Monday Open Thread [6.29.15]

I’m back from vacation, and it looks like my 10 day departure from political world were ten days of great political consequence that forever made this country a more progressive place. The lesson here is that I should go on vacation more often.

Wall Street Journal:

“When deciding whether to run for office, Vice President Joe Biden has made it a practice to seek his family’s counsel. That advice has included at least two members of his immediate family—his sons—urging him to run for president in 2016, Biden friends and advisers say.”

“The Biden family’s wishes add an intriguing wrinkle to a Democratic presidential race that has unfolded in unpredictable ways. But a White House official said speculation about the vice president’s political future was premature during this tough time for the family.”

Hmmmmmmm….

Ed Kilgore at the Washington Monthly:

It would be hard to identify a recent day in the more saturated with “history” than Friday, June 26. You had an epochal marriage equality decision from the U.S. Supreme Court, still echoing from its decision the day before rejecting what could have been a traumatic and politically overwhelming challenge to the Affordable Care Act. down in Charleston, the President of the United States–you know, that secular socialist–delivered a eulogy at the funeral of slain pastor/politician Clementa Pinckney that (I can assure you from my correspondence) made cold-blooded political analysts weep and atheists murmur the lyrics to Amazing Grace.

James Fallows:

I think Barack Obama’s eulogy [Friday] at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston was his most fully successful performance as an orator. It was also one that could have come only at this point in his public career—and not, for instance, when he was an intriguing figure first coming to national notice, as he was during his celebrated debut speech at the Democratic National Convention in Boston 11 years ago; or when he was a candidate fighting for political survival, as he was when he gave his “Race in America” speech in Philadelphia early in 2008.

If you have not read that whole Fallows piece at the Atlantic, do so, and if you have not watched the whole Obama eulogy, you are required now by law to. Here, I will make it easy for you:

Well, I disagree with the Trade Deal being a good thing, but all the other stuff is good.

Rick Klein on the marriage equality ruling further dividing Republicans, just as I predicted. Mwuhahahaha:

“If you’re going to start over, it helps to agree on a new place to begin. There’s a hope among some Republicans that the end of the nation’s gay-marriage debate wipes the slate clean on social issues, after a first half of the year where liberals seemed to be running up the score. The responses from GOP contenders on gay marriage are varied, though they don’t run the full gamut: All of the 16 major candidates continue to oppose something that, as of Friday, is a constitutional right.”

“From there, there’s Jeb Bush, John Kasich, and Marco Rubio suggesting that the Supreme Court has effectively settled the argument, with their focus now turning to protecting religious liberty ins this context. You have Scott Walker among those backing a constitutional amendment, Ted Cruz wanting a new process to oust justices, and Bobby Jindal suggesting we should shut the Supreme Court down altogether. Then there’s Mike Huckabee, who said on ABC’s This Week that ‘I’m not sure that every governor and every attorney general’ should simply comply with the court’s edict.

“These are more than different shadings; these are conflicting takes on a matter of major social policy where the Supreme Court has ruled – and a majority of Americans agree. Is there any scenario where this doesn’t get ugly inside a free-wheeling Republican primary – to say nothing of what that might do to the eventual nominee for the general election?”

Michael Cohen looks at our collective epiphany regarding the Dixie Swastika:

But then something amazing happened. Practically overnight, America had a national epiphany. For decades, the Confederate flag, which has flown on the grounds of the state capitol building in South Carolina and across the south, became recognised for what it truly is – not a symbol of regional heritage, but a painful, modern symbol of racial exclusion.

Within days of the shooting, politicians across the Deep South couldn’t run fast enough to the nearest microphone or television camera to denounce a flag that a week earlier they would have self-righteously defended. Corporations from eBay to Wal-Mart quickly joined in, announcing their newfound realisation that the stars and bars causes pain. By the end of the week, there were serious discussions taking place in both north and south of removing all vestiges of Confederate reverence – statues to southern generals, schools and highways named after Americans who, at their core, were racists and traitors.

These were largely symbolic acts, but in America, which has for so long denied the racism that is as endemic to our nation’s history as Mom and apple pie, it was a revelation. And the week was far from over.

What has always made America a great nation is that for all our many flaws, we are established on a creed, one that is perhaps the simplest and yet most powerful political idea ever articulated, namely that all men are created equal. Living up to that ideal has been America’s arduous journey for 240 years and at the end of these 10 days we got that much closer to it. On Friday, the US Supreme Court ruled that gay Americans have the same right to marriage as other citizens.

David Remnick on the Age of Obama:

“Obama is a flawed President, but his sense of historical perspective is well developed. He gives every sign of believing that his most important role in the American history of race was his election in November, 2008, and, nearly as important, his re-election, four years later. For millions of Americans, that election was an inspiration. But, for some untold number of others, it remains a source of tremendous resentment, a kind of threat that is capable, in some, of arousing the basest prejudices.”

“Obama hates to talk about this. He allows himself so little latitude. Maybe that will change when he is an ex-President focussed on his memoirs. As a very young man he wrote a book about becoming, about identity, about finding community in a black church, about finding a sense of home—in his case, on the South Side of Chicago, with a young lawyer named Michelle Robinson. It will be beyond interesting to see what he’s willing to tell us—tell us with real freedom—about being the focus of so much hope, but also the subject of so much ambient and organized racial anger: the birther movement, the death threats, the voter-suppression attempts, the articles, books, and films that portray him as everything from an unreconstructed, drug-addled campus radical to a Kenyan post-colonial socialist. This has been the Age of Obama, but we have learned over and over that this has hardly meant the end of racism in America. Not remotely. Dylann Roof, tragically, seems to be yet another terrible reminder of that.”

President Barack H. Obama, while flawed, has been the best President of my lifetime, and I have been on this planetary rock since 1976.

First Read says that President Obama has not been and will not be a lame duck: “Right after the 2014 midterms, many political observers — including your authors here — believed Obama had officially entered lame-duck status. But we were wrong. After the Democratic losses, Obama flexed his executive muscles on Cuba, the environment, and immigration (though the latter has been stalled in the courts). Now you can throw in likely passage of a historic trade agreement, as well as the possibility of a finalized nuclear deal with Iran. As we wrote last week, this June is a big legacy month for the president. So far, he’s cleared the trade hurdle. Now we’re on to health care (with a Supreme Court decision coming) and Iran (with the deadline at the end of the month).”

That First Read piece was written last week before the King v. Burwell ruling. David Remnick says the idea that President Obama “would play out his Presidency, after the political defeat of the midterm elections, as a professorial lame duck turns out to be without basis. And that gives a certain weight to his remarks in early 2014.”

Said Obama: “We’re on this planet a pretty short time, so that we cannot remake the world entirely during this little stretch that we have. … But I think our decisions matter. And I think America was very lucky that Abraham Lincoln was President when he was President. If he hadn’t been, the course of history would be very different. But I also think that, despite being the greatest President, in my mind, in our history, it took another hundred and fifty years before African-Americans had anything approaching formal equality, much less real equality. I think that doesn’t diminish Lincoln’s achievements, but it acknowledges that, at the end of the day, we’re part of a long-running story. We just try to get our paragraph right.”

“It turns out that this was not, for Barack Obama, a rhetoric of resignation at all, but a kind of resolve.