Greg Sargent/WaPo:
A big question about Trump that Democrats must insist Kavanaugh answer
Here’s one important area in which they can do that: They must press Kavanaugh to clarify his thinking on the question of whether presidents are above the law, or more specifically, how much power presidents have with regard to investigations into themselves.
Many observers are pointing to a 2009 law review article by Kavanaugh that argues that “we should not burden a sitting President with civil suits, criminal investigations, or criminal prosecutions,” and instead that “impeachment” is the proper “mechanism” against a “bad-behaving or law-breaking president.” He suggests that “Congress might consider a law” exempting presidents in office “from criminal prosecution and investigation, including from questioning by criminal prosecutors.”
Caroline Fredrickson and Norm Eisen/NY Times:
On Monday President Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, to replace retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court. In the coming weeks, the Senate will undertake its constitutional duty to vet Judge Kavanaugh on issues like health care and abortion. But the Senate must also explore a question central to evaluating the judge’s commitment to the rule of law: Does he have the requisite independence from President Trump to serve as a check on his abuses of power?
This issue is particularly important given repeated claims by the president’s attorneys that Mr. Trump is essentially above the law — that he can even refuse a subpoena to testify. Given the looming Mueller investigation, these weighty, knotty constitutional questions may soon come before the court.
Tara Golshan/Vox:
Trump thinks immigration is his party’s winning issue in midterms. The polls aren’t so sure.
Trump’s signature policy platform is a total wild card in the 2018 midterms.
Immigration — President Donald Trump’s signature policy issue — is a wild card in the 2018 midterm elections.
Trump and conservative Republicans are running hard on immigration, but warring polls show it’s not at all clear how voters really see Trump’s immigration crackdown….
For Democrats, it’s been a simple calculus. Democrats’ attempts at “tough love” centrism didn’t win them any credit across the aisle, while an increasingly empowered immigrant-rights movement started taking them to task for the adverse consequences of enforcement policies. Democrats have now learned to ignore the critics on the right they couldn’t please, and embrace the critics on the left whom they could.
But for now, it’s unclear if this more aggressive pitch will be the main vehicle to propel a “so-called” blue wave, which Democrats are seeking in November.
Immigration may be the leading issue for voters overall at the moment, but health care and the economy continue to be the top two priorities for Democratic voters.
Will Bunch/philly.com:
The unbearable whiteness of being Trump's judicial picks
Nothing could shatter the too-ready-for-primetime framing of this 9 p.m. announcement that forced NBC to sandwich Trump and his newest member of the Supremes smack in the middle of “American Ninja Warrior” — not even when Kavanaugh finally moved his lips and the very first words that came out were a lie.
“No president has ever consulted more widely or talked to more people from more backgrounds to seek input for a Supreme Court nomination,” said the 53-year-old jurist — pretending that Trump hadn’t just wrapped up a process in which he was spoon-fed names by just one far-right lobbying group that were then culled into four almost indistinguishable white blobs of pasty conservative dough, in a process that many pundits think was rigged in cahoots with retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy even before Trump staged his week-long episode of “American Justice Warrior” or whatever the heck you’d call this fake reality show.
Seth Masket/Pacific Standard:
THREE WAYS OF GOVERNING AS A MINORITY PARTY
Republicans are settling in to be the minority party in power for many years to come, and they are increasingly testing many voters' faith in the system.
We saw an example of this in 2000, when George W. Bush was awarded the presidency through a controversial series of judicial rulings following a disputed election in which his opponent received the most votes. Bush faced the unenviable position of beginning a presidency amid a legitimacy crisis. Only about half the country felt he was elected "fair and square."
Such a leader faces at least three paths for addressing the legitimacy problem. One is to reach out to the majority party's voters in an attempt to be the president of the whole country. This rests on the reasonable conclusion that people will be more inclined to see your position as legitimate if they agree with how you do the job. …
Another approach is to simply do nothing and assume that the legitimacy problem will take care of itself….
There is a third approach to the seriousness of a legitimacy crisis: to minimize challenges to the regime by limiting the majority party's access to the polls.
I should be clear here that the current Republican Party's legitimacy problem goes well beyond Donald Trump's popular vote loss in 2016.
Wonkblog/WaPo:
Rich people prefer Grey Poupon, white people own pets: the data behind the cultural divide
It turns out that people are separated not just by gun ownership, religion and their beliefs on affirmative action — but also by English muffins, flashlights and mustard.
To prove it, University of Chicago economists Marianne Bertrand and Emir Kamenica taught machines to guess a person’s income, political ideology, race, education and gender based on either their media habits, their consumer behavior, their social and political beliefs, and even how they spent their time. Their results were released in a new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Also gives some insight into how the annoying ads you see on the internet are selected, and not just by Facebook.
Paul Waldman/American Prospect:
The Liberal Backlash Is Coming
The politics of backlash have been a Republican specialty for decades, but liberal anger continues to rise.
Indeed, the angry demand for a reversion to the prior order—what we can call the politics of backlash—has been the basis of Republican electoral success for decades. They have held up one social or political development after another and told have voters, "These changes are the symptom and cause of what you have lost." Your standard of living, your hopes for the future, the vibrancy of your community, your security, your place in a society ordered as you would like it, or just the feeling that people like you are on top, where they should be—whenever any of it is threatened, the GOP is there to say, "Yes, you should be angry. You should be even angrier than you are, because these things have been stolen from you. And we can help you get them back."
But right now we're seeing something extraordinary: a liberal backlash, potentially equal in potency to what we're used to seeing from the right. The left is already mad because of their own sense of loss, and it's about to get much worse.