There are 59 vacancies on America’s federal courts, “including 27 that have been classified as judicial emergencies because of the strain they are putting on caseloads,” according to Working Assets. Yet “Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Charles Grassley, known for his obstructionism when he was in the minority, is slow-walking current nominees through his committee. And Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is not scheduling votes for nominees who do finally make it through Grassley’s committee.” If you want to do something to help end the Republican roadblock, register your support here.
After the landmark Supreme Court decision protecting the ACA, Jacob Hacker ponders the Act’s future at The American Prospect .
Former Bush speechwriter David Frum gets in his ‘Mend it, don’t end it I-told-you-so’ licks at The Atlantic.
On the perils of having two big shot GOP candidates for President, a divisive Governor and increasingly complex demographics in one mega-state, Scott Bland notes at National Journal: “Frosty relationships and Byzantine turf wars are nothing new to politics in any state, especially when one party dominates, the way Republicans have in Florida. But with a presidential election 17 months away, many Republicans are worried that the party’s trouble with state leaders could do more than fray nerves–it could ultimately deny the GOP’s eventual nominee Florida’s 29 electoral votes.”
From “Republicans are in retreat” by David Russell at The Hill: “So the Republicans are all in a flurry to redefine, adjust or refocus their message, since the past week showed them to be out of step with both their normally conservative brethren on the Supreme Court and American public opinion. It wasn’t just a matter of Obamacare, gay marriage or public anxiety over corporate sponsored trade agreements; it was a confluence of a whole host of data points that made them look out of step and quite silly.Just to string together a few of the threads: The nine deaths in a Charleston, S.C., church bared their racial preferences with a nod toward removing the Confederate flag, but not an inch of give on gun legislation; A Republican-sponsored bill banning notification of the source of meat products as protection for consumers gets national laughs; Their ridicule for Pope Francis’s pronouncements on climate change is seen as offensive; The bombastic entry of Donald Trump into the presidential fray, joined by also-ran Govs. Chris Christie (R-N.J.) and Bobby Jindal (R-La.), does little more than highlight the comic element of the Republican presidential campaign; A bill sponsored by Comcast, tagged onto budget legislation to end net neutrality, is called out for the regressive step it is; And a notification that the rich donors have already exceeded their spending in the last election gives the public notice to just how much the party is in the pocket of wealthy sponsors.”
Of course Dems should applaud the SCOTUS decision upholding independent redistricting commissions as a victory for good government. But National Journal’s Jack Fitzpatrick explains why it will be a tough sell.
Jennifer Agiesta reports at CNN that “A new CNN/ORC poll finds that for the first time in more than two years, 50% of Americans approve of the way Obama is handling the presidency. And his overall ratings are bolstered by increasingly positive reviews of his treatment of race relations and the economy…Obama’s approval rating for handling the economy has also climbed, 52% approve in the new poll, compared with 46% who approved in the May survey. That’s the first time approval for Obama’s handling of the economy has topped 50% in CNN/ORC polling in nearly six years.”
“The Demolition of Workers’ Compensation” — a ‘sleeper issue’ almost guaranteed to make Republicans just about everywhere squirm and sweat, when asked what they would do about it.
Here’s a GOP ticket that could lock up the ‘low-information voter’ bloc.

The following article by George Lakoff, author of “Don’t Think of an Elephant,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Beginning with my book Moral Politics in 1996 (Ch. 12), I have been arguing that environmental issues are moral issues. There I reviewed and critiqued conservative metaphors of nature as a resource, as property, as an adversary to be conquered.
Instead I argued that we needed to conceptualize nature as the giver of all life, as sustainer and provider, as having inherent value, imposing responsibility, and deserving gratitude, love, adoration, and commitment.
I suggested alternative metaphors of nature as mother, as a divine being, as a living organism, as a home, as a victim to be cared for, and a whole with us as parts inseparable from nature and from each other.
This week, Pope Francis in his Encyclical used all of these and then went much further. First, he got all the science right — no small task. I have been writing for some time about role of systemic causation in global warming and the environment. The Pope not only got the ecological system effects right, but he went much, much further linking the environmental effects to effects on those most oppressed on earth by poverty, weather disasters, disease, ocean rise, lack of drinking water, the degradation of agriculture, and the of the essential aesthetic and spiritual contact with unspoiled nature. And more, he spoke of our moral responsibility toward animals.
He spoke in metaphors that might sound strange coming in a scientific or political speech, but somehow seem entirely natural for the Pope.
The title of the encyclical is “On Care for our Common Home.” This simple phrase establishes the most important frame right from the start. Using the metaphor of the “Earth as Home”, he triggers a frame in which all the people of the world are a family, living in a common home.
This frame carries with it many assumptions: As one family, we should care for each other and take responsibility for each other. A home is something we all depend on, physically and emotionally. A home is something inherently worth maintaining and protecting.
164. “…there has been a growing conviction that our planet is a homeland and that humanity is one people living in a common home.”
61. “…our common home is falling into seri­ous disrepair.”
13. “Humanity still has the ability to work together in building our common home.”
Pope Francis explicitly states what most progressives implicitly believe but rarely say out loud: “The climate is a common good, belonging to all and meant for all.” The “Common Good” frame is about interdependence, shared responsibility and shared benefit.
156. Human ecology is inseparable from the notion of the common good, a central and uni­fying principle of social ethics.
157. Society as a whole, and the state in particular, are obliged to defend and promote the common good.
Critics of Pope Francis have attacked him as having a naïve understanding of the economy, of being anti-technology, or of denying the so-called productive role of self-interest. But he is doing much more, suggesting that business and technology can, and ought to, have moral ends, especially in the face of the looming worldwide disaster of global warming. He is further pointing out, correctly, that the global warming disaster and hugely disastrous other effects were created by the business-technology axis seeking profit above all, without being structured to serve the common good.
129. Business is a noble vocation, directed to producing wealth and improving our world. It can be a fruitful source of prosperity for the areas in which it operates, especially if it sees the creation of jobs as an essential part of its service to the common good.
54. The alliance between the economy and technology ends up sidelining anything unrelated to its immediate interests.

Read more…

This week’s two landmark Supreme Court decisions represented the culmination (for the time being, at least) of two long, hard legal and political struggles. This is most obvious with respect to Obergefell v. Hodges, which made marriage a federally protected constitutional right. It sounds corny, but it really does seem like yesterday that here at TDS we were publishing Jasmine Beach-Ferrara’s analysis of how marriage equality activists lost the fight over Proposition 8 in California. It’s been a remarkably quick sprint to victory since then.
But unique as Obergefell is, there’s something to be said for the historic nature of the Obamacare case, too, as I discussed at Washington Monthly today:

[A]t Vox today, Dylan Matthews reminds us that of the incredibly long hard path this country has followed to reach even the Affordable Care Act’s first timorous steps towards universal health coverage. Those conservatives who talk as though no one has ever seriously considered such a socialist abomination until now really are betraying their ignorance about history:

National health insurance has been the single defining goal of American progressivism for more than a century. There have been other struggles, of course: for equality for women, African-Americans, and LGBT people; for environmental protection; against militarism in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. But ever since its inclusion in Teddy Roosevelt’s 1912 Bull Moose platform, a federally guaranteed right to health coverage has been the one economic and social policy demand that loomed over all others. It was the big gap between our welfare state and those of our peers in Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan.
And for more than a century, efforts to achieve national health insurance failed. Roosevelt’s third-party run came up short. His Progressive allies, despite support from the American Medical Association, failed to pass a bill in the 1910s. FDR declined to include health insurance in the Social Security Act, fearing it would sink the whole program, and the Wagner Act, his second attempt, ended in failure too. Harry Truman included a single-payer plan open to all Americans in his Fair Deal set of proposals, but it went nowhere. LBJ got Medicare and Medicaid done after JFK utterly failed, but both programs targeted limited groups.
Richard Nixon proposed a universal health-care plan remarkably similar to Obamacare that was killed when then-Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) walked away from a deal to pass it, in what Kennedy would later call his greatest regret as a senator. Jimmy Carter endorsed single-payer on the campaign trail, but despite having a Democratic supermajority in Congress did nothing to pass it. And the failure of Bill Clinton’s health-care plan is the stuff of legend.

Yes, Obamacare haters may dismiss the experience of virtually every other wealthy country by intoning “American exceptionalism”, as though we have some long-cherished right to die young that’s as essential to the national character as unlimited possession of guns. But this has been a constant issue in our own country, too, and it’s a token of how far our political system has drifted to the right that redeeming the vision of Teddy Roosevelt and Harry Truman and Richard Nixon strikes so many people as a horrifying lurch into socialism.

America actually feels a lot more “centered” today.

In her NYT column Linda Greenhouse nicely summarizes the 6-3 U.S. Supreme Court decision saving Obamacare from the shameless partisan hackwork of Scalia, Thomas and Alito. Referring to Chief Justice Roberts eloquent shredding of Justice Scalia’s tortured argument for the destruction of the Affordable Care Act, Greenhouse explained it well:

The chief justice’s masterful opinion showed that line of argument for the simplistic and agenda-driven construct that it was. Parsing the 1,000-plus-page statute in a succinct 21-page opinion, he deftly wove in quotations from recent Supreme Court opinions.
…And so a case that once looked easy, almost cost-free, became a trap. Justice Scalia derided the majority opinion as a “defense of the indefensible.” But what would be truly indefensible, I believe the chief justice and Justice Kennedy came to understand, was the Supreme Court itself, if it bought a cynically manufactured and meritless argument and thus came to be perceived as a partisan tool.
This whole exercise was unnecessary, the outcome too close for comfort. But there is cause for celebration in a disaster narrowly averted — for the country and the court, which is to say, for us all.

In his column, Paul Krugman echoes Greenhouse’s relief:

…The big distractions — the teething problems of the website, the objectively ludicrous but nonetheless menacing attempts at legal sabotage — are behind us, and we can focus on the reality of health reform. The Affordable Care Act is now in its second year of full operation; how’s it doing?
The answer is, better than even many supporters realize.

Krugman chronicles the impressive achievements of the ACA and adds,

Put all these things together, and what you have is a portrait of policy triumph — a law that, despite everything its opponents have done to undermine it, is achieving its goals, costing less than expected, and making the lives of millions of Americans better and more secure.
what conservatives have always feared about health reform is the possibility that it might succeed, and in so doing remind voters that sometimes government action can improve ordinary Americans’ lives.
That’s why the right went all out to destroy the Clinton health plan in 1993, and tried to do the same to the Affordable Care Act. But Obamacare has survived, it’s here, and it’s working. The great conservative nightmare has come true. And it’s a beautiful thing.

In a saner Republican Party of previous years this would be the end of the kamikaze GOP ideologues’ quest to nuke Obamacare. Sweet reason would prevail and the Republicans would grumble their way to a workable compromise. Millions of Americans would not have to worry about losing their health security, such as it is.
But the fever swamps of the right are already roiling, and there will be more unmerited challenges. We can only hope that the high court will refuse to hear them.
We can hope, further, that this latest blow to the Obama-haters will prove instructive to political moderates and reasonable conservatives. Obamacare-bashing is now more clearly a waste of time.
The U.S. Supreme Court may actually have saved the Republican Parrty from a political disaster. Had Scalia, Thomas and Alito gotten their way, millions of Americans would today have reduced health security and millions more would likely be perceiving the GOP as an extremist party of reckless ideologues. In the end, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kennedy may have saved the GOP from a rout in 2016.

Will the racist slayings in Charleston help improve chances for passing the Voting Rights law which will be introduced today? Expect lots of coverage over the next week or so, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of President Johnson’s signing the Voting Rights Act (July 2nd). But, as Ed Kilgore noted yesterday, “Or maybe GOPers will be too busy congratulating themselves from finally abandoning Confederate insignia to pay attention.”
No surprise, unfortunately, that the Ku Klux Klan is cranking up a recruiting drive in the wake of the Charleston shootings. The nation-wide uprising against Confederate battle flags and license plates is long-overdue. But, even more importantly, we also need more and better anti-racist education in America’s schools, which should be a cause that attracts a broad constituency.
E.J. Dionne, Jr. believes it’s time for Americans to face a hard truth, regardless of the political reverberations: “We cannot go on like this, wringing our hands in frustration after every tragedy involving firearms. We said “enough” after Sandy Hook. We thought the moment for action had come. Yet nothing happened. We are saying “enough” after Charleston. But this time, we don’t even expect anything to happen…What’s needed is a long-term national effort to change popular attitudes toward handgun ownership. And we need to insist on protecting the rights of Americans who do not want to be anywhere near guns.”
Former Sen. Jim Webb may have damaged his chances for a spot of the Democratic ticket with this equivocation, which amplifies his image as a tad too cold to win hearts and minds.
In sports you sometimes have to win ugly. In politics, however, you don’t want to win this ugly.
Thomas B. Edsall is on to something in his latest NYT column. It’s another way of saying class consciousness is inordinately weak ink America. In one graph, Edsall notes, “In his book “The Great Risk Shift,” Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale, joins the argument by documenting the economic pressures on individuals resulting from the widespread erosion of social insurance. “For decades, Americans and their government upheld a powerful set of ideals that combined a commitment to economic security with a faith in economic opportunity,” Hacker writes. “Today that message is starkly different: You are on your own.”
Joel K. Goldstein explains at Crystal Ball why the “third term jinx” is not all that well-reasoned.
New meme for Democratic project to flip a few Republicans: “Do you really want to support a party that thinks this guy should lead the free world?”
Say g’nite, Governor.

You may recall that two years ago from tomorrow the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965. There was a lot of talk about a bipartisan “fix”–that never came. So now Democrats are moving on their own, as I discussed today at Washington Monthly.

At the time Shelby County v. Holder came down, there was initially some talk about bipartisan action to “fix” the VRA, mostly led by the genuinely well-meaning Rep. James Sensenbrenner, but fed by comments from then-House GOP Majority Leader Eric Cantor suggesting the GOP congressional leadership wanted to make this a priority. Then, for two years: crickets.
So now congressional Democrats are tired of waiting for the GOP to show some interest, even as GOP-controlled state governments trip over each other in enacting voting restrictions.
As Ari Berman notes at The Nation, a new bill will be introduced tomorrow

The legislation will be formally introduced tomorrow by Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and leaders of the Black Caucus, Hispanic Caucus, and Asian Pacific American Caucus in the House. Civil-rights icon Representative John Lewis will be a co-sponsor. The bill is much stronger than the Voting Rights Amendment Act of 2014 (VRAA), Congress’s initial response to the Supreme Court’s decision, which garnered bipartisan support in the House but was not embraced by the congressional Republican leadership, which declined to schedule a hearing, let alone a vote, on the bill.
“The previous bill we did in a way to try and get bipartisan support–which we did,” Senator Leahy told me. “We had the Republican majority leader of the House [Eric Cantor] promise us that if we kept it like that it would come up for a vote. It never did. We made compromises to get [Republican] support and they didn’t keep their word. So this time I decided to listen to the voters who had their right to vote blocked, and they asked for strong legislation that fully restores the protections of the VRA.”

It’s not like waiting around forever for GOP interest in a “fix” didn’t have a psychological cost:

The legislation will be formally introduced tomorrow by Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and leaders of the Black Caucus, Hispanic Caucus, and Asian Pacific American Caucus in the House. Civil-rights icon Representative John Lewis will be a co-sponsor. The bill is much stronger than the Voting Rights Amendment Act of 2014 (VRAA), Congress’s initial response to the Supreme Court’s decision, which garnered bipartisan support in the House but was not embraced by the congressional Republican leadership, which declined to schedule a hearing, let alone a vote, on the bill.
Since the Shelby decision, onerous new laws have been passed or implemented in states like North Carolina and Texas, which have disenfranchised thousands of voters, disproportionately those of color. In the past five years, 395 new voting restrictions have been introduced in 49 states, with half the states in the country adopting measures making it harder to vote. “If anybody thinks there’s not racial discrimination in voting today, they’re not really paying attention,” Senator Leahy said.

This history probably won’t keep Republicans from complaining that Democrats aren’t being bipartisan on voting rights. Or maybe GOPers will be too busy congratulating themselves from finally abandoning Confederate insignia to pay attention.

At Campaign for America’s Future website Bill Scher evaluates some of the latest political self-i.d. data and concludes that “The Political Center Is Moving Left.” While other observers have noted leftward drift in public opinion, Scher’s perspective adds revealing context:

Eight years ago, when Campaign for America’s Future and Media Matters for America issued the report “Progressive Majority: Why a Conservative America Is a Myth,” George W. Bush was still president, Barack Obama was trailing by 15 points in the Democratic primary and gays could only legally marry in Massachusetts.
Back then, the report had to explain if the nation was more liberal than perceived by pundits and politicians, then why didn’t more Americans choose to label themselves “liberal.” The word was a “victim of a relentless conservative marketing campaign” and yet “many people who hold liberal issue positions call themselves moderates.”
This may have seemed like a stretch to some at the time. But now the ideological landscape is even clearer, as overt liberal pride is on the rise.
As I explain in Politico Magazine, there’s a big jump in Democrats that describe themselves as “socially liberal” and a notable bump in voters overall who embrace “liberal,” while “conservative” has taken a hit. The vast majority of Americans consider Obama a “liberal,” and elected him twice with solid margins.

NYT columnist/ Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman has noted “Growing ethnic diversity is producing what should be a more favorable electorate; growing tolerance is turning social issues, once a source of Republican strength, into a Democratic advantage instead. Reagan was elected by a nation in which half the public still disapproved of interracial marriage; Mrs. Clinton is running to lead a nation in which 60 percent support same-sex marriage.”
Scher acknowledges that midterm elections usually bring a conservative backlash going back to FDR. But he adds that “in the 2014 elections, Republican wins in blue states only came off when candidates leaned left on key issues.”
Scher cautions that “Bad surprises on Obama’s watch could change the current trajectory.” Yet, “The current one is promising, and Republicans need to watch it carefully. If the center of gravity moves from under their feet, 2016 is going to be their 1988 – the last gasp before their ideological dead weight has to be thrown overboard.”
For now the “blue wave” election Democrats long for is a distant hope. But that’s better than a fading dream. It’s only a matter of time before Democrats win a landslide — that’s part of the rhythm of American politics. The Republicans’ overwhelming advantages in terms of gerrymandering and midterm turnouts could be offset by their ideological rigidity and their inability to adapt to rapidly-changing American values — in a more progressive direction.

A message from Ed Kilgore:
Dear Readers:
Since the recent military setbacks in the struggle against ISIS, a growing range of conservative voices have been asserting that our current military strategy “isn’t working” and that a new strategy is needed.
Oddly, however, in the latest pronouncements of the major GOP Neo-Conservatives you just can’t find any clear statement of what this fundamentally different military strategy might be. There are a variety of specific suggestions but no overall strategy that underlies them.
This TDS Strategy Memo argues that the GOP Neo-Conservatives do indeed have an alternative military strategy in mind, but it’s not one that they are willing to publicly discuss.

You can read the memo HERE.
We believe you will find this memo both useful and important.
Sincerely,
Ed Kilgore
Managing Editor