Donald Trump is a Glass-Jawed Coward Afraid to Debate Rubio or Cruz Again

RS: Donald Trump is a Glass-Jawed Coward Afraid to Debate Rubio or Cruz Again

Donald Trump did not like getting humiliated by Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz in the last debate in Houston, and you know how we know that he knows he got humiliated? Because he’s doing what glass-jawed bullies always do when you hit them back – whining like a baby and threatening to run away like a coward:

Trump on Friday night hinted he had thought about skipping another GOP debate, as he lamented the events as “a terrible waste of time.”

“Aren’t these debates ridiculous, though?” Trump asked supporters at a rally in Oklahoma City, according to Business Insider.

“How about if I don’t do the next debate? Yes?” he added, before quickly deciding: “Ah, no, I’ll do it.”

The billionaire businessman said debates are repetitive and predictable.

“How many times can you say the same thing over and over? I can give you the answers of the governor, the two senators,” he said. “I can give you every single answer. I can also say Ben [Carson] will complain about not being asked a question. And he’s right! It’s not fair.”

Trump ran away once before, at the Iowa debate, because he was scared of Megyn Kelly – or perhaps just put out that a smart, attractive woman was neither intimidated nor wowed by him. Now, he gets his head handed to him by two sons-of-Hispanic-immigrant Senators who had the effrontery to not inherit $200 million, and he whimpers about “unfair” and talks about running away again.

Remind me why anyone even pretends to think this guy could stand up to Hillary Clinton? Marco Rubio didn’t give up when he had one bad debate. Reagan in ’84 and George W. Bush in 2004 didn’t give up when they had one bad debate. Even Barack Obama in 2012 didn’t give up when he had one bad debate. But Trump is made of more delicate stuff. He couldn’t even say no to Hillary when she asked him for donations, because he was too frightened to take the Koch brothers’ path of standing up to public vilification for putting their money where their principles are. Trump may have a few right-wing instincts to go with his lifelong social liberalism and love of big government, but he has the backbone of a jellyfish.

Will Donald Trump Bail on Future Debates?

RS: Will Donald Trump Bail on Future Debates?

After last night’s debate disaster in front of 13-16 million people (by early estimates the highest-rated debate of the five since the start of the new year), Donald Trump must be looking with horror at the prospect of three more debates in the next month, two of them before the big Florida/Ohio/North Carolina/Illinois/Missouri showdown on March 15. And unlike, say, his tangles with Jeb Bush, he has no prospect of escaping a repeat by candidates dropping out; at least one of Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, if not both, will be in the race through at least the first two of those debates no matter what happens on Super Tuesday.

Trump’s only viable strategy right now is to run out the clock, and that’s what his flacks and courtiers are out doing on Twitter this morning, declaring that hey, the election is over, the polls show he’s way ahead, so the voters may as well give up and debates don’t matter. He can try changing the subject – see today’s Chris Christie hug – but that only buys him respites from the pain of being humiliated and shown to be out of his depth by smart, aggressive lawyers who have acquired a taste for his blood.

Which raises the question of whether Trump will just run away and avoid any further debates. It’s a classic “Rose Garden strategy” campaign frontrunners have used in the past. It carries major risks as well: Trump would effectively have to implicitly admit that he’s afraid to stand toe to toe with Rubio or Cruz again, and that did not help his ‘alpha dog’ image when he tried it in Iowa. But compared to the potential for being exposed again the way he was last night, it may be the smaller risk.

America Won Tonight’s Debate

RS: America Won Tonight’s Debate

Tonight America finally got to see the most talented conservative debaters in the business – Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz – team up to attack Donald Trump as an ill-informed, empty-talking-points-dependent blowhard and lifelong liberal Democrat who doesn’t take a punch well. Cruz was pretty close to his A game, which is very good indeed, getting better as the night went on; Rubio was spitting straight fire from the starting gun, mocking Trump with ease and contempt and a smile on his face. If anyone who watched this debate still votes for Trump, we really have no excuse for becoming France, and we should turn in Old Glory right now and seek a retirement home for former great powers that no longer care about freedom and the Constitution.

Rubio, other than a few minutes with Chris Christie (a man who never once had the stones to turn his formidable guns against Trump) has had a marvelous string of debate moments, but tonight was a Rubio we have not seen before, and he took it to another level, making complete fools of people who claimed as late as this afternoon that Rubio would not attack Trump tonight. Instead, he seems to have decided to lull Trump into a false sense of security by holding his fire until he could see the whites of Trump’s eyes. Rubio went hard after the contrast between his own humble origins and Trump’s rich-kid silver-spoon upbringing (and what a mockery it makes of Trump’s claim to be the working-class hero), sneering that if Trump hadn’t inherited so much money he’d be selling watches on the street in Manhattan. Trump was reduced to sputtering that he only got a one million dollar loan from his daddy:

RUBIO: Here’s a guy that inherited $200 million. If he hadn’t inherited $200 million, you know where Donald Trump would be right now?

TRUMP: No, no, no.

RUBIO: Selling watches in (inaudible)

(APPLAUSE)

TRUMP: (Inaudible) I took…

RUBIO: That’s where he would be.

TRUMP: That is so wrong. We’ll work on that. I took $1 million and I turned into $10 billion.

RUBIO: Oh, OK. One million.

TRUMP: I borrowed $1 million…

Rubio laughed at Trump, and not for the last time, and Trump spent a whole lot of the debate with a sour look on his face and his chin raised in the air, the unmistakable look of a man who is not enjoying being mocked by his social inferiors. Rubio bored in on this contrast in talking about immigration and how Trump’s record is nothing like his rhetoric:

And so even today, we saw a report in one of the newspapers that Donald, you’ve hired a significant number of people from other countries to take jobs that Americans could have filled.

My mom and dad — my mom was a maid at a hotel, and instead of hiring an American like her, you have brought in over a thousand people from all over the world to fill those jobs instead.

A second thing that both Rubio and Cruz did in different ways to counteract Trump’s incessent lies and habit of yelling over people who get too close to exposing them was to dare the voters to go Google what they were talking about. Rubio did this twice with Trump’s hiring of illegal Polish immigrants, and Cruz did it with Trump’s general election poll standing against Hillary, specifically referencing RealClearPolitics.com’s poll averages.

A third important thing was that Rubio laid off Cruz almost entirely, except to defend himself. And Cruz launched far fewer attacks than before against Rubio, although almost all his weakest hits against Trump were when he tried to shoehorn 2-for-1 attacks on Rubio into his answers. Cruz demolished Trump on electability, which if you’d asked at any point in this campaign would have been the last thing you’d expect Ted Cruz to be talking about at a debate on the eve of Super Tuesday:

You know, it’s interesting — Donald went — went on — on an extended tirade about the polls, but he didn’t respond to any of the substance. He has yet to say — he can release past year’s tax returns. He can do it tomorrow.

He doesn’t want to do it, because presumably there’s something in there…

TRUMP: Nothing.

CRUZ: … that is bad. If there’s nothing, release them tomorrow.

(CROSSTALK)

CRUZ: They’re already prepared. The only reason he’s not releasing them…

TRUMP: You — you don’t…

CRUZ: … is because he’s afraid that he will get hit.

TRUMP: I’m not afraid (inaudible).

CRUZ: You know, Marco made reference earlier to the litigation against Trump University. It’s a fraud case. His lawyers have scheduled the trial for July.

I want you to think about, if this man is the nominee, having the Republican nominee…

(BELL RINGS)

… on the stand in court, being cross-examined about whether he committed fraud. You don’t think the mainstream media will go crazy on that?

And on substance, how do we nominate a candidate who has said Hillary Clinton was the best secretary of state of modern times, who agreed with her on foreign policy, who agrees with Bernie Sanders on health care, who agreed with Barack Obama on the Wall Street bailout?

BLITZER: All right (ph)…

CRUZ: If — we’ve got to win this election, and we can’t do it with a candidate who agrees with Hillary Clinton and can’t take it to her and beat her on the debate stage and at the polls.

BLITZER: Mr. Trump. Mr, — hold on. Mr. Trump — Mr. Trump…

TRUMP: … first of all, he’s talking about the polls. I’m beating him awfully badly in the polls.

(CROSSTALK)

CRUZ: But you’re not beating Hillary. You’re not beating Hillary.

TRUMP: Well, then, if I can’t — if — hey, if I can’t beat her, you’re really going to get killed, aren’t you?

(APPLAUSE)
[TRUMP, attributed on the rush transcript to CRUZ]: So — so let me ask you this, because you’re really getting beaten badly. I know you’re embarrassed — I know you’re embarrassed, but keep fighting — keep swinging, man (ph). Swing for the fences.

Let me just tell you — let me just tell you, the Trump University case is a civil case. Not a — it’s a civil case. It’s a case where people want to try and get — it’s a case that is nonsense.

It’s something I could have settled many times. I could settle it right now for very little money, but I don’t want to do it out of principle. The people that took the course all signed — most — many — many signed report cards saying it was fantastic, it was wonderful, it was beautiful.

As — and believe me, I’ll win that case. That’s an easy case. Civil case. Number two, as far as the taxes are concerned, I’m being audited. It’s a very routine audit, and it’s very unfair, because I’ve been audited for, I think, over 12 years.

Every year, because of the size of my company, which is very, very large, I’m being audited — which is a very large company.

(BELL RINGS)

BLITZER: Thank you.

TRUMP: I’m being audited 12 years in a row, at least.

Now, until that audit’s done, and I don’t think anybody would blame me, I’m not giving it…

(CROSSTALK)

CRUZ: … the years you’re not being audited? Will you release those years?

BLITZER: Gentlemen, gentlemen, thank you.

TRUMP: (inaudible) audited for those years.

CRUZ: Which years? Which years are you being audited?

Probably the single best moment of the debate was when Rubio basically ripped out Trump’s intestines, wrapped them around his neck and set them on fire over healthcare after a typical Trump answer that blamed Cruz and Rubio for writing Obamacare (editor’s note – lol) and making it too friendly to the insurers (one of several times Rubio openly mocked Trump for not knowing what he was talking about):

RUBIO: You may not be aware of this, Donald, because you don’t follow this stuff very closely, but here’s what happened. When they passed Obamacare they put a bailout fund in Obamacare. All these lobbyists you keep talking about, they put a bailout fund in the law that would allow public money to be used, taxpayer money, to bail out companies when they lost money.

And, we led the effort and wiped out that bailout fund. The insurance companies are not in favor of me, they hate that. They’re suing that now to get that bailout money put back in.

Here’s what you didn’t hear in that answer, and this is important guys, this is an important thing. What is your plan? I understand the lines around the state, whatever that means. This is not a game where you draw maps…

TRUMP: … And, you don’t know what it means…

RUBIO: … What is your plan, Mr. Trump?

(APPLAUSE)

RUBIO: What is your plan on healthcare?

TRUMP: You don’t know.

BASH: (inaudible)

TRUMP: … The biggest problem…

(CROSSTALK)

RUBIO: … What’s your plan…

TRUMP: … The biggest problem, I’ll have you know…

RUBIO: … What’s your plan…

TRUMP: … You know, I watched him meltdown two weeks ago with Chris Christie. I got to tell you, the biggest problem he’s got is he really doesn’t know about the lines. The biggest thing we’ve got, and the reason we’ve got no competition, is because we have lines around the state, and you have essentially….

RUBIO: … We already mentioned that (inaudible) plan, I know what that is, but what else is part of your plan…

TRUMP: … You don’t know much…

RUBIO: … So, you’re only thing is to get rid of the lines around the states. What else is part of your healthcare plan…

TRUMP: … The lines around the states…

RUBIO: … That’s your only plan…

TRUMP: … and, it was almost done — not now…

RUBIO: … Alright, (inaudible)…

TRUMP: … Excuse me. Excuse me.

RUBIO: … His plan. That was the plan…

TRUMP: … You get rid of the lines, it brings in competition. So, instead of having one insurance company taking care of New York, or Texas, you’ll have many. They’ll compete, and it’ll be a beautiful thing.

RUBIO: Alright…

(APPLAUSE)

RUBIO: So, that’s the only part of the plan? Just the lines?

BASH: (inaudible)

TRUMP: The nice part of the plan — you’ll have many different plans. You’ll have competition, you’ll have so many different plans.

RUBIO: Now he’s repeating himself.

TRUMP: No, no, no.

(LAUGHTER) (APPLAUSE) (CHEERING)

TRUMP: (inaudible)

RUBIO: (inaudible)

(CHEERING)

TRUMP: (inaudible) I watched him repeat himself five times four weeks ago…

RUBIO: … I just watched you repeat yourself five times five seconds ago…

(APPLAUSE)

TRUMP: I watched him meltdown on the stage like that, I’ve never seen it in anybody…

BASH: … Let’s stay focused on the subject…

TRUMP: … I thought he came out of the swimming pool…

RUBIO: … I see him repeat himself every night, he says five things, everyone’s dumb, he’s gonna make America great again…

BASH: … Senator Rubio…

RUBIO: … We’re going to win, win win, he’s winning in the polls…

BASH: … Senator Rubio, please.

RUBIO: … And the lines around the state.

(APPLAUSE)

RUBIO: … Every night.

BASH: Senator Rubio.

(CHEERING)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I tell the truth, I tell the truth.

BASH: Senator Rubio, you will have time to respond if you would just let Mr. Trump respond to what you’ve just posed to him…

RUBIO: … Yeah, he’s going to give us his plan now, right? OK…

BASH: … If you could talk a little bit more about your plan. I know you talked about…

TRUMP: … We’re going to have many different plans because…

BASH: … Can you be a little specific…

TRUMP: … competition…

RUBIO: … He’s done it again.

(CHEERING) (APPLAUSE)

TRUMP: There is going to be competition among all of the states, and the insurance companies. They’re going to have many, many different plans. BASH: Is there anything else you would like to add to that…

TRUMP: No, there’s nothing to add.

(CHEERING) (APPLAUSE)

TRUMP: What is to add?

It got even better than this later when Cruz and Rubio went at Trump simultaneously, despite Wolf Blitzer’s desperate efforts to rescue Trump and throw some questions to the two pointless “candidates” at the edges of the stage – Rubio at one point interjected with perfect comedic timing in an exchange where Cruz had Trump spluttering about his support for socialized medicine:

RUBIO: Well, can I just clarify something?

BLITZER: Gentleman, please.

RUBIO: Wolf, no. I want to clarify something.

BLITZER: Gentlemen please. I want to move on.

RUBIO: This is a Republican debate, right? Because that attack about letting people die in the streets…

Both Rubio and Cruz battered Trump on his “negotiation” mantra, Cruz whacking him for being an unprincipled dealmaker who financed John Kerry and Jimmy Carter, Rubio for thinking he could do business with the Palestinians like he was negotiating a lease:

BLITZER: We’re going to get to North Korea in a moment. But Senator Rubio, what’s wrong with the U.S. being an honest broker in a negotiation, as Mr. Trump is proposing?

RUBIO: Because — and I don’t know if Donald realizes this. I’m sure it’s not his intent perhaps. But the position you’ve taken is an anti-Israel position. And here’s why. Because you cannot be an honest broker in a dispute between two sides in which one of the sides is constantly acting in bad faith. The Palestinian Authority has walked away from multiple efforts to make peace, very generous offers from the Israelis. Instead, here’s what the Palestinians do. They teach their four- year-old children that killing Jews is a glorious thing. Here’s what Hamas does. They launch rockets and terrorist attacks again Israel on an ongoing basis. The bottom line is, a deal between Israel and the Palestinians, given the current makeup of the Palestinians, is not possible.

And so the next president of the United States needs to be someone like me who will stand firmly on the side of Israel. I’m not — I’m not going to sit here and say, “Oh, I’m not on either side.” I will be on a side. I will be on Israel’s side every single day because they are the only pro-American, free enterprise democracy in the entire Middle East.

(APPLAUSE)

BLITZER: Mr. Trump?

TRUMP: I’m a negotiator. I’ve done very well over the years through negotiation. It’s very important that we do that. In all fairness, Marco is not a negotiator. I watched him melt down and I’ll tell you, it was one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen. He’s not going down — excuse me…

RUBIO: He thinks a Palestinian is a real estate deal.

TRUMP: … wait a minute, and these people may even be tougher than Chris Christie. OK?

RUBIO: The Palestinians are not a real estate deal, Donald.

TRUMP: OK, no, no, no — a deal is a deal. Let me tell you that. I learned a long time ago.

RUBIO: A deal is not a deal when you’re dealing with terrorists. Have you ever negotiated with terrorists?

TRUMP: You are not a negotiator. You are not a negotiator.

(APPLAUSE)

TRUMP: And, with your thinking, you will never bring peace. You will never bring peace…

RUBIO: … Donald, might be able to (inaudible) Palestinians and Arabs, but it’s not a real estate deal…

TRUMP: … Excuse me, I want to be able to bring peace…

BLITZER: … Senator.

TRUMP: He will never be able to do it. I think I may be able to do it, although I will say this. Probably the toughest deal of any kind is that particular deal.

If anything, all of these exchanges were more devastating to watch live than they read on paper.

(Irony is truly dead if Donald Trump can go on about how “demeaning the neighbors” is a bad thing, or ramble about how the problem with our healthcare system is that we have borders that prevent competition).

Did any of this mean anything? Will it matter? Well, only the voters can decide. But the two best conservatives in the field acted like it tonight, and exposed the GOP frontrunner as an ignorant, thin-skinned fraud who belongs in the other party’s debate. No supporter of Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz could go home disappointed tonight: they held nothing back and left it all on the floor. They were commanding, they were eloquent, they were funny, they were informed, they spoke from the heart about America’s promise and its challenges, and a spoiled rich kid blustered at them out of his overblown sense of entitlement that they should sit down and get out of his way.

If that doesn’t make a difference, maybe America isn’t really meant to have two parties anymore.

The Vindication of Rick Perry

RS: The Vindication of Rick Perry

The Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas, the state’s highest criminal court, today threw out the entirety of the bogus criminal indictment against former Governor Rick Perry. The indictment was always a farce, and worse. Farce, because it suggested that Democrats would go much further than Republicans ever would to destroy a political opponent; worse, because it actively sought to criminalize good government by charging Perry with a crime for attempting to use his power of the purse to compel Democrats to get rid of a corrupt, alcoholic District Attorney who tried to abuse her office to get out of a drunk driving rap. The entire episode is a vivid reminder of why Rick Perry has been one of this nation’s most admirable leaders over the course of his career, and a man who deserved better in his runs at national office.

A lower appeals court had thrown out half of the indictment, but the Court of Criminal Appeals opinion disposes of the whole abusive case, and is worth reading if you’re into the kinds of separation of powers issues that Justice Scalia championed for years on the U.S. Supreme Court, and which the Texas courts take more seriously as a result of explicit language in the Texas Constitution:

The powers of the Government of the State of Texas shall be divided into three distinct departments, each of which shall be confided to a separate body of magistracy, to wit: Those which are Legislative to one; those which are Executive to another, and those which are Judicial to another; and no person, or collection of persons, being of one of these departments, shall exercise any power properly attached to either of the others, except in the instances herein expressly permitted.

The court began by ruling that it would make an exception to its normal rules regarding “as applied” pretrial constitutional challenges to an indictment (i.e., arguments that the statute was unconsititutional only as it applies to this situation, not as to every possible set of facts) because of the importance of separation of powers to good government:

If a statute violates separation of powers by unconstitutionally infringing on a public official’s own power, then the mere prosecution of the public official is an undue infringement on his power. And given the disruptive effects of a criminal prosecution, pretrial resolution of this type of separation of powers claim is necessary to ensure that public officials can effectively perform their duties.

Turning to Count I of the indictment’s charge that Perry misused public money by vetoing the budget of the DA’s Public Integrity Unit in order to require it to show some public integrity of its own, the court emphasized that the public purposes to which a veto is put cannot be criminalized without destroying the veto power:

The Legislature cannot directly or indirectly limit the governor’s veto power. No law passed by the Legislature can constitutionally make the mere act of vetoing legislation a crime…the governor cannot by agreement, on his own or through legislation, limit his veto power in any manner that is not provided in the Texas Constitution…When the only act that is being prosecuted is a veto, then the prosecution itself violates separation of powers…A governor could be prosecuted for bribery if he accepted money, or agreed to accept money, in exchange for a promise to veto certain legislation, and a governor might be subject to prosecution for some other offense that involves a veto. But the illegal conduct is not the veto; it is the agreement to take money in exchange for the promise.

Count II charged Perry with “coercion of a public servant” for threatening the veto before he issued it, in order to pressure the DA to step down, as she should have. The lower appeals court had concluded that this statute applied in this manner would be massively overbroad in criminalizing completely legitimate politics:

The court of appeals recited a number of hypothetical situations offered by Governor Perry to illustrate the improper reach of the statute:

• A manager could not threaten to fire or demote a government employee for poor performance.
• A judge could not threaten to sanction an attorney for the State, to declare a mistrial if jurors did not avoid misconduct, or to deny warrants that failed to contain certain information.
• An inspector general could not threaten to investigate an agency’s financial dealings.
• A prosecutor could not threaten to bring charges against another public servant.
• A public university administrator could not threaten to withdraw funding from a professor’s research program.
• A public defender could not threaten to file a motion for suppression of evidence to secure a better plea bargain for his client.

The court agreed that the statute would indeed criminalize these acts. The court also offered its own hypotheticals: that the statute would appear to criminalize a justice’s threat to write a dissenting opinion unless another justice’s draft majority opinion were changed, and the court’s clerk’s threat, when a brief is late, to dismiss a government entity’s appeal unless it corrects the deficiency.

A cynic would note that these examples cut rather too close to home for the judges.

The Court of Criminal Appeals agreed that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution would be violated by the prosecutor’s broad view of what could be criminalized in a public official’s veto threats. The court noted that more specific situations of real misconduct like bribery were already covered by other statutes, and added its own list of real-world political give-and-take (which it linked to news reports of ordinary Texas politics) that would become crimes:

Th[e statute covers officials who] include[] the Governor, Attorney General, Comptroller, Secretary of State, Land Commissioner, tax-assessor collectors, and trial judges. Many threats that these public servants make as part of the normal functioning of government are criminalized:

• a threat by the governor to veto a bill unless it is amended,
• a threat by the governor to veto a bill unless a different bill he favors is also passed,
• a threat by the governor to use his veto power to wield “the budget hammer” over a state agency to force necessary improvements,
• a threat by the comptroller to refuse to certify the budget unless a budget shortfall is eliminated,
• a threat by the attorney general to file a lawsuit if a government official or entity proceeds with an undesired action or policy,
• a threat by a public defender to file, proceed with, or appeal a ruling on a motion to suppress unless a favorable plea agreement is reached,
• A threat by a trial judge to quash an indictment unless it is amended.

Of these, the only example involving anything unusual is the one in which the comptroller actually followed through with her threat not to certify the budget. At least some of these examples, involving the governor and the attorney general, involve logrolling, part of “the ‘usual course of business’ in politics.”

Another indication of the pervasive application that the statute has to protected expression is that the last example we listed above occurred in this very case. Concluding that quashing Count II would be premature, the trial court ordered the State to amend Count II of Governor Perry’s indictment. But a trial court has no authority to order the State to amend an indictment; the State has the right to stand on its indictment and appeal any dismissal that might result from refusing to amend. The trial court’s order that the State amend the indictment was, in practical terms, a threat to quash Count II if it were not amended. And the trial court’s exact words are of no moment because the statute refers to a threat “however communicated.”

The regular and frequent violation of the statute by conduct that is protected by the First Amendment suggests that the statute is substantially overbroad.

In theory, because the dismissal of Count II was on federal Constitutional grounds, the prosecutor could appeal that ruling to the 8-member U.S. Supreme Court, but it appears that this is the end of the line. Rick Perry stood his ground for honest government and was branded a criminal for doing so, long enough to help hobble his 2016 Presidential campaign. Everyone involved in that effort should be ashamed of themselves. But tonight, Governor Perry can hold his head high, as he has been completely vindicated.

‘Amnesty’ Is A Majority Position With Republican Primary Voters

RS: ‘Amnesty’ Is A Majority Position With Republican Primary Voters

Sometimes it is useful to get out of the echo chamber of arguments on the internet among partisans and look at the data. And the data we have from the primary exit polling so far is telling us that, among voters in the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries (both won by Donald Trump), some form of ‘amnesty’ for illegal aliens is a majority position.

Binary Choice

One reason why the word “amnesty” is such an unhelpful one in the immigration debate is that different people use it to mean different things – some have said “amnesty” means only that people who broke the law get to stay here with little or no meaningful penalty (this has tended to be the way Marco Rubio uses it, to contrast to requiring various payments and other consequences), while others take the harder meaning: that it’s “amnesty” to ever allow people to stay here legally if they entered illegally, at least unless they first go back to their country of origin and re-apply from scratch through the regular legal process. Still others view it as “amnesty” only if people are able to get citizenship.

Moreover, opinions on these issues tend to vary a lot by wording, by the options offered, and to some extent as well by when the poll is taken: the more people feel like government is doing nothing to enforce the border or to impose real conditions on some sort of path to legalization, the more likely they are to say “deport ’em all.” And people are more sympathetic to “enforce the law, let them self-deport” than to rounding people up en masse. Etc.

All that said, if you offer people a straight-up referendum on whether illegal immigrants should be given any chance to stay or not, without specifying the conditions, the media and a lot of the tenor of conversation around conservative talk radio, Twitter and the internet would have you believe that “any amnesty of any kind, ever” is a very unpopular position in the GOP and perhaps with the public at large. The fact that Trump has won two of the first three primaries, and that Trump plus Cruz (who agree on few other things besides hard-line rhetoric on immigration, their more nuanced prior records aside) equals a majority in each of the first three states, would seem to support that.

But as I noted this morning, it’s not so. And it’s worth teasing that out here in a post of its own to focus on that.

Here’s how the question was reported in New Hampshire – I don’t have the specific wording:

Feelings on undocumented immigrants
Offered a chance to apply for legal status (56% of voters)
Deported to the country they came from (41%)

Trump won 50-19-8 over Cruz-Rubio with the “deport ’em all” voters, tied Kasich 23-23 with Rubio at 14, Jeb at 13, Christie 9 and Cruz 7 with the rest.

In South Carolina:
Most illegal immigrants working in U.S. should be
Offered a chance to apply for legal status 53% of voters
Deported 44% of voters

Again, Trump dominated the “deport ’em all” voters 47-24-15 over Cruz-Rubio, while Rubio won 31-22-18 over Trump-Cruz with the majority who took the opposite view.

Priorities

We don’t have polling on this question from the Iowa Caucus entrance poll, except that given three other choices (Economy/Jobs, Government Spending, and Terrorism), 13% of voters said immigration was the #1 issue, and those broke Trump 44, Cruz 34, Rubio 10. In New Hampshire, the same questions were asked and 15% picked immigration; they broke Trump 52/Cruz 21/Rubio 8. Same in South Carolina: 10% picked immigration and they went Trump 52/Cruz 25/Rubio 11.

Conclusion

Support in the mid-40s for deporting all illegal immigrants is actually pretty high, even in a GOP primary, and unsurprisingly correlates closely with Trump support. And the support for a specific legalization proposal might well drop a lot lower, especially if the conditions are too weak and if mass deportation does not seem like the only alternative on offer. So none of this should suggest it is safe or easy for Republican politicians to ignore a substantial minority of Republican voters entirely.

But it would be hard to find better conditions for polling a majority in favor of “no amnesty of any kind, ever” than on the very day when the people being polled are voting in a partisan primary won by Donald Trump. Yet even then, you can’t do it. It is therefore vital for anyone trying to talk sensibly and realistically about the politics of immigration to realize that a rejection of a path to legalization on principle is a minority position even among the small, focused universe of voters in Republican presidential primaries.

A Nutty Plan To Confirm An Obama Nominee To Replace Scalia – After The Election

RS: A Nutty Plan To Confirm An Obama Nominee To Replace Scalia – After The Election

Barack Obama’s nominee to replace Justice Scalia on the Supreme Court cannot be confirmed by the U.S. Senate without the co-operation of Republicans, because there are 54 Republicans in the Senate. That’s enough to block Democrats from getting (1) the 50 votes needed to confirm (the tiebreaking 51st would be Vice President Biden), (2) the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster, or (3) the 50 votes needed (plus Biden) to change the Senate rules to eliminate the filibuster. Of course, if Hillary Clinton wins the presidential election, the nomination could be sent back and the GOP would likely have to confirm someone acceptable to her. But otherwise, while they can use Senate procedure to make it painful for Republicans to hold the line, it looks like the Democrats would have no recourse if Republicans win in November, thus setting up the presidential election as the closest thing we have had in memory to a direct referendum on the Supreme Court.

Judging by this NBC News report by Ari Melber, some Democrats are now floating a novel idea: that if they lose the presidential election but recapture the Senate, they could vote down the filibuster rule and ram through a nominee in the 17-day interregnum between when the new Senate is seated January 3 and when the new President is inaugurated (and the nomination rescinded) on January 20.

Let’s unpack the problems with this scenario.

Problem 1: Coattails It’s really hard to win back the Senate without also winning the presidential race. Yes, there have been years like 2000, when Democrats gained four Senate seats while losing nationally. But 2000 was really unusual (Gore, as you’ll recall, won the national popular vote). Let’s look at the six states where Democrats picked up seats in 2000, measured by the Democrats’ two-party presidential vote in those states in 1996 and 2000 (five of these six had Republican incumbents; Florida was an open seat):

Delaware: 58.6% in 1996, 56.7% in 2000
Washington: 57.2% in 1996, 52.9% in 2000
Michigan: 57.3% in 1996, 52.6% in 2000
Minnesota: 59.4% in 1996, 51.3% in 2000
Florida: 53.2% in 1996, 50.0% in 2000
Missouri: 53.6% in 1996, 48.3% in 2000

And then there’s the two states where Republicans had Senate pickups, again by the Democrats’ share of the two-party vote:

Nevada 50.6% in 1996, 48.1% in 2000
Virginia 48.9% in 1996, 45.9% in 2000

In other worse, aside from Florida (which was famously 50/50 that year), Democrats picked up a Senate seat in only one state Gore lost, and their pickups included two states where Clinton had carried 52-54% of the two-party vote four years earlier, and four where he carried 57-60%. This was a very bad map for Republicans.

Now let’s look at the 2016 Senate races, and you will see that while the GOP has a lot of headaches to defend, it will be hard for Democrats to match 2000 without winning the national election. Here’s the GOP Senate seats up this year in states where the Democrats won at least 44% of the two-party presdential vote in 2012:

Illinois (Kirk) 58.6%
Wisconsin (Johnson) 53.5%
Iowa (Grassley) 53.0%
New Hampshire (Ayotte) 52.8%
Pennsylvania (Toomey) 52.7%
Ohio (Portman) 51.5%
Florida (open – Rubio) 50.4%
North Carolina (Burr) 49.0%
Georgia (Isakson) 46.0%
Arizona (McCain) 45.4%
Missouri (Blunt) 45.2%
Indiana (open – Coats) 44.8%
South Carolina (Scott) 44.7%

Two Democratic seats are also up in states where the GOP was competitive but unsuccessful in 2012:

Nevada (open- Reid) 53.4%
Colorado (Bennet) 52.8%

That’s a map with a lot of opportunities for Democrats and peril for Republicans, but unlike 2000, there’s only one Republican (Kirk) rather than four running in deep-blue territory the presidential race is likely to ignore or bypass. It would be highly unusual for Democrats to sweep this many Senate races in key presidential battleground states while the top of their ticket is losing those states.

Problem 2: Five Votes Are Harder Than Four On top of the difficulty of capturing the four (net) Senate seats needed to retake the Senate is the difficulty of gaining the fifth Senate seat necessary to keep the Senate after January 20, when Biden would be replaced by a Republican Vice President who would cast tie-breaking votes. Put yourself in the shoes of Chuck Schumer, the likely new Democratic Leader after Harry Reid retires. You just regained a Senate majority. You have the chance to seize something of enormous value, yes: a lifetime Supreme Court appointment. To do so, you have to pass a filibuster rule change that strips the Senate minority of long-cherished rights and drastically reduces their power. But you also know that the result is to completely and irrevocably poison the well with Senate Republicans and the incoming Administration.

If you picked up five seats, this may seem like a worthwhile tradeoff and one that will allow you to rule the Senate with an iron fist and negotiate with the new Republican President and Speaker Ryan from a position of strength. But if you only gained four seats, your majority will only last three weeks, and you will have destroyed powers your own caucus will badly want to use to stop a united GOP with the White House and both Houses of Congress for the remaining two years. Heck, you might even get them so angry they decide to pass a Court-packing plan to add two new Justices, and you just disabled yourself from stopping it as well as denuding yourself of any possible arguments for doing so.

Problem 3: What About Red State Democrats? Finally, let’s recall that no matter the margin we’re discussing here, it would require a lockstep unified Democratic caucus. Schumer or whoever else replaces Reid may well have that on many issues, but a dramatic burning of bridges with socially conservative voters may not be one of them. There are five Democratic Senators who still represent states that even Mitt Romney carried in 2012: Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota, Jon Tester in Montana, Joe Donnelly in Indiana, Joe Manchin in West Virginia, and Claire McCaskill in Missouri. All five are up for re-election in 2018, as are Democratic Senators in Florida, Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin who rode the wave of Obama-driven turnout in 2012. And if any of those Senators did defect from the plan, they would face certain doom in a primary. No incoming Senate Majority Leader – who after all needs their votes to get the job on January 3 in the first place – would want to put so much of his caucus in that much peril right from the outset if he can avoid it.

Democrats may well win this fight, if they can recapture the White House. But unless they do so, the plan for a January Surprise is a spectacularly impractical one.

[Standard disclaimer: the above analysis assumes that the Republican Party continues to exist after mid-June. If Donald Trump were to capture enough delegates win the Presidential nomination, it would effectively dissolve the party, and any attempt to analyze the dynamics on Capitol Hill in terms of the existing two-party system would have to be recalibrated from scratch]

Are “Electable” Candidates Actually Electable? Part II: Swing State Electability

RS: Are “Electable” Candidates Actually Electable? Part II: Swing State Electability
From left, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz, Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., and others participate in a news conference on Capitol Hill, Tuesday, May 5, 2015, to discuss support of keeping the A-10 military aircraft.  (AP Photo/Brett Carlsen)
Is “electability” a meaningless term? It is certainly an overused one, and overused words tend to lose their meaning even when they have something to tell us. In Part I, I looked at “electability” candidates in past Republican presidential primaries. But if we look at recent presidential, Senate and Governor’s races, we can get a better fix on what kinds of candidates win and lose in the 17 states that represent the outer limits of “swing states.” A lot of things matter in contested elections, notably the national political environment. But like it or not, good candidates is one of the things that matter. They may be conservatives or they may be moderates, and in a few cases in blue states they may even be liberal Republicans, but the answer for conservatives is not to ignore electability entirely but to develop and support conservative candidates who are winners.
One way we can do that is by running candidates with proven experience, as they tend to be less likely to make the mistakes that kill inexperienced candidates. As I noted in Part I, it is mostly a myth that the GOP has repeatedly nominated moderate losers in presidential contests because voters somehow got talked into thinking their opponents were too conservative; it has more typically been the case that we have nominated moderates because conservative opposition was divided or marginalized in the absence of a good conservative alternative, and our contested races have often been between two relatively moderate Republicans. That’s what’s so unusual about 2016, in which the voting begins with two viable and talented conservatives in the race (Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio) and real questions about the viability of any of the moderate (Christie, Kasich) and/or establishment (Jeb) candidates.
To complete the picture of electability, let’s look at the statewide races going back a decade, to 2006, the start of the current post-Bush-coalition political era, ranking statewide winners and losers by their percentage of the vote.

Continue reading Are “Electable” Candidates Actually Electable? Part II: Swing State Electability

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