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.

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.

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.

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.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, albeit officially (and for a very long time) an Independent, is a member of the Senate Democratic Caucus, and votes with Democrats most of the time. Still, his Independent self-ID could create some problems for him on the presidential campaign trail, as I discussed today at Washington Monthly.

In what I assume is a moment of mischief, former NH Republican congressman Charlie Bass has penned a WaPo op-ed suggesting that Bernie Sanders’ robust poll numbers in NH may not matter because he will not be elgible to run for president in the Granite State as a Democrat. Here’s the logic:

[S]tate law makes clear that candidates must be registered members of the party on whose ballot line they wish to appear.
This is a problem for Sanders, who is not a registered Democrat. One might ask why the good senator can’t simply change his registration in his home state from socialist or independent to Democrat. The answer is that Vermont doesn’t have a party registration system, so he can’t. Similar issues arose with the candidacies of Al Gore and both George H.W. and George W. Bush because, like Vermont, Tennessee and Texas do not register voters by party. But Gore and the Bushes qualified for New Hampshire’s primary ballots because they could show that they had previously appeared on ballots as a Democrat and Republicans, respectively. In his last election, Sanders likewise won the Democratic primary in Vermont, but he declined the nomination and asked that his name not appear on the general election ballot as a Democrat.
In short, Sanders is not a Democrat, has not been elected as a Democrat, has never served as a Democrat and cannot plausibly claim, at least in New Hampshire, to be a Democrat.

According to Bass, a State Ballot Law Commission would rule on any challenge to Sanders’ ballot access, and he thinks it would be compelled to exclude Bernie. Presumably the courts could offer a way around the Commission; I’m not sure what the legal or constitutional rationale would be, but it would be a mite strange to hold that an independent could not contest a primary in which independent voters are allowed to participate. And even if Bernie was to be excluded, he could always run a write-in campaign (which have been known to succeed in NH, viz. Henry Cabot Lodge in 1964).
Whether or not Bass is pointing to a real problem in NH, it is a reminder that there could be issues for Sanders elsewhere, particularly in closed primary and caucus states deemed legally to be open only to registered Democrats. It would be a bit ironic if the candidate of people who view themselves as representing the “Democratic wing of the Democratic Party” wasn’t Democratic enough to get on the ballot.

In any event, the much-discussed advantages of calling oneself an “Independent” might have some consequences.

I’m not sure I can recall a major Newspaper of Record piece of political analysis that was shot down more quickly and more overwhelmingly than last weekend’s New York Times piece by Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman giving vent to red-state Democratic complaints that Hillary Clinton had spurned the family tradition by focusing on Obama Coalition voters. The fact that these complaints were echoed by Ron Fournier and David Brooks undermined them even more.
I added my two cents at the Washington Monthly after a lot of other critiques had appeared:

Unlike some bashers, I didn’t spend the Clinton years arguing that a “middle-out” strategy of the sort Joe Manchin wants HRC to pursue was a treasonous alternative to the “base-in” strategy that Obama more or less adopted in 2012. What Bill Clinton did made perfect sense for 1992 and 1996. It might have even worked for Al Gore in 2000 had he chosen one approach instead of alternating back-and-forth between defending the Clinton-Gore record and championing “the people versus the powerful.”
That was then and this is now, and as Nancy LeTourneau pointed out yesterday, the idea that the “Clinton strategy” puts more electoral votes in play than the “Obama strategy” is dubious to begin with. What do you think is a safer electoral vote strategy: one that concedes Kentucky and West Virginia, or one in which California has to be defended?
As for downballot support, I hate to be cynical about it, but by election day 2016 the only thing surer than red-state Democratic demands for more national money will be red-state demands that HRC keep the hell away from the campaigns of red-state Democrats.
Candidates hunt where the ducks are. The planted axiom of the Times piece is that somehow “America” should be identified with swing voters, no matter how scarce or numerous they are. That’s based in part on the entirely erroneous impression that a candidate who “reaches out” to voters beyond her or his “base” is going to face a more reasonable opposition. The experience of Barack Obama in the first two years of his first term is proof positive against that proposition, for the time being. The only thing that is going to produce a more reasonable opposition is another couple of general election beatings.
Truth is we wouldn’t be having this argument if HRC had a different last name. We’re supposed to believe there is some sort of “Clinton strategy” to which she should be loyal whether it makes any sense or not, 20 years after the last time Bill Clinton appeared on any ballot. I’m tempted to say it would be nice if the Big Dog himself took to the Times op-ed pages and knocked this down for good. But that would just perpetuate the notion HRC’s campaign belongs to her husband, and is best run as a wayback machine.

Even Jeb Bush knows that re-running an old campaign doesn’t work, now that his emulation of his brother’s steamroller Invisible Primary campaign of 1999 has not made him a strong, or even a weak, front-runner.

At TNR Brian Beutler has offered a fascinating interpretation of Hillary Clinton’s recent policy statements–notably her staunch support for the President’s immigration actions and legislation to go beyond it, and her speech this week on voting rights–as representing a presentation of popular and very progressive positions that also trap Republicans into unpopular positions.
But before going into this exposition, Beutler suggests Clinton is having to work against the family reputation for “triangulation.”

[F]or the better part of 20 years now, Bill Clinton’s presidency has been synonymous with a hazy political concept called triangulation. Since his advisers made the term famous, it has been used to describe everything from standard-issue compromise, to the willingness to confront reactionary elements in one’s own party (think Sister Souljah), to the appropriation of another political party’s policy ideas. The latter is as close to a proper definition as there is.

As I have done here at TDS before a number of years ago, I took the occasion at Washington Monthly to offer a different take on “triangulation” that among other things suggests HRC is not turning over some new leaf in order to atone for her sins.

Brian’s willingness to concede that “triangulation” has been defined in different ways (some progressives would say it is as simple and evil as sin itself) is refreshing, but I believe he ought to acknowledge that it’s a term used almost exclusively by Clinton critics. So far as I can tell, the only Clinton defender to have used it even briefly is its inventor, the diabolical Dick Morris. But even Morris (who used it narrowly to describe Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election strategy) did not argue for “appropriation of the other party’s policy ideas.” In a 2003 book (perhaps his last major utterance before leaping into permanent conservative punditry), Morris said:

The essence of triangulation is to use your party’s solutions to solve the other party’s problems. Use your tools to fix their car.

That’s not a bad description of what the Clinton administration tried to do between 1992 and 1994 on welfare reform, developing a proposal focused on creating strong incentives for recipients to move from public assistance to work without “hard” time limits or block grants. After 1994, of course, the administration was in no position to dictate the shape of welfare reform, and instead embarked on the long carrot-and-stick process that led to two presidential vetoes and then finally, after agonized deliberations, to the 1996 signature. You can argue that was a bad decision and/or that the compromise went too far, but it’s just not true the whole idea was to adopt conservative positions.
What the Clintonians argued at the time, and I will go to my grave believing they were right, is that it’s both politically and even morally wrong to look at public concerns and divide them into “Democratic issues” and “Republican issues.” The “solutions” can and usually are very, very different, but for the most part if big majorities of the American people are worried about something, you don’t just dismiss it or change the subject to “your” issues. Yet that’s pretty much how Democrats behaved before Clinton took office. And behaving that way again is certainly an option for the future.
Believing that (a) progressives ought to have their own policy solutions for all sorts of problems, and (b) the configuration of partisan forces at any given moment can change exactly how these solutions are deployed and whether they should be bargained over is consistent at the most basic level with what the Clintons did in office and what HRC seems to be doing today. If so, then the planted axiom in Beutler’s essay–that Hillary Clinton is repudiating her past and dealing with a rebuttable presumption that she’s eager to triangulate–is off-base.
The legend of triangulation is so powerful that it’s certainly understandable Beutler would try to confront it on HRC’s behalf–to triangulate against triangulation, in effect. But those who sympathize with her should probably more actively consider the possibility that she’s doing what she believes in the best way she knows how.

The second Washington Monthly/TDS roundtable discussion on the white working class, around Stan Greenberg’s new article, “The Battle for Working People Begins with Government Reform,” was initiated at WaMo this morning with my introduction. The roundtable essays will be published daily there and here.

One of the hardiest of perennials in progressive political discussion is the direction of non-college educated white voters–a.k.a., in the era of mass higher education, the White Working Class. There are a variety of reasons for this preoccupation. For one thing, much of the progressive policy legacy that has been extended and contested in recent decades is rooted in a New Deal Democratic Coalition squarely based on the white working class. That this group of voters is now arguably a component of the Republican “base” is a source of both political frustration and moral self-doubt for progressives.
At the practical level, steady declines in support among white working class voters have diminished Democrats’ geographical reach while increasing the party’s already heavy dependence on young and minority voters who do not participate proportionately in non-presidential elections. More generally, white working class Americans represent a puzzle to Democrats who constantly appeal to their economic self-interest and the positive role of government in their lives, but who nonetheless for hotly debated reasons continue to give a majority of their votes (at least in presidential elections) to a Republican Party deeply committed to trickle-down economics and limited–sometimes disabled–government. In the past many Democrats sought to neutralize alleged cultural conservatism among these voters by muting or even negating their own cultural liberalism, with mixed results and a lot of regrets. More recently, many progressives have come to rationalize the problem as a product of inherently reactionary southerners saturated with racial resentments, or dismiss it as a phenomenon prevailing among a shrinking minority of economic and demographic losers.
No progressive political analyst has devoted more passionate attention to this dilemma over the years than Stan Greenberg, an adviser to presidents and global leaders who first came to national prominence studying the Reagan Democrats of suburban Detroit. Greenberg has returned to this topic again and again in his polling and strategic work, and now is offering fresh data and analysis suggesting a path–though not an easy path–for a Democratic revival in key segments of the white working class, and among the unmarried women who overlap with the white working class by definition and by affinity of views.
Greenberg concedes that certain non-college educated white voters, the “most religiously observant, racially conscious and rural” voters in the South and the Mountain West, are mostly beyond reach of any progressive message at present; most also live in states with formidable Republican majorities. But beyond those limitations, he finds robust support for a progressive agenda and message that includes “policies to protect Medicare and Social Security, investments in infrastructure to modernize the country, a cluster of policies to help working families with child care and paid leave, and new efforts to ensure equal pay and family leave for women.” But among both white working class voters and unmarried women, what undermines support for this agenda is a deeply felt antipathy to government as corrupt, beholden to wealthy special interests, and incompetent to achieve progressive goals.
This is a dynamic that observers like Greenberg have been noting for years. But now, he believes, it has become critical:

We have arrived at a tipping point at the outset of the 2016 election cycle, where the demand to reform government is equal to or stronger than the demand to reform the economy. More accurately, reform can make it possible to use governmental policies to help the middle class. In short, it is reform first.

Greenberg is convinced the conventional wisdom that issues like cleaning up the influence of money over Congress or campaigns are bloodless “process issues” of interest only to “wine-track” voters is dead wrong.

White working-class and downscale voters are open to a bold Democratic agenda and prefer it to a conservative Republican vision for the country. To win their support, however, voters are demanding, with growing ferocity, that Democrats battle against America’s corrupted politics and for a government that really works for the average citizen.

This second part of the “reform” agenda is especially difficult for some progressives: a demand that government be streamlined to become a more efficient instrument for vindicating middle-class interests. This is, interestingly enough, of particular concern to women (both white working-class women and unmarried women generally).
Add together the middle-class economic agenda and a reform agenda and you have, says Greenberg, a potent message that can unite the Obama Coalition with a higher percentage of the white working class, with women from all backgrounds especially supportive.
The “reform first” strategy is sufficiently provocative that we at the Washington Monthly and at The Democratic Strategist (with whom we are collaborating) decided to focus this Second White Working Class Roundtable on this critical subject. The contributors will include John Judis; Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin; Mark Schmitt; Joan Walsh; Richard Kahlenberg; Karen Nussbaum; John Russo; and Jack Metzgar; Andrew Levison; and myself; others may join as well. Here at Political Animal we’ll roll out an essay each day beginning tomorrow, and will collect them at both The Democratic Strategist and at the White Working Class Roundtable website (http://thedemocraticstrategist-roundtables.com/) We may hold follow-up discussions as well.
We hope this will become a watershed discussion that will not only cast light on what progressives can do to appeal to a broader coalition of voters, but dispel some myths as well.

According to Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times:

Hillary Clinton has been telling people — a group of financial backers in Brooklyn, a house party in Iowa — that as president, she would appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn the Citizens United decision erasing limits on political spending by corporations.
“I will do everything I can to appoint Supreme Court justices who protect the right to vote and do not protect the right of billionaires to buy elections” is the way she puts it.

As I noted at the Washington Monthly, that’s good news indeed.

[T]his is what is known as “setting a litmus test” for judicial appointees, and it’s still frowned upon by Serious People who don’t quite understand that the ideological polarization of American politics has penetrated pretty deeply into the judicial system, professional legal circles, and law schools. That a small handful of legal precedents the Supreme Court can choose to preserve, modify, or reverse have risen to the level of requiring candidates for president to pay attention to them should hardly be surprising. And as Greenhouse explains, Republicans have been openly advocating judicial litmus tests on abortion and other “family values” issues for more than a generation. For nearly that long, it’s been inconceivable that a Democratic president would appoint a Justice who wasn’t committed to abortion rights, whatever they thought about the particular constitutional theories underlying Roe v. Wade.
So it’s a little late for anyone to piously cluck-cluck at HRC for elevating another issue to this level. Perhaps the recent cavalcade of hugely important SCOTUS decisions will change the CW about judicial litmus tests–or, as Greenhouse says, make the composition of the Court something you don’t just talk about at small gatherings:

During the presidential debates in 2012, neither candidate was asked a single question about the Supreme Court. If a Citizens United litmus test serves only to put the court on the campaign screen, where it urgently belongs, it will have done some good before the first vote is cast.

Amen to that.

Going into every election cycle, Republicans worried about their party’s extremism and MSM types determined to maintain equivalency between the two parties on every front both engage in an attempted demonstration that Democrats are moving far to the left. Usually Bill Clinton is used as some sort of benchmark of what is not “left,” though Republicans attacked him for alleged extremism as well.
We had a particularly weak example of this meme in a New York Times op-ed by conservative policy writer and occasional intraparty critic Peter Wehner, as I noted at Washington Monthly:

Ignoring the fact that most actual lefty Democrats think Barack Obama is too much like Bill Clinton, Wehner’s case almost entirely depends on contrasting the noble centrist Big Dog (who, of course, conservatives denounced as a godless socialist when he was actually in office) with the left-bent Obama.
And it’s a really terrible argument. Exhibit one for Wehner involves Clinton’s support for three-strikes-and-you’re-out and 100,000 cops, as though they are the same thing, with Eric Holder’s de-incarceration commitment. Keep up, Pete: Clinton, along with two-thirds of the Republican presidential field, has called for a reversal of “mass incarceration” policies. It’s not an ideological move in either direction so much as a rare and belated bipartisan recognition of what does and doesn’t work.
Exhibit two is welfare reform, and aside from ignoring everything Clinton did on low-income economic policy other than signing the 1996 welfare law, Wehner blandly accepts the race-drenched lie–and he’s smart enough to know that it is indeed widely interpreted to be a lie–from the 2012 Romney campaign that Obama has “loosened welfare-to-work requirements.” Then he tries to pivot to a contrast of Clinton’s shutdown of the “welfare entitlement” with Obama’s creation of a health care entitlement–without noting that Clinton had a health care proposal that was distinctly more “liberal” than Obama’s. Pretty big omission, I’d say.
It gets worse. Wehner suggests that unlike Clinton Obama wants to boost taxes on the wealthy, which conveniently ignores Clinton’s first budget. Speaking of the budget, Obama’s fiscal record is contrasted with Clinton’s without noting that Obama inherited not only a huge deficit but the worst economy since the 1930s. Wehner makes a fact-free assertion that Obama isn’t as friendly towards U.S. allies as Clinton was. And in a telling maneuver, he suddenly shifts the contrast from Clinton-versus-Obama to Clinton-versus-Clinton in mentioning the dispute over the Trans-Pacific Partnership, where HRC has been “non-committal.” Well, the crazy lefty Barack Obama hasn’t been “non-committal,” has he? Yes, a majority of congressional Democrats oppose him on TPP. But a majority of congressional Democrats also opposed Clinton on NAFTA and GATT, and denied him “fast-track” trade negotiating authority. Plus ca change….
Nonetheless, Wehner stumbles on to his pre-fab conclusion:

The Democratic Party is now a pre-Bill Clinton party, the result of Mr. Obama’s own ideological predilections and the coalition he has built.

In the very next breath he acknowledges that on the one issue where the Democratic Party really has “moved to the left,” same-sex marriage, the country has moved with it (and the “pre-Bill Clinton” Democratic Party had to move as well). And then he leaps to the circular argument that Republicans must be better representing the “center” of public opinion, because they’re doing so well in midterms!

I suspect Wehner’s object in the op-ed was to sanitize any criticism he might have of his own party in the immediate future. Others use the meme to claim the “center” for the GOP strictly by way of comparative extremism. Either way, the facts just are no friendly to the case, and are not getting any friendlier with the passage of time.