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Ted Cruz has consistently tried to outflank Donald Trump to the right on immigration by saying that once all 11 million undocumented immigrants are kicked out, he wouldn't even consider letting them back in. But now Marco Rubio thinks he's found an in with the GOP's nativist crowd by lifting up Mitt Romney's disastrous 2012 solution to immigration: Making life so miserable for undocumented immigrants that they choose to “self-deport.” 

Here's Rubio at Thursday night's debate: 

“In 2012, Donald criticized Mitt Romney, saying that Mitt lost his election because of self-deportation. […]

“My point that I made was you had criticized Mitt Romney for self-deportation. You said that his strategy of self- deportation is why he lost the election. […]

“I agree we should have won and I wished we would have, but, in fact, you did criticize him for using the term ‘self-deportation.’”

As Rubio urged viewers to look it up online, Trump deflected, saying that he merely criticized Romney for "losing the election. He should have won that election."

But Steve Benen points to the significance of Rubio resurrecting "self-deportation," a line that has routinely been linked to Romney's poor performance with Latino voters.

“Today in Confederate Chronicles we cast our gaze upon the shore of Maryland.”

Maryland, which ultimately decided to stick with the Union during the Civil War, is trying to figure out if it should ditch its state song “Maryland, My Maryland.” Sean Tully, a Baltimore-based musician who advocates a new song for the state, says the song “shows Confederate sympathies.”  Other proponents of a new state song say the lyrics to “Maryland, My Maryland” are not particularly flattering to President Abraham Lincoln, calling him both a despot and a tyrant.

Like other parts of the country, particularly the Deep South Maryland, which sits below the Mason-Dixon Line (i.e, it’s in the South), has been questioning what to do with its symbols of the Confederacy. In Baltimore, a city commission is mulling over two Confederate statues in public parks, and the state’s motor vehicle administration has yanked license plates that carry the Confederate battle flag. Now … this.

Calling President Lincoln names and Northerners “scum” notwithstanding, this latest flap is not as egregious as, say, calling known treasonous individuals “heroes” and proposing legislation to keep their gigantic granite mountain Confederate monument in tact, but hey, it’s nice to know they care.

On Tuesday, March 1, 11 states will bind their GOP delegates. It can be very difficult to track the allocation of Republican delegates because the rules wildly differ from state to state, much more so than on the Democratic side. But maybe too much is made of those differences: While details like the exact threshold to qualify for delegates or rounding rules mean that no two states have the exact same rules, most have modeled their rules according to a few basic templates.

So here I will be grouping states into groups for a simpler account of who uses what method—and what you should be keeping track of on Super Tuesday.

1. Statewide proportionality: Alaska (28), Massachusetts (42), Vermont (16), Virginia (49)

These four states distribute their delegates proportionally based only on the statewide vote. This is the same method used in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada. (For instance, Ted Cruz received 27.64 percent of the vote in Iowa. Iowa allocates 30 delegates. And 27.64 percent of 30 is 8.24. So Cruz received 8 delegates, the nearest whole number.)

The main variation here is the so-called viability threshold that a candidate has to cross to be eligible to receive delegates. In Iowa, there was no threshold; in New Hampshire, the threshold was 10 percent, which Chris Christie failed to cross; in Nevada, it was 3.33 percent, which every remaining candidate crossed, though John Kasich only barely. So here are the viability rules in these four states: In Virginia, there is none; in Massachusetts, it is 5 percent; in Alaska, it is 13 percent; and in Vermont, it is 20 percent.

In Thursday's Republican debate, Marco Rubio made one of his favorite claims to demonstrate just how much he hates Obamacare and how's he's the only one who's ever done anything about it. Which is true in the sense that he has helped do some very real damage in the market, resulting in confusion for 800,000 people and a bunch of small insurers shutting down. So, good on him? Here's his claim:

When they passed Obamacare they put a bailout fund in Obamacare. All these lobbyists you [Donald Trump] keep talking about, they put a bailout fund in the law that would allow public money to be used, taxpayer money, to bail out companies when they lost money.

And, we led the effort and wiped out that bailout fund. The insurance companies are not in favor of me, they hate that. They're suing that now to get that bailout money put back in.

He got half of one part of that right. There's a lawsuit, but it's not by big insurers, and it's not over a "bailout." Here's all the stuff he got wrong: first, he and fellow Republicans didn't get rid of the bailout—they postponed a provision of Obamacare that created what are actually "risk corridors." That's a fund paid into by insurers and supplemented by taxpayers to spread the risk for insurers taking on all newcomers, including sick people with pre-existing conditions who would be expensive. Setting premium rates in the first few years of the law was going to be challenging because insurers just wouldn't know who they were going to get and how much to charge in premium to get everyone covered. The risk corridor provision would allow for resulting losses to be covered. Oh, and it was modeled after a provision in George W. Bush's Medicare Part D prescription drug plan.

Anti-abortion activists have been waiting more than two years for one of their crown jewel legislative achievements—Texas' HB2—to become their crown jewel judicial achievement. But when the Supreme Court reviews the law next week in Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt, the vacant seat left by Justice Antonin Scalia's death almost assures that they can't win the case outright. Such a precedent-setting decision would have left Roe v. Wade vulnerable to an onslaught of legislative attacks, so long as conservative lawmakers framed abortion restrictions as a means of protecting women’s health. 

Enacted in 2013, HB2 employs a treasure trove of anti-abortion tactics ranging from architectural and admitting privileges requirements for abortion providers, to a 20-week abortion ban. If HB2 went into full effect, at least 32 Texas abortion providers would be forced to close, leaving just eight clinics open statewide. That nearly happened in 2014, before the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in to block the law from taking effect until "the issuance of the judgment of this Court." Justice Anthony Kennedy sided with the court's liberal justices to provide the fifth vote for that order.

But now that conservatives have lost their reliable fourth vote, a 5-4 decision upholding the law has become next to impossible. So the question becomes whether Justice Kennedy provides a vote that produces a 4-4 tie—or a 5-3 win to advocates for a woman’s right to make her own health care decisions. Ian Millhiser weighs the likely outcome.

If you missed it, the GOP debate in Houston—the last one before super Tuesday—happened live on CNN Thursday night. The Republican debates this election cycle have been nonstop entertainment in the classic vaudevillian sense: A bunch of guys who act like they’re drunk and make people laugh at their own expense. Yelling, putdowns, red faces, interruptions, and Wolf Blitzer’s beard! Also, Ben Carson was there.

Watch a supercut of the night when you realized that the “moderate” Republican wants to start a war with North Korea.

From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE...

Friday Margaret and Helen Blogging

The intertubes’ feistiest 80-somethings have a thing or two to say about last night’s Republican debate, and some advice for our team:

Can someone please tell me when exactly does the Republican Party  have to finally  take responsibility for unleashing these lunatics on the American people? I mean they gave us Sarah Palin and now this?  

After years of pandering to uneducated, racist, gun-loving, women hating,  born again and again and again asshats, the Republican Party is finally reaping their reward---Donald Trump. And they don’t seem very happy with their harvest. [...]

Watching the debate I actually found myself  agreeing with Donald on a few things.  Rubio is a fool and Cruz is a liar.  The problem is… Donald Trump is an asshole.  And that was the Republican debate in a nutshell---an asshole standing between a fool and a liar. [...]

Listen. I think the right choice is Hillary. Some of you think it’s Bernie.  Can we all at least agree that when the time comes we’ll get ourselves, our family members  and our friends off our asses and out to the polls to vote for the Democratic nominee regardless of who it is?  Because there are three words in the English language that we can never, ever allow to be spoken: President Donald Trump.  I mean it.  Really. 

Read the whole thing here. And if it’s any help, mark me down for a YES.

Your west coast-friendly edition of Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]

The Washington Post spoke with Paul Butler, Georgetown University Professor of Law, about recent open displays of white supremacist privilege via police and city governments.  Well … they didn’t actually call it that ... but that’s what it is. They specifically asked Butler about what was up with the city of Cleveland trying to shake down Tamir Rice’s family for $500; the Chicago cop who killed Quintonio LeGrier suing his estate; and the city of Ferguson’s rewriting of a federal consent decree designed to protect its black residents because it would cost too much money—all issues that have been previously reported on here, here, and here.

Butler created some noise last summer in the immediate aftermath of Dylann Roof’s massacre of nine African Americans at Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church. The subject was efforts to remove the white supremacist symbol of the Confederate flag. Speaking on MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes, Butler had to break it down for a caller to the show. The caller said she respected her ancestors who fought for the Confederacy even though she didn’t think the flag should fly. Butler’s response was that he had no respect for her ancestors, which is both understandable and sensible. Stating that the caller’s response was typical of white privilege, Butler explained that you would never—EVER—hear a German saying that the Holocaust was bad but they respect their Nazi ancestors, and that the reason the caller—and others—say such things is because black lives don’t really matter much to people. You can view that segment here.

Some of the quick points made by Prof. Butler in the Washington Post include what might the three parties be trying to accomplish:

Cleveland is just trying to get paid – any way it can. A child has been shot dead by the police. The city then demands $10 per mile for the ambulance ride and $450 for “advanced life support.” Does not one city official say, “Hold up. Is this right?”  Not until the city’s cold-heartedness becomes national news. Again. It’s the parts of the bill that say “Due by 03/11/2016” and  “Detach along line and return stub with your payment. Thank you.” that really express the banality of this evil. Tamir Rice’s family has been treated this way for generations.

Ferguson is also trying to save money. It costs too much to police its citizens fairly, so it’s attempting to get the court to lower the standard to something that’s good enough for black people.

The Chicago cop is trying to salvage his reputation, but his lawsuit confirms why his reputation is damaged in the first place.

I was born and raised in an African American neighborhood in Chicago, and the police were notorious. My mom spanked me once for talking back to cops. She said they could have killed me, because that’s what they did to black boys who challenged their authority.

In terms of legal protections against this kind of nonsense, Butler had this to say:

In general, however, the law is not especially friendly to poor people. It’s easier, for example, for Flint to go after people who don’t pay their water bill than for Flint residents to sue government officials for giving them poisoned water.

And low-income folks don’t have nearly as many protections against lawsuits as do the police. Often, they can’t afford lawyers to defend them when they get sued.

And of course, Butler was asked about the usual refrain of “black on black” violence which is inserted into conversations about state violence:

Of course [the two issues are] different. One is official violence by government employees; the other is a consequence of many systemic and complex problems: racism, segregation, poverty, the availability of guns and horrendous policing. And when black people commit crimes against other black people, they are usually prosecuted. When cops commit crimes against black people, they are usually not prosecuted. That’s the concern.

Sounds like Prof. Butler reads Daily Kos kinda regularly.

Arizona death row inmates, together with a coalition of First Amendment groups, have gone to court arguing that the public has a right to see whether someone being executed by lethal injection suffers intense pain. State officials argue that the challengers are trying to create “a spectacle with the objective of swaying public opinion and ultimately abolishing the death penalty.” They say the inmates have no First Amendment right to make such executions “go viral.” Chris McDaniel reports:

Arizona, like several other death penalty states, plans to use a three-drug protocol. The first drug intends to sedate the inmate, the second intends to paralyze the inmate, and the third drug kills. The third drug could cause extreme pain if the inmate were not properly sedated. The inmates and the press coalition argue that the second drug—the paralytic—has no legitimate purpose, and only serves to obstruct the ability to notice any pain the inmate may be feeling.

The paralytic, the inmates and coalition argue, “serves as a chemical curtain,” masking whether midazolam, the sedative, effectively prevents the prisoner being executed from suffering intense pain from the heart-stopping drug, and whether the paralytic also creates suffering on its own by slow suffocation. Arizonans, prisoners and the press have a right to know, the challengers say, whether the use of the paralytic agent is “just as effective in preventing disclosure of that fact [of suffering] as if the execution occurred without any public witness at all.”

Attorney David Weinzweig wrote the state’s response, saying:

The Department has been forced to change its drug protocols over time, almost always in reaction to opponents of the death penalty who wage guerilla [sic] warfare in courts and international commerce—suing and sabotaging in order to erect obstacle after obstacle in the State’s path to acquire court-approved chemicals.

Justice Scalia had the gall to croak during Obama's presidency, so Senate Republicans are going to obstruct the appointment of his successor. I doubt stalling Scalia's replacement is a great strategy. Even if he thinks a Republican will win in November, McConnell can't seriously think whomever Trump (gah!), Cruz (gross!) or Rubio (duh!) would pick is worth losing control of the Senate by giving their obstructionism a sympathetic name and face in Obama's stonewalled nominee which will likely increase Democratic turnout.

Marco Rubio likes to talk about his family's story—his Cuban-born parents, a bartender and a maid, who could hardly have dreamed their son would be running for president one day. In fact, Rubio invoked his mother, Oriales García Rubio, twice during Thursday night's GOP debate. Once he noted that Donald Trump's hiring practices in Florida would have excluded his mother from his employment, then he mentioned that she still depends on Social Security and Medicare to get by. 

Yet in same debate, he slammed Trump's 2012 criticism of "self-deportation"—seemingly finding virtue in the concept of making life so difficult for undocumented immigrants that they choose to leave. Those immigrants are a lot like his mother, but for her good fortune of being admitted for permanent residence upon arrival from Cuba in the mid-'50s, when the immigration system still worked.

That's probably why his mother, who grew up in Cuba sharing a one-room house with a family of nine, implored her son not to "mess with the immigrants" in 2012, as chronicled by Michael Grunwald.

[O]n the morning of Dec. 21, she called her youngest son, Marco Antonio Rubio, the 41-year-old Senator from Florida and great Hispanic hope of the Republican Party—or, as she calls him, Tony. She got his voice mail. “Tony, some loving advice from the person who cares for you most in the world,” she said in Spanish. “Don’t mess with the immigrants, my son. Please, don’t mess with them.” She reminded him that undocumented Americans—los pobrecitos, she called them, the poor things—work hard and get treated horribly. “They’re human beings just like us, and they came for the same reasons we came. To work. To improve their lives. So please, don’t mess with them.”

Rubio has placed political expediency over principle repeatedly on immigration: opposing the DREAM Act, running away from his own immigration bill in 2013, constantly emphasizing "border security first" on the campaign trail and promising to repeal Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) as president, and now exhibiting a certain nostalgia for the concept of self-deportation. Wonder what his mother might say now.

The Wall Street Journal appears to be a little worried about the Republican party's prospects for keeping the Senate, now that they've basically gone nuclear on obstruction. Not even meeting with a prospective Supreme Court justice from President Obama is going just a little bit far, they seem to think.

The Senate GOP's strategy is sure to please the party's most loyal followers. But the refusal to consider a nominee to succeed Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who died this month, even before President Barack Obama has announced his pick, carries greater risks with the independent and more centrist Republicans voting in the swing states that will decide which party controls the Senate in 2017. […]

In Ohio, 56% of registered voters favored considering a Supreme Court nominee this year, compared with 41% who preferred delaying action, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday. Nationally, about 56% of Americans believe the Senate should hold hearings and vote on Mr. Obama's Supreme Court nominee this year, according to a Pew Research Center poll this week.

On the other hand, they report, (there's always an "other hand" for conservative outlets who don't want to release the rabid tea party hounds on themselves) "refusing to convene confirmation hearings holds advantages for Republicans." Those advantages meaning they don't have to expose themselves to blocking what would undoubtedly be a highly qualified, personable nominee.

And speaking of the nominee, the WSJ of course slips in a little gaming of the refs by dropping in a bit how it is universally expected that President Obama will nominate "a centrist, well-qualified candidate," which will make it even more difficult for Republican senators. After the Brian Sandoval head fake, when Republicans flat-out refused to even consider a fellow Republican, it's not going to take a centrist candidate to make them look bad. They've already achieved that. Any candidate is going to be refused, so Obama is free to nominate one that will carry on a progressive legacy.

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