When actual news happens, writing APR can be a bit frustrating. Like posting a set of Superbowl predictions the morning after the big game, reading the columns put together by the, ahem, cream of beltway journalism several days before the world takes a lurch, offers little more than a forensic level of interest.
In this case, somewhere between now and when Maureen Dowd wrote her six hundredth piece on how upset she is that Hillary Clinton stood by Bill, Atonin Scalia died.
In writing about the Civil War, historian Barbara Fields said that it might have been a “very ugly filthy war with no redeeming characteristics at all” except that the cause of emancipation “ennobled what otherwise would have been meaningless carnage into something higher.”
In more democratic (small d or big D, take your pick) times, we might expect that President Obama nominates a replacement for Scalia, that replacement receives some weeks of Senate review, and is then approved. It’s happened that way just over one hundred times. However, as the howling on the right already indicates, the replacement of Scalia might easily stretch into the election.
In which case, Fields’ quote will have a new use. This election, which has been ugly, filthy, and above all blindingly silly and disheartening, may be elevated into a direct referendum on compelling, divisive issues which have roiled the country for decades. Americans will step into a voting booth knowing that they are as close to voting directly on a woman’s right to choose, on affirmative action, on the right to organize, on the continuation of the Voting Rights Act as we are ever likely to achieve.
Don’t expect the election to stop being ugly, filthy, silly or disheartening. But we just got a reminder: it’s also of staggering import.
The New York Times on this decision...
Justice Antonin Scalia… served on the Supreme Court for 30 years and made as big a mark on the court and on American law and politics as some of the chief justices under whom he served. It took about 10 minutes after the announcement of his death for the right wing to start screaming that the Senate should not confirm a replacement while President Obama is in office.
Given how blindly ideological the Republicans in the Senate are, after nearly eight years of doing little besides trying to thwart Mr. Obama, it is disturbingly likely that Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader and architect of the just-say-no approach, will lead his colleagues in keeping Justice Scalia’s seat open, and the highest court in the land essentially paralyzed, in the hope that one of the hard-right Republicans running for the presidency will win.
Mr. McConnell announced on Saturday night that “this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president,” claiming that he wanted to give American voters the chance to decide.
If you don’t hear the drum-roll and the bugles being sounded, you’re not listening. What’s that tune? This is important. This is important. This is important.
Justice Scalia, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1986... was more than any other conservative justice responsible for bringing ideology to the foreground in the court’s deliberations and, sometimes, its decisions. The conservative justices who preceded him, including Justice Rehnquist, and who followed him, like Anthony Kennedy, were not ideological animals in the same sense as Justice Scalia. …
Justice Scalia wrote few of the divided court’s 5-to-4 decisions, perhaps because the chief justices were aware that Justice Scalia’s lack of self-control in his judgments made him unreliable in those cases.
One prominent exception was his majority decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, in which the court ruled for the first time that the Second Amendment granted an individual right to bear arms. But Justice Scalia did say that that right was not absolute, and that certain weapons like assault rifles could be banned, but the case still set the court’s fundamentalist approach to gun rights.
Now. Let’s go inside and see what else is up. But before you do, get Glory playing on the speakers. You’re going to need it.
Ross Douthat didn’t appear in APR last week, to general applause, but naturally the NYT has called on their resident spin-the-thesaurus and God is a Conservative Catholic expert to sing a paean to Scalia.
Antonin Scalia, dead unexpectedly this weekend at 79, was not the most politically powerful justice during his three decades on the Supreme Court. That distinction belonged to the court’s two swing votes, Sandra Day O’Connor and then Anthony M. Kennedy, respectively the philosopher queen and king of our fraying republican order.
...
But in every other respect, he was the most important Supreme Court justice of his era.
He was important because of his intellectual influence. There were and are many legal theories and schools of constitutional interpretation within the world of American conservatism. But Scalia’s combination of brilliance, eloquence and good timing — he was appointed to the court in 1986, a handful of years after the Federalist Society was founded, and with it the conservative legal movement as we know it — ensured that his ideas, originalism in constitutional law and textualism in statutory interpretation, would set the agenda for a serious judicial conservatism and define the worldview that any “living Constitution” liberal needed to wrestle with in order to justify his own position.
You want to know the terrible thing? Douthat’s view might be made retroactively true. Want to make Scalia look sage? Think of any Court nominee put forward by Ted Cruz.
Elizabeth Williamson on Republicans riding the brakes.
It came as no real surprise that all six Republican presidential candidates called for President Barack Obama to hold off on nominating a Supreme Court justice to replace Antonin Scalia, who died Saturday, portraying the appointment as a crucial opportunity to determine the direction of a raft of ideologically charged cases currently being considered by the high court.
There a list of how all the candidates phrased their particular version of me, me, me, let me do it! But as so often happens, Cruz topped the list.
Ted Cruz, who clerked for former Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist, referred to “80 years of precedent of not confirming justices in an election year,” but then seemed to get a bit lost when asked if it had actually ever come up in that period.
The amazing part? Someone thought to ask if it had come up.
Linda Hirshman thinks this is a can’t lose proposition for the president.
After Justice Antonin Scalia’s death Saturday at 79, the Supreme Court is now evenly divided between four liberal justices and four conservatives, even with Anthony Kennedy’s occasional swings. What a moment for Scalia to depart: The court faces a wild array of closely divided decisions. It is an election year. And President Obama has stacked the lower circuit courts with Democrats. Obama has been chewing on his legacy for months. Fate has handed him the opportunity of any presidency — to swing the balance of the Supreme Court from conservative to liberal. ...
Any nominee, of course, would have to be confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate. Leaders there, and also most GOP presidential candidates, are already making clear that they intend to block Obama. But they may not realize that leaving Scalia’s seat vacant plays right into his hands. ...
There is no constitutional provision, no case law and no official policy about what the court should do with cases that have been argued and voted on when a justice dies. If the vote in a case that hasn’t yet been handed down was 5 to 4, as one might expect with these controversial rulings, can Scalia cast the deciding vote from beyond the grave to change the way America chooses every legislature in the land or integrates its public universities? A court that cares about its image and constitutional role will not rule in the name of a majority that counts on a dead justice, especially on the core issues of American social life.
You know who would swear that a dead justice can vote so long as that vote is on the hard-line conservative side of every issue? Antonin Scalia. In fact, I’m willing to bet Scalia could have give you an argument about why he should be propped at the table perpetually, while Alito steers his (and Thomas’, of course) hands toward the yes / no box on every vote. Hey, crack open that will! Maybe it’s in there.
Leonard Pitts on one of those issues that’s moving front and center should the Supreme Court composition become an election day decision.
Are you anti-abortion?”
That question, from a colleague, caught me by surprise. After all, she knows I’ve written a number of pro-choice columns.
“I know you’re pro-choice,” she added, reading my mind. “But I was wondering if you’re anti-abortion.” … her question intrigued me because it suggested a seldom-heard perspective, a third way, if you will, in the eternal battle between pro-choice and pro-life.
We are taught that there are those two ways only. Indeed, where abortion is concerned, that’s the fundament of every policy debate and political speech.
But it seems ever clearer to me that it’s a false dichotomy, a narrative of hard, diametrical opposition that, while it makes for great headlines, fails to acknowledge the mushy middle ground where many, if not most of us, reside.
“Are you anti-abortion?”
How is this “mushy middle ground?” Is there a pro-abortion person in the world? If so, I’ve never met them.
Dana Milbank in one of three (3) “Hillary and feminism” articles surviving from the pre-Scalialypse this week.
Much of Hillary Clinton’s difficulty in this campaign stems from a single, unalterable fact: She is a woman.
I’m not referring primarily to the Bernie Bros, those Bernie Sanders supporters who fill the Internet with misogynistic filth about Clinton. What drags down her candidacy is more pervasive and far subtler — unconscious, even.
The criticism is the same as in 2008: She doesn’t connect. She isn’t likeable. She doesn’t inspire. She seems shrill. “She shouts,” Bob Woodward said on MSNBC this month, also suggesting she “get off this screaming stuff.”…
At a Clinton rally last week in New Hampshire, I discussed the decibel dilemma with Jay Newton-Small of Time magazine. “It’s very hard for a woman to telegraph passion,” she explained. “When Bernie yells, it shows his dedication to the cause. When she yells, it’s interpreted in a very different way: She’s yelling at you.”
That’s not about Clinton; it’s about us. “It is a subtle kind of sexism that exists that we don’t recognize,” said Newton-Small, who literally wrote the book on the matter. “Broad Influence: How Women Are Changing the Way America Works,” out last month, includes a chapter on Clinton. “When women raise their voices, people tend to get their hackles up. People I talk to at Clinton events put her in a maternal role: Why is she screaming at me? Am I in trouble?”
… This is the essence of Clinton’s trouble: If she can’t plausibly offer pie in the sky, and she can’t raise her voice, how does she inspire people? This hurts particularly with young voters — the same segment that shunned Clinton in 2008.
Even if you’re a solid Sanders supporter, stop for a second, read Milbank’s piece. Then think about it: if you were running HIllary’s campaign, what would you recommend (the first person to reflexively type-scream “drop out” gets an officially non productive donut).
Ruth Marcus has been kind of wandering into weirdness for several weeks now.
In Springfield, Ill., Obama lamented the “poisonous political climate” and mourned that “the tone of our politics hasn’t gotten better since I was inaugurated; in fact, it has gotten worse.”
… Obama’s speech can be interpreted as a rebuttal to Sanders, a rebuke of the Vermont senator’s unyielding approach to politics and an unstated endorsement of Hillary Clinton’s more-plodding pragmatism.
Or, stop me if this sounds crazy, it might be a rebuke to people like Trump, Cruz, and Christie whose every spittle-laden word in this campaign has been not just angry but an attack on Obama? You can read the rest, but Marcus is clearly 1) reaching for a conflict on the Democratic side and 2) absolutely politically tone deaf.
Kathleen Parker predicts a hot time down south.
For those keeping an eye on the upcoming South Carolina primary contests, including the droves of journalists now combing the state for fresh fodder, a bit of background is in order. As to my bona fides, suffice it to say that my family settled hereabouts in the late 1600s.
Essentially, the state is three within one, each with its own personality and voting history — Upcountry (conservative), Midlands (mixed) and Lowcountry (liberal) — plus the nation of Charleston, which is its own, singular place. The city is a Democrat’s town, owing not least to its large African American community. But also, port towns tend to play a little looser than the landlocked. Most of South Carolina otherwise consists of small rural towns that honor tradition in all its forms.
When someone in the South says “honor tradition” that means… yeah, you know what it means. Parker goes on to say that Republicans in the state below the tar heel state (the oily ground state?) are likely to vote Trump simply because he represents a big F-U to reason. And being unreasonable is the real tradition in South Carolina. But she also says…
At any other time, Bernie Sanders would be an impossible candidate — unfamiliar and beyond the norms of southern rectitude. He’s loud, angry and graceless with an accent you don’t hear much in these parts.
But Sanders has something the others don’t. He’s real as dirt. If there’s one thing a native son or daughter can’t stand, it’s fakery.
They hate reason and they hate fakery. Perhaps candidates could run on the strength of their clozapine prescriptions.
Yoav Fromer on why Democrats shouldn’t shy from the term “revolution.”
Whenever Sen. Bernie Sanders talks about overthrowing the system — his campaign “is nothing short of the beginning of a political revolution,” he declared in his New Hampshire victory speech Tuesday night, for instance — mainstream Democrats roll their eyes. ...
In the name of electability, Sanders’s liberal critics dismiss him as naive. Hillary Clinton, who calls herself the “practical” one, condescendingly rebuffs his ideas as “good on paper” but irrelevant to what Democrats need: “a progressive who likes to get things done.” Her constant pleas to “get back to the middle” and reclaim “the big center” place her in the pragmatic liberal tradition of presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson and her husband, Bill — while distancing her from the ideologues of her party’s past. She and her supporters echo Christopher Lasch’s fatalistic lament that “radicalism in the United States has no great triumphs to record” and imply that it does more harm than good.
I’d like to point out that it was only 16 years between Barry Goldwater taking the biggest percentage loss since 1820 and Ronald Reagan nearly sweeping the board. Republicans had no problem embracing their “radicals,” and it was exactly this radicalism that reinvigorated a dying GOP and delivered wins at every level. In fact, I’d be pointing this out in about 3,000 words this morning… except I missed my deadline. Sorry about that.
J. Peter Scoblic and Philip E. Tetlock on how something Trumpic this way came…
It’s rare for an election to raise a metaphysical question — and even rarer for Donald Trump to do so. But that is exactly what he has done by repeatedly confounding expectations of his electoral demise: He has rattled our conception of how knowable the future is.
Pundit predictions are notoriously poor, but last fall, there was near-unanimity among political analysts that Trump would fail, and fast. Nate Silver, the statistical wunderkind who made his reputation by accurately calling elections using poll-driven models, said that Trump’s base of support was “about the same share of people who think the Apollo moon landings were faked.” …
Putting aside the (many) earthly worries about a Trump administration, the epistemological problem with Trump’s campaign is that it seems … Most things that matter can’t be forecast, and most things that can be forecast don’t matter. Our ability to understand the world around us, or at least the world ahead of us, is limited to the trivial.
You know, someone should have asked a geologist. For more than a century, geology was dominated by an idea called “gradualism” — the concept that everything we see around us is the product of common, every-day processes operating over long periods. The idea that the world might be just as often shaped by rare, brief, devastating and seldom predictable disasters (i.e. catastrophism) was treated with a good deal of horror. Yeah… now guess which one turned out to be right. It’s a trick question. The answer is: both of them.
Laurence Krauss offers the only piece this morning that really puts everything in a different perspective.
With presidential primaries in full steam, with the country wrapped up in concern about the economy, immigration and terrorism, one might wonder why we should care about the news of a minuscule jiggle produced by an event in a far corner of the universe.
The answer is simple. While the political displays we have been treated to over the past weeks may reflect some of the worst about what it means to be human, this jiggle, discovered in an exotic physics experiment, reflects the best. Scientists overcame almost insurmountable odds to open a vast new window on the cosmos. And if history is any guide, every time we have built new eyes to observe the universe, our understanding of ourselves and our place in it has been forever altered.
... on Thursday, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, announced that a signal from gravitational waves had been discovered emanating from the collision and merger of two massive black holes over a billion light-years away. How far away is that? Well, one light-year is about 5.88 trillion miles.
… Every child has wondered at some time where we came from and how we got here. That we can try and answer such questions by building devices like LIGO to peer out into the cosmos stands as a testament to the persistent curiosity and ingenuity of humankind — the qualities that we should most celebrate about being human.
By the way, just because the event detected is a billion light years away, doesn’t mean that the detectors aren’t in peril from politics much closer to home.
Okay, I’m going to make a complaint you rarely hear from me—there are too many columns this morning. Between those spawned by Scalia’s death, and the ones that existed before, I’ve been reading and summarizing for… yikes, the last seven hours. I’ve got about one hour to sleep now before this thing pops, and I didn’t even write a word about Isabel Wilkerson's piece on how Emmett Till and Tamir Rice fit into the African-American story, or the Washington Post's look into the mess at Mount St. Mary’s University, or Barton Swaim's explanation of why Marco Rubio sounds like a robot and so do many other candidates. Given enough time, I might even have covered Douthat’s other column on why Hillary wasn’t getting much mileage out of the first Clinton era.
But just because I didn’t write about it, doesn’t mean that you can’t go read those columns. Get an extra deep cup of coffee this morning and grab a second bagel. It’s a bonus week for punditry. Now excuse me, I’m going to grab 4.3 winks.