E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post asks whether the gun lobby finally cornered?
What makes Orlando different is the clash the attack revealed between two powerful impulses of contemporary conservatism: the reflexive hostility to gun restrictions and the incessant assertion that we must do what it takes to protect the United States from terrorism. If you believe the second, you really can’t believe the first. This has always been true, but the murder of 49 people by a terrorist made the incongruity so stark that Donald Trump was moved to suggest he would talk to the NRA about ways to keep guns out of the hands of terrorists.
One can be skeptical about whether Trump will go beyond the NRA’s ineffectual solutions to the problem. But Trump’s verbal shift was a telltale sign of an intellectual system that is crumbling.
And the demoralization of one side in a debate is often accompanied by new energy on the other. This is why the Senate filibuster last week to force votes on gun restrictions led by Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) was so important.
There was power to Murphy’s witness itself, coming as it did from a politician whose constituents include the families who suffered grievously at Sandy Hook. And his rejection of business as usual showed that the long accumulation of massacres has broken the patience of those demanding action. It was a signal that advocates of sane gun laws have moved off the defensive.
“Hillary Clinton will target Donald Trump’s business record on Tuesday, casting the presumptive Republican nominee as self-interested and deceptive as he prepares to provide more details about his economic proposals during the coming weeks,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Tuesday’s address in Columbus, Ohio, will build on Mrs. Clinton’s recent foreign-policy speech in which she used a compilation of Mr. Trump’s own words to suggest that he is uninformed and even dangerous.”
Said Clinton policy chief Jake Sullivan: “It really comes down to being able to show that every time Trump had an opportunity to get something for himself at the expense of someone else, he took it, in spades.”
Peter Bloom at Common Dreams says that What Progressives and Democrats Need is Coalition Not Unity:
While the media has called the Democratic race all but over, the supporters of Sanders are faced with a difficult decision. The mainstream opinion is for them to simply surrender to the “inevitability” of Clinton’s victory and embrace her as a candidate to unify the Democratic Party. However, for many progressives this option is both ethically and tactically problematic—forcing them into a familiar territory of voting for the “lesser of two evils.” Instead they have sought to send a distinct message to the status quo by proclaiming themselves “Bernie or Bust.”
Sanders, for his part, is far from willing to go away quietly. While he admits that defeating Trump must be priority number one, he has vowed to continue his revolution to transform the Democratic Party and the country. The immediate goal is to amass enough delegates and momentum to progressively influence the Party’s present platform and future direction.
However, is there an alternative option beyond the opposing poles of unity or bust? Is there a way for progressives to find a compromise with the Democratic Party without becoming compromised? The answer may be to fight for a coalition between progressives and the Democratic Party.
Well, in any realistic rather than fantastical view of our system of government and elections, the choice is binary. You either vote for Clinton, or you, whether directly or indirectly, vote for Trump. So I am not sure what Peter Bloom is talking about here. Further, the Democratic Party has always been a coalition of multiple groups that agree to come together to vote for a single Presidential candidate. There are trade unions, environmentalists, teachers, African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, liberals, moderates, progressives, etc., etc. The compromising he speaks of happens all the time: trading votes for President for policies. It will happen again in the crafting of the platform. The Democratic Platform will be the most progressive major party platform in all history.
The New York Times on how Hillary should choose a running mate: “There is much for Mrs. Clinton to consider, including competence, agreement on policy and geography. Yet Mrs. Clinton’s advisers and those who have gone through the process emphasize an equally important, if more elusive, quality: chemistry.”
“Mrs. Clinton needs a No. 2 who can ease into the insular and often distrusting Clinton orbit. And a running mate whose company Mrs. Clinton genuinely enjoys could help present a joyful picture to voters, after a primary season that was sometimes dreary.”
“Mrs. Clinton’s aides began collecting information last week on as many as 10 candidates.”
Emma Foeringer Merchant at The New Republic:
The grieving began in earnest on June 6, on the eve of the California primary, when the Associated Press declared Clinton the presumptive Democratic nominee.
“For 24 hours I was very angry with the Associated Press,” says R.L. Miller, president of green PAC Climate Hawks Vote Political Action and the chair of the California Democratic Party’s environmental caucus. Miller says that as a Californian she was concerned about whether declaring a nominee would repress voter turnout.
In a “climate primary” of Climate Hawks Vote members, Bernie Sanders received 92 percent of the vote. Miller calls Clinton “mediocre” on climate, and says she won’t get her group’s endorsement, but Climate Hawks Vote will advocate for Clinton over Trump. “We don’t endorse every candidate who is a ‘B’ or ‘C’ candidate on climate just because they’re running against a Republican,” she says.
But Miller says there are signs that Clinton could become a climate hawk, like her solar plan, and she plans to vote for Clinton in the general election.
“I definitely want to defeat Donald Trump,” she says.
Justice Clarence Thomas, “a reliable conservative vote on the Supreme Court, is mulling retirement after the presidential election,” the Washington Examiner reports.
“Thomas, appointed by former President George H.W. Bush and approved by the Senate after a bitter confirmation, has been considering retirement for a while and never planned to stay until he died.”
So now we have two Supreme Court appointments on the line, with a possible third and fourth in the potential retirements of Justices Breyer and Ginsberg over the next four years. If we elect Hillary and a Democratic Senate, the Supreme Court will be under liberal control for the next 30 years. Or those seats can be filled by a racist authoritarian piece of shit.
The Washington Post says Trump’s campaign is cratering: “Not only are Trump’s poll numbers slipping, they are at a low that no one, Republican or Democrat, has seen in the past three election cycles. Looking at the window of time between 200 and 100 days before each of those elections, you can see that Trump has consistently polled worse than George W. Bush in 2004, John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012. He caught up briefly after clinching the GOP nomination — and then sank again.”
“There’s every reason to think that those numbers will get worse. Trump essentially has no campaign at this point; there’s no sign that he has started staffing up significantly.”
“Concerned with polls showing Hillary Clinton has a chance to win in one of the most conservative states in the nation, Utah Republican Party Chairman James Evans huddled with Donald Trump in Las Vegas on Saturday,” the Salt Lake Tribune reports.
“They talked for half an hour shortly before Trump held a packed rally at the Treasure Island casino, and he vowed to campaign in Utah after the national convention in Cleveland in July.”
“I bet if someone offered him $150 million to drop out, he would.”
— A former Donald Trump adviser, quoted by Politico.
Washington Post: “There is no recent reliable public polling in Arizona, but Democratic and Republican strategists said private research shows the presidential race as a toss-up.”
Asked whether Hillary Clinton has a path to victory, GOP strategist Charles Coughlin conceded: “I believe it’s there if she wanted to do it. Everybody always says, ‘This is the election when Latinos turn out,’ and it’s never happened. But I can actually see that happening this time.”
Politico reports that Donald Trump’s “own toxicity is making the job of finding a vice presidential nominee that much easier, because the short list is so short.”
“Multiple high-level Republican sources said it is topped by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, with Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions a distant third and Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin also in the mix.”