Paul Krugman at The New York Times writes—Cranks on Top:
Marco Rubio has yet to win anything, but by losing less badly than other non-Trump candidates he has become the overwhelming choice of the Republican establishment. Does this give him a real chance of overtaking the man who probably just won all of South Carolina’s delegates? I have no idea.
But what I do know is that one shouldn’t treat establishment support as an indication that Mr. Rubio is moderate and sensible. On the contrary, not long ago someone holding his policy views would have been considered a fringe crank.
Let me leave aside Mr. Rubio’s terrifying statements on foreign policy and his evident willingness to make a bonfire of civil liberties, and focus on what I know best, economics.
You probably know that Mr. Rubio is proposing big tax cuts, and may know that among other things he proposes completely eliminating taxes on investment income — which would mean, for example, that Mitt Romney would end up owing precisely zero in federal taxes.
Jeet Heer at The New Republic writes—Bernie Sanders fared better than expected in the caucus—but he's got a tough road ahead:
Hillary Clinton needed a decisive victory in Nevada to put to rest fears that her campaign was in trouble, and it looks like she got it. At this writing, with final results still to come, it appears that she will win by four or five percentage points, basically matching her 2008 win in the state over Barack Obama. With this victory, Clinton has a clear path for pushing aside her too-close win in Iowa and big loss in New Hampshire. She can plausibly argue that Bernie Sanders’s coalition is too narrow—that it is, in particular, too heavily white—to reflect the Democratic Party, which after all is a multi-racial coalition.
And she’s clearly aiming to broaden her own coalition. In her victory speech, Clinton incorporated many of the themes of Sanders’s campaign, emphasizing economic populist messages like student debt. She also made sure to note (a la Sanders) that most of her funding comes from small donors contributing less than $100. And throughout the speech, she repeatedly used the communitarian “we”—a response perhaps to criticism that her campaign has been too much about her leadership and experience, and not enough about common purpose.
If this win is followed by Clinton’s expected victory in next Saturday’s South Carolina primary and the six Southern states of Super Tuesday on March 1, she has a clear path to racking up enough delegates to be the prohibitive front-runner, especially in light of her strong lead among the Democratic super-delegates. The irony is that Clinton might end up making the same argument from delegate math that Obama made in 2008. If Clinton wants to wrap up the primary early, she could soon be in a position to argue that the delegate math overwhelmingly favors her—and Sanders would have to make the same argument that Clinton did in 2008, when Obama took the lead, that every voter needs to be heard from and that he could still conceivably win a majority of votes going forward.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—The Clinton dynasty survives, while the Bush dynasty is routed:
The Clinton political dynasty is still alive. The Bush dynasty has been routed. Their contrasting fates, to this point at least, tell us much about our two parties, the nature of this year’s presidential election, and the dueling legacies themselves.
The Republican and Democratic contests are very different, beginning with the fact that Hillary Clinton did not have to deal with Donald Trump, who targeted Jeb Bush with a viciousness rarely seen in contemporary politics. For months, the self-contained former Florida governor responded ineffectually to an opponent who flouted all the norms. This only made it easier for Trump to mock him as “low energy” and “weak.” [...]
Clinton now faces only one opponent, and Bernie Sanders, especially in contrast to the often thuggish behavior of Republican candidates toward each other, has been positively courtly. Building a durable progressive wing of the Democratic Party clearly matters more to him than scoring points off Clinton.
The Editorial Board of The Washington Post concludes—Rethink life tenure:
Life tenure has bolstered the judiciary’s “firmness and independence,” just as Alexander Hamilton predicted in Federalist No. 78 that it would.
However, he wrote those words in 1788, when average life expectancy was less than 50 years, and long before the court assumed its role as arbiter of so many deeply contentious national issues — from abortion to environmental regulation to civil rights. In theory, the court could relieve the pressure on the confirmation process by shedding its modern responsibilities. This is certainly what Justice Scalia and like-minded colleagues said they were trying to do. Their limited success after three decades suggests that a powerful, active federal judiciary is here to stay and with it the incentive to stock the judiciary with party activists, the younger and fitter the better.
A likelier way to lower the stakes, then, would be to fill Supreme Court vacancies not for a lifetime but for a finite term. Many European high court judges face mandatory retirement at 70. Judges on New York state’s highest court serve for 14 years. The FBI director serves a single 10-year term. Whatever the number, it should be significantly longer than either a Senate term or a presidential one. But if it were shorter than “indefinitely,” the political drama over every vacancy would not be quite so fevered.
The Editorial Board of The New York Times states—Young Voters, Motivated Again:
This is the first presidential campaign in which people age 18 to 29 make up the same proportion of the electorate as do baby boomers — about one-third. This year, the youth turnout for both parties in the primaries so far is rivaling 2008, the year of Barack Obama’s first campaign. On Saturday, young voters turned out in far greater numbers in the South Carolina Republican primary than they did in 2008 or 2012 in that state, according to a study by Tufts University’s Circle center. Donald Trump won the primary, with 32.5 percent of the vote, but young voters were the only group he didn’t carry. Marco Rubio came in second with 22.5 percent, closely followed by Ted Cruz, with 22.3 percent. Both Mr. Cruz and Mr. Trump drew bigger share of the youth vote than Mr. Rubio.
The youth vote’s biggest beneficiary by far is Bernie Sanders, who filled venues in Las Vegas with cheering young admirers last week, after winning more than 80 percent of this group in both Iowa and New Hampshire. On Saturday young people made up 18 percent of voters in Nevada’s Democratic caucus, five percentage points more than in 2008. Mr. Sanders again drew more than eight in 10 of these voters. Mrs. Clinton won Nevada with 52.7 percent, besting Mr. Sanders by 5.5 percentage points. But young people were largely responsible for closing what just a month ago had been a more than 20-point lead for her.
Many find it odd that the 74-year-old Sanders would have this appeal. But John Della Volpe wasn’t surprised. Surveying young voters in November, Mr. Della Volpe, the director of polling at the Harvard Institute of Politics, noted that support for Sanders among potential voters age 18 to 29 had rocketed from 1 percent to 41 percent in about six months. Asked what they valued most in a candidate, young voters said integrity, level-headedness, and authenticity, in that order. Political and business experience were far down the list.
So far, 2016 has been a campaign season marked mainly by voter anger in both parties. But the results of the early contests suggest growing engagement by the nation’s newest voters. That would be a bright spot in any election cycle, and it’s particularly welcome now.
Juan Cole at Informed Comment writes—Trump’s SC Victory and anti-Muslim Hatred:
Trump did much better than his rivals with men, with over-45 voters and with the less educated. He even outdid Cruz with regard to the evangelical vote (self-described evangelicals were 3/4s of Republican SC voters this year, up from 65% in 2012).
But perhaps one unexpected indication as to why he won is Trump’s strident hatred of Muslims. Some 75% of GOP primary voters in South Carolina support his bizarre and unconstitutional idea of banning Muslims from traveling to the United States. That is nearly twice the national average on this issue (46%) and more than the average among Republicans nationally (66%).
A sounding by Public Policy Polling found that SC GOP voters supporting Trump are outliers among Republicans in that state. Some 80% of them want to ban Muslims from traveling to the US, and about a third of Trump supporters want to ban gays from coming here as well. (That was twice the percentage among SC Repubicans in general). Among Trump supporters, 62 percent want to create a database to track US Muslims, and 40% want to ban mosques. 44% of Trump supporters want to ban the practice of Islam entirely (Not sure why 4% of these stupid jingoists want to allow mosques but not Muslims). About 38% of Trump voters said they wish the South had won the Civil War, as opposed to 30% of SC Republicans overall.
Melvin I. Urofsky at Los Angeles Times writes—Antonin Scalia and the judgment of history:
Scalia famously argued that only by reading the Constitution in the light of the Framers' original intent can judges arrive at an impartial and objective understanding of the document. He was a caustic critic of activist courts — especially if they were liberal — but originalism itself gives conservative judges a fig leaf to cover their activism. Close observers of the court have noted that whenever Scalia invoked an originalist interpretation of the Constitution, it usually favored his biases. In the 2010 Citizens United case — which allows companies to make large campaign contributions from their corporate treasuries — Scalia wrote a concurrence in which he claimed the Framers believed in free speech rights for corporations. It astounded and dumbfounded historians who know that corporations barely existed in 18th century America.
Originalism has long been under attack, and not just by its political opponents. How is it possible to discern absolutely the Framers' intent? A book published last fall revealed that James Madison's notes on the Constitutional Convention, long considered a documentary source on the debates of the Framers, was edited later by Madison to emphasize his and Thomas Jefferson's states' rights view of government rather than that of their archenemy, Alexander Hamilton, who believed in a strong central government. Moreover, there are many parts of the Constitution for which there is no contemporary source of meaning. The basis for impeachment, for example, is “high crimes and misdemeanors,” for which no definition is to be found in the Federalist Papers or elsewhere.
Scalia will without doubt be remembered as one of the best writers on the court. Even those who disagree with his opinions read them just for the fun of it. But he often went too far, especially when in dissent, and his tirades insulted more moderate conservatives such as Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy. The justices shrugged it off with a “well, that's just Nino.” In recent years, observers have noted that a nastiness is showing up in lower federal courts. A number of opinions have attacked opposing jurists not just on jurisprudental grounds, but on a personal basis as well. “If Scalia can do it,” the writers seem to think, “then so can we.”
Jill Abramson at The Guardian writes—Hillary Clinton needs hope and change. Can she accept that before it's too late?
But a lot has changed for Clinton since 2008, when Clyburn found himself torn and not making an endorsement; instead, he got an angry phone call at 2am from Bill Clinton, whom Clyburn had supported, after Obama trounced Hillary Clinton in the Palmetto state.
Now Clinton owns the black establishment, which is why she has surrounded herself with almost all the leaders of major civil rights groups and let the media cover it all. But here – as everywhere, it seems – tying up the political establishment doesn’t guarantee anything in 2016. [...]
The Joshua generation of younger black leaders, whom I’ve written about in this space before, is taking a deep look at Sanders and questioning the welfare and crime bills pushed by Bill Clinton in the 1990s. The latter resulted in the incarceration of unimaginable numbers of black people and Hillary, too, is getting blamed for supporting his policies. [...]
It’s thrilling to see black voters matter so much in the state that started the civil war and has still has its legacy looming so large. The horrendous killings by a white gunman of black churchgoers in Charleston and the battle royale over whether to take down the Confederate flag flying at the statehouse in Columbia are only recent examples.
When I worked for a small South Carolina newspaper in 1978, there were different kinds of of racial overtones. I covered the late Strom Thurmond, the state’s most durable politician. He began his career as a Democratic segregationist and ended it as a Republican who built bridges to the people he once reviled. I covered a Black Veterans Appreciation Night in honor of Thurmond inside a packed coliseum in Columbia, and nobody but me seemed to find the scene bizarre.
Spencer Woodman at In These Times writes—Remember How Jeb Bush Dismantled Florida’s Department of Labor?
In the spring of 2000, Jeb Bush, then governor of Florida, launched a campaign unprecedented in a state of that size: He set out to dismantle the state’s department of labor.
Like those across the country, Florida’s labor department carried out a range of duties, such as tracking workforce statistics, presenting annual awards to safety-conscious businesses, and running a hotline for workers to learn more about their rights. As of 1999, the department reportedly employed some 20 compliance investigators, whose duties including policing child labor, overseeing low-wage industries like fast food and agriculture, and fielding complaints of minimum wage violations.
By the end of his first term, Bush had largely succeeded.
He pushed through a plan to dissolve the department and scatter its functions among a number of state offices, including a semi-privatized agency called Workforce Florida Inc. By the end of his tenure as governor, the state of Florida employed not a single official dedicated to enforcing its wage and hour laws, according to Cynthia Hernandez, who studied wage theft in Florida for nearly a decade as a researcher at Florida International University.
During his quest for the Republican presidential nomination, Jeb Bush’s record as Florida’s governor has been vigorously picked apart. Yet his aggressive approach to Florida’s labor department has gone almost wholly unmentioned. While Republican governors have had their share of spats with state workforce agencies, Bush is the only one in recent memory to have simply dissolved a labor department.
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