Donald Trump at long last found a state where he could break 50% of the vote. Prior to last night, the nearest he came was the great conservative colossus of Massachusetts. To achieve the elusive number, he needed a state to the left of the commonwealth of Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, Barney Frank, and Elizabeth Warren, and he found it last night. It is New York. It is the home of Governor Andrew Cuomo, who once growled at pro-lifers that they have “no place in the state of New York.” It is the home of comrade Mayor Bill de Blasio, who once peddled subscriptions to the newspaper of the Marxist Nicaraguan Sandinistas. It is the home of Communist Party USA and Columbia University. It is the home of obscenely unlivable tax rates. It is the home turf where Donald Trump launched his empire of casinos and strip clubs with a path blazed by the torch of eminent domain. It is the home of the New York Times.

It comes down to this. Crazy Bernie Sanders is running for the Democratic nomination against Hillary Clinton because no other Democrat would stick his/her/its neck out. Hillary was billed “Hillary, The Inevitable” and the rest of the gullible Democrats believed it. Of course, Crazy Bernie was not really a Democrat. He was a self-proclaimed democratic socialist. There was a day when a democratic socialist was too outré for the Democratic Party. Back then the democratic socialist would have had to run on a third-party ticket, perhaps on a fourth-party ticket. Now, of course, the Democratic Party has moved so far to the left that Bernie can claim he speaks for the party’s base.

That makes him a pretty potent adversary for Hillary, at least with Democrats. One wonders, what would happen if Crazy Bernie had gone beyond socialism. What if he had declared himself a Communist? Would the Democratic base still be with him? After all he did honeymoon in the Soviet Union in 1988 after visiting Nicaragua in 1985. Maybe next time around an aspiring Democratic candidate will run as a Communist.

I have to admit that I like Jerry Brown. No, I don’t like the California governor’s destructive liberal policies. What I like is his honesty. Recently, Governor Brown signed a ridiculous bill that will raise California’s minimum wage to $15 an hour (that’s $30,000 a year for a full-time worker). But unlike President Obama and other Democrat politicians, he did not try to justify this legislation with twisted Keynesian arguments that this would somehow be good for the economy. Brown signed the bill admitting, “Economically, minimum wages may not make sense.” Rather, he insisted that they make sense “morally and socially and politically.”

It’s a bad sign when you get halfway through a presidential campaign with no sages wagging their heads sagaciously as they cite Lord Acton. No wonder the politicians get away with so much. Their consciences have not had to reconcile with the most profound political sagacity of modern times. To wit: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

The great English historian delivered this pronouncement in a letter to his friend Bishop Mandell Creighton. I’m not aware of any instance in which the words have suffered intellectual rebuff — probably because they illuminate such occasions as the Supreme Court put on display this week.

A pity our distinguished historian wasn’t there himself to put a few questions to the solicitor general, who was then urging the justices to uphold President Obama’s plan for giving millions of undocumented aliens the right to work legally in the United States — on grounds that the president thought doing it was a good idea!