Erik Wemple:
President Obama these days is all about guns. Yesterday he held a teary news conference to champion a measure to expand background checks for gun buyers. “We know we can’t stop every act of violence, every act of evil in the world. But maybe we could try to stop one act of evil, one act of violence,” said the president, who was surrounded by gun-control advocates and victims of gun violence. There’s more to come, too: Tomorrow night, CNN’s Anderson Cooper will host a town hall meeting with Obama at George Mason University.
From the outside, that looks awfully convenient for the White House: A nationally televised program on a topic central to the president’s legacy agenda. Just whose idea was this, anyway?
AL.com reminds us this nutter is still around:
Chief Justice Roy Moore issued an order today saying that a ruling issued last March by the Alabama Supreme Court remains in effect and that probate judges "have a ministerial duty not to issue any marriage license contrary" to Alabama's law and constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.
In a four-page administrative order, Moore said the conflict between the state court ruling and the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in June has caused "confusion and uncertainty" among probate judges.
Moore said he issued the order today in his role as administrative head of the state court system.
Slate:
We should treat Moore’s order with the same respect and reverence that Moore has shown for his office—which is to say, absolutely none at all. At best, Moore’s order reads like a senior prank by an underachieving high school student. To review: Yes,Obergefell directly applied only to Michigan, Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee. The Supreme Court’s ruling, however, was not so limited: “The Fourteenth Amendment,” the majority held, “requires a state to license a marriage between two people of the same sex.” Not those four states, but every state. And that ruling supersedes any state laws or court decisions to the contrary, thanks to the Supremacy Clause. Put differently, Moore and his colleagues can throw as many temper tantrums as they want—but they can’t override the United States Supreme Court.
Philip Bump with a quiz:
In honor of the Trump-Cruz birther fight, can you tell who is and isn’t a natural-born citizen?
Ed Kilgore:
[Ross] Douthat and [Reihan] Salam expanded their essay into the 2008 book Grand New Party, and three years later, Mr. Sam's Club Republican himself, Tim Pawlenty, launched an unsuccessful presidential campaign that mainly just looked like a bland effort to appeal to GOP voters across factional lines. But joined by others who began calling themselves "reform conservatives" or Reformicons (Ryan Cooper wrote a useful taxonomy of them early in 2013 for the Washington Monthly), those calling for a more middle-class-oriented domestic policy stance by the GOP (the Reformicons mostly ignored foreign policy) grew into a loose, if elite, faction that sought influence in various parts of the GOP. In early 2014, Reformicons put together something of a rough policy playbook under the sponsorship of then-high-flying House GOP leader Eric Cantor. And as the 2016 presidential contest took shape, Reformicons were found in prominent positions in the campaigns of Marco Rubio, Rick Perry, and Jeb Bush. Rubio looked to be the best vehicle for Reformicon ideas, given his youth, his warm embrace of "family-friendly" tax policies, and a Hispanic identity that made his sudden opposition to comprehensive immigration reform (an about-face that most, if not all, Reformicons supported) go down easier. Sure, Rubio's tax plan gave trillions to corporations and wealthy individuals and relative peanuts to working-class families (a good reflection of the balance of power in the GOP), but it won plaudits for heretical courage nonetheless.
And then, like a very bad joke (You call that Sam's Club Republicanism? Here's Sam's Club Republicanism!), along came a presidential candidate who represented what many in the white working class really wanted: not just a GOP Establishment figure who paid their economic interests lip service, but someone who violently opposed liberalized immigration policies along with the pro-trade, "entitlement reform" orthodoxy of wealthy GOP elites, and articulated a fear of cultural change and national decline that most well-off Republicans, continuing to prosper during the current economic "recovery," could not begin to fathom. Worse yet, it seems Republicans' best idea for "taking Trump down" was to show he is not a "true conservative" on economic issues. As Reformicons could have told them, neither are most white working-class Republican voters.
Paul Starobin:
This search for comparisons can be a good way to get a grip on a figure like Trump, whose rapid rise and staying power has defied predictions. But it doesn’t need to stray so far from home. Trump is a profoundly American demagogue, part of a long tradition, and one whose roots go far deeper than the 20th-century populists whose names usually come up. The true pioneers of what might be called the American political tradition of demagoguery were a cadre of Southern orators from the decades leading up to the Civil War, men adept at arousing and manipulating the fears and anxieties of their target audience in the service of their cherished cause—to prod the South into leaving the Union in order to save the institution of slavery and protect Southern “rights” generally. They were known, at least to their critics, as the Fire-Eaters.
Public Policy Polling:
PPP's newest New Hampshire poll finds Donald Trump leading in the state by 14 points. Trump's position in the state has been steady over the last three months- we found him at 28% in mid-October, 27% in early December, and we find him at 29% this month. 5 other candidates are in double digits but pretty closely clustered and all well behind Trump- Marco Rubio at 15%, Chris Christie and John Kasich at 11%, and Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz at 10%. Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina at 4%, Rand Paul at 3%, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum at 1%, and Jim Gilmore with less than 1% round out the field.
Trump actually ranks 8th out of the 12 candidates in New Hampshire in net favorability with only 49% of GOP voters seeing him favorably to 44% with a negative opinion. But his support has the greatest intensity among the top level candidates- 68% of his supporters say they're firmly committed to him compared to 63% for Cruz, 58% for Bush, 46% for Rubio, 40% for Christie, and just 34% for Kasich on that metric. Looking at the race just among those who say their mind is totally made up, Trump's support goes up to 38% to 13% for Rubio, 12% for Cruz, 11% for Bush, 9% for Christie, and 7% for Kasich.
As for the Dems:
Things remain extremely close on the Democratic side, with Hillary Clinton at 47% to 44% for Bernie Sanders, and 3% for Martin O'Malley. There's an incredible divide between the Democrats and independents planning to vote in the primary- Clinton leads Sanders 55/36 with Democrats, but Sanders almost completely cancels that out with a 59/29 advantage among non-Democrats planning to vote in the primary. That's just one of several big dividers in the Democratic race- Clinton leads 51/38 with women while Sanders leads 50/42 with men, and Clinton leads 54/36 with seniors while Sanders is up 46/45 with everyone else.
Sanders is more broadly popular than Clinton, with an 85/8 favorability rating to her 69/24 standing. Clinton's supporters are a little more committed though with 68% of them saying they will definitely vote for her to 62% of Sanders' voters who say they're firmly with him.
The above is… interesting.