Thursday Open Thread [2.25.16]

Texas may give Cruz new life, or at least a reason to stay in the race while arguing that Rubio should get out.

TEXAS—Austin American-Statesman–Cruz 38, Trump 26, Rubio 13, Kasich 7, Carson 6
TEXAS—TEGNA/SurveyUSA–Clinton 61, Sanders 32
TEXAS—TEGNA/SurveyUSA–Cruz 32, Trump 32, Rubio 17, Kasich 6, Carson 5
TEXAS—Emerson–Clinton 56, Sanders 40
TEXAS—Emerson–Cruz 29, Trump 28, Rubio 25, Kasich 9, Carson 4
TEXAS—KTVT-CBS 11–Clinton 61, Sanders 29
TEXAS—KTVT-CBS 11–Cruz 33, Trump 25, Rubio 15, Kasich 8, Carson 6
TEXAS—University of Houston–Cruz 35, Trump 20, Rubio 8, Carson 7, Kasich 4
OKLAHOMA—The Oklahoman–Trump 29, Rubio 21, Cruz 20, Carson 6, Kasich 5

Pew Research: “In the high-stakes battle over replacing Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court, a majority of Americans (56%) say the Senate should hold hearings and vote on President Obama’s choice to fill the vacancy. About four-in-ten (38%) say the Senate should not hold hearings until the next president selects a court nominee.”

First Read says Kasich staying in helps Trump win: “The Stop Trump movement is now picking up momentum with just a week to go until Super Tuesday (where 595 delegates are up for grabs on the Republican side). Yesterday, for instance, we saw more members of the GOP establishment — Sen. Orrin Hatch, Sen. Dan Coats, Gov. Asa Hutchinson, Bob Dole — endorse Marco Rubio. But maybe the biggest impediment to stopping Trump right now is … John Kasich.”

“Think about it: If you assume that a big chunk of the Jeb Bush vote goes to Rubio, that means that Rubio can rack up delegates under the proportional allocation formulas. But Rubio won’t be able to grow his percentages as long as Kasich is in the race and competing in Super Tuesday states like Georgia (where he campaigns today), Tennessee (where he’ll be Friday and Saturday). And with Kasich in the race, it’s possible that Trump could sweep the Super Tuesday states a week from now – he’s in striking distance in Texas, where the University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll has him trailing Ted Cruz there by just eight points (and that poll was taken before Saturday’s South Carolina results).”

“If you’re the GOP establishment, the good news is the Quinnipiac poll showing Kasich losing to Trump in his home state of Ohio. The bad news: We’re just a week out from Super Tuesday, and it doesn’t look like Kasich is going anywhere anytime soon.”

Jonathan Chait says Bernie Sanders had no plan for losing Nevada:

So far, turnout in the Democratic primary has lagged far behind its 2008 pace, casting severe doubt upon [the promise of a Sandersian Political Revolution]. Does Sanders actually believe it, or is it merely a thing he says to sidestep serious objections to his candidacy? Alex Seitz-Wald reports that Sanders genuinely believes it. Sanders, reports Seitz-Wald, “wanted a win so badly in Nevada that he never wrote a concession speech, according to aides, and the night before the caucuses he said that historians would mark Nevada as the beginning of his promised political revolution.” Some Democrats want to know if Sanders has some realistic backup plan for what he would do as president if the political revolution doesn’t come to pass. Looks like we have an answer.

Steve Benen says the GOP is gambling that voters won’t care about the Supreme Court.

It sounds cynical and undemocratic, but by all appearances, GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill just don’t buy into the notion that there will ever be a public backlash against them – on practically anything. Cycle after cycle, their antics are rewarded, even after a government shutdown, a debt-ceiling crisis, and a complete unwillingness to govern on practically any issue. Periodically, someone will say, “The public won’t stand for this,” to which Republicans respond, “Of course they will. Voters don’t pay much attention anyway.”

When the Democrats win back the Senate in November, their first order of business is to eliminate all holds and privileges that a Senator can use to gum up the works, and eliminate the filibuster for everything. Even the standing and talking until you die filibuster. These are privileges built into the Senate Rules. The GOP has abused their power. So their privileges must be revoked.

Chez Pazienza says the political press needs to grow a pair when it comes to Trump.

Nobody is willing to openly admit what most of us have been able to see for months: that if Donald Trump is the best the Republican party can do, and if he winds up becoming the nominee for president, we’re fucking doomed. The political press just keeps right on plugging along, pretending that while this is an unusual and surprising election season there’s nothing completely offensive and undeniably dangerous about it. Donald Trump is calling immigrants rapists and killers, he’s for banning all Muslims from entering the country, and he’s regularly encouraging his rabid followers to rough up protesters, and yet as a whole our nation’s political media is covering Trump’s rise as if it’s something to marvel at — or to hardly notice at all — rather than something to be utterly ashamed of. The job of the political press is to hold candidates accountable — but our political press for the most part isn’t doing a damn thing when it comes to Trump.

On Sunday, MSNBC correspondent Katy Tur tweeted out a depressing but not all that surprising incident that happened on the trail. She claims that at a campaign rally, Trump worked the audience by going after the media — not at all the first time he’s done it — and that led to the angry crowd hurling insults and threats at the press covering the event. According to Tur, at least one guy in the audience turned toward her and shouted, “You’re a bitch!” while another flipped the press gaggle off. In response to this, Chuck Todd fired off a tweet accusing Trump and his nutjob acolytes of engaging in “outrageous and dangerous behavior,” and saying that the “campaign rhetoric” needs to be “ratcheted back.” Trump singles out Katy Tur, accusing her of saying something negative about him, then whips the crowd into a frenzy against her until people are basically ready to tear her head off, and that’s just “campaign rhetoric?” No, it absolutely isn’t. It’s the frightening ravings of a would-be fascist dictator, one who refuses to behave decently or responsibly and who all the admonition in the world won’t stop. Remember, this is the same guy who responded to a protester being punched at a rally in November by agreeing that “maybe he should’ve been roughed up.” […]

Eventually, some member of the media is going to get hurt when Trump singles them out for a scathing rebuke. Back in January, he tore the head off a poor camera operator in the middle of a Trump rally for the unforgivable sin of not moving the camera to show the size of the crowd. (As if the people covering the rally work for Trump and are therefore required to take orders from him.) When Trump went after him, the crowd followed suit and launched into the same kind of mass tirade Katy Tur was on the receiving end of. And yet, again, not only does the media not take steps to protect its own people, it otherwise behaves as if Trump isn’t a threat to the public and America as a whole. Granted, the easiest way to correct itself on both counts would be to simply stop covering Trump, but given his status as ratings and page-view catnip that’s just never going to happen. Barring that then, the political media should be willing to take a stand and at every turn portray Trump as he is: a dangerous, megalomaniacal demagogue.

I have been thinking something for a while, but have been unwilling to put it into digital print, or say it out loud, but I think I will now. American politics has faced dark and dangerous and chaotic elections before. 1968 brings to mind a very good example. Then you had two political leaders, RFK and MLK, assassinated, and protesters and supporters of candidates beaten. It could happen again. This is not a prediction, or a “Round them up” hyperbolic call to arms that I am infamous for. It’s just a gut feeling I have that something violent is going to happen to change this presidential race Either a protester is killed at a Trump rally by a mob of Trump supporters, maybe even upon Trump’s orders, or maybe Trump himself will be shot at or assassinated.

Yahoo News reports that Trump does face an embarrassing court case soon: “Here’s a part of the political calendar that nobody in the Republican Party seems to have noticed: This spring, just as the GOP nomination battle enters its final phase, frontrunner Donald Trump could be forced to take time out for some unwanted personal business: He’s due to take the witness stand in a federal courtroom in San Diego, where he is being accused of running a financial fraud.”

Bill James thinks America does not have enough morons for Trump to win. “I don’t think that Trump can win, frankly, because I don’t think there are enough morons to elect him. A certain percentage of the American public is just morons; that’s the way it is. When you divide the public in two then divide the voters in one of those halves among five candidates or more, a candidate can win by dominating the moron vote because it only takes about one-seventh of the total population to take the ‘lead’ under those circumstances.”

But in a general election, James noted “when you’re talking about needing 51 percent of the whole population, rather than needing 30 percent of half of the population, you run out of morons. I hope we will.”

If there is one thing I have learned in my life, is that normal everyday people are just really really dumb. Maybe not moronic, but just not possessing the basic knowledge that I thought everyone had. Like know who the current Vice President is. Or how our government works. Or where Canada is on a map. So I am not as confident as Bill James is.

David Wasserman on the one last chance to stop Trump: “Rubio’s increasingly tenuous path depends on his ability to win a series of winner-take-all states with high proportions of white-collar, college-educated Republicans, most critically his home state of Florida on March 15. Rubio’s path may also depend on his ability to claim delegates from low-turnout territories like Puerto Rico (which, amazingly, will select the same number of delegates as New Hampshire despite having a fraction of the GOP voters) as well as blue-leaning congressional districts with few GOP voters but many available delegates, such as those in Chicago, Maryland and coastal California.”

“In each instance, Rubio might hope to win large delegate margins with relatively small raw vote margins, while Trump wins far more votes elsewhere but reaps more modest delegate payoffs — raising the prospect of an unusual split votes/delegates verdict enabled by the GOP’s uneven delegate allocation rules.”

“However, to move beyond wishful thinking and achieve such tactical victories, Rubio will need to consolidate much more of the non-Trump vote and rapidly grow his support in Democratic-leaning areas in an extremely compressed window of time. That’s a tall order, but it may be GOP leaders’ last hope to stop Trump, who clearly has the best chance of winning the nomination outright by the final primaries in June.”

Mitt Romney is doing to Donald Trump what Harry Reid did to him. From CNN:

Said Romney: “We have good reason to believe that there’s a bombshell in Donald Trump’s taxes. Either he’s not anywhere near as wealthy as he says he is, or he hasn’t been paying taxes we would expect him to pay or perhaps he hasn’t been giving money to vets or to the disabled like he’s been telling us he’s been doing.”

Melania Trump donated the max to Hillary Clinton in 2006.

Bernie Sanders now is an action figure. Here is the Hillary Clinton action figure introduced last year:

Bernie’s looks more true to life, which I am sure will be taken as a sign of something. LOL.

RNC chairman Reince Priebus “has begun stating in private meetings that the party has sway over its at times unwelcome front-runner because it has tools Trump will need to use to win a general election — voter data and field, digital and media operations that a nominee typically inherits from the party infrastructure,” Politico reports.

“Dangling access to these resources, Priebus thinks he can help steer Trump toward partywide policy goals and away from the inflammatory rhetoric that Republican officials see as divisive and dangerous, especially outside of the primary.”

Hahahahaha. Reince Priebus is a fool. Trump cares not about your resources.

Matt Yglesias: “[F]loating Sandoval’s name in the press as a way to bait Republicans into batting it down could be a savvy strategy for Democrats to underscore exactly how rigid the GOP is being about the confirmation battle.”

Jay Willis says the only way Republicans can win the Supreme Court fight is by confirming President Obama’s nominee:

Set aside, though, the question of whether refusing to consider President Obama’s candidate is right in any normative sense, and consider that it might be a good strategic decision for Senate Republican leadership to reverse course, hold a hearing, and even confirm President Obama’s nominee. Doing so could boost the Republican Party’s chances at winning the presidency, holding on to the legislature, and controlling the long-term trajectory of the Supreme Court.

Take President Obama’s position first. He wants to replace Justice Scalia, but he also knows that the looming election is going to make it more difficult than ever to get his choice approved by the Republican-controlled Senate. As a result, he will look to make it as difficult as possible for the GOP to both reject his nominee and also come out looking like a fair, impartial, and reasonable bunch. You could see the outline of this strategy in the White House’s statement issued after Justice Scalia’s death in which President Obama, essentially staring down Senate Republicans, pointedly pledged to fulfill his “constitutional responsibility” to name a successor to Justice Scalia. […]

Willis says Obama’s strategy will be to nominate a safe choice like Sri Srinivasan, approved by the Senate 97-0 not 3 years ago. Srinivasan can fit the bill as a safe “moderate” choice.

But by considering and perhaps even confirming President Obama’s nominee, Republicans concede the battle but earn a chance to win the war. Replacing Justice Scalia with President Obama’s safe, moderate pick is unlikely to hurt the conservative movement. More importantly, considering the nominee in good faith would allow Republicans to portray themselves as reasonable, fair, and principled. Opportunities to endear the party to swing voters have been rare in this primary season concerned more with things like wall-building and pig’s-blood-dipping. Here, the GOP can deprive the Democrats of general election attack ad fodder and allow the Republican nominee to show that his party places the rule of law above political maneuvering. Confirming Justice Scalia’s successor may help the Republican Party win what is otherwise a very grim-looking election.

We all know that the GOP will do no such thing. Thank you, racist GOP. Vox illustrates the game theory behind all this:

Many have speculated that McConnell’s reluctance is due to his hope that a future Republican president might nominate Justice Scalia’s replacement. However, our logic suggests a different rationale. Given President Obama’s relatively constrained political capital and the GOP’s control of the Senate, this seems like a good opportunity for the Republicans to press Obama for a moderate nominee. However, that might be exactly what McConnell fears!

McConnell’s desire to preempt any Obama nominee is motivated by the fear that, when confronted by a nominee, his GOP colleagues will confront a Catch-22 in which, regardless of what they say or do, the GOP’s prospects for maintaining control of the Senate in 2017 will be worsened. Scalia’s passing rocked the political scene, and left Mitch McConnell in a very hard place indeed.

See, if you’re an R Senator form a swing state (Kirk, Ayotte, Portman and many more) and vote yes on a moderate, your base is pissed. But if you vote no, the indies you need to win are pissed. You can’t win except if you don’t play at all. And that’s exactly what we are seeing.

Exactly.

New York Magazine has a good column on who could be the “next Obama” eight years from now.

Five years before he won the White House at 47, Barack Obama was a barely known state senator. Here are ten young Democrats who, like Obama, have unusual ambition, an inspiring life story, a gift for public oratory, or some combination of the three. They aren’t prominent — nor are they seasoned enough to have much of a shot on a 2016 ticket — but they just might be poised to break out eight years from now. They are the future of the party that styles itself the party of the future.