of the most suspect—if not daftest—claims he's ever made about the 2013 "Gang of 8" immigration bill he helped author. Alex Jaffe reports:
Marco Rubio on Monday insisted the immigration reform bill he helped spearhead through the Senate was never intended to become law and that the authors of the bill expected conservatives in the House to make it "even better."
"The Senate immigration law was not headed towards becoming law," he told a questioner at a town hall in Rock Hill, S.C. "Ideally it was headed towards the House, where conservative members of the House were going to make it even better." [...] "But it was never going to go from there to the president's desk."
So you mean, Senator, you staked your entire future on a bill that you hoped would never actually become law in the form you wrote it? Wow, that's a claim we admittedly didn't see coming. Brilliant. So when you made that Sunday morning sweep of seven Sunday TV shows back in April 2013 touting the bill, you thought it was just a bunch of rubbish?
The Florida Republican appeared on seven weekly news programs, including two Spanish-language shows, to promote an immigration reform bill he and a bipartisan group of senators are preparing to unveil this week.
And then after it passed the Senate in June 2013 and you said it was pretty much in "perfect shape" to pass the House, you were just joshing.
Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants and potential 2016 presidential candidate, said roughly 95 percent of the bill is in “perfect shape” and that the full chamber debates are off to a good start.
Hey, let’s give the guy some credit: most politicians shy away from legislation they oppose. But Marco Rubio just throws caution to the wind. Ballsy.
Capital punishment is just one of many issues a liberal Supreme Court could affect
Capital punishment is just one of many issues a liberal Supreme Court could affect
ThinkProgress’s Ian Millhiser wrote a smart piece this weekend covering the ways in which Justice Antonin Scalia’s passing will affect the cases pending before the Supreme Court. Millhiser covers how the loss of Scalia’s vote will significantly affect rulings relating to labor unions, immigration, abortion, and redistricting, but there are still many more ways a shift in the court’s composition could affect future cases.
The enormity of moving the court to the left cannot be understated, which is why it would be ridiculous for President Obama to nominate a "compromise” choice, or even a supposedly moderate Republican to Scalia’s seat. A fifth liberal vote could both move the country in a more progressive direction and make it easier to elect Democrats to other levels and branches of government. It’s not hyperbole to say that the fate of the country rests on this seat.
The Supreme Court as been dominated by a mix of moderate-to-arch conservatives since the early 1970s, when Richard Nixon appointed Chief Justice Warren Burger and Justices Lewis Powell, William Rehnquist and Harry Blackmun. While the overall composition has varied, the court’s swing votes have generally been moderate conservatives such as Byron White, Sandra Day O’Connor, and the still-serving Anthony Kennedy. Not since the court of Earl Warren has a liberal majority been able to decide cases without needing to appeal to the vote of a conservative-leaning justice.
Modern American politics has largely forgotten how far the Warren Court pushed the country in a more liberal direction. The end of segregation, Miranda rights, the right to a public defender, “one person, one vote,” and the right to privacy were all thanks to a Supreme Court that defended and advanced the rights of all citizens, not just powerful ones. It’s been decades since the court has done that in any sort of consistent way.
In recent memory, the court has been a place where liberals have played defense, unless the issue happened to be one of a handful where Kennedy or another conservative held divergent views (most notably with Kennedy on gay rights and some death penalty cases). In 2012, liberals “won” a great victory by convincing one conservative to strike down only a small part of a manifestly constitutional law—the Affordable Care Act—rather than the entire thing.
If a Democratic president (be it Obama, Clinton, or Sanders) successfully appoints even a moderately liberal justice to the Supreme Court, we could enter a new era of American politics. The second decade of the Roberts Court could transform the country in ways liberals have dreamed of for years.
It’s impossible to cover all the issues that could be affected, and of course, we don’t know who will become the next Justice or how they will vote on any future cases, but here are some areas that could be in for big changes.
The lie that began with Sen. Chuck Grassley, that "it's been standard practice over the last 80 years to not confirm Supreme Court nominees during a presidential election year" has taken on a life of its own, mostly perpetuated by presidential candidates Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. It's a lie that NBC's Chuck Todd wasn't up to debunking on Sunday's Meet the Press.
Here's Cruz:
It has been 80 years since a Supreme Court vacancy was nominated and confirmed in an election year. There is a long tradition that you don't do this in an election year.
Here's Rubio:
Because actually, it's not just for the Supreme Court, even for appellate court, it's been both parties have followed this precedent. There comes a point in the last year of the president, especially in their second term, where you stop nominating, or you stop the advice and consent process. You basically say, "At this point, with a few months left in your term, no accountability from the ballot box and the appointment you're going to make, on a lifetime—
Cruz repeated it on ABC's This Week, with a slight, extremely oily tweak, when George Stephanopoulos reminded him that Kennedy was confirmed in February 1988. An election year.
CRUZ: George, the Senate has not confirmed a nominee that was named in the final year, an election year, in 80 years. This is a lame duck president. And, by the way, the only reason Anthony Kennedy was nominated that late is that Democrats in the Senate had gone after and defeated two previous nominees, Robert Bork, which set a new standard for partisan attacks on a nominee, and Doug Ginsburg.
See how he weaseled that talking point around? Now it's that the Senate hasn't confirmed someone named in an election year. Rubio, not being as bright as Cruz, stuck with the old "I'm not saying the president can't make an appointment. I'm saying we're not going to move forward on it in the Senate. And that has been the practice now […] for over 80 years." He repeated that on CBS's Face the Nation, and on CNN. He stuck with that until, remarkably, Fox News's Chris Wallace called him on it, reminding Rubio that the Kennedy confirmation happened in an election year. Oh, but that's all different, says Rubio, because the nomination came at the end of Reagan's seventh year and not the beginning of his eighth. Thus, President Obama only has "about 11 months" left in office and the Kennedy case doesn't count.
None of this weaseling makes the "80 year precedent" lie true as SCOTUSblog has demonstrated. Nor does it make any difference to the Constitution, because as Sen. Elizabeth Warren says there isn't "a clause that says '… except when there's a year left in the term of a Democratic president.'"
Chuck Grassley (R-IA) has sure changed his tune on nominations in the last decade. The senator came out swinging early after news that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had died, declaring what appears to be brand-new tactics standard procedure.
"The fact of the matter is that it’s been standard practice over the last 80 years to not confirm Supreme Court nominees during a presidential election year," Grassley said.
Which is, of course, total bullshit. It's total bullshit by Chuck Grassley's 2008 position when he said:
"The reality is that the Senate has never stopped confirming judicial nominees during the last few months of a president's term."
Nevertheless, it's total bullshit that's been embraced pretty much by all Republicans. So let's just take this opportunity right now to set the record straight, and there's no one better at doing that than the folks at SCOTUSblog.
The historical record does not reveal any instances since at least 1900 of the president failing to nominate and/or the Senate failing to confirm a nominee in a presidential election year because of the impending election. In that period, there were several nominations and confirmations of Justices during presidential election years. […]
In two instances in the twentieth century, presidents were not able to nominate and confirm a successor during an election year. But neither reflects a practice of leaving a seat open on the Supreme Court until after the election.
Just to make that clear: there is no modern precedent for leaving a vacancy on the Supreme Court until after an election. None. The closest parallel Republicans could make when a death or resignation left a seat open is in 1956, when Justice Sherman Minton stepped down when the Senate was not in session. President Dwight D. Eisenhower made a recess appointment of William J. Brennan to make sure there wasn't a vacancy, and Brennan was officially nominated and confirmed in early 1957.
There's also a relatively recent experience in 1988, when the Senate confirmed President Ronald Reagan's nominee, Anthony Kennedy. Grassley should remember that. He is on the record praising an expedited vote for Kennedy in that election year, and of course voted for Kennedy that same year. Along with every single other Republican senator. Even Mitch McConnnell. Boy, Republicans sure do have short memories. And selective interpretations of how things work.
Two major articles by criminal justice experts last week roundly criticized Hillary Clinton for her support of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. Both pieces are brilliant—I suggest you read them—and I fundamentally agree with their analysis of how the Clinton administration's use of tough-on-crime rhetoric perpetuated the demonization of America's suffering.
After all, perhaps no other federal law fully encompasses the legacy of America's obsession with correctional control than this one. The law, which expanded draconian sentencing, ensured longer sentencing, and expanded the federal death penalty, among many, many other things, is one of the most shameful legislative relics of recent memory. President Clinton boasted about the bill in his 1994 State of the Union, advocating for tough-on-crime policies and calling for a three strikes law. Clinton wasn't an outlier, and much of the criminal justice narrative of that time centered around incarceration as the only workable answer. But knowing what we know now—and what people should have known then—the law is hard to stomach.
Yet, much of what has been reported about the 1994 act is critically mistaken. The law had much less influence on widespread mass incarceration than the articles imply and than many seem to believe. Our federal government doesn't wield the real power when it comes to criminal justice, and the more we perpetuate that perception the farther we get from true reform.
Yes, as Michelle Alexander writes in The Nation, "Bill Clinton presided over the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history." And yes, as Donna Murch notes in the New Republic, "during his two terms, the inmate population grew from roughly 1.3 million to 2 million and the number of executions to 98 by 1999." Technically, both these facts are true. But this is one of those instances where the technical story is not the whole story.
It is terribly misleading to hold President Clinton directly responsible for what happened in state prisons. Of the 2 million prisoners incarcerated in 2000, Clinton had direct influence on less than 7 percent of them. Of the almost one hundred executions in 1999, not a single one was federal.
• 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."
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.
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 Dawghere.
• 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.
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:
x
This is like a horrible Thanksgiving where the family decides finally they’re all going to say what they really think about each other
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.
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