Monday Open Thread [2.22.16]

MASSACHUSETTS—Emerson–Trump 50, Rubio 16, Cruz 10, Kasich 13, Carson 2
MASSACHUSETTS—Emerson–Clinton 46, Sanders 46

Nate Silver says Trump is now favored to win the nomination: “A reasonable person might adjudicate the case as follows: Yes, if the Republican nomination becomes a two-man race between Trump and Rubio, it could be pretty close. But that might not happen, or it at least might not happen for a while, not until Trump is off to a pretty big head start in delegates. What happens in a three-way race between Trump, Rubio and Cruz is a little murky. This reasonable person would concede that Rubio had a chance. But who’s the favorite? Trump!”

“Betting markets, weighing all of this information, see the Republican race thusly: Trump at about 50 percent to win the nomination, Rubio at 40 percent, and the rest of the field at 10 percent. I might quibble here and there, but that seems like basically a sound assessment.”

Larry Sabato says Rubio needs to push Kasich out next: “Now that Bush is out, Rubio might want to consider a daring gambit — openly offering Kasich the vice presidential slot in exchange for the Ohio governor’s support. (Ronald Reagan did something similar much later in his 1976 campaign, right before the Republican convention, and while it didn’t work out, Reagan shook up conventional wisdom. It is a tactic worth considering.)”

“If Rubio can somehow push Kasich out after Bush’s exit, it seems reasonable to think that the lion’s share of their supporters would go to him, and in a three-way race, that could be enough for Rubio to start getting the victories he has failed to secure so far.”

Martin Longman:

Much later, I finally grimly sat down to take a look at Mein Kampf. It was so sickening that I couldn’t complete it. What struck me, though, is how Hitler had laid out his ideas and plans so clearly. I’d been told so many times that people didn’t know what he was going to do (or even what he was doing), but in the book it was all spelled out in detail.

I mention this because my inclination is to kind of discount it when Donald Trump talks about his desire to torture and massacre Muslims, and to desecrate their religion. I’ve been around Trump since I was a pre-teen growing up in the shadow of the Big Apple. I’ve never taken him seriously about anything. And I’ve never seen him as any kind of threat. For most of the time I’ve been watching him, he hasn’t even been a hateful person.

So, it’s hard for me to adjust to the things he’s saying now. It seems like an act, and almost like a prank. But I haven’t forgotten how people misjudged another guy who said he wanted to massacre a religious minority. That’s why I think we ought to err on the side of caution and take him at his word.

Matt Bai wonders if Christie will be to blame if Trump wins: “When Mitt Romney lost his presidential bid in 2012, a lot of senior Republicans blamed Chris Christie for cementing his defeat… In truth, it was pretty weak to blame Christie, given the litany of Romney’s shortcomings, not to mention the fact that Christie had a decimated state to govern and shouldn’t have been thinking about electoral votes at that moment anyway.”

“But if the field of Republican hopefuls not named Donald Trump remains overcrowded and hopelessly muddled after this weekend, and if Trump himself cruises to another victory in South Carolina and ends up winning the nomination, a lot of those same Republican leaders may look back and conclude that it was Christie who cost them a victory yet again. And this time, they may actually be right.”

Now that it appears Hillary is positioned to win the Democratic nomination, any possible opening for Michael Bloomberg to run as a social liberal (but not socialist) businessman appears to be closing. Politico: “The multi-billionaire media mogul has held out the possibility of an independent candidacy as a tonic for centrists fearful of a Trump presidency. But even as Trump bolstered his chances for the Republican nomination with a solid win in South Carolina, Bloomberg’s trial balloon has yet to gain much altitude, even among those most likely to favor his candidacy.”

“Only if the self-avowed Democratic socialist Bernie Sanders were to cop the Democratic nomination and square off against reality-TV star Trump could these would-be Bloomberg supporters imagine him making the race — and even then, there were doubts.”

Jeff Greenfield says history suggests Trump can’t be stopped: “There are any number of primary campaigns that saw a significant shift of fortunes, but they provide cold comfort for the anti-Trumpeteers. Why? Because 1) they happened a relatively long time ago, 2) they all happened in two-candidate races and 3) none of them resulted in a victory for the come-from behind candidate.”

This is bad news for Jason and myself, since we both went all in on Ted Cruz winning the nomination. On the election prediction betting markets, he has collapsed to Kasich/Bush levels of support, in the 2% range, which Trump and Rubio are ahead 50% and 46% respectively. Cruz really had to win South Carolina to set himself up for the SEC Primary on Super Tuesday. Amy Walter agrees, Cruz is in trouble:

“From the beginning, Cruz’s strategy was based on putting together a strong showing among conservative and evangelical voters that would help muscle him through South Carolina and the SEC primary states. Yet in South Carolina, a state where 73 percent of the electorate defined themselves as evangelical, and where Cruz attacked Trump for his past support of abortion rights, Cruz lost the evangelical vote to Trump by six points!”

“If Cruz can’t win in South Carolina, a state tailor-made for a conservative, evangelical candidate, what makes him think that he can win in similar-looking southern states that vote on March 1? And, as I wrote earlier this week, losing out on South Carolina’s 50 delegates puts a major – perhaps insurmountable – roadblock in his path to winning the delegate race.”

My hope is that Trump and Rubio compete to a stalemate, and that we have a brokered convention where Cruz emerges as the compromise candidate somehow.

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that Trump and Cruz have the deepest pockets: “A seven-month, $220 million surge of spending on behalf of mainstream Republican candidates has yielded a primary battle dominated by Donald Trump and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, two candidates reviled by most of the party’s leading donors.”

“Now, as they approach a pivotal and expensive stage of the campaign, the two insurgent candidates — who have won the first three contests — appear to be in the best position financially to compete in the twelve states that will vote on ‘Super Tuesday,’ according to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission on Saturday.”

Jeffrey Toobin on the Justice that always looked backward: “Antonin Scalia, who died this month, after nearly three decades on the Supreme Court, devoted his professional life to making the United States a less fair, less tolerant, and less admirable democracy. Fortunately, he mostly failed. Belligerent with his colleagues, dismissive of his critics, nostalgic for a world where outsiders knew their place and stayed there, Scalia represents a perfect model for everything that President Obama should avoid in a successor.”

“The great Justices of the Supreme Court have always looked forward; their words both anticipated and helped shape the nation that the United States was becoming. Chief Justice John Marshall read the new Constitution to allow for a vibrant and progressive federal government. Louis Brandeis understood the need for that government to regulate an industrializing economy. Earl Warren saw that segregation was poison in the modern world. Scalia, in contrast, looked backward.”

Jeff Stein at Vox says the lower turnout (relatively speaking compared to 2008) in the Nevada Caucus and in the primaries and caucuses to date is bad sign for Bernie Sanders’ political revolution.

As Vox’s Ezra Klein has written, Sanders thinks “the core failure” of Obama’s presidency is its failure to convert voter enthusiasm in 2008 into a durable, mobilized organizing force beyond the election. Sanders vows to rectify this mistake by maintaining the energy from the campaign for subsequent fights against the corporate interests and in congressional and state elections.

The relatively low voter turnout in the Democratic primary so far makes this more sweeping plan seem laughably implausible. Three states have voted, we’ve had countless debates and town halls, and there’s been wall-to-wall media coverage for weeks. Sanders has drawn close to Clinton in the polls, and there are real stakes in a closely divided race.

And yet … we have little evidence that Sanders has actually activated a new force in electoral politics. If he can’t match the excitement generated by Obama on the campaign trail, how can he promise to exceed it once in office?

Slate’s Jamelle Bouie wonders if Clinton is once again inevitable:

The Clinton campaign believes that Sanders’ strength and enthusiasm is illusory; that it reflects the peculiar demographics of Iowa and New Hampshire — rural states with few minorities — more than any pro-Bernie tide in the Democratic Party. Nevada, in other words, was a test. If Clinton lost, then it presaged a tighter race in South Carolina and beyond, and possibly one that ended with a Sanders nomination. Now, instead, we have a race that essentially looks like it did in the beginning of the year. Clinton has the advantage, and barring a catastrophic decline with black voters, she’ll march steadily to the nomination. […]

Sanders is still a formidable candidate. He will win additional contests and demonstrate the extent to which he — or at least, his ideology — is the future of the Democratic Party. To that point, Sanders continues to excel with young voters, including non-whites. In exit polls, Sanders won 68 percent of non-white voters under 45. Clinton will continue to have to respond to Sanders’ challenge and reach out to these supporters. Despite a clearer path to the nomination, she cannot be complacent. In all likelihood, this primary season will end with a Clinton who has moved even further to the left, adopting some of Sanders’ approach and even his rhetoric.

If that is the end result of a Clinton v. Sanders primary, I’d say, to most everyone except the Sanders diehards or anti-Hillary forces, that that is a successful result. A more liberal, more progressive, more campaign tested Hillary is a better nominee than a complacent inevitable coronated Hillary running to the middle. The latter is something most of us feared as approached 2016, that the lack of a credible primary would hurt Hillary. Well, that fear has been avoided.

Peter Dreier at The American Prospect puts the 2016 stakes in clear perspective: “If the Democrats win the Senate and a Democratic president gets to replace Scalia and appoint three other justices, they will cement a liberal majority for at least two or three decades. If either Clinton or Sanders wins the White House, Justices Ginsburg (who will be 83 next year) and Stephen Breyer (78) might retire to allow the president to pick their younger successors. Anthony Kennedy, a conservative who sometimes votes with the court liberals, will be 80 in 2017. If he retires and a Democrat selects his replacement, the court could find itself with a 6-3 liberal majority, with only Chief Justice John Roberts (currently 61 years old) and Justices Clarence Thomas (67) and Samuel Alito (65) remaining to carry the conservative torch. (Two other liberals–61-year-old Sonia Sotomayor and 55-year-old Elena Kagan, both Obama appointees–could remain on the court for another two decades…Even with Roberts remaining as chief justice, a court with a 6-3 liberal majority could have more influence in moving the country in a progressive direction than at any time since Chief Justice Earl Warren led the court between 1953 and 1969.”

Melvin I. Urofsky at Los Angeles Times on Antonin Scalia and the judgment of history:

Scalia famously argued that only by reading the Constitution in the light of the Framers’ original intent can judges arrive at an impartial and objective understanding of the document. He was a caustic critic of activist courts — especially if they were liberal — but originalism itself gives conservative judges a fig leaf to cover their activism. Close observers of the court have noted that whenever Scalia invoked an originalist interpretation of the Constitution, it usually favored his biases. In the 2010 Citizens United case — which allows companies to make large campaign contributions from their corporate treasuries — Scalia wrote a concurrence in which he claimed the Framers believed in free speech rights for corporations. It astounded and dumbfounded historians who know that corporations barely existed in 18th century America.

Originalism has long been under attack, and not just by its political opponents. How is it possible to discern absolutely the Framers’ intent? A book published last fall revealed that James Madison’s notes on the Constitutional Convention, long considered a documentary source on the debates of the Framers, was edited later by Madison to emphasize his and Thomas Jefferson’s states’ rights view of government rather than that of their archenemy, Alexander Hamilton, who believed in a strong central government. Moreover, there are many parts of the Constitution for which there is no contemporary source of meaning. The basis for impeachment, for example, is “high crimes and misdemeanors,” for which no definition is to be found in the Federalist Papers or elsewhere.

Scalia will without doubt be remembered as one of the best writers on the court. Even those who disagree with his opinions read them just for the fun of it. But he often went too far, especially when in dissent, and his tirades insulted more moderate conservatives such as Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy. The justices shrugged it off with a “well, that’s just Nino.” In recent years, observers have noted that a nastiness is showing up in lower federal courts. A number of opinions have attacked opposing jurists not just on jurisprudental grounds, but on a personal basis as well. “If Scalia can do it,” the writers seem to think, “then so can we.”