Watching primary and caucus returns from Arizona and Utah on Tuesday night, one Republican candidate’s performance was reminiscent of an episode of the TV show about a zombie apocalpyse, The Walking Dead. I wrote about it the next day at New York:

Donald Trump won Arizona and all of its 58 delegates, while Ted Cruz won Utah and its 40 delegates. The third candidate still in the field, John Kasich, won no delegates, and his big psychological victory was finishing a very poor second place in Utah over Trump in what may very well be America’s preeminent Trump-hating jurisdiction. He also managed to “finish fourth in a three-man race” in Arizona by trailing the zombie candidacy of Marco Rubio (who did better in early voting than Kasich did in early voting or on election day).
In popular mythology, when you get bit by a zombie you soon zombify yourself. The Arizona showing by Kasich seems to consign him to the ranks of the walking dead. Even before last night, there were signs in every direction that the Ohioan had worn out his welcome with, well, just about everybody in the GOP. His refusal to give Ted Cruz a clean shot at Trump in Utah greatly annoyed Mitt Romney, who can hardly be expected to promote Kasich’s interests if the contested convention they both want actually materializes. But as Robert Draper explained on Monday in The New York Times Magazine, it’s hard to find much of any “insider” base of support for the man:

[M]ost party insiders to whom I’ve spoken flatly reject a draft-Kasich movement. Partly this is because he hasn’t earned it. To date he has triumphed only in his home state — which was not a huge surprise, given that he won all 12 of his previous elections (for State Senate, Congress and governor) there. Kasich was something of an absentee candidate in the South and has underperformed in the North and the Midwest outside Ohio. His fund-raising abilities are not especially impressive: He has raised $15.3 million thus far, not much more than the $14.2 million that Marco Rubio raised in the last quarter of last year alone …
Perhaps just as important, conservatives — particularly in the G.O.P. commentariat — do not see Kasich as one of them … As governor, Kasich expanded Medicaid benefits in his state, against the wishes of a Republican-controlled Legislature. He also embraced Common Core educational standards and today favors a guest-worker program for illegal immigrants. All of these constitute apostasies to movement conservatives.
But there’s a third layer of resistance to Kasich, one with which Cruz can identify: Many Beltway Republicans don’t like him.

Yeah, the dirty little secret of the Kasich campaign all along has been that the actual candidate behind his relentlessly upbeat campaign has a long-standing reputation in Washington and Columbus as a nasty piece of work. Republicans who know this are understandably a mite irritated at Kasich’s little lectures on how to emulate the sweet reasonableness of Jesus.
But if Kasich really has little support in the Republican Establishment, how about his occasional claim of being a big brawling anti-Establishment figure himself, fighting the good fight out there in the Ohio badlands? Roll Call‘s Stu Rothenberg, who certainly knows a Beltway insider when he sees one, had great sport with the idea of Kasich the Outsider in a recent column:

Kasich … often refers to his service in the House but insists that the establishment fears him.
Just don’t look behind the curtain, because if you do, you will see that Kasich’s supporters and advisers include party establishment types like consultant Charlie Black, former Minnesota congressman Vin Weber, long-time party strategist Stu Spencer, former Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott, former New Hampshire Sen. John Sununu and New Hampshire veteran GOP operative Tom Rath.
There is nothing wrong with that team, except that it was the establishment before anyone was complaining about “the establishment.”

And that gets us to the strategic anomaly of the Kasich campaign. The one thing we know right now with a high degree of certainty is that Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are going to arrive in Cleveland ranked first and second in bound delegates, together holding a sizable and perhaps an overwhelming majority. How exactly does it transpire that these delegates (yes, there will be some disloyal-to-the-candidate party hacks among them, but not really that many) will on some second or third or fourth ballot settle on the candidate they’ve both regularly trounced in the primaries and who epitomizes the veteran elected official RINOs their supporters despise? Is the “year of the outsider” in the GOP really going to produce a nominee who’s been in public office for 27 years, dating back to the Carter administration?

I don’t think so.

In her article “Can Donald Trump Rewrite The Electoral Map For The GOP?,” NPR’s Mara Liasson quotes Democratic strategist Stan Greenberg “The Reagan Democrats are alive with the angry white male who’ve made themselves felt in the Trump primaries…The question is: Are there enough of them, and what’s the price of trying to reach them?” Liason adds, “There’s no question the white working-class vote is shrinking. Non-college-educated voters were about half of the electorate in 1992. Now they make up a third. But in Rust Belt states like Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania, they still make up half of eligible voters…Those voters are exactly Trump’s base, but turning them out won’t be easy. In the last election, white non-college-educated voters had a turnout rate of about 57 percent, while 80 percent of white college-educated voters showed up…Ultimately, Trump would need an unprecedented turnout among these voters. Some analysts calculate that Trump would need at least 65 percent of the white vote to win; 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney got 59 percent.”
Conservative columnist Kathleen Parker’s syndicted column delineates the stark choice facing ‘Republicans of conscience’: “The conundrum for Republicans is that though Trump may be the devil, he’s their devil. How can they condemn the guy that a near-majority of their own party prefers?..That is the question of the moment, isn’t it? This is what we ask ourselves about the industrialists and “good Germans” who supported Hitler. This is what we ask our Southern grandparents about the time when blacks were being lynched. What we ask the World War II generation about rounding up Japanese-Americans. And while we’re at it, what was your vote on Vietnam, Iraq? There’s a price to pay for silence.”
It looks increasingly like the 2016 presidential campaign may indeed be “the YouTube election.” Luciana Lopez reports at Reuters that the Democratic Party has more than 70 people at their Washington HQ “glued to screens playing back videos of Donald Trump and other Republicans, digitally documenting their policy positions on everything from torture to climate change.”
In her post “How to Stop Trump,” Trish Kahle of Jacobin defends the protests at Trump rallies, despite concerns of some progressives: “In addition to complaining about abridgements of free speech, liberal writers have argued that protesting Trump only plays into his hands and further polarizes politics…the strategy protesters are employing seems quite sensible: impair the circulation of Trump’s hate-filled message, inject turmoil into his events, and further isolate him from the American mainstream…If anything, the protesters who nonviolently shut down Donald Trump should be heralded as guardians of democracy. They did not call for the state to prevent Trump from speaking, and rightly so. Instead, they demonstrated the power of collective action and asserted that ordinary people, rather than a billionaire demagogue, would be heard.”
Dalia Sussman reports at NYT First Draft that a new NYT/CBS News poll conducted 3/17-20 found that “Fifty-three percent say the Senate should hold a vote on President Obama’s nominee, while 42 percent say the Senate should wait until next year for the new president to nominate someone. The poll finds views sharply divided by party, with three-quarters of Democrats wanting a vote on Judge Garland and two-thirds of Republicans opposed. Independents are closely divided.”
At The Washington Post Charles Camosy, author of “Beyond the Abortion Wars: A Way Forward for A New Generation,” argues that “Democrats could destroy the GOP — if only they would welcome antiabortion liberals: A bigger tent would make Democrats unstoppable at the polls.”
A new voter participation project, “The TurboVote Challenge” takes an interesting approach. The project “brings leading companies and organizations together in a nonpartisan, long-term commitment to increase voter registration and participation across America. Our goal – 80% voter turnout by 2020 – is ambitious and can only be achieved through a broad, cross-sector effort to help make voting accessible and modernized. The TurboVote Challenge embraces collaboration across America, from schools to businesses to non-profits, around local, state, and national elections, with an end goal of greater participation in our democracy.”
At Roll Call, Alex Roarty’s “Money Can’t Buy Love — or in Some Cases, Even Elections” notes that ecoomic advantage hasn’t helped candidates like Jeb Bush, who tanked despite his $100 million war chest. But the 2016 presidential primary/caucus season has been somewhat anomalous in that one candidate, Trump, has leveraged his media experience to get free media coverage and exposure worth tens of millions of dollars — a resource unavailable to other candidates. The Democratic presidential nominee is going to need plenty of cash just to stay in the game. And down-ballott Dems will be even more challenged by the onslaught of Koch brothers billions supporting Republicans.
And speaking of money worries, do read “Democrats have momentum but lack money in battle for Senate: There’s growing anxiety within the party that they’ll blow a chance to retake the chamber because of the GOP’s cash edge” by Politico’s Burgess Everett, Seung Min Kim and Kevin Robillard. As the authors note, “Republicans are outspending Democrats in key races so far. There’s little indication that Democrats will close the gap as Election Day approaches, and signs the chasm will grow thanks to the longer roster of deep-pocketed outside groups on the right. That’s triggered growing anxiety within the minority party about relinquishing an opening to net the four or five seats they need to recapture the Senate.” Those who want to contribute to Democrats retaking a Senate majority should check out ActBlue’s 2016 Senate campaign webpage.

At The New York Times Opinion Pages ‘Room for Debate’ forum, the topic is “Do College Students’ Votes Really Matter in an Election?” Some observations from the forum participants:
GOP message guru Frank Luntz opines,

…Young voters respond, above all else, to authenticity. They know a fraud when they see it, and they flock in droves to those politicians who say what they mean, and mean what they say.
And while the rallies in 2016 are not quite as large as 2008, even more young people are participating in the political discourse via social media. Snapchat and Twitter have replaced the convention of a coffee shop and the “water cooler” conservation as the place where youth gather to talk politics. Even old journalists and pundits (like me) have learned we need to go there if we want to be heard. We have learned from people less than half our age. They set the trends now.
True, youth engagement and support (alone) still cannot win an election, but it can deliver the credibility needed to drive the public discussion.

Quentin Kidd, director of the Judy Ford Wason Center for Public Policy at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Va., observes:

…a large portion of students don’t get to the voting booth or take the time to fill out an absentee ballot…The problem is that political parties mobilize voters around their physical residential address: We vote in-person based on our place of residence. While big data has allowed parties to know increasingly more about us, without a consistent residential address the ability to use that data to ultimately get a person to become a voter is very difficult.
College students are the poster children of this problem. Many live in dorms that are increasingly secured, inaccessible to the party’s volunteer doorknockers or leaflet droppers.
Additionally, many students don’t or can’t vote where they go to school anyway. Students live on campus for eight or nine months of the year, and whether they can vote where they go to school depends on the registration laws of the state…As students, they are a largely unreliable voting block.

It may be that the best response to the student residence and voter eligibility issues cited by Kidd is automatic registration and court challenges to Republican-driven measures to suppress the student vote, such as North Carolina’s voter i.d. measure.
Columbia University sophomore and NPR contributor Bianca Brooks, cites a dearth of open political discourse, leaving students who are not already firmly comitted to a particular candidate feeling ostracized and uninvolved. “Students who can’t “pick a side” are left feeling isolated and politically apathetic,” says Brooks. “If the university does not reclaim and reform political discourse, students will be unable to find the middle ground necessary not just to be sensible voters, but effective political leaders of the future.”
But Wesleyan University sophomore and military veteran Bryan Stascavage sees impressive student activism and social media participation, which he believes can have an impact, despite low youth voter turnout. In addition to a growing presence on Reddit, “Young voters …start trends on Twitter, create content for Facebook, and push stories to go viral. They are the new grassroots, using new media to spread information about their candidates to the general public….The youth vote is a valuable constituency. They have the time, energy, will and ability to impact politics in America, even though they may not show up on Election Day.”
Young voters played a critical, perhaps pivotal role in the 2008 presidential election, and student support of Obama’s campaign may have helped win votes from non-student youth via peer influence. Young people with at least some college experience vote at approximately twice the rate as non-college youth.
But most of student energy in 2016 seems to be concentrated in support of the Sanders campaign. So there is growing concern about attrition of student activism and voter participation if Sanders does not win the Democratic nomination.
Perhaps even more important in the longer range, students and young voters in general have a poor turnout rate in midterm elections, which helps Republicans severely restrict the President’s ability to secure progressive legislation. In 2010 for example, the first midterm following all of the excitement of the 2008 Obama victory, voters age 18-29 had a turnout rate of just 24 percent, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, compared with 54.5 percent of 18 to 29 year-old voters in 2008.
Democrats must find a way to maximize youth turnout in 2016, but a more creative and muscular effort to mobilize young voters in the midterms is long-overdue. This could include more funding for Democratic partty activities on campus, voter registration rallies, on-line teach-ins, concerts and other cultural events to educate and motivate young voters and build their interest. In terms of issues, Democratic candidates must dramatize their commitment to making higher education more affordable and providing entry-level jobs in stark contrast to the Republicans’ lack of credible reforms.
If Democrats can raise student turnout and increase their share of the vote by just a few percentage points, it could prove to be a cost-effective investment in a more stable Democratic majority.

The New Yorker’s John Cassidy explains “What Bernie Sanders Has Achieved“:

…To gauge his influence, you need only listen to one of Clinton’s campaign speeches. On issues like inequality, trade, the environment, corporate offshoring, and bringing Wall Street miscreants to justice, the former Secretary of State has adopted Sanders’s language–and, in some cases, his policies. Clinton had undoubtedly always intended to run as a center-left progressive in 2016, just as she did in 2008, but Sanders has forced her onto ground she hadn’t originally intended to occupy.
It isn’t just Clinton, either. Even Republicans have been taking up some of Sanders’s themes. “The top one per cent under President Obama, the millionaires and billionaires that he constantly demagogued, earned a higher share for our national income than any year since 1928,” Ted Cruz said earlier this year. Donald Trump has talked about the need to raise taxes on hedge-fund managers and leveraged-buyout tycoons. John Kasich has rebranded himself as a champion for the poor and excluded. Of course, the regressive tax policies that Cruz, Trump, and Kasich are advocating would exacerbate inequality, rather than reduce it, but the fact that Republicans have felt obliged to address these issues at all surely owes something to Sanders and the populist wave that he represents.

Cassidy credits Sanders with doing more than any other candidate to raise the issue of money in politics, a growing concern with all demographic groups. It may be a while before the needed reforms to prevent further abuse are achieved. But when it finally occurs, Sanders will deserve some of the credit. Cassidy adds,

It’s too early to say what Sanders’s legacy will be, or whether some of the ideas that he is pushing–such as breaking up the big banks, introducing a single-payer health-care system, and returning tax rates on the rich closer to the levels that F.D.R. introduced–will eventually be adopted. Given the Republicans Party’s grip on Congress and the centrist mindset of Clinton’s advisers, it is hard to see much movement in this direction any time soon.
But it is also evident that, in the past ten months, Sanders has defied the pundits, alarmed the comfortable, and inspired the young. He has turned what looked to be a political coronation into a lively and hard-fought contest, forcing his opponent to modify her positions and raise her game. He has demonstrated that Presidential campaigns don’t have to be beholden to big donors…

Sanders’ path to victory has narrowed, considerably. But in a fragile political environment, there are several scenarios that could shift the political winds in his favor and lots of delegates are still available.
Many Democrats would like to see Sanders fold, so Clinton could save her money for the general election. But that benefit should be measured against the added credibility Clinton would have as a result of winning a hard-fought nomination — Sanders has killed the “coronation” rap the GOP hoped to pin on her. If Sanders quit now, the youth vote he has mobilized could evaporate into apathy.
More of consequence, Clinton’s policies have improved from being honed in the forge of competition with an adversary who has some popular positions. As an added benefit, she has also sharpened her debating skills. And if she picks Sanders for her running mate, she will likely get the benefit of a more unified party than would be available to her via the ‘coronation’ route.
Perhaps most importantly, concludes Cassidy, Sanders “has shown that, surprisingly enough, there is still a place in American politics for an independent-minded speaker of uncomfortable truths. What’s more, he isn’t done yet.” And that is likely a good thing for the Democratic Party.

At HuffPo Julia Sagebien writes about the politics underlying President Obama’s visit to Cuba: “…Senator Marco Rubio, a second-generation Cuban-American hard-liner, lost the Republican primary and retired from the race. On that day, for the first time since the ‘Triumph of the Revolution’, both Florida primaries were won by pro-engagement candidates (Trump and Clinton). With Florida on board, the electoral threat that made it nearly impossible for either party to ease the embargo in any significant manner – has been dealt a near mortal blow. The only contest left, if it comes to that, is a Ted Cruz vs. the U.S. Chamber of Commerce fight…This new ‘friendship’ between Cuba and the U.S. (this is, after all, also a family visit with sightseeing, baseball games and a symbolic arrival on the first day of spring) is one of the few ‘feel good’ stories of the second decade of the 21st century. But despite high levels of approval and generalized cheer in both nations, there is still a long hard way to go.”
Recent opinion polls by Gallup and other major pollsters indicate large majorities favor the resumption of normal diplomatic and trade relations between the U.S. and Cuba.
Hillary Clinton’s impressive strength with senior voters during the primary/caucus season mirrors Sanders edge with young voters. As Amy Chozick writes at The New York Times, “In her sweep of the states that voted last week, she captured voters 65 and older by large margins, ranging from 39 percentage points in Missouri to 54 in Ohio. In Virginia, Texas and other Southern states that voted earlier, she won more than 80 percent of these voters, often matching or beating the support Mr. Sanders received from voters 18 to 29.” It would be interesting to see some trial heat polls of seniors, pitting Clinton and Sanders against remaining GOP candidates. Clinton has learned that her campaign must have better educational outreach to young voters, while Sanders has to reach senior voters more effectively.
Eric Bradner< of CNN Politics has a good preview of tonight's debate, "What to watch for on ‘The Final Five’ Monday night,” hosted by CNN and aired from 8 to 11 p.m. ET.
Matthew Yglesias notes in his post “Why experts think Trump could hand Democrats a House majority” at vox.com that “The high odds of a Trump nomination and the fact that any alternative to a Trump nomination would almost certainly entail some kind of party-crushing convention hijinks mean that a Democratic wave is definitely on the table in a way it wasn’t previously.”
“Simply getting to the polls is a problem for some – particularly black Americans. In the Census Bureau data, 6% of black Americans said they didn’t vote because of “transportation problems” compared with 3% of white Americans,” — from The Guardian’s “Why doesn’t anyone care about voter turnout?” It’s complicated” by Mona Chalabi.
Kira Lerner reports at ThinkProgress that “Students Are Being Rejected From The Polls Because Of North Carolina’s Voter ID Law.”
At Salon.com Sean McElwee discusses “America’s disturbing voter-turnout crisis: How inequality extends to polling place — and why that makes our country less fair. The U.S. leads rich nations for disparity in turnout across income and education levels. This has consequences.”
WaPo’s Dan Balz explores the politics of a Clinton vs. Trump general election: “With a focus on trade issues and by tapping anti-establishment anger, Trump would seek to energize white working-class Americans, who Republicans believe have been on the sidelines in recent elections in substantial numbers..At the same time, Clinton could find Trump a powerful energizing force on her behalf among African Americans and Latinos, which could help to offset the absence of Obama on the ticket after two elections that drew huge minority turnout. That could put off-limits to Trump some states with large Hispanic populations where Republicans have competed intensely in recent elections…A Washington Post-ABC News poll from earlier this month showed stark divides among those backing Trump and Clinton. Overall, the former secretary of state led 50 to 41 percent among registered voters. Trump led 49 to 40 percent among white voters, while Clinton led 73 to 19 among non-whites. Trump led by five points among men, and Clinton was up by 21 among women. Trump led by 24 points among whites without college degrees, while Clinton led by 15 among whites with degrees.”

One of the most unusual things about this unusual presidential cycle is the disconnect, especially on the Republican side, between campaign money and candidate performance. I discussed this topic in connection with Donald Trump’s strange candidacy at New York.

[C]andidates other than front-runner Donald J. Trump have spent a lot more money on themselves and against him than he’s had to expend, enabling him to pose as the guy too rich (and too popular with small donors) to be vulnerable to “bribery.” This was exemplified by the failed effort by Marco Rubio and an assortment of conservative groups to take down Trump in Florida. Anti-Trump “independent” ads alone in the Sunshine State cost an estimated $35.5 million. Total spending by Trump and his supporters for the entire campaign nationwide is at $25.8 million.
Trump’s difference-maker financially, of course, has been his massive advantage in “earned media” (or what used to be called “free media,” because it’s provided by media coverage free of charge). MediaQuant, a firm that measures and values unpaid media coverage, estimates that Trump has harvested nearly $1.9 billion in earned media this cycle. That’s about twice as much as Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, and Jeb Bush combined have received, and within shouting distance of being twice as much as the two Democratic candidates combined as well.
But general-election campaigns are a lot more expensive than primaries. So it’s not surprising that Trump has hedged on repeating his “no special-interest contributions” pledge beyond the Republican Convention in July, and CNN is reporting that he’s already planning a big fund-raising blitz for the general election.
At The American Prospect, Eliza Newlin Carney puts all this together and suggests that total campaign costs are about to become too high for Trump to perpetually surf earned media to victory:

So far, Trump has enjoyed an extraordinary political ride, fending off millions worth of hostile attacks, prevailing against opponents who out-organized and outspent him, and sparing himself the punishing grind of high-dollar fundraisers. He’s also gotten considerable political mileage out of his claim to be above the big money fray. It remains to be seen whether Trump can continue playing by his own rules, or whether he will be forced to get his hands dirty in the messy business of campaign financing–and answer for it to voters.

But there are two factors that undercut this possibility. For one thing, Trump could liquidate some of his assets (estimated independently as having a value of about $4.5 billion) and self-finance to a considerable extent. And for another, this long nominating contest season in both parties is shortening the general-election campaign and the time and cost of any “air war.” Additionally, earned media is much easier to come by in presidential general elections than any other mode of politics, sometimes dwarfing paid media even when there’s not a wildly entertaining and galvanizing figure like Donald Trump in the fray. So it might make sense for Trump to wait and see if he even needs to spend a lot of money.

If he doesn’t, that means the news media’s fascination with Trump is still paying him dividends.

This is a good start, from the DSCC:

This week, the DSCC launched the “Party of Trump” campaign, a sustained campaign that will feature spending across platforms including television, radio, online, Twitter and Facebook, as well as up to the minute “Party of Trump” news alerts, highlighting Republicans’ continued support of Donald Trump as the nominee. With another big round of victories on Tuesday, Trump is even closer to becoming the Republicans’ nominee. Republican Senate incumbents and candidates are to blame for the rise of this toxic, divisive element that has overtaken their party, and they’ve all pledged to support Trump as the nominee. The DSCC’s “Party of Trump” campaign will remind voters that Republican Senate candidates are running in lockstep with Trump and his toxic rhetoric.

And here’s an opening ad to help the kick-off:

Not bad for openers. It appears that the DSCC is putting more brain-power and video muscle and into the effort to take back the Senate, which is long-overdue. There is enough material to make many such ads anchoring GOP senators and senate candidates to Trump and policies that are even worse than some of his positions.
With respect to Trump, there are gobs of clever amateur videos already up on Youtube, and the DSCC should be mining them on a daily basis. Now that Facebook has become the town square for ever-increasing numbers of Americans, the party that masters its potential will likely be well-rewarded in November.

Few believe Merrick Garland has a chance of actually being confirmed in this session of congress. But, in the highly unlikely event he is confirmed, according to the “Martin-Quinn scores” ranking judicial ideology, Garland would make the High Court “the most liberal in decades,” report Alicia Parlapiano and Margo Sanger-Katz at The Upshot. The authors show that Garland or Justice Stephen Breyer would become the new ‘swing vote’ on the Court.
AP’s Josh Lederman argues that “By nominating an uncontroversial 63-year-old judge, President Barack Obama handed Republicans an unwelcome election-year proposition: Give in or risk letting Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump pick a Supreme Court justice the GOP might like even less…Republicans loathe Clinton, but they recognize that if she wins the presidency, she could nominate someone far more liberal than Garland, who’s regarded as a centrist.”
A couple of weeks ago Jesse Wegman noted in his NYT editorial page editor blog, that “In the weeks since Justice Scalia’s death, at least half a dozen polls have asked Americans who they think should pick the next justice. Each one has found that people want President Obama to name a choice. A CNN/ORC poll released Thursday found that two-thirds of Americans, including majorities of Democrats, Republicans, and independents, want the Senate to hold hearings on an Obama nominee.”
In his Daily Beast post, “D.C.’s Dueling Supreme Court Strategies,” Jay Michelson notes, “”They are establishing a precedent, if they do this, that if you don’t like the president, you never have to have a vote. Ever,” said Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA), who argues that the obstruction flies in the face of the constitutional order of government. “What this is about is, ‘We don’t like this president and so we are going to refuse to entertain any discussion of the president’s nominees.'””
Carle Hulse explores how “Supreme Court Showdown Could Shape Fall Elections.” Hulse writes that, in one scenario, a Democratic takeover of the Senate in the November elections might force a lame duck session confirmation: “That possibility led some jittery Senate Republicans to suggest they might be willing to take up the nomination of Judge Garland in a postelection lame-duck session, preferring the relatively moderate and known commodity of Mr. Garland to the uncertain choice of a future Democratic president.”
Ed Kilgore calls the Lame Duck idea a “convoluted scenario whereby Garland might be confirmed. However, observes Kilgore. “Even then, many conservatives in the Senate would shrink from the intraparty consequences of voting for a baby-killing defender of executive tyranny. But that could be the only way Garland makes it to the Court.”
The New York Times editorial board says, “If you tried to create the ideal moderate Supreme Court nominee in a laboratory, it would be hard to do better than Judge Merrick Garland…In his 19 years on the bench, Judge Garland has established a solidly centrist voting record that reflects no strong political ideology. He has sided with the government in cases involving habeas corpus petitions from detainees at Guantánamo Bay, and has voted against criminal defendants more often than his liberal colleagues have. He has generally voted in favor of deferring to the considered decisions of federal agencies. In civil rights cases, he has voted in favor of plaintiffs who have claimed rights violations.”
If you needed further evidence of President Obama’s prowess at political chess, try this paragraph from Lincoln Caplan’s New Yorker article “Merrick Garland, President Obama’s Sensible Supreme Court Choice“: “The day the President told Kagan that he planned to nominate her for the Supreme Court, in May of 2010, the Times ran a story saying that Garland “was widely seen as the most likely alternative to Ms. Kagan and the one most likely to win easy confirmation”; that Senator Orrin Hatch, the Republican from Utah, “privately made clear to the president that he considered Judge Garland a good choice”; and that “Mr. Obama ultimately opted to save Judge Garland for when he faces a more hostile Senate and needs a nominee with more Republican support.”
As an election ploy, Garland’s nomination should shine an unwelcome spotlight on GOP obstructionism, causing Republican senators in blue states to cringe, hem and haw as they struggle to justify opposing such a highly-qualified centrist. John Healey’s L.A. Times op-ed “Garland nomination to Supreme Court could put GOP in no-win situation” illuminates the other half of their dilemma: “if Republicans allow Garland to be confirmed, their core constituencies are likely to feel betrayed regardless of what anyone says about how reasonable and non-ideological the judge may be. And with control of the Senate hanging in the balance, and Republicans having more incumbents facing reelection than Democrats do, the last thing the Senate GOP can afford to do is to discourage its political base.”