This Week in America

This Week in America (Vol. 4, Week 9, #SuperTuesday Eve Edition, or, Math and Momentum)

Yes, we skipped last week, due to a time crunch.

This Week in What's the Right Analogy?

We're writing this post before the Super Tuesday contests. If things go as predicted then, we'll be well on the way to a Clinton vs. Trump matchup in the fall (although there are still unknowns that could shift the dynamic, bringing us, perhaps, a Clinton-Trump-Bloomberg contest, or Clinton-Trump-Some as-yet unidentified "true" conservative). Super Tuesday won't be definitive, but the month of March may well be; at any rate, it could be mathematically impossible for Sanders to catch up to Clinton after March, and if anyone is going to challenge Trump, it will have to be at a contested convention. The way Trump is running now, the other candidates--even combined--might not have enough delegates to keep Trump from winning on the first vote.

Over the past several weeks, we've seen multiple efforts to analyze just how Trump came to such dominance over the Republican electorate. The most common analogy used has been that Trump is a kind of Frankenstein's monster--that he was formed from bits and pieces of contemporary Republican ideology, and given life by Republican voters (here's one of those, from David Corn at Mother Jones). Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo strains an analogy based on debt and hostile takeovers, but reaches much the same conclusion. The Weekly Sift calls him an "opportunistic infection," able to attack because the Republican Party's immune system has been compromised.

Each of these analogies comes close, but none really addresses the entire issue. Other analogies that could be applied are Pandora's Box (when the party embraces extremism, it let a host of ills out into the world without realizing the time would come when it couldn't control them), or an invasive weed (able to take root and thrive because the party allowed the soil of reason to be denuded to the point that it can no longer support reality-based candidates).

The Sift's and Marshall's analysis are closer to right, because they identify the problem as one going back decades, whereas Corn's just takes it back to the Obama-McCain race of 2008. The long view is more accurate, because the factors that allowed Trump to surface and succeed reach back to the Goldwater campaign of 1964, if not earlier. In those days, Democrats were taking on the issue of civil rights, and the party of Lincoln was losing the hold it had once enjoyed on the votes of African-Americans. In response to that trend, instead of making an effort to win black votes, the Republicans decided to make up the difference by appealing more directly to whites who felt that giving blacks equal rights meant limiting white rights. That appeal--primarily directed at Southern white racists-didn't work for Goldwater, but it did for Nixon, then in an even bigger way for Reagan, when the phrase "Reagan Democrat" principally meant "middle-class or lower, predominantly Southern whites who feel left behind by a changing demographic tide."

It's important to remember how the country looked in the 1960s. Johnson's defeat of Goldwater was crushing. Congress was reliably Democratic. The Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement combined to create what looked like a truly revolutionary counterculture, a youth movement that would forever change the nation. It did, but not always in the ways the counterculture expected.

Looking at these trends, the conservative movement in general and the Republican Party with which it was aligned decided some fundamental changes need to be made. The media and the world of academia were perceived to be left-leaning. What the conservative world needed were its own think tanks and media outlets. Since conservatism, then and now, was largely dedicated toward the end of making rich people richer, amassing the funding for these efforts wasn't too hard. It took a while to get them off the ground, but now they're pervasive and influential: think tanks include the Heritage Foundation and the CATO Institute and the American Enterprise Institute, all granddaddies now, as well as upstarts like FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity; media outlets include Fox "News," the Washington Times, the National Review, and the Weekly Standard, along with sites like the Drudge Report and Breitbart, and talkers like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and the execrable Alex Jones.

Part of the pitch these organizations have made to Americans has been the idea that the mainstream media is necessarily "liberal" and can't be trusted to tell the truth. At the same time, they have no interest in telling the truth, either--their whole purpose is to propagandize on behalf of the right, after all. So they've been working hard on turning Americans away from any outlets that aren't sufficiently right-wing--but the real mainstream media: the New York Times, the Washington Post, the network news organizations, Time and Newsweek and CNN were never left-wing to begin with. They were mainstream precisely because they were centrist in orientation. If some opinion page writers were liberal, they were counterbalanced by hiring conservative ones.

The real truth of media bias is complex and requires more space than we want to devote to it here, but it boils down to this: various studies have shown that working journalists tend to have more left-leaning beliefs. Working journalists, however, often have little influence over what stories are told or how much play they get. Network TV news anchors can become incredibly wealthy, and tend to move in the same social circles as other wealthy people. And more and more media outlets are owned by fewer and fewer massive corporations, the heads of which are also wealthy and inclined to favor the status quo. So there's an inherent tug-of-war at media organizations that typically keeps them from moving too far in any ideological direction--except when they were created from the start to serve a specifically ideological purpose.

By discrediting the mainstream media--the organizations that might otherwise provide some kind of factual balance--the right-wing outlets and think tanks have deprived their most loyal followers of the ability to know when they're being propagandized. The most mendacious political campaign of our lifetime, Mitt Romney's 2012 campaign, literally said "We're not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers." Translated into English, that means, "Mitt can say whatever he wants, because most of the voters we want will never know he's lying."

The inevitable result is that nearly half of the American electorate now lives within a bubble that simply denies facts it finds inconvenient. Addressing climate change in any real way might limit the profits of the extractive industries--the oil and coal companies and the timber giants--so climate change is a hoax.  Addressing wealth/income/opportunity inequality might require raising taxes on the wealthy, so tax cuts pay for themselves (and then some!). Addressing gun violence might impact the profits of gun and ammunition manufacturers, so any attempt at gun safety legislation is the first step toward mass confiscation. And so on. The response to almost any issue that might, in some way, change the dynamic that pushes the vast majority of the nation's wealth into ever fewer pockets requires a denial of facts (and the accompanying insistence that those facts aren't really facts, anyway).

Yes, as David Corn writes, these trends all became more pronounced during the Obama era. But they didn't begin then. By the time Obama was elected, we'd had decades of pushback from the right--dog-whistle politics blaming the troubles of poor and middle-class whites on minorities, subtle acceptance and even endorsement of racism, and an army of voices saying that government can't be trusted, that government is the enemy, that what's good for the rich is good for America, that Democrats are all Commies who hate flag and country. So when a black, left-leaning president was elected, the Republicans in power had to live up to the rhetoric that put them there and do everything they could to obstruct him.

For awhile, those efforts paid off politically. When Obama got a stimulus package passed, it was demonized as big-government spending instead of accepted as a necessary--but too-small--step to prevent the economy from falling into depression. When the Affordable Care Act passed, it was painted as a massive government takeover of one of the nation's biggest industries instead of being seen as a partial step toward universal coverage that preserved the position--and increased the profits--of the giant health insurance corporations. Racism and right-wing-fueled anger at government fanned the Tea Party flames, and people flocked to meetings and voting booths, acting (often without knowing it, because the mainstream media couldn't be trusted) on behalf of the rich and powerful, turning Congress Republican and taking over the majority of statehouses across the country.

The combination of far-right media outlets, think tanks, and white victimization worked. Republicans had more power than they'd had in decades. They could use that power to prevent the president from enjoying any more major victories, helping to paint their preferred picture that government can't solve problems, and ensuring that they could take the White House in Obama's wake. What could go wrong?

Answer: plenty.

Because Obama did continue to have victories, although most were not as big as those early ones (and those were smaller than they should have been, because of his continuous, if misguided, attempts at bipartisanship--his determination to heal the nation's partisan divide by working across the aisle, while unable or unwilling to accept that those across the aisle had no intention of working with him). Those victories, small as they might have been, said to the far-right base that the people they'd elected weren't efficient enough at blocking the president. They were too willing to compromise, too willing to give in instead of hanging tough. When Ted Cruz managed to shut the government down, the Republican establishment--realizing the trouble that would cause in a general election--worked to reopen it, giving more credence on the right to the idea that the establishment was not sufficiently conservative. So Eric Cantor and John Boehner had to go. Every tiny win of Obama's brought a corresponding surge of antipathy from the right. What we need, they said, are leaders who are strong enough and conservative enough to stand up to the Socialist in the White House.

And "Socialist" was one of the lesser names they called him. This same rabid right embraced the Birther movement, and consistently painted Obama as "the other," not one of us. He was born in Kenya. He was a Muslim. He couldn't be understood, Newt Gingrich said, unless you understood "Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior." He didn't love America, he was out to destroy it.

The Republican establishment didn't push back against these extraordinary claims, because they were already in trouble with an increasingly radical base--the base that had put them in office, the base they had created through those think tanks and media outlets they'd wanted in the first place. The base that couldn't see how extreme they had become, because the only points of measurement that might have shown them were outside the approved bubble, over there in the "liberal" media.

Republican obstruction paid ideological dividends that the elected Republicans practicing it might not have recognized even as they were happening. Wages had been stagnating since the 1970s, in large part because labor unions tended to support Democrats, so some of the right-wing propaganda had been directed at reducing union membership and finally banning unions altogether for some classes of workers. Without the negotiating power of unions, it was each worker negotiating for him- or herself against corporations that rapidly grew richer and more powerful, and as a result, good middle-class jobs lost traction in terms of wage growth.

Because most of those workers had been white, it was whites who felt the effects of that stagnation the most (also because whites, unlike blacks and Latinos, were used to doing better generation by generation, accustomed to steady wage growth). And the explanation that fit into the conservative narrative was that "others"--minority workers hired through affirmative action, or illegal immigrants from Mexico--were taking the good jobs and depressing wages. During the Bush recession of 2007-08, not only did wages not grow, but jobs disappeared at a faster rate than they had in decades, terrifying those who were barely making it as is. A bigger stimulus would have turned that around faster, as would the major jobs initiative Obama tried to pass, but without 60 votes in the Senate and with universal Republican obstruction, those things didn't happen. As a result, the job situation stayed perilous and wages stayed flat--pushing ever more middle-class whites toward the idea that Obama (because it's always the president's fault) didn't care about their troubles. And the Republican establishment wasn't standing up to him.

It's not hard to see how radicalized big chunks of the electorate became. They've been told that minorities threaten their livelihoods. They've been told Mexicans are streaming across the border, when in fact more are leaving than coming in. They've been told that government is their enemy, and government dysfunction has been demonstrated to them time and again, intentionally. They've been told not to trust voices from outside the conservative bubble. They've been told that Muslims want to kill them, and that even the president might be a Muslim. They're been told that America is in decline, that we're not great anymore, because he's been allowed to ruin it.

It's not remotely surprising that someone like Trump would rise from this stew of hatred and distrust and self-pity. Trump projects the image of a strong man. He revels in the attack on "political correctness," which the right-wing media has said for years was a liberal plot to silence conservative voices (the fact that they've been anything but silent never seemed to enter into the conversation). He's willing to come out and say in public what had only been layered beneath the surface of conservative rhetoric for ages--that Muslims were coming here to kills us, that immigrants were responsible for our economic woes, that our military was weak, that the world no longer respected us. None of those things are true, but you'd have to look outside the bubble to know that, and Trump's campaign exists almost entirely inside the bubble.

So yes, Trump is giving voice to feelings that have been simmering on the right for a long time. They haven't been invisible--we here at TWiA, among others, have called them out for years, and warned that a schism in the Republican Party could result if those feelings were ever given full expression. Those feelings have been increasingly radicalized by the same forces that allowed Republicans to win the presidency in the Reagan, Bush, and Bush 2 eras, that allowed them to take full control of Congress and a majority of state capitols. Republicans have traded for years on long-disproven economic theories, on the idea that government can't solve problems but can only create them, and on the notion that our troubles are the fault of "others"--people who by definition are not us, not white, not middle class.

Trump didn't come out of nowhere. Decades ago, conservatives opened Pandora's Box. They stitched together Frankenstein's monster. They compromised their immune system, and they overgrazed the political landscape so that invasive species could creep in.

Now the invasion is here. Its name is Donald J. Trump. It's well on the way to claiming the Republican nomination. And the conservative movement has no one to blame but themselves. They watered the weed, and fertilized it, with their rhetoric and their actions. They shouldn't be surprised that it has grown tall and strong.

And if they don't do something now, the next ones will be taller and stronger still.

Or, to go back to the Sift's analogy:

But this is where the compromised-immune-system analogy has something to teach: People whose immune systems have been crippled by AIDS or chemotherapy seldom catch just one disease. Even if some massive dose of political antibiotics could flush Trump out of the Republican system, the underlying problem is still there: The Republican base cannot detect and reject hucksters. It cannot tell fact from fantasy. It values posturing and bombast over the skills necessary to govern a republic. It seeks scapegoats rather than solutions. It winks and nods at racism and white entitlement.

As long as that remains true, new Trumps will arise in 2020 and 2024, and any qualified Republican candidate offering real solutions will be defenseless against them. The Republican Party doesn’t just need to find a way to deal with Donald Trump. It needs rebuild its immune system.

It's too early to tell if Trump will indeed be their nominee. He might still be stopped, though math and momentum are on his side. But even if he is, the forces that created his candidacy have also created an electorate unwilling to turn to the few experienced candidates in the race--the Rick Perrys or Jeb! Bushes or Chris Christies who know something about governing. Instead, we see poor John Kasich flailing away for recognition. We see the intellectual and political lightweight Marco Rubio nearly collapsing under the hopes and expectations of what's left of the establishment. And we see the far-right bomb-thrower Ted Cruz, who, if Trump hadn't surfaced, would be recognized as the extremist that he is. To a party that doesn't believe in government, governing experience is a drawback, not a strength. To a party that's been radicalized over the decades, leaning toward the center is treason.

Of course Trump is in command. Of course he'll win Super Tuesday.

The right wing wanted this. Worked for it. Spent hundreds of millions of dollars to get here. Now they have it. And they can't hope to contain it.

The best they can hope for is that the left will save the day by electing Clinton or Sanders.

It would be funny, if it weren't so tragic.

 

Side Note: We've seen Republicans recently saying that the presence of two Hispanics and a black man on the Republican debate stage means that the Republican Party isn't racist. It's worth noting, therefore, that Rubio and Cruz are both Cuban-Americans. Cuban-Americans--largely as a result of their hereditary homeland being under Castro's rule for so long--are reliably conservative, and it's almost impossible to win the swing state of Florida without their support. If either one were Mexican-American, say, or Venezuelan-American, we suspect their performance at the polls would be far different, as would the language Trump uses to describe them.

As for Ben Carson? It's not his race that's keeping him from being taken seriously; it's his absolute ignorance of any policy issue ever. The same went for Herman Cain in 2012. It's easy to not vote for a black man who's also hopelessly unsuited to the job. One wonders what the result might be if a serious black conservative with commanding policy knowledge and governing experience were to emerge from the Republican ranks. So far, that seems unlikely--perhaps Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina could polish his intellectual chops and make a run in a cycle or two; otherwise, the party doesn't have a lot of African-Americans in a position to answer the question.

This Week in America (Vol. 4, Week 7, What is "Tradition," Anyway?)

We're giving up on the idea that TWiA is on hiatus, and leaning more toward the notion that this is the new normal--that instead of trying to cover the broad swath of political/policy news, we'll focus in on either the most important story or two of the week, or on an angle we're not seeing covered elsewhere. So it is this week, when we look at what "tradition" means.

 

Our thoughts turned to the question of tradition sometime in the last couple of weeks, when we saw an online comment or Tweet by someone arguing against any restrictions on gun ownership by saying he (we think it was a he, but we'll never find the original comment again) supported the "traditional interpretation of the Second Amendment."

Of course, the commenter couldn't be more wrong. The traditional meaning of the Second Amendment is not the abbreviated version the National Rifle Association put on the wall at its headquarters, but the one that embraces the full text of the amendment. Here's how it appears in the actual Bill of Rights: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

And until the recently deceased Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the conservative majority's opinion in 2008's District of Columbia v. Heller case, that first half of the sentence carried the most weight.  In an excerpt from his book The Second Amendment: A Biography, Brennan Center for Justice president Michael Waldman writes:

From 1888, when law review articles first were indexed, through 1959, every single one on the Second Amendment concluded it did not guarantee an individual right to a gun. The first to argue otherwise, written by a William and Mary law student named Stuart R. Hays, appeared in 1960. He began by citing an article in the NRA’s  American Rifleman magazine and argued that the amendment enforced a “right of revolution,” of which the Southern states availed themselves during what the author called “The War Between the States.”

At first, only a few articles echoed that view. Then, starting in the late 1970s, a squad of attorneys and professors began to churn out law review submissions, dozens of them, at a prodigious rate. Funds—much of them from the NRA—flowed freely. An essay contest, grants to write book reviews, the creation of “Academics for the Second Amendment,” all followed. In 2003, the NRA Foundation provided $1 million to endow the Patrick Henry professorship in constitutional law and the Second Amendment at George Mason University Law School.

This fusillade of scholarship and pseudo-scholarship insisted that the traditional view—shared by courts and historians—was wrong. There had been a colossal constitutional mistake. Two centuries of legal consensus, they argued, must be overturned.

In the District of Columbia v. Heller decision, Scalia turned tradition on its head. He dismissed the first half of the amendment's single sentence as meaningless, and opined that only the second half should be considered--and, in opposition to 200+ years of legal tradition and scholarship, decided that it gave the right of gun ownership to individuals even if they were not associated with any "well regulated Militia."

And he did it while maintaining his longtime claim to be a "textual originalist"--a scholar who believed the Court should look only at the original words of the Constitution, which he called a "dead document," meaning that contemporary interpretations held no place in judicial proceedings.

Scalia was a textual originalist, except when he wasn't (which was often). The force of his personality--with a little help--swayed the justices such that originalism is now considered by many to be the traditional way that the Court considers cases. But it's not. Until Scalia, the justices thought it was important to look at the world we live in now, and to try to apply the approach indicated by the Constitution to those circumstances. That, of course, meant interpreting the historic document through the lens of the modern world. The framers couldn't have known about automatic weapons with extended magazines, about interstate highways, about rockets to the moon or climate change or nuclear weapons. They considered non-whites less than a full human. The only way to address these present-day issues, previous SCOTUSes have held, was to work out how the words of the Constitution would apply today. Scalia's approach--which has since come to be the Roberts Court's approach--was the opposite. If the document didn't specifically mention a given situation, then it didn't allow government to make decisions regarding it. Of course, in many cases, not making a decision in fact is a decision in itself (usually on behalf of the already powerful, which was Scalia's preferred constituency anyway).

Scalia was willing to ignore precedent, to twist himself and the Constitution he claimed as his shield into logical pretzels in order to confer upon corporations the rights of citizens, to define money as "free speech," to argue against providing health care for millions of Americans, and for the idea that protecting voting rights was allowing a racial entitlement. No single justice in the modern era has done so much to try to stem the tide of progress--to straighten, in Dr. Martin Luther King's analogy, the "arc of the moral universe" that would otherwise bend toward justice.

In his review of a book that Scalia co-wrote, conservative jurist Richard A. Posner shreds Scalia's claim of "originalism." The truth is more complex: Scalia was no originalist, except when it suited his purposes. He was really a partisan hack--sometimes a brilliant one, but a hack just the same. Above we mentioned the help he had in reshaping the Court in his image. That help was in the form of his own power of writing, which was considerable; few justices in our history could turn a phrase as originally and elegantly as he. But there's also sometimes a Lewis Carroll aspect to his writing , as when he inserts phrases like "argle bargle" and "jiggery pokery."

Like Carroll, Scalia's best-known writings describe a world that exists only in his imagination--the far-right utopia Scalia wanted to live in rather than the real world the rest of us inhabit. Scalia could write rings around his colleagues, which made his decisions eminently quotable--and that leads us to the other form of help Scalia had: a right-wing media construction like none that had ever existed before. In a different age, Scalia's opinions might never have been heard beyond the walls of the Court. But Scalia came along at just the right time, and his words and ideas made their way into the bubble formed by conservative think tanks and advocacy groups, media personalities like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, and outlets like Fox "News" and the Drudge Report. In turn, that bubble shaped and inspired Scalia's views and encouraged him to lean ever farther to the right, to keep the encomiums coming his way.

His hackery shows its purest self, perhaps, in the Bush v. Gore decision that installed George W. Bush--the Court's conservative majority's favorite--to be the president of the United States in 2000. Shortly thereafter, Renata Adler wrote:

To return for a moment to the decision--in particular, to Justice Scalia's concurrence (in itself unusual) in the Supreme Court's order, which abruptly halted the manual count by granting Bush's application for a stay. It is often forgotten that, in addition to Florida's state courts, lawyers for Bush had already brought their case before three federal courts (the U.S. District Courts of Orlando and Miami, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit Court in Atlanta), without success. A "stay" is a form of the ancient equitable remedy of injunction. Centuries ago, a petitioner might appeal directly to the king for a writ to "enjoin" his neighbor from doing something so drastic and destructive that it threatened the petitioner with "irreparable harm," damage, in other words, that could not subsequently be undone or compensated. The very basis of a petition for such a writ was an emergency.

A "stay"--and every application by petitioners Bush and Cheney in the federal courts to stop the manual recount was phrased in terms of "An Emergency Motion" or "An Emergency Application for a Stay"--is a drastic remedy. It is not to be granted unless the petitioner clearly establishes that he will suffer "irreparable injury" if the stay is denied; and that this threatened injury outweighs whatever damage the proposed injunction may cause the opposing party. He must also establish that granting a stay would not be adverse to the public interest.

In his concurrence, Justice Scalia did not trouble for a moment to consider whether the threatened injury to Bush if the counting continued outweighed the damage to Gore if it did not. Scalia went straight to "irreparable harm." If the manual count continued, he said, it "does in my view threaten irreparable harm to the petitioner, and to the country, by casting a cloud upon what he claims to be the legitimacy of his election."

Well, there it is. The irreparable harm of "casting a cloud." In the long and honorable tradition of injunctions and stays, this "irreparable injury" is a new one. Not just a cloud, but a cloud on "what he claims to be the legitimacy" of what he is claiming. By that standard, of course, every litigant in every case should be granted an injunction to halt the proceeding that offends him: the prosecutor casts a cloud on a claim of innocence; the civil plaintiff, a cloud on the defendant's claim that he has already paid him. And of course vice versa, the defendants casting clouds on plaintiffs and prosecutors. The whole adversary system consists of a casting of clouds.

Adler continues:

But none of this, not a word or a concept, is the reasoning or the language of the law. And the vague, nattering--simultaneously brazen, timid, and evasive--quality of the decision culminates, of course, in this: "Our consideration is limited to the present circumstances, for the problem of equal protection in election processes generally presents many complexities."

Look at that sentence a minute. What can it possibly mean? It apparently says that, for some reason, the decision in Bush v. Gore is not to be regarded as precedent for any other. But if this were so, it would undermine, at one stroke, the whole basis of American and Anglo-Saxon law. That each case has precedential value, must have precedential value, is the bedrock of our system of justice. Otherwise each case can be decided ad hoc, at the caprice of judges--non-elected, federal judges with lifelong tenure. The Constitution and even the Magna Carta would be superseded, the justices would be kings.

It is, however, simply not in the power of the Court to determine that its decision has no precedential value. All decisions of the Court have such value, though it is hard to see how this particular travesty could serve as precedent for anything--or, for that matter, how it could be abandoned or overruled. But a special case, with no precedents and no future applications, is a case that, for ancient, profound, and lasting reasons, no court under our system is entitled to decide. No court has a right to say, This case is the law, crafted for one citizen, George W. Bush, and for him alone.

Following the Clinton years, Scalia and his cronies on the Court wanted a Republican president in office. Scalia has always served the interests of the wealthy white conservatives--to him, extending the rights of straight white males to other genders, races, or sexual orientations was a matter of extending special privileges, not equal rights. Equal rights were only for his preferred class of people. His personal bias--and that of the other four conservative justices--put a singularly unsuited man into the Oval Office, a man who within a couple of years had committed the most disastrous foreign policy blunder in American history, a mistake the consequences of which we're still dealing with today. But whenever he was challenged on the decision, Scalia's pat response was "Get over it." Of course it was--the Bush v. Gore decision couldn't be defended in rational terms because it was not arrived at through any process other than personal preference. They didn't want Gore to take the office to which he was apparently rightfully elected, so they decided that counting votes might do "irreparable harm" to the petitioner (i.e., Bush).

The justification they used was just as transparent. The Constitution's equal protection clause, they said, would be violated if they let the count in Florida proceed the way it had been ordered, because in other parts of the country, the standards for counting votes varied. Of course they did--voting is run by the states, and each state gets to make up its own rules (within reason). Under other circumstances, Scalia would have ruled that the states were perfectly within their rights to set varying standards, that the federal government had no business telling them how to count their votes. But in this case--and this case alone--states' rights meant nothing. The Supreme Court had to act decisively to prevent the legally cast ballots of Americans from being counted.

It's almost beside the point to observe that Scalia had two children working for law firms that had been employed by the Bush campaign, and that therefore he should have recused himself from the matter altogether. Scalia wanted to be a hero of the far right, and he became one. That history will paint him as a brilliant, talented legal mind who willingly transformed himself into a partisan hack is noted here by law and political science professor Andrew Koppelman, who writes, "Shakespeare’s Othello is a great man misled by friendship, induced by his malign companion to murder what he most loved. The dominant theme in Scalia’s jurisprudence is a deep faith in judicial restraint, the virtues that prevent a judge from being a political apparatchik. Alas, his conservative friends led him astray, so that on these crucial occasions, all unknowing he killed the thing he loved. It is with deep regret that one must repeat another line from Shakespeare: Oh, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown."

***

Another, related area where "tradition" has lost all meaning this week is in the conversation about how to fill Scalia's place on the Court. Republicans are arguing that because President Obama is in his last year in office (barely), he shouldn't bother nominating someone to take that seat, and if he does, they won't hold confirmation hearings or a vote. They say that for the president to nominate a Supreme Court justice so late in his last term breaks with tradition.

That's an obviously bogus argument. The Senate has often confirmed justices in the last year of a president's final term. Some Republicans are raising the specter of Robert Bork to declare that Democrats have blocked nominees, but Bork was blocked because he was a radical and a bigot (and six Republicans joined the Democrats in rejecting his nomination). After that failure, President Reagan nominated a more moderate candidate, Anthony Kennedy, who was confirmed 97-0 and who still sits on the Court. At no time have Democrats simply refused to consider a Republican president's nominee, particularly with almost a year to go before a new president will even take office. By the time that new president could make a nomination and that nominee be confirmed, more than a year would have passed. More than a year with one of the three branches of government essentially out to lunch--what would Scalia have said about that?

If he turned to the original text, he would find that Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution says this:  "He [the president] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments."

Article III describes the establishment of the Supreme Court. It is, therefore, the duty of the president to nominate a replacement for Scalia, and the duty of the Senate to consider and vote on that nomination. If tradition mattered to them, they would vote on the person's qualifications for the job, not on partisan considerations (unless--as in the case of Bork--the nominee was extremist beyond the pale).

Another Republican talking point has been that Senator Chuck Schumer (D/NY) said, in mid-2007, that the then-Democratic Senate should refuse to consider any Bush nominees. Ordinarily, Republicans would never look to Schumer for advice on any topic; anything that New York liberal uttered would only be so much argle bargle, to quote Scalia. But it might be ever-so-faintly persuasive, if Schumer had said it. Only he didn't. Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo went to the video, and reports: "Schumer quite explicitly never said that the Bush shouldn't get any more nominations. He also didn't say that any nominee should be rejected. He said they should insist on proof based on judicial history, rather than just promises that they were mainstream conservatives rather than conservative activists, which both have proven to be. But again, set all this aside. He clearly spoke of holding hearings and being willing to confirm Bush nominees if they met reasonable criteria."

Far right groups like the Family Research Council, FreedomWorks, and Heritage Action are leaning hard on Republican senators to resist the idea of meeting their Constitutional obligations and doing the nation's business. Curt Levey, the executive director of the FreedomWorks Foundation, admitted the truth: "The very fact that people on our side feel very strongly that there shouldn’t be a hearing before we know the nominee is because it’s not really about the nominee. ... Frankly, the real objection here is to Obama."

So they want the Senate to ignore the Constitution and refuse to even consider a nominee because they don't like the person who the American people overwhelmingly elected twice to the presidency. It's a little hard to find a way to consider that a patriotic stand.

Patriotism, tradition--and the Constitution--agree on one thing. The president needs to nominate someone. The Senate should act on that nomination. The Constitution doesn't specifically demand that they do it quickly, but patriotism and tradition do. And if they don't, they should be honest about their reasoning, and not try to claim that almost a year before his second term is finished, President Obama's office no longer matters.

This Week in Race/Hate

Since before Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, he's been subjected to attacks on a level different from any other president, with even his birthplace and his faith coming into question (despite both being long-established facts). It's hard to see any rationale for the ongoing attempts to undermine his legacy, to pretend he's never been our "real" president, other than the color of his skin, because that is what sets him apart from previous Democratic presidents who have similarly governed from the center-left.

A lot of people are seeing, in the Senate's stated disinterest in considering a Supreme Court nomination, another example of that. The New York Times reports:

“Our president, the president of the United States, has been disrespected from Day 1,” Carol Richardson, 61, said on Wednesday as she colored a customer’s hair at Ultra Beauty Salon in Hollywood, S.C., a mostly black town near Charleston. “The words that have been said, the things the Republicans have done they’d have never have done to another president. Let’s talk like it is, it’s because of his skin color.”

Reflecting on the Supreme Court vacancy, Bakari Sellers, a former state representative from Denmark, S.C., likened the Senate treatment of the president to the 18th century constitutional compromise that counted black men as equivalent to three-fifths of a person.

“I guess many of them are using this in the strictest construction that Barack Obama’s serving three-fifths of a term or he’s three-fifths of a human being, so he doesn’t get to make this choice,” Mr. Sellers said. “It’s infuriating.”

Early in his presidency, the number of hate groups in the country--as tracked by the Southern Poverty Law Center--grew rapidly. For the last five years, that number has leveled off, but in 2015, they spiked again, according to the newest stats. (Full disclosure: TWiA is a longtime financial supporter of the SPLC.) So did violence perpetrated by hate groups. The rhetoric of Republican presidential candidates--particularly frontrunner Donald Trump--has helped spur that rise.

In the New Republic, Jeet Heer argues that far from being an anomaly in the Republican Party, Trump is the "beneficiary of the policies the party has pursued for more than half a century." Those policies were laid out over a period of years by William F. Buckley's blatantly racist, right-wing National Review, then adopted by Barry Goldwater in 1964 and Richard Nixon in 1968 and 1972. Since then, that "Southern Strategy" has provided the party with its only solid, permanent base--racist whites in the South. Heer concludes:

Trump does represent an innovation, or perhaps a return to form, in one way. The Southern Strategy has long relied on coded appeals to racism—an emphasis on “law and order,” denunciations of racial quotas, and so on—that enticed the bigoted base while still giving the Republican Party plausible deniability. This sort of winking racism no longer works, in part because the base feels the party hasn’t delivered. Trump’s signature trait is that he doesn’t hide his bigotry, so he excites voters who feel that here, at last, they have the real thing. 

If Trump is victorious in South Carolina and the six upcoming Southern contests on Super Tuesday, he’ll owe much of his success to the racial politics crafted by the conservative movement that reshaped the Republican Party. There’s no denying that. 

The modern conservative movement can't be divorced from the racist tactics that gave birth to it and helped it thrive (and if anyone doubts the truth of that, just look at efforts to disenfranchise minority voters in Republican-controlled states. Look at the imposition of "emergency managers" on black-run cities in Michigan, and the lack of urgency felt by white Republican authorities in Lansing while mostly black people in Flint were being poisoned by their own water supply. Look at the conservative embrace of Scalia, who spent most of his career trying to protect the rights of whites while denying those of non-whites. Look at the rise of Trump, the overwhelming favorite to win the Republican primary in the reliably conservative state of South Carolina, where the preponderance of his supporters wish the South had won the Civil War.

* * *

And speaking of hate groups and antigovernment "patriot" militias--which are anything but patriotic--Cliven Bundy and some co-conspirators were finally indicted this week for pointing guns at federal officials back in 2014. It's about time, and we hope long prison sentences await those thugs.

This Week in Bears

In a Republican town hall in South Carolina this week, other candidates talked about the threat of ISIS, but Dr. Ben Carson was the only one who addressed the danger of bear attacks.

When a bear has a milk can stuck on its head, it's handy to have a crane.

 

This Week in America on Hiatus, Week 4 (What's the Matter with Macro?)

 

We discovered this week that we--along with most of the country--have been getting the name of Florida's junior senator wrong for years. We've been calling him "Marco Rubio," but during Saturday night's Republican debate, we learned that his real name is Macro Rubio.

Here's how Google defines the word:

mac·ro

ˈmakrō/

noun

noun: macro; plural noun: macros; noun: macro instruction; plural noun: macro instructions; plural noun: macros instruction

 

Computing: a single instruction that expands automatically into a set of instructions to perform a particular task.

 

 

 

In other words, when you want to automate a task so you get the same output every time, you create a macro. They you just need to hit a couple of keys to get the repeatable result you need.

 

Much like Macro Rubio's debate performance. Let's go to the transcript.

 

Macro's first answer (emphasis ours):

RUBIO: And let's dispel once and for all [sic] with this fiction that Barack Obama doesn't know what he's doing. He knows exactly what he's doing. Barack Obama is undertaking a systematic effort to change this country, to make America more like the rest of the world.

That's why he passed Obamacare and the stimulus and Dodd-Frank and the deal with Iran. It is a systematic effort to change America.

Macro's second answer:

RUBIO: But I would add this. Let's dispel with this fiction [sic, again] that Barack Obama doesn't know what he's doing. He knows exactly what he's doing. He is trying to change this country. He wants America to become more like the rest of the world. We don't want to be like the rest of the world, we want to be the United States of America. And when I'm elected president, this will become once again, the single greatest nation in the history of the world, not the disaster Barack Obama has imposed upon us.

CHRISTIE: See Marco -- Marco, the thing is this. When you're president of the United States, when you're a governor of a state, the memorized 30-second speech where you talk about how great America is at the end of it doesn't solve one problem for one person. They expect you to plow the snow. They expect you to get the schools open. And when the worst natural disaster in your state's history hits you, they expect you to rebuild their state, which is what I've done.

None of that stuff happens on the floor of the United States Senate. It's a fine job, I'm glad you ran for it, but it does not prepare you for president of the United States.

RUBIO: Chris -- Chris, your state got hit by a massive snowstorm two weeks ago. You didn't even want to go back. They had to shame you into going back. And then you stayed there for 36 hours and then he left and came back to campaign. Those are the facts.

Here's the bottom line. This notion that Barack Obama doesn't know what he's doing is just not true. He knows exactly what he's doing.

CHRISTIE: There it is. There it is. The memorized 25-second speech. There it is, everybody.

RUBIO: Well, that's the -- that's the reason why this campaign is so important. Because I think this notion -- I think this is an important point. We have to understand what we're going through here. We are not facing a president that doesn't know what he's doing. He knows what he is doing. That's why he's done the things he's done.

That's why we have a president that passed Obamacare and the stimulus. All this damage that he's done to America is deliberate. This is a president that's trying to redefine this country. That's why this election is truly a referendum on our identity as a nation, as a people. Our future is at stake.

Rubio's eighth answer:

RUBIO: Well, here's the response. I think anyone who believes that Barack Obama isn't doing what he's doing on purpose doesn't understand what we're dealing with here, OK? This is a president -- this is a president who is trying to change this country. When he talked about change, he wasn't talking about dealing with our problems.

Obamacare was not an accident. The undermining of the Second Amendment is not an accident. The gutting of our military is not an accident. The undermining of America on the global stage is not an accident. Barack Obama is, indeed, trying to redefine this country. We better understand what we're dealing with here, because that's what Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders want to double down on if they are elected.

Five times during one debate. (And, Macro, it's "dispel" or "dispense with," not "dispel with." --ed.).

It's dumb, and it makes him sound like the robot that he is--that Chris Christie described.

But it's not what's really important about what he said. What's important is what he believes, and what he doesn't understand.

He's upset because President Obama changed the country? Can he name a two-term president who didn't? Ronald Reagan, who Macro admires, was a transformative president. George W. Bush changed the country, in ways we think were largely for the worse. And Macro wants to change the country.

According to the policies he espouses, he wants to change the country to a place where the government gets to decide who can marry whom, based on the religious beliefs of some--but hardly all--members of the public. He wants to change the country to one in which the insurance companies once again get the ultimate say over what medical treatments a sick person can try, one in which there are annual and lifetime caps on treatment, one in which being a female is a preexisting condition that requires one to pay higher prices, one in which millions of Americans have no health insurance coverage whatsoever. He wants to change the country into one that embraces torture. He wants to change the country into one with ever-increasing economic inequality--one where the rich get even more of the national wealth we all work for, and the middle class continues to shrink while the poor grow ever poorer. He wants to change the country into one in which the biggest corporations have all the power, and regular people have none.

The point isn't that Obama wants to change the country. Of course he does. The point is that Macro thinks that keeping the country from falling into another Great Depression was a bad idea. He thinks protecting the health of millions of American families was a bad thing. He thinks addressing climate change is a bad thing. He thinks preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons is a bad thing. He thinks maintaining our historic prohibition against torture is a bad thing.

We beg to differ.

Does Macro really think America was perfect in 2008? Shedding hundreds of thousands of jobs, embroiled in two grueling wars in the Middle East, big banks setting their own rules? None of that needed changing? Apparently so, because he considers Obama's efforts to fix those things as a "disaster," as "damage he's done to America."

Those weren't the only robotic responses Macro made during the debate, of course. He went back to a few favorites, including his demonstration of why he doesn't understand enough to ever be Commander in Chief of the armed forces. He even admitted that he keeps repeating this particular bit of idiocy:

RUBIO: I think the more fundamental challenge we're now facing is what's happening to the U.S. military -- I've said this many times, and I think it's important to start paying attention to this. Our Air Force is about to be the smallest it's been in 100 years. I'm sorry, in our history. Our Army is set to be smaller than it's been since the second World War, and our Navy is about to be the smallest than it's been in 100 years.

Amazingly, the dumbest thing he did there wasn't "correcting" himself to make himself more wrong on the Air Force. The Air Force was "born" in 1947, so there were plenty of times in our history--most of our history--in which we had no Air Force at all. Zero is considerably smaller than what we have now.

But the main point, Macro, is that you don't measure the strength of a military force by number of ships or planes or soldiers. You measure it by capability. Our military capability is is the greatest it's ever been, by a long shot. If you truly don't understand that, then maybe you need to go back to Florida and study up. If you do understand it but you think the American people are so ignorant that we don't understand it, you need to learn some respect for the country you claim to love. Either way, you're not suited to occupy the White House.

It's not just because you sound like you've been programmed. It's because the direction you want to take the country--the changes you want to make, whether you admit that's what they are or not--are changes that take us in the wrong direction. You're right about one thing--we are the greatest nation in history. We're better than you, that's for sure.

 

Side Note: Macro wasn't the only one on that stage who doesn't understand fundamentals of military action.

CRUZ: Now, when I say saturation carpet bombing, that is not indiscriminate.

That is targeted at oil facilities. It's targeted at the oil tankers. It's targeted at command and control locations. It's targeted at infrastructure. It's targeted at communications. It's targeted at bombing all of the roads and bridges going in and out of Raqqa. It's using overwhelming air power.

What Sen. Cruz is talking about here are two different things. Saturation carpet bombing is, by definition, indiscriminate. Targeted bombing is not saturation carpet bombing. Period. If Cruz doesn't understand that, he's another guy who should only get in the White House by taking the tour.

Tomorrow we'll know how the voters of New Hampshire feel about these two geniuses.

Edited to add: Looks like New Hampshire wasn't particularly impressed with Macro or Cruz. Glad to see Kasich in second place--he's very conservative, but he's running a positive campaign, and he acts like an adult.

This Week in America on Hiatus, Week 3 (#WhyTrumpLost)

We're still mostly on hiatus for the indefinite future, but we have a theory we haven't seen anyone else express, so we wanted to share.

 

This Week in Iowa

There have been lots of efforts made to explain Donald Trump's second-place finish in Iowa. Some say skipping the last debate cost him support there. Some suggest that his supporters are largely people who don't usually participate in the political process, so the funky caucus system seemed like too much trouble. Others say when he tried to put money in the communion plate in church, the Sunday before the primaries, evangelicals finally saw what a fraud he was. Maybe a barrage of anti-Trump advertising did the trick. Trump never developed much of a ground game in the state, but Ted Cruz had tens of thousands of volunteers, well over a thousand trained precinct captains, and a dormitory for volunteers to live in.

All those things are true, and they were probably all factors. But here's our theory:

The main difference between the Iowa caucuses and most primaries is that the Iowa caucuses aren't secret ballots. To participate, you have to stand (or sit) in the part of the caucus room where supporters of your candidate are gathered. There's give-and-take, as supporters of other candidates sometimes try to persuade you to abandon your camp and join theirs. Participation means making a very public showing of your views. You have to show your face to demonstrate your support.

Trump underperformed his polls in Iowa. Answering a pollster's question on the telephone is one thing--that pollster isn't going to use your name, so your neighbors aren't going to know that you verbally expressed your support for Trump. And Trump seems--according to the polls--to have a solid 24% or so of Republican voters behind him, nationwide. In polling, people who like him really like him. That's a good base, but it's not enough to win an election, or even an Iowa caucus.

But even some of the people who agree with his views have to know that he's an egomaniacal blowhard. They like the way he puts down various groups of people, and some of the "Yuge" plans he announces. Agreeing with those words, though, doesn't mean being blind to the fact that he never says how he's going to do the things he claims. He's going to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it. How? Never mind, he just will. He'll negotiate. He's going to make Putin behave. He's going to be very, very good for women. In what ways? Never mind, he just will.

It's one thing to approve of those nebulous concepts. It's another altogether to stand in a room where your neighbors can see you and pretend you don't know it's all an con. Evangelicals in particular might not have felt comfortable standing up for a guy who's been married multiple times, continues to make skeezy remarks about dating his own daughter, rarely goes to church, and owns a Bible his mother gave him years ago but has seemingly never opened it--all while people they'll have to sit next to in the pews on Sunday are across the room watching. Cruz, whose religious convictions sound more sincere--whose father had been allowed to preach from pulpits across the state--would have been an easier sell when it came to visibly expressing support, and Cruz got by far the lion's share of evangelicals.

What it will mean in New Hampshire and beyond is anybody's guess. Trump's brand was "I'm a winner!" and now he's not. That'll likely hurt him going forward. But in places where ballots truly are private, more of his supporters might be willing to come out for him. Iowa could be--hopefully will be--the beginning of the end of the Trump campaign. He can't be counted out quite yet. But we think all the pundits we've heard from since Monday night have missed the plain truth about the caucus results: It's just embarrassing to be seen supporting an ignorant carnival barker, and in their heart of hearts, even his supporters know that's what he is.

This Week in Predictions

After devastating losses in New Hampshire, Rick Santorum, Carly Fiorina, and Ben Carson drop out of the race--if they make it that far. Maybe Rand "Crybaby" Paul and Jeb! Bush, too. Establishment Republicans need to coalesce around somebody fast, if they want to block Cruz or Trump from being their nominee (and they do). Right now, that somebody looks like Marco Rubio. We would rather it were John Kasich, because although he's as conservative as anyone in the race, he's more sane than the rest of them, and appears to have a core of integrity the others lack. But he basically skipped Iowa and spent all his energy in New Hampshire. If he doesn't do well in , he's probably out, too--until the eventual winner goes looking for a VP candidate, in which case he'll be on every short list.

On the other side, Bernie Sanders wins New Hampshire easily, but that doesn't mean much. Clinton remains the frontrunner, but she'll have to become a far better retail politician to win in November. Can she do it?

This Week in New Words

We learned a new word this week when we were pummeled by birdshot made of snow: "graupel." According to Wikipedia, "Under some atmospheric conditions, snow crystals may encounter supercooled water droplets. These droplets, which have a diameter of about 10 µm (0.00039 in), can exist in the liquid state at temperatures as low as −40 °C (−40 °F), far below the normal freezing point. Contact between a snow crystal and the supercooled droplets results in freezing of the liquid droplets onto the surface of the crystal. This process of crystal growth is known as accretion. Crystals that exhibit frozen droplets on their surfaces are often referred to as rimed. When this process continues so that the shape of the original snow crystal is no longer identifiable, the resulting crystal is referred to as graupel."

Graupel on my sleeve