Aside from some of last week’s less publicized but significant conservative victories on the Supreme Court in cases involving Clean Air regulations and the death penalty, its latest term ended with a couple of signs of trouble in orders for cases it will hear next year. I discussed them briefly at Washington Monthly:

One involves a racial gerrymandering complaint from Arizona Republicans which could create new problems for what is left of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Another, and the one that got a lot of horrified reaction from progressives today, is a case designed to enable SCOTUS to overturn a precedent benefiting public employee unions.
The case, brought by California teachers at odds with the California Teachers Association union, is aimed at generating a decision that would deem any required payment of fees by non-union members in a public employment setting a compelled “political” expenditure that violates the non-member’s First Amendment rights.
I’m not as sure as some commentators that this would be the end of the road for public-sector unions. It would, unless I’m missing something, put them in the same position as private-sector unions in a “right-to-work” state–forced to put up with “free riders” who cannot be required to help support the collective bargaining efforts from which they benefit in compensation and working conditions. That’s not a good position. But it’s more another unfair burden than a death sentence.
Both actions today are a pretty good indication that the talk of a “left-leaning” Roberts Court is premature, particularly when it comes to anything that directly handicaps the Republican Party or helps workers.

A much more ambivalent signal came from an order to suspend enforcement of a notorious Texas statute aimed at restricting the availability of abortion services via phony “health” regulations. The four Justices traditionally opposed to abortion rights all voted against the order. But it also could pave the way for the long-awaited Supreme Court review of “health”-based abortion restrictions on which one of the five Justices supporting the order, Anthony Kennedy, has already flipped to the dark side.

A succinct summary of the importance of President Obama’s release of a new rule expanding eligibility for overtime pay — and a good message point for Democrats — from E. J. Dionne, Jr.’s syndicated column: “To much bellyaching from Republicans and business groups, Obama is putting forward new rules that would make up to 5 million more American workers eligible for overtime pay. He’s doing this by ending a scam through which employers designate even relatively low-paid workers as managers to get around the law, which requires an overtime premium after 40 hours per week…Under the current rules, as Obama wrote this week in The Huffington Post, workers earning as little as $23,660 a year can be robbed of overtime by being given supervisory or managerial designations. The new regulation would raise the threshold to a more plausible $50,440 a year.”
Another affirmation that courses in civics and government help improve voter turnout.
Jeffrey M. Jones reports on new Gallup poll findings bearing good news for Democrats: “In the second quarter of 2015, Democrats regained an advantage over Republicans in terms of Americans’ party affiliation. A total of 46% of Americans identified as Democrats (30%) or said they are independents who lean toward the Democratic Party (16%), while 41% identified as Republicans (25%) or leaned Republican (16%). The two parties were generally even during the previous three quarters, including the fourth quarter of 2014, when the midterm elections took place.”
Ralph Nader challenges all presidential candidates to support a $15 minimum wage. But only Gov. Martin O’Malley and Sen. Bernie Sanders have thus far expressed their support of the increase. Nader notes, “Almost all of the Republican candidates support keeping the minimum wage at $7.25 an hour.” Nader provides good message points in favor of the measure: “A 2014 study by the Center for American Progress showed that raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour would cause a six percent drop in welfare enrollments, saving the American people over four billion dollars a year…It’s time for the candidates from all parties to reject the corporate dogma that allows companies to pay exploitative wages and force their employees onto public assistance. ”
National Journal’s Josh Kraushaar sees Dems in good position to regain a Senate majority in 2016: “For this cycle, the map is difficult for Republicans, who are defending many more seats than their Democratic counterparts. Of the nine most-competitive Senate seats, seven are held by Republicans–and six feature sitting Republican senators. Eight of the races are being held in states that President Obama carried twice.” Kraushaar also argues that “Republican Senate candidates face the harsh reality that their party’s presidential nominees have a bigger impact on their reelection than their own campaigns.”
At Brookings William A. Galson and Elaine Kamarck make the case for “More builders and fewer traders: A growth strategy for the American economy,” which could be a potent message for Democratic candidates in projecting an economic vision.
A little nugget from Kerry Eleveld’s Daily Kos post, “Jeb’s taxes reveal a wealthy man who thrived in the great recession and donated little,” quoting Bloomberg’s Richard Rubin and Michael C. Bender “Jeb’s taxes reveal a wealthy man who thrived in the great recession and donated little”: “From 2007 to 2013, the Bushes gave a total of $431,056 to charity, or about 1.5 percent of their adjusted gross income. In 2011, Romney, who is much wealthier than Bush, donated more than 29 percent of his income to charity. The Obamas donated 14.8 percent last year.
A few short weeks ago I figured that the GOP had probably bottomed-out with Hispanic LVs. But it now seems Trump’s immigrant-bashing and better than expected poll numbers among Republican respondents could damage the GOP brand even more with Latino voters.
Meanwhile, Simon Malloy just puts it out there at Salon.com with “GOP’s baffling Trump cowardice: A party too timid to denounce a bigoted gasbag.”

The recent intraparty tensions over trade and commercial policy haven’t been a picnic for any Democrats. But it’s possible to exaggerate the disunity and its implications, and that’s what The Hill columnist Brent Budowsky did today, or so I argued at Washington Monthly:

[Budowsky claims that] liberals “insulted” by the president’s disrespecting of Elizabeth Warren during the fast-track debate may well decide to stay home in 2016–just as they did when similarly insulted in 2010 and 2014–forfeiting Democratic control of the White House. Watch him add 2 and 2 and get 13:

The president’s defamation of Democrats over trade was untrue, shameful and destructive to the Democratic Party. Most Democrats inside and outside Washington are genuinely worried — with good reason, rooted in the history of trade agreements — about the potential loss of American jobs.
This pattern of Obama and his aides insulting liberals began well before the 2010 and 2014 midterm elections, with repeated background quotes in mainstream media from unnamed White House personnel referring to leaders and members of the Democratic base as “the left of the left” and “the professional left….”
Given this legacy of damage that Obama has inflicted against his party and his presidency, by depressing liberal Democratic voters and motivating conservative Republican voters in two midterm elections that were disastrous for Democrats, it was breathtaking that throughout the recent trade debate Obama demonstrated he still has not learned that the leader of a great party must not insult its core voters if it has any hopes of prevailing in future presidential and congressional elections.

Funny, isn’t it, that in the midst of all this carnage Obama managed to get himself reelected. Why weren’t liberal Democratic voters “depressed” in 2012? Why did they take out their anger at Obama on their own Democratic candidates in 2010 but then turn out for the source of their “discouragement” two years later? And did Democratic losses in more conservative parts of the country in the two midterms really revolve around hordes of angry liberals staying home?
There are two things we actually do know reasonably well: first, the demographic groups that don’t tend to show up in non-presidential elections ever, even if liberals are not being insulted by a Democratic president, are now a disproportionate element of the Democratic electoral coalition. And second, strongly committed ideologues, including liberals, do tend to show up and vote in a higher proportion than their less committed “moderate” or “somewhat ideological” counterparts, whether or not they’ve been “insulted” or “discouraged” or “deenergized” by this or that leader. 25% of the 2012 electorate self-identified as “liberal.” That number dropped to 23% in 2014–less than you’d expect given the dropoff in youth and minority voting. That was hardly the most important factor in the outcome. I strongly suspect self-identified “moderates” who are by and large less engaged politically were the people over-represented in the “dropoff” population. And like voters generally, they were vastly less interested, and mostly unaware of, all the ideological signals by Obama that so obsess pundits.
You can certainly make a case that had Obama paid more attention to the advice offered by liberals his policies might have been more effective, and that would have improved party prospects in 2010 and 2014, both in terms of turnout and the Democratic share of the persuadable vote. But the idea that turnout patterns are mostly the product of which party faction has its feelings hurt or assuaged is an ax-grinding proposition with no real empirical basis that I can discern. It doesn’t help that Budowsky assumes Obama is personally responsible for the downballot losses of the Democratic Party since 2010. And he also blames Obama for managing to fire up conservatives even as he is discouraging liberals. Had Obama been an Eagle Scout liberal throughout his presidency, would conservatives have been less “energized” in 2010 and 2014? Are we supposed to believe they are like dogs, sensing fear or irresolution in their opponents?
Look, I agree it was a bad idea for the president to talk smack about fast-track opponents and criticize Elizabeth Warren. But let’s don’t get carried away with the implications. Turnout is unlikely to be the central problem for Democrats in the presidential year of 2016, and to the extent that it is, the challenge will be maximizing minority turnout, which is by no means the same as “liberal” turnout, as the long history of liberal presidential primary challengers who cannot attract minority voters should make reasonably clear. There’s also no particular reason to assume that liberal anger at Obama is directly transferable to the 2016 presidential nominee. Even if HRC has annoyed some Democrats by refusing to break with the president whose youth and minority supporters she desperately needs in 2016–more than she needs self-identified liberals–she has not insulted anybody so far as I can tell. And everything about the unfolding presidential nominating process indicates that self-identified liberals are going to get a lot of love from HRC.
So no, I don’t think Barack Obama has destroyed the Democratic Party by insulting liberals, and if he’s done anything to disproportionately “energize” conservatives who have been working themselves up to an ideological bender for years, it’s by embodying the right-wing caricature of “liberals” as elitists working hand-in-glove with those people.

Since Democrats are still going to have to deal with additional tensions as the Trans-Pacific Partnership is taken up in Congress (assuming negotiations don’t somehow break down), it’s a good time to contain the damage instead of claiming the party is heading towards another 2014. I would add to what I said above that if self-identified Liberal Democrats are indeed so “insulted” by the president’s words that they’ll likely sit out a high-stakes 2016 election, you’d think it would show up in the president’s approval ratings with that category of voters, wouldn’t you? According to Gallup, it’s at 88%. If liberals are “insulted,” they’re rapidly getting over it.

Amid the fading euphoria after the Supreme Court rulings favoring Obamacare and same-sex marriage, here is a sobering reminder from Michael Tomasky’s Daily Beast column, “Hey, Liberals: SCOTUS Ain’t Your Friend“:

It would be understandable if liberals were feeling kind of relaxed, kind of “Supreme Court, what’s so bad?” over the weekend. John Roberts and Anthony Kennedy delivered for our team on Obamacare, and then Kennedy came through again on same-sex marriage. If this is a conservative court, is getting a liberal one–which will be one of the trump-card arguments for voting for Hillary Clinton next fall–really a matter of such pressing urgency?
Well, yes. As we saw yesterday with the court’s death-penalty and EPA rulings, it’s still a long way from being a liberal court. But there’s more to it than that. People should remember that if a Republican is elected president next year and has the chance to replace Kennedy and/or Ruth Bader Ginsburg with another Samuel Alito, the Obamacare and same-sex marriage standings could easily be reversed. And don’t think there aren’t conservatives out there thinking about it, because there most certainly are, and they literally want to roll back the judicial clock to 1905.

Tomasky goes on to cite the evaporation of judicial restraint as the guiding principle of conservative jurisprudence. He notes the very real possibility that, if a Republicans wins the white house, there is a danger that they will push forward Supreme Court nominees who are opposed to Medicare, Social Security and even child labor laws. Tomasky concludes with the nightmare scenario that electing a Republican president could mean that “we could end up with two or three more Alitos on the bench.”
On the spectrum of issues including campaign finance reform, voting rights, economic justice and worker rights, the Supreme Court’s majority is already quite reactionary, despite the Obamacare and gay marriage rulings. If a Republican wins the white house next year, the high court could get even worse. Progressive unity behind the Democratic presidential nominee in the fall of 2016 is an imperative, not only for the survival of the Democratic Party, but perhaps also for American democracy.