Judge Garland Visits the Senate

Mitch McConnell moved quickly to suspend the Constitution moments after Justice Scalia died. Republican strategists are much better than Democrats at framing issues for public discussion as well as the terms of engagement. The Republican strategists devise the tactics they will employ and then come up with arguments in their favor. Somehow the normal functioning of our federal government -the President nominates a Supreme Court Justice who is considered for confirmation by the Senate - becomes debatable.

We see the tactical advantages of McConnell's first move strategy playing out now in moderate GOP Senators granting interview meetings to the President's nominee. Think of how extraordinary this is. These meetings accomplish absolutely nothing, but the optics of being willing to meet affords Senators Ayotte, Kirk, and the few others whose terms in office may be threatened the appearance of being "bipartisan". If, on the other hand, the Senate had considered the Garland nomination in the usual manner, these so-called moderates would have necessarily joined the majority in approving the nomination. We have come to accept obstruction in the Congress as something that somehow just happens due to a few stubborn leaders rather than as a key element of an ongoing strategy that succeeds because the moderates with the power to oppose that strategy are unwilling to stand up to their leader as a voting bloc. Due to the 60 votes required to break a filibuster, the half dozen moderate Senators would need to break with their own party control of Congress, which is just not going to happen.

Down the Road

In response to Douthat's Trumpism after Trump:
The best case scenario to end Republican obstructionism in the Congress is a split in the Republican party between those willing to compromise and those not.The most stable outcome for the country that could emerge following a Republican party split into two parties would be a Democratic party split of the current Sanders supporters following four years of the Hillary Clinton administration. Without a counterbalance of a leftist 4th party, we will continue to experience the debilitating instability of the various Republican party coalitions jockeying for position. Those coalitions will continue to seek to exert more power by morphing into two separate groups such as Tea Party/Establishment, but third parties are doomed to failure in our system without a counterbalancing effect of a fourth party on the other side. If this 4-party system does not evolve, we will continue to experience a stalemated Congress, and possibly a Democratic President stymied by a do-nothing Congress. We could have an 8 member Supreme Court or even a 7 member Supreme Court down the road with appointees blocked indefinitely, along with substantially Republican control of governorships and state legislatures for years to come.

Trump's Secret Weakness

Donald Trump has one weakness that threatens the success of his candidacy. If he has no one on the stage with him to attack he runs out of things to say and quickly becomes an incredibly boring speaker. This was evident the night he skipped the Republican debate televised by Fox News just before the Iowa caucuses. He held his own rally and the monologue was painful.  Jeb Bush proved to be the perfect foil for him throughout the span of televised debates, but when Jeb! dropped out of the race, the Donald was stretching for things to say in his speeches. How many times in one appearance can you say you are going to build a wall? And oh what a wall it"s going to be. When you have only simple answers for complex problems, there is not a lot to say. So, in a way, the spotlight on the potential for violence at the Trump rallies deflects attention from just how boring they are and that maybe, just maybe, he does not have many ideas about just what he would do as president.

What is Trump

Having core beliefs is detrimental to a winning strategy in Republican presidential politics. That helps make Trump the strongest candidate - willing to say anything, to employ any tactics to win. He has all the necessary qualities - truly an outsider, with a simple solution to every problem. His experience with elimination politics as the judge on The Apprentice taught him everything he needs to know to win the nomination. Donald is the ultimate Celebrity Apprentice, preparing to be a celebrity apprentice president.
The success of  a Trump could not happen in the Democratic party where debates focus on issues, not personalities. Trump's popularity among the Republican base combined with his ambiguous political leanings exposes the reality that the Republican Party is now defined primarily as a loose coalition that is the Notthedemocrat Party.  If the existing alignment of the coalitions that make up the two party system was heading toward collapse, it would look like it does now. The one-upsmanship of the standoff in the Senate on the Scalia succession and failure to hold hearings on the President's budget proposal mean that all three branches are now in crisis over political party differences, which will only worsen.  Our current situation resembles the Civil War era fragmentation and realignment of the parties more than it looks like any other time in history. A party realignment is necessary for a functioning government to be restored, but the transition may be painful. We could see 3 parties or even 4 parties forming before we get back to an equilibrium of two major parties.

Clinton Speaking Fees

 NYT Editorial Demands Mrs. Clinton Show Voters Those Transcripts
Thoughts on the NYT editorial:
 Industry meetings invite outside speakers all the time and pay what the market will bear. For the outside speaker, these are more like performances, not meetings. The Clintons are the super rock stars of our age who can command high speaking fees based on who they are and how well they can engage a live audience, far better than almost any other public figures. Hillary Clinton was presumably paid the high market value of her appearances whlie a private citizen. Sad to say, this is yet another fishing expedition. Why would there be transcripts of performances? And if there are no transcripts, is that the next manufactured scandal?

Who's on First?

Who is on first? The next step in the escalating tit-for-tat on judicial nominations will occur in 2017 when the Senate Majority leader will announce his pick for Supreme Court justice after conferring on possible candidates with his caucus. The Senate Judiciary Committee will hold hearings on the candidate. Each Republican on the committee will ask friendly questions and each Democrat at the hearing will complain vociferously about the process that excluded the President. Once approved by the Senate Majority leader, the name will be forwarded to the President for him to nominate and the Senate to rubber stamp. The Senate majority leader will inform the President that the Senate will not consider any other names that she puts forward.

Restructuring the Political Parties or the Constitution - Which Will it Be?

Interesting read on structural tensions within the parties by Thomas Edsall in NYT Opinion today. Our constitutional system is being stretched beyond its limits. The most basic built in checks and balances (Senate approval of President's nominees to an independent judiciary, Senate filibuster, and passage of a law requiring both House and Senate and Presidential signature with veto that can be sustained or overridden) no longer work. The problem is with the party system and that is where the solution lies. We could never have an effective Constitutional Convention rewriting the rules of our democracy because the structure and functioning of such convention would be stymied for the same reasons Congress no longer works. The system has long relied on two parties working within established norms of behavior, as party leaders tack toward the fringes of their own parties. Up until recent weeks, we were still hearing President Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Democratic leaders saying how much we all need to work together. With the Scalia succession battle, we may not hear that again. The looming breakdown of our system of governance at the federal level, barring tweaks to the rules in Congress on the filibuster or the Constitutional framework on nomination of justices, begs for a union of the moderates into a centrist coalition. That coalition could function more as a majoritarian party, allied with the left on some issues and the right on others. This would be the only way that the U.S. majority rule system could work like the muli-party parliamentary systems of Europe.

The barrier to this new system is that it could be preempted by the long term strategy of the Republican Party establishment to succeed on its agenda at the state level, one state at a time. This strategy contemplates ruling as a minority, but with the power of a majority, which depends on wielding power within the states to suppress voter turnout of Democrats, maximize the advantages of gerrymandering, and win legal challenges from Democrats before a Supreme Court dominated by Republicans. See Edsall piece from last month: The Republican Party's 50-State Solution.

Unless the Republican strategy is successful, the path to a new majoritarian centrist party system lies in a Presidential candidate who can win as an independent possessing the right combination of personal attributes and experience with substantial financial backing. We have never seen a third party Presidential candidate with sufficient appeal to win an election from the center in the electoral college system. The victory of that candidate will only come when voters are angry enough, which could happen in 2020 if the logjam continues in 2017 - 2020 with a Democratic President and Republican Congress. We can thank Donald Trump for showing us this scenario for 2020 is possible , but not with him as the candidate.  Unless something changes, we could see an even angrier electorate and more severe fracturing of our politics.