Less than half of Americans approve of the job the U.S. Supreme Court is doing, according to a new Gallup poll conducted July 7-10, reports Rebeca Rifkin of Gallup Politics:

Americans remain divided in their assessments of the U.S. Supreme Court, with 47% approving of the job it is doing, and 46% disapproving. These ratings are consistent with approval last September, when 46% approved and 45% disapproved, and rank among the lowest approval ratings for the court in Gallup’s 14-year trend.
Since Gallup began asking the question in 2000, Americans have typically been more likely to approve than to disapprove of the job the Supreme Court is doing. However, the margin between the two has been narrowing since its recent high point in 2009, and Americans were divided over the court in 2012 and again in 2013. Separate polling found that confidence in the Supreme Court also fell to record lows this year, as Americans’ confidence in all three branches of government is down.

It’s a partisan thing, as Rifkin notes. Numbers rise and fall in response to recent decisions, with Republican approval of the court spiking up in response to the Bush v. Gore, Hobby Lobby and abortion/contraception clinics buffer zone decisions, and Democratic approval tanking. The Democratic respondents high (68 percent) was reached after the decision upholding Obamacare. Rifkin did not note the numbers after the Citizens United decision.
While nearly 2/3 of the Supreme Court’s decisions this term have been unanimous, the high profile cases like Hobby Lobby tend to polarize public opinion. Regardless of how the public feels about the court, however, it’s not likely to become a pivotal issue for voters in the foreseeable future.
It would be interesting for Gallup or other pollsters to ask respondents how they feel about increasing the size of the court to 11, in order to make room for genuinely moderate justices.
It doesn’t require a constitutional amendment to increase the size of the Supreme Court. Article III authorizes the Congress to determine the number of justices. The U.S. started out with six justices, as a result of the Judiciary Act of 1789, grew to 7 in 1807, then 9 in 1837 and 10 in 1863. In 1866, however, the Judicial Circuits Act of 1866 provided that the next three justices to retire would not be replaced, reducing the size of the Court to 7 by attrition. The Court shrank by two seats until the Judiciary Act of 1869 set the number of justices again at nine, where it has remained unchanged.
FDR got into big trouble trying to “pack” the Supreme court, proposing to appoint a new justice for each incumbent Supreme Court justice who reached the age of 70 years 6 months and refused to retire — appointments which would continue until the court reached 15 justices. The political fallout was disastrous for Roosevelt.
The public may, indeed be somewhat wary about increasing the size of the court, which the Republicans would likely flog as “big government” liberalism. But FDR’s mistake may have been overreach — the maximum size of 15 he requested. A 2012 CBS/New York Times poll indicated that 60 percent of the public thought lifetime appointments for the Supreme Court justices is a “bad thing.,” with just 33 percent saying it was a good thing. Another indication that the public favors some reform of the high court is reflected in polls showing strong support for televising the proceedings.
Adding two justices might be more acceptable to the public, despite the certainty of an all-out GOP propaganda campaign against it. Nonetheless, it’s a needed discussion which might resonate in the current political climate — and one which Democrats should certainly lead the next time we get a landslide.

Melissa R. Michelson’s “How to increase voter turnout in communities where people have not usually participated in elections: Research brief” from the Scholars Strategy Network, (via Journalist’s Resource) offers some insightful observations, including: “Voter turnout among members of different groups of Americans varies widely, with Latinos and Asians generally lagging behind other groups. Blacks usually fall in between, with turnout usually ahead of other minorities but behind whites…Nonpartisan experiments have not shown that messages designed to appeal to ethnic or racial solidarities are any more effective than general appeals to “civic duty” or other broad concerns…For example, experiments conducted in cooperation with community organizations using “Green Jobs” or other non-racial issue-based appeals have successfully mobilized African American voters, while another experiment that stressed racial solidarity produced negligible increases in turnout.” Michaelson is co-author, with Lisa García Bedolla, of “Mobilizing Inclusion: Transforming the Electorate through Get-Out-the-Vote Campaigns,” which analyses “268 get-out-the-vote experiments conducted repeatedly across six electoral cycles from 2006 to 2008.” The book won the American Political Science Best Book Award for 2013.
Janet Hook’s “2014 Voter Turnout: GOP Has Advantage, But It’s Not 2010” in The Wall St. Journal notes “The Rhodes Cook Letter, a nonpartisan political report, has analyzed turnout in 25 states that had held primaries by the end of June and found that 9.66 million Republicans and 8.28 million Democrats had voted-a 1.38 million edge for the GOP…The Cook analysis found that 2014 turnout so far has fallen short of the tidal wave of interest in the 2010 midterms. So far, 17.6 million have voted in major party primaries this year, compared with 21.1 million at this point in 2010…That is a 16% drop, which Mr. Cook says could be “the voters’ way of saying to both the Democrats and Republicans, a pox on both your houses.”
Republicans have to defend 22 of the 36 governorships that are up for election this year. Normallty this would translate into a huge advantage for Dems. But the improving economy is helping many Republican governors, report Jonathan Martin and Nicholas Confessore in their New York Times article “G.O.P. Replays 2010 Strategy at State Level.” Worse, Democratic Governors Association Chairman Gov. Peter Shumlin of Vermont said his group expects to be outspent 2-1 buy the RGA, a discrepancy which you can help reduce right here.
Gov. Christie isn’t out of trouble yet, but he has managed his scandal effectively and continued to wield influence in his party, despite revelations that should be career-enders. CNN Politics’ Julian Zelizer explains how he has survived thus far.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren “is quickly becoming a top Democratic fundraiser and campaign powerhouse, hitting the road on behalf of candidates in key races the party will need to win to retain control of the U.S. Senate in November,” reports AP’s Steve LeBlanc.
Also at the Times, Jonathan Weisman reveals how Senate Republicans kill popular legislation, simply because it is being sponsored by Democrats they want to defeat in 2014. To cite just one example, 26 Republicans supported a successful filibuster of a widely-popular sportsman’s bill because it was being sponsored by Democratic Senator Kay Hagan. Dems hope the GOP blockade participants will be seen as obstructionists, while Republicans hope Sen. Hagan will be seen as ineffective.
AP’s Thomas Beaumont reports that the “Democrats Scour Records for Provocative Comments” in hopes of turning up game-changing gaffe’s.
But, at the National Journal, Emma Roller does a good job of putting into perspective “What Really Matters in Midterm Elections? Hint: it’s not gaffes.”

Every time polls show high “wrong track” and low congressional approval numbers (particularly in a time of divided control of Congress), you’ll find someone predicting a bipartisan anti-incumbent wave that will sweep out the old and sweep in the new regardless of party. Something vaguely like that sometimes occurs to House incumbents in a redistricting year (though it didn’t much happen in 2012), but not so much any other time. And so far 2014 is no exception, as I pointed out today at Washington Monthly:

I suppose it could happen in November (though a bipartisan anti-incumbent wave is the Loch Ness Monster of electoral phenomena). But as Kyle Kondik of Sabato’s Crystal Ball points out, the primary season so far is making this a banner year for incumbent survival:

So far this cycle, 273 of 275 House incumbents who wanted another term have been renominated, and 18 of 18 Senate incumbents. That includes results from the 31 states that have held their initial primaries; while a few of those states — Alabama, Georgia, and North Carolina — have runoffs coming up later this month, those overtime elections for House or Senate seats are all in open seats.
This is a better performance than the postwar averages in both chambers. Since the end of World War II, just 1.6% of House incumbents who have sought another term were not renominated by their party, and just 4.6% of Senate incumbents.

To put it another way, Eric Cantor’s loss in Virginia constitutes exactly one-half of the incumbent primary losses in either party this cycle (so far). That’s all the more reason it was so noteworthy.

And so hard to explain. Don’t expect a recurrence any time soon.

From Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich’s Salon.com post, “Walgreens shouldn’t have a say about how the U.S. government does anything: The former secretary of labor weighs in on corporate America’s newest bid to reduce its tax bills“:

Dozens of big U.S. corporations are considering leaving the United States in order to reduce their tax bills…But they’ll be leaving the country only on paper. They’ll still do as much business in the U.S. as they were doing before.
The only difference is they’ll no longer be “American,” and won’t have to pay U.S. taxes on the profits they make.
Okay. But if they’re no longer American citizens, they should no longer be able to spend a penny influencing American politics.

Reich demolishes the corporate whine that they have to split the U.S. because, y’know, taxes:

It’s true that the official corporate tax rate of 39.1 percent, including state and local taxes, is the highest among members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development…But the effective rate – what corporations actually pay after all deductions, tax credits, and other maneuvers – is far lower.
Last year, the Government Accountability Office, examined corporate tax returns in detail and found that in 2010, profitable corporations headquartered in the United States paid an effective federal tax rate of 13 percent on their worldwide income, 17 percent including state and local taxes. Some pay no taxes at all.

He continues, “One tax dodge often used by multi-national companies is to squirrel their earnings abroad in foreign subsidiaries located in countries where taxes are lower. The subsidiary merely charges the U.S. parent inflated costs, and gets repaid in extra-fat profits. Further says Reich, “Becoming a foreign company is the extreme form of this dodge. It’s a bigger accounting gimmick. The American company merges with a foreign competitor headquartered in another nation where taxes are lower, and reincorporates there.”
Clearly, this is an issue Dems could make some serious gains with, especially because their Republican opponents will do everything they can to kill any reforms to end this privilege that robs the U.S. treasury and increases taxes on working people. He cites the example of Walgreen’s:

Walgreens, the largest drugstore chain in the United States with more than 8,700 drugstores spread across the nation, is on the verge of moving its corporate headquarters to Switzerland as part of a merger with Alliance Boots, the European drugstore chain.
Founded in Chicago in 1901, with current headquarters in the nearby suburb of Deerfield, Walgreens is about as American as apple pie — or your Main Street druggist…Even if it becomes a Swiss corporation, Walgreen will remain your Main Street druggist. It just won’t pay nearly as much in U.S. taxes.
Which means the rest of us will have to make up the difference. Walgreens morph into a Swiss corporation will cost you and me and every other American taxpayer about $4 billion over five years, according to an analysis by Americans for Tax Fairness.
The tax dodge likewise means more money for Walgreens investors and top executives. Which is why its large investors – including Goldman Sachs — have been pushing for it.

Reich responds “Even if there’s no way to stop U.S. corporations from shedding their U.S. identities and becoming foreign corporations, there’s no reason they should retain the privileges of U.S. citizenship…In fact, Walgreens should no longer have any say about how the U.S. government does anything.”
Reich notes further, “Since the 2010 election cycle, Walgreens Political Action Committee has spent $991,030 on federal elections. If it becomes a Swiss corporation, it shouldn’t be able to spend a penny more.”
Amen. Democratic leaders should make this a leading issue and force Republicans to squirm as they try to justify this indefensible expat corporate privilege that screws American taxpayers. If there was ever an issue that could win the support of the white working class the pundits are always talking about, here it is, a big fat softball, begging to be belted out of the park.

Mason Adams has an interesting Politco post, “Do Democrats Need a Bubba Strategy? The party shouldn’t give up on NASCAR voters, says Dave “Mudcat” Saunders.” Adams calls Saunders the Democrats’ “bubba whisperer.”One of Saunders’ insights: “The greatest problem in America is the disintegration of the middle class,” Saunders says, and “unless you’re super-rich, you probably feel like you’re getting screwed. That feeling transcends geography…America’s become more concentrated. There are as many rednecks–or let me say it like this, rural-thinking people–on Route 1 in Alexandria as there are in all five coal-producing counties of Virginia.” Saunders argues that Democratic candidates “don’t have to be from the culture,” but they do have to respect it and show some appreciation for it…”It’s just too easy to say if you go out to the culture you’ll get them. Democrats have to understand the culture,” says Saunders. “They have to understand what people go through.”
Emily Deruy’s Fusion.net post “Will Confusion Over Voter ID Laws Hurt Youth Turnout?” sheds light on a cornerstone strategy of the NC GOP.
At Sabato’s Crystal Ball Alan I. Abramowitz analyses the Pew Research report on polarization in political opinion, and finds: “Both parties are less popular today than they were 30 or 40 years ago, but that’s almost entirely due to a decline in ratings of the opposing party by Democratic and Republican identifiers…ratings of the opposing party have declined substantially, falling from the upper-40s during the late 1970s and 1980s to the mid 20s in 2012…Between the late 1970s and 2012, the proportion of Democrats with a positive opinion of the Democratic Party and a negative opinion of the Republican Party increased from 32% to 71%, while the proportion of Republicans with a positive opinion of the Republican Party and a negative opinion of the Democratic Party increased from 39% to 65%.” All of which lends credence to the argument that turning out the base merits more party resources than persuasion.
The Latino coalition “‘Movimiento Hispano’ to Engage, Increase Latino and Millennial Voter Turnout for Midterm Elections,” reports Michael Oleaga at The Latin Post. Oleaga notes, “Movimiento Hispano’s goal is to get “historical numbers” of Latino turnout at voting locations. The campaign aims to register more than 52,000 Latino voters and mobilize over 100,000 Latino voters.”
Greg Sargent explores the ramifications of President Obama going big and loud with unilateral action to ease deportations.
Fans of political invective should not miss Charles Pierce’s latest Esquire post (via Reader Supported News). Pierce burns NYT columnist, “His Eminence Ross Cardinal Douthat” a new one, in response to Douthat’s “Pecksnifian dweebery” in warning gay people “that they ought not to celebrate their right to marry quite so … gaily” and “crowing just a bit over the Supreme Court’s decision in the Hobby Lobby.”
Dems should be more vocal as advocates for voting rights for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. It’s the right thing to do, and the number of people with such disabilities, plus their families, is not small.
Also at the Crystal Ball, Geoffrey Skelley takes a look at “2014 Races Where Third-Party and Independent Candidates Could Impact Outcomes,” and provides capsule descriptions of the situation in races for AK Senate; HI Governor; ME Governor; MT Senate; NC Senate and SC Governor. Regarding the marquee NC Senate race, Skelley notes, “Now the question is, could Libertarian Sean Haugh impact the outcome in the Tar Heel State? Early surveys seem to show him doing exactly that — Haugh is polling at around 9% in the polling averages and attracting national attention with some homemade YouTube videos. History has shown that non-major party candidates with large early support typically fade as November gets closer. However, it’s possible that Haugh winds up becoming a “none of the above” option for voters who are particularly dissatisfied with the major-party candidates, as aforementioned Libertarian Robert Sarvis did in the 2013 Virginia gubernatorial contest between now-Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) and former state Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli…But in a very tight race, Haugh’s take might be consequential.
One of the better headlines of the week.

Embedded in the furor over the MS GOP SEN runoff is an argument by conservatives about the legitimacy of pursuing African-American votes that could prove toxic the more it is articulated. I discussed it at some length today at TPMCafe:

[F]or the immediate future, we’re going to hear ever-more-shrill arguments from the right in Mississippi and elsewhere that by appealing to African-Americans on the positive grounds of potency in securing federal dollars, and the negative grounds that the challenger is a bit of a neo-Confederate, Cochran’s campaign replicated the Democratic “race card” appeals that conservatives so violently resent.
Since state Sen. McDaniel’s campaign cannot repudiate the very idea of outreach to African-Americans (particularly in a state where black folks make up well over a third of the population), it’s forced into an argument that outreach can only be pursued via the right kind of message to the right kind of African-Americans. McDaniel’s campaign manager, state Sen. Melanie Sojourner, exposed the perils of that argument in a Facebook post wherein she pledged never to endorse Cochran no matter what the party decides:

Throughout my campaign and since I’ve repeatedly made comments about how I felt the Republican Party was doing itself a disservice by not reaching out to conservative African-Americans. Where I’m from, in rural Mississippi, I grew up knowing lots a [sic] God-fearing, hard-working, independent conservative minded African-American family’s [sic]. On the McDaniel campaign we had two young men from just such family’s on our staff.

So it seems anything other than appealing to self-consciously conservative African-Americans is forbidden.
Aside from the implied suggestion that the vast majority of African-Americans are not God-fearing or hard-working, and may actually be selling their votes for government benefits (a charge at the rotten heart of the many extant GOP versions of Mitt Romney’s “47 percent video”), how likely is it that the kind of minority outreach deemed kosher by this and other conservative activists could actually succeed? Not very.
Despite the many rationalizations and revisionist takes we hear about the GOP and race during the 1960s, the truth is Republican support among African-Americans collapsed dramatically at the moment of the first conservative movement conquest of the GOP, in 1964, and has never recovered.
From the New Deal through 1960, the GOP share of the African-American vote in presidential elections averaged about 30 percent; it was 32 percent in 1960, in part because a lot of African-American clergy shared their white Protestants’ antipathy to the Catholic John F. Kennedy (who also, of course, was supported by many southern segregationists). But in 1964, even as Barry Goldwater was sweeping the white vote in much of the deep south after he voted against the Civil Rights Act, the GOP share of the black vote plunged to 6 percent. (That didn’t much matter in Mississippi, as it happens, since African-Americans outside a few cities were largely barred from voting; Goldwater took 87 percent of the vote in the Magnolia State).
African-American support for GOP presidential candidates has since peaked at 15 percent twice in years the party promoted a “centrist” image (1968 and 1976). The Great Communicator of the conservative message, Ronald Reagan, pulled 12 percent and 9 percent of the black vote in his two general elections. There was great excitement in 2004 when George W. Bush, deploying both “compassionate conservatism” and hostility to same-sex marriage, won 11 percent of the African-American vote. And now, as of 2012, the vote share is back down to 6 percent, right where it was in 1964.
The idea that becoming more conservative is going to lift the prospects of Republicans among African-Americans is a complete hallucination. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say, reflecting Sojourner’s comments, that conservatives want African-Americans to change before they are worthy of outreach.

So do Republicans really want to be a Big Tent party that’s not mainly limited to older white folks? Not, it seems, if that means they have to change.

Aaron Blake of The Fix has a post, “Who doesn’t care about politics? People who would otherwise vote for Democrats.” It’s about “the bystanders.” These are the 10 percent of Americans who aren’t registered to vote and don’t really follow political news.” Blake mines the data from a new Pew Research study and observes:

So why do these people matter? Because politics is as much about who doesn’t participate as who does.
American politics is dominated by the wealthy, the old and the educated — because they’re the ones playing the game. The “bystanders,” as you might imagine, are not wealthy, old or educated. They’re also disproportionately Hispanic.
Hispanics’ share of the “bystanders” (32 percent) is about 2½ times as large as their share of the entire population (13 percent), and young people’s share of the most apathetic group (38 percent) is nearly twice their share of the populace (22 percent).
These “bystanders,” as a whole, also tend to favor the Democratic Party and a liberal ideology — to the extent that they even care, of course.

Assuming the Latinos referenced in the study are eligible voters, Democrats have a challenge to meet in persuading more of them to get registered, since voter registration status remains the most reliable indicator of who is likely to vote. This won’t be done with gimmicks. It is apparently not enough that the GOP is all-out opposed to reforms that could help Latinos improve their lives. Like all demographic groups, they need to feel that they have a stake in the party they are being asked to support.
As for youth ‘bystanders,’ some more creative approaches to get young people registered and motivated are urgently needed, especially for midterm elections. This may be the most progressive generation ever, in terms of their attitudes. But that doesn’t mean much if they sit out elections. Dems may need to hold a summit to address this biennial problem that keeps festering on the party’s prospects for growth.

In his New York magazine column, “How Barack Obama Saved the Obama Administration,” Jonathan Chait takes on the meme Republicans (and some Dems) are parroting about President Obama being an ineffectual chief executive, particularly with respect to health care and environmental protection.Conceding that Obama probably could have pressed for a bolder stimulus, Chait argues that Obama’s grit, (along with his congressional majority early in his term) is pivotal reason why we have health care reform and progress on environmental protection.

The logic of Obama’s environmental regulations is fairly straightforward now. But it wasn’t straightforward before he announced them. Some extremely smart reporters and political analysts considered it doubtful (John Broder), or even vanishingly unlikely (Matthew Yglesias, Ryan Lizza) that Obama would actually regulate existing power-plants. If it was that obvious that Obama would use his regulatory authority this way, nobody would have believed otherwise. The decision obviously undertook some political risks that not any Democratic president would have unhesitatingly accepted.
On health care, the record of Obama’s personal influence is even stronger. It’s surely true that any Democratic president would have pursued health-care reform in 2009. But as the health-care bill dragged on, while it, Obama, and Democrats in Congress grew increasingly unpopular, many Democrats would have pulled the plug and tried to get out with a small, incremental bill. In late August of 2009, Jonathan Cohn later said in his deeply reported reconstruction of the bill’s passage that both Joe Biden and Rahm Emanuel wanted to pull the plug on comprehensive reform, but Obama overruled them.
The true moment of peril occurred in early 2010, when Scott Brown won a Massachusetts Senate race, depriving the Democrats of their ability to break a filibuster. At that point, probably most Democrats wanted to give up. As Cohn reported, “many administration officials assumed that health reform really was ‘Dead, DEAD DEAD,’ as one put it to me in an e-mail.” Emanuel again proposed abandoning comprehensive reform for a small, incremental measure. Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, operating on the widespread assumption that comprehensive reform could not be resuscitated, argued, “Obama’s greatest mistake was failing to listen to Emanuel on health care … The president disregarded that strategy and sided with Capitol Hill liberals who hoped to ram a larger, less popular bill through Congress with Democratic votes only. The result was, as the world now knows, disastrous.” Even liberals like Anthony Weiner and Barney Frank wanted to throw in the towel. Now, the logic of passage was always clear to those who paid close attention to the legislative dynamics, but not everybody did. If Obama had given up on health care, most analysts in Washington — and even many Democrats — would have deemed it a sensible, or even perfectly obvious, decision.

Chait concludes that “On most issues, Obama simply used his power the way any member of his party would have.” However, “On climate and health care, he bucked significant pockets of intra-party disagreement — not about policy goals themselves, which the whole Party shared, but of the prudence of accepting political risk to achieve them. Not coincidentally, suggests Chait, “these two episodes where Obama’s own intervention proved decisive happen to be the two largest pieces of his domestic legacy.”