We begin today’s roundup with this op-ed from Nancy Pelosi calling out Republicans for their hypocrisy on tax cuts and the deficit:
President Clinton handed his successor, President George W. Bush, a projected $5.6 trillion 10-year budget surplus and eight years of economic expansion. But Republicans quickly abandoned any measure of fiscal responsibility and began a catastrophic spending spree. The completely unpaid-for tax cuts, including huge tax cuts for the wealthy in 2001, and two completely unpaid-for wars shattered our multitrillion-dollar surplus and created a vast new deficit.
After President Bush left the White House, President Obama was faced with a staggering $1.2 trillion projected budget deficit in his first year alone, according to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office, and an economy in free fall. Under President Obama, the paygo law was reinstated, and we’ve brought the annual deficit from $1.2 trillion when President Obama took office to $544 billion today.
With the recent tax package, however, the Republican Congress is once again ignoring the inescapable mathematical realities behind budgeting. In advancing a narrow and expensive agenda largely benefiting special interests, they are adding trillions to the deficit in the coming decades.
Is this any surprise? Claire Landsbaum at New York Magazine runs down the numbers on GOP self-loathing:
This election cycle has plunged the Republican party into an existential crisis. Convinced that Donald Trump's candidacy would falter and fade early on, most establishment conservatives have looked on in horror as he's risen in the polls and begun to collect delegates with ease. A new poll from the New York Times and CBS News illustrates their predicament — of 362 Republicans surveyed over four days, 60 percent say they're embarrassed by their party's presidential campaign, and 88 percent agree that their party is divided. What's more, 58 percent say that the tone of this year's campaign is more negative than that of campaigns in previous years.
Of those Republicans surveyed, 46 percent say they'd like to see Donald Trump as the nominee, and a full three-quarters say that's what they expect.
Meanwhile, Michael Tomasky at The Daily Beast writes about the dream of some Republicans of adding in a spoiler candidates and having the election be so close it gets tossed to the House of Representatives:
Fortunately, I doubt it can work as a practical matter. To the second question I asked above, about how this person would impact the vote, the probable answer is that he’d simply split the Republican-conservative vote and help Clinton. I mean, imagine a three-way Clinton, Trump, Rick Perry race in, say, Georgia. It’s about a 55-45 Republican state, maybe a little less. If Perry got anywhere north of 10 percent, he could hand the state to Clinton. All the important swing states are less Republican than that, meaning that in Florida or Ohio, for example, if Perry took even 5 percent, he’d ensure a Clinton win there.
Now, defenders of this stop-Trump effort might say, oh, Tomasky, you’re being too conspiratorial. We just want to get the person on as close to 50 ballots as possible and maybe then can even win. But that seems delusional. If anything, two conservative candidates splitting the moderate-to-conservative vote ought to help the Democrat win a lot of states with something like 37 to 44 percent of the vote. Clinton could thus win Arizona, Missouri, Indiana, South Carolina, and maybe others.
Josh Voorhies at Slate previews today’s primaries:
Polling has been few and far between in Utah and Arizona but the numbers we do have suggest any suspense tonight won’t be about the actual statewide winners. In the most recent Arizona poll—taken after Marco Rubio dropped out—Trump led Cruz by 13 points and Kasich by 29, while Nate Silver and his FiveThirtyEight team put the odds of a Trump victory at about 93 percent. Meanwhile, in the most recent Utah poll—also taken after Rubio’s exit—Cruz leads Kasich by 24 points and Trump by a whopping 42, and FiveThirtyEight sees Cruz with a 98 percent chance of victory. If those numbers hold up when the votes are actually cast—never a certainty, particularly when polling has been so sparse—Trump will again be the one walking away with the lion’s share of delegates. And, once again, the Trump-favoring status quo will have been the result of an unholy combination of a split field and the way Republicans dole out delegates. [...]
If Cruz comes up just shy of a majority in Utah tonight, Republicans looking to assign blame for blowing an easy opportunity to deny Trump a few delegates won’t have a shortage of targets. First and foremost, there will be Kasich, who spent part of the weekend campaigning in Utah despite the fact his ostensible chief goal—stopping Trump—is better achieved by denying the Donald a delegate than winning one for himself. Then, too, there is the GOP establishment in Utah, which has been incapable of choosing between Kasich and Cruz. Mitt Romney and current Utah Gov. Gary Herbert are telling Republicans to vote for Cruz, former Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt is backing Kasich, and former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman has been unwilling to choose between the two. Much like we’ve seen play out on the national stage for nearly a year now, the anybody-but-Trump plan that could work in Utah in theory is in danger of becoming an everybody-but-Trump strategy that splits the vote and fails in reality.
Turning to the nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, Rolling Stone’s Tessa Stuart runs down the Republican hypocrisy on that issue as well:
Jeff Sessions
In 1997, on the Senate floor: "I respect the legal ability of Mr. Garland... We are not here in any way to impugn the integrity of Mr. Garland. By all accounts, he is a fine person and an able lawyer. He does have a very good job with the U.S. Department of Justice... I would feel comfortable supporting him for another judgeship."
In 1997, on the Senate floor: "But I think it is important to say that there is not a stall, that I or other Senators could have delayed the vote on Merrick Garland for longer periods of time had we chosen to do so. We want to have a vote on it. We want to have a debate on it. We want this Senate to consider whether or not this vacancy should be filled."
And, on a final note, here’s Steve Benen’s take:
Part of the problem here is the cringe-worthy incoherence of the Republican pitch. Over the course of literally a few days, the party, which had a month to prepare for this showdown, has managed to tell the public the fight is about Garland, is not about Garland, except when it is, which it isn’t. McConnell failed to keep his own story straight to a dizzying degree: the Kentucky lawmaker ended up changing his mind about his own argument several times just yesterday morning, taking both sides of the same issue within the same interview.
It’s tempting to have Senate Republicans debate themselves for a while. Perhaps they can let the rest of us know when they’ve figured out what they want to say.
The more alarming problem is the fact that the Senate Majority Leader seems to think press releases from activist groups should have some direct role in shaping the future of the nation’s highest court.