National

There was news that the Republicans are already plotting their schemes to obstruct President Hillary Clinton's plans for her first 100 days, and they plan to deny she has any mandate to govern. Jonathan Chait goes LOL, and says mandates are meaningless.

A mandate is an archaic holdover from the bygone age of weak, ideologically heterogeneous parties. Crossing the aisle was common, so if Washington believed that a president had run on a clear agenda, Congress might feel some added moral pressure to pass it. (This happened in 1981, when the Democratic-controlled House enacted Ronald Reagan’s economic program.) In other words, the mandate is a political norm, a broadly if not perfectly shared sense of how politics ought to be conducted. Like most 20th-century American political norms — “filibusters should only be used rarely,” “the president has a right to fill Supreme Court vacancies with somebody qualified and not too extreme” — it is disappearing. The negative mandate of George W. Bush’s 2000 popular-vote defeat did not discourage him or his party from passing the largest tax cut they could; neither of Barack Obama’s clear victories gave Republicans any pause in opposing the policies he ran on. The obsession with a mandate, in which the style and scope of a Clinton victory has crucial ramifications, complicates what is actually a simple series of binary questions. If Democrats control only the presidency next year, Clinton will direct foreign policy and implement federal regulations. If her party adds the Senate, she will also have the ability to nominate judges to open seats. If Democrats win the above plus the House of Representatives, they will be able to pass major legislation for two years (after which Republicans would almost certainly regain their House majority during the midterms). Clinton’s “mandate” is irrelevant. All that matters is the levers of power she commands.

Take over Congress. Go nuclear on the filibuster rule, eliminating all holds and requiring the Senator to stand there until they die in order to filibuster a bill. And then pass your agenda with your majority. That is how you govern in this new order. Fuck mandates. Hillary could win all 50 states and the GOP will declare her an illegitimate President because 1) she is a woman and 2) she only beat Trump.

Republicans who think their problems will go away once Donald Trump has left the national stage haven’t been paying attention this week. Trump’s shifting position on immigration this week perfectly illustrates why the issue is nearly impossible for Republicans. Greg Sargent explains:

Trump’s rhetoric right now reflects a search for a magic formula. He wants to reassure suburban white swing voters — who essentially favor mass assimilation because they see most undocumented immigrants as largely making a positive contribution — that he isn’t proposing to cruelly ship out millions, which would be costly and disruptive to families and communities. So he says, don’t worry, we’re only starting with the bad ones, and the status of the good ones may be subject to negotiation later. In other words, he compassionately recognizes that many of them are good people — they’re not all merely criminals. But he also wants to reassure the hardliners, so he indicates that they all are still subject to removal, which is code for indicating that he is not making mass assimilation the goal. In the end, though, Trump’s actual position, for now at least, is defined by the latter. The prospective goal is not mass assimilation. It’s shrinkage and removal — beyond just the “bad ones.” There is no straddle that works. There is no magic formula here.

As Democratic pollster Geoff Garin notes, wherever Trump lands on immigration, he’ll be out of step with Americans. Over 60% favor a path to citizenship and oppose his border wall. But Trump's success in the GOP primary proves that the GOP base are opposed to that. They want mass deportation of all the brown Latinos, no matter if they are good or bad. That garners 30-40% of the GOP vote, enough for Trump to win in a massively crowded field. But that position, expressed with all the hate and vitriol found on Brietbart and Stormfront, is a guaranteed loser in a general election. Hence, the Catch-22 for the GOP, a problem that existed before Trump and will exist after Trump. The only way the GOP will get out of this trap is for them to tell their base to go fuck their racist selves, no matter the electoral consequences in the short term.

NBC News has tracked down Dr. Harold Bornstein, the doctor who signed the completely bizarre letter of health for Donald Trump. It turns out that Dr. Harold Bornstein does exist, and he is like a character out of the Sopranos or Breaking Bad, who treats patients in the back of a strip club. He wrote the letter in 5 minutes while a Trump limousine was waiting outside to pick it up.

Let's look at the reasons Trump is running according to his idiot son:

"He opens up the paper each morning and sees our nation’s leaders giving a hundred billion dollars to Iran,"

Iranian frozen assets were unfrozen through negotiations, so this is bullshit.

... or he opens the paper and some new school district has just eliminated the ability for its students to say the pledge of allegiance,

Pure BS. Show me this non-existent school district.

...or some fire department in some town is ordered by the mayor to no longer fly the American flag on the back of a fire truck,"

Again, what a load of crap. Please point me to whatever "paper" carried this story.

"Or, he sees the tree on the White House lawn has been renamed 'Holiday tree' instead of 'Christmas tree.'

Nope. Maybe in Bill O'Reilly's fever dreams, but not in reality.

I could go on and on for hours. Those are the very things that made my father run, and those are the very things he cares about."

So... he cares about utter nonsense. Got it.

Earlier this week, the Delaware Chapter of the ADA released its annual Legislative Report Card, which evaluates each Representative and Senator's votes on priority progressive legislation and determines which have acted as Progressive Heros, or, alternatively Progressive Zeros. For the 2nd year in a row, Rep. John Kowalko in the House and Sen. Bryan Townsend were the legislators at the top of the list as the most progressive in Delaware. The full list is inside...