Damon Linker at The Week says the GOP should be less worried about Donald Trump himself and more worried about why he appeals so much to the Republician base:
The GOP's Trump problem goes all the way down to the roots of the party — the grassroots.[...] that faction's roots go back much further than 2012 — all the way back to the origins of the modern conservative movement in the right-wing populism of the postwar John Birch Society and similar groups. They were a ragtag conglomeration of ideological radicals animated by rage against various actors, forces, trends, and policies in mid-20th-century American life: the New Deal, Big Government, communists, negroes, elites, decadent city folk, Catholics, Jews, immigrants, feminists, homosexuals, and secularists. Some feared them all, others focused on one or a few. All of them saw the world through a fog of paranoia and conspiracy.
The populists are the now base of the party — its most loyal and devoted members, surpassed only by super-rich donors for influence among the party's leading politicians and strategists. Candidates for president have no choice but to woo this base, to legitimize its obsessions and flatter its prejudices. And the underdog candidates, meanwhile, pin their entire campaigns on these voters, hoping that the flattery will pay off in a surge of support, catapulting them to prominence.
That's how we've ended up with a vulgar blowhard like Donald Trump riding high (almost certainly for a brief time) in the polls. Trump's policy positions (to the extent that he's bothered to articulate them) place him on the far-right flank of American political culture.
Michael Barbaro, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Martin at The New York Times:
Dispirited party elders, worried that Republicans are handing Democratic rivals a powerful campaign weapon by allowing Mr. Trump’s voice to be depicted as representative of the party, are sounding the alarm with growing urgency.
“The Republican Party is making a mistake if they think they can just remain quiet when he speaks up, or to demur or to just lightly distance themselves,” said Peter Wehner, a former official in the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. “He’s doing tremendous damage.”
More on the day's top stories below the fold.
Jonathan Bernstein:
[A]s Trump is demonstrating, reaching double digits in early polls of a 17-candidate field isn't about getting people to like a candidate. If a candidate can make the entire campaign a referendum on himself, then even if he loses by a lopsided margin, the 10 or 12 percent who do approve of him will place him among the polling leaders. That won't help him in 2016, when voters take the whole thing more seriously, but it's enough to get into the top 10.
Any candidate who doesn't make the cut loses an opportunity to spark a public-opinion rally. Even worse, party actors may use the polling cutoff as an excuse to narrow down the list of contenders they are actively considering. That could spell the end for several of them
The New York Times calls out those who refuse to issue same sex marriage licenses:
These public employees seem to forget that taxpayers pay them to do their job. If doing that job violates his or her religious beliefs, the best solution is to find another job, as several have done in the days since the Obergefell ruling.
Some same-sex marriage opponents argue that under state religious-freedom laws, a government employee’s beliefs should be accommodated so long as another official is available to carry out the task. But government employees do not have a constitutionally protected right to pick and choose which members of the public they will serve, no matter their religious beliefs.
Not so long ago, of course, government officials invoked religious beliefs to justify all manner of racial segregation and discrimination, including laws banning interracial marriage. The Supreme Court struck down that marriage ban in 1967 in Loving v. Virginia.
Catherine Rampell:
This week, the entire staff of a county clerk’s office in Tennessee resigned because they didn’t want to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
To which I say: Thank you for setting a good example! If you don’t feel like doing your job, then you should be honest about it, man up and quit. It’s the honorable thing to do.
Unfortunately, public officials in other parts of the country — including Kentucky, South Dakota, Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama and Texas — have taken a more cowardly approach. They have instead tried to weasel out of some of their sworn duties, while still collecting the same taxpayer-funded paychecks. Why are we letting them suckle the government teat if they won’t work? They should either perform their jobs in full or follow their consciences out the door.
Eugene Robinson:
For 150 years after Appomattox, the states of the Confederacy lived a twisted fantasy. As evidenced by the diehards in the South Carolina legislature, some white Southerners still refuse to wake from the reverie. But the rest of the state has finally moved on.
Does this mean that South Carolina and other former Confederate states will take a new look at all the monuments and memorials dedicated to white supremacists who advocated slavery and fomented armed rebellion against the United States? Does it mean Southern towns will pull down all those town-square statues of rebel soldiers, their backs defiantly turned against the north?
Probably not, or at least not anytime soon.