In the ongoing debate over the meaning of the Second Amendment, it is often forgotten that the NRA’s position on it was not endorsed by the courts until recently. I offered a quick refresher on that subject at New York:

In the minds of most gun enthusiasts, the idea that the Second Amendment was consciously designed by the Founders as a bedrock right to horde shooting irons, either for self-protection or to overthrow future “tyrants,” is beyond question. But as retired Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens reminds us today, the personal right to bear arms as a premise of constitutional law is actually less than a decade old.

“For over 200 years after the adoption of the Second Amendment, it was uniformly understood as not placing any limit on either federal or state authority to enact gun control legislation. In 1939 the Supreme Court unanimously held that Congress could prohibit the possession of a sawed-off shotgun because that weapon had no reasonable relation to the preservation or efficiency of a ‘well regulated militia.'”

That precedent held until June of 2008, when by a 5–4 margin in the case of District of Columbia v. Heller the court finally recognized a right to civilian firearm ownership for self-protection.

Stevens wrote the main dissenting opinion in that case, which featured this argument:

“Neither the text of the Amendment nor the arguments advanced by its proponents evidenced the slightest interest in limiting any legislature’s authority to regulate private civilian uses of firearms. Specifically, there is no indication that the Framers of the Amendment intended to enshrine the common-law right of self-defense in the Constitution.”

It wasn’t until 2010, in the case of McDonald v. Chicago that another 5–4 Supreme Court majority determined that its novel interpretation of personal, civilian gun rights would be binding on the states via the 14th Amendment. Again Stevens wrote the principal dissent, arguing that even if there’s some personal right to bear arms outside the militia context, it’s hardly the sort of “liberty interest” that requires its imposition on the states.

This treatment of the subject is far, far away from the standard conservative treatment of the Second Amendment as the most fundamental right of them all, extending not just to the sawed-off shotguns Congress was regulating in 1939 to all sorts of military and quasi-military weapons.

Yes, Stevens was in the minority in those two landmark cases, but the point to keep in mind is that the arguments about the Second Amendment assumed as being self-evidently true by gun rights advocates these days are, from the point of view of constitutional law, fragile and recent. And even conservative jurists were dismayed by the gun lobby’s efforts to change constitutional law on this subject, as Stevens points out:

“During the years when Warren Burger was our chief justice, from 1969 to 1986, no judge, federal or state, as far as I am aware, expressed any doubt as to the limited coverage of that [Second] amendment. When organizations like the National Rifle Association disagreed with that position and began their campaign claiming that federal regulation of firearms curtailed Second Amendment rights, Chief Justice Burger publicly characterized the N.R.A. as perpetrating ‘one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.'”

Stevens understands how much water has gone over that particular dam in the years since the Heller decision. And so he is now advocating a constitutional amendment to remove the Second Amendment altogether, as “a relic of the 18th century” that is enabling gun violence.

Constitutional amendments, of course, are all but impossible to enact these days, and the zeal, paranoia, and vast resources the gun lobby would bring to bear in opposition to any effort to remove the Second Amendment make that idea a total nonstarter. What’s less fanciful is the possibility that a Democratic president or two could make Supreme Court appointments leading to a partial or even total reversal of the not-so-well-established precedent of Heller.

Today’s crowded news cycle included the death of former Georgia governor and senator Zell Miller. Because many people from outside his native state have a limited view of his career, which I observed from up close, I wrote an assessment for New York:

Most news consumers remember Zell Miller, if they remember him at all, for his abrasive attacks on John Kerry — the presidential nominee of the party to which Miller had belonged for his entire, long life — at the 2004 Republican National Convention. Older folk may remember his keynote address at the 1992 Democratic Convention that nominated his close friend Bill Clinton.

People in his home state of Georgia are probably aware of additional aspects of Miller’s career, including his many years in elected office (he was lieutenant governor from 1975 until 1991, and governor from 1991 to 1999, before an appointed stint in the Senate from 2000 until 2005). They also know about his legacy initiative, the much-praised and imitated lottery-supported HOPE Scholarship program, which made college affordable for many hundreds of thousands of young Georgians while boosting academic standards at the state’s public colleges and universities by getting talented kids to stay in-state.

The length of Miller’s time in the public spotlight, and the wildly varying directions it took him, have often been encapsulated by the nickname he acquired from critics early on: “Zig-Zag Zell.” And the taunt goes back a lot further than his bookend Democratic and Republican convention addresses. Early on Miller ran twice for Congress in his native North Georgia mountains as an opponent of civil-rights legislation (a posture for which he later apologized), and then served as chief of staff for the state’s infamous segregationist governor Lester Maddox. But by 1974, Miller had managed to reframe himself as a relatively progressive Democrat in running for lieutenant governor, and by 1980 was most definitely the “liberal” candidate challenging the old reformed segregationist Herman Talmadge (losing in a Democratic runoff).

Elected governor in 1990 by running to the left of former ambassador and Atlanta mayor Andrew Young and future governor Roy Barnes, Miller had a reasonably progressive record centered on HOPE and unprecedented appointments of women and minorities to executive and judicial offices. After his association with Clinton very nearly earned him defeat in 1994 (his Republican opponent ran hundreds of ads featuring Miller’s Democratic Convention speech, particularly the line, delivered in Zell’s mountain twang: “BILL CLINTON FEELS YORE PAIN”), he lost his zest for national Democratic politics. He was settling into multiple university teaching gigs and political retirement until he shocked most people he knew by accepting a Senate appointment when Paul Coverdell died in 2000.

No one was more shocked than I was, as his former (from 1992 through 1994) federal-state relations director, who had accompanied him to Washington often enough to understand his intense antipathy to the city and its culture. It surprised me less when he hated the Senate, and began lashing out at his Senate Democratic colleagues and the party to which he nominally owed allegiance. In 2003, he published a strange memoir (titled, for maximum book sales to conservatives, A National Party No More: The Conscience of a Conservative Democrat), which enveloped a proud account of his own progressive record in brief but quote-worthy attacks on Democrats. Soon afterwards, he completed his apostasy with his RNC speech embracing George W. Bush and savaging his former colleague John Kerry.

For a while there, Miller was like fellow arch-Appalachian Andrew Johnson reincarnated, turning on former friends and embracing former enemies with equal passion. It seemed there was no GOP candidate he wasn’t willing to support, the nadir probably being his establishment of a group called Democrats for Santorum, just as the right-wing senator was going down the tubes in the 2006 elections in Pennsylvania.

But in the last few years, as his health declined and he became more distant from politics, the fiery mountaineer seemed to mellow. He mended fences with old Democratic friends and advisers James Carville and Paul Begala (whom he first introduced to Bill Clinton). And in his last major political endorsement, in 2014, he supported Democrat Michelle Nunn’s Senate campaign.

You can think of that as a final “zig-zag,” or as a bit of a homecoming. I personally think it reflected a complicated and conflicted man who often regretted his own political impulses, and had more of a sense of humor about it all than most people realized.

I had some evidence for that suspicion. Back when it appeared, I wrote a review of A National Party No More that basically suggested Miller had lost his bearings after going to the Senate. The title was “Zell Bent.” A few months later a friend who had visited his Senate office brought me a handwritten note from my former boss (who was normally proper but not affectionate towards staff) that read: “Your review was fair and honest, and I remain your friend and admirer.” And he signed it “Zell Bent.”

He was one of a kind, and should be remembered for more than his zig-zags.

In watching the ever-changing Senate landscape for this November, an unexpected development from West Virginia caught my eye. Here’s my explanation from New York:

Of all the “Trump Ten” Democratic senators from states carried by the president in 2016 who are facing reelection this November, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin is fighting the strongest MAGA tide. Trump won his highest percentage in the Mountain State, defeating Hillary Clinton by a 69/26 margin. Enthusiasm for the 45th president in West Virginia has not flagged; according to Gallup, his average job approval rating in the state during 2017 was 61 percent — again, the highest in the country.

So despite Manchin’s popularity in the state (his job approval ratio as of the end of 2017, according to Morning Consult, was 52/36), he attracted two A-list Republican opponents: U.S. Representative Evan Jenkins, who represents coal country’s Third Congressional District, and Attorney General Pat Morrisey. But as a May 8 primary approaches, it’s a third candidate who has all the momentum and is seriously worrying Republicans: former mine owner Dan Blankenship. A prominent figure in West Virginia economic and political life for years, Blankenship gained national notoriety during his prosecution by the Justice Department for his alleged role in a 2010 mine explosion in West Virginia that killed 29 workers. He was acquitted of the felony charges the Feds wanted, but was convicted on a misdemeanor charge of conspiring to violate federal mine safety standards, and served a year in a federal prison in California.

Now Blankenship has launched an unlikely Senate bid, which appears largely designed to reboot his brand. Thanks to his high name ID, his wealth, and his willingness to go after his GOP opponents, he’s soon become a formidable candidate, as Politico reports:

“Blankenship’s rise has been driven in part by his self-financed TV ads. Since launching his campaign in late November, Blankenship has spent over $1.1 million on roughly a dozen commercials, according to media buying totals, far surpassing his opponents. Morrisey has so far spent nothing on TV ads and Jenkins only about $38,000.

“Blankenship has used the ads to paint his rivals as insufficiently conservative, blasting Jenkins over his positions on Obamacare and climate change, and Morrisey on abortion. He’s positioned himself as an unshakable ally of President Donald Trump, who received 68 percent of the vote in the state.”

Jenkins is somewhat vulnerable as a former longtime Democratic state legislator who only became a Republican in 2013 when he decided to run for Congress. And Blankenship has gone after Morrisey for his law firm’s links to pharmaceutical companies, and his wife’s law firm’s representation of Planned Parenthood.

Objective public polls in this contest are hard to come by, but the consensus is that the race has become a close three-way fight. A new Morrisey-commissioned poll shows Jenkins dropping into third place behind Blankenship, who is right behind Morrisey.

A Manchin–Blankenship general election would be nasty and personal. The senator has said of the mine owner: “I believe Don has blood on his hands.” And Blankenship has charged that Manchin, who was governor at the time of the mine explosion, conspired with Barack Obama (not a popular figure in West Virginia) to send him to the hoosegow.

National Republicans understandably fear that this kind of grudge match would move a key Senate race away from the partisan and ideological issues where they have a big advantage in West Virginia. And even if Blankenship fades before May 8, he’s doing some damage to the other two candidates.

West Virginians seem split over Blankenship’s culpability in the death of the miners; their tendency to forgive him reflects the ancient dependence of the state on vanishing coal jobs and their defensiveness about federal efforts to regulate the industry. But if Blankenship makes it through the GOP primary, voters will have to come to grips with his decidedly mixed legacy.

And Joe Manchin would not be the only candidate with a bullseye on his back.

Late in the evening of the special election in PA-18 Tuesday night, before it was clear Democrat Conor Lamb had won, I offered some reflections at New York on how shocking it was that this race was even competitive.

While we don’t yet have a clear winner in this election, we do have a clear loser: the Republican Party. This was, as I argued some time ago, the “no-excuses” special election for the GOP. This congressional district is strongly Republican and strongly pro-Trump. Saccone wasn’t a perfect candidate, but he wasn’t a disaster like Roy Moore, either: He had enough outside money and enough get-out-the-vote help from the national party and conservative groups to counteract anything Lamb could throw at him. Plus, he had massive support from the president, his family, and his administration, in an iconic Trump Country district that almost perfectly typified the Rust Belt areas that decided the presidency. If Lamb wins, it will represent a historic disaster for the GOP. If Saccone wins, it will still send a stark warning sign to the majority party in the House as we head toward November.

Republican message-meister Frank Luntz put it plainly this evening:

Whatever the outcome tonight, #PA18 is an extremely bad omen for the @GOP.

Make no mistake: It is a leaning Republican district that is leaning no more.

— Frank Luntz (@FrankLuntz) March 14, 2018

Yes, this is a special election; some might imagine that in a regular election, such as the one in November, more Republican voters will show up. The problem with that hypothesis is that turnout today was at full midterm levels. There’s no reason to think turnout patterns in November will be more favorable for the GOP, particularly given the massive Trump administration attention that this district got during this contest.

Another Republican rationalization we have already heard from the Washington Examiner’s Salena Zito is that Conor Lamb is not a real Democrat (because he was nominated by a convention and didn’t have to win the votes of left-bent primary voters), and thus his performance does not show how real Democrats will do in November. But, by any standard, Saccone is a real Republican who ran more than ten points behind the normal GOP vote in Pennsylvania’s 18th district. And Lamb was lifted to parity with Saccone by the very same labor movement — battered and diminished as it is — that will be fighting for Democrats in swing districts all over the country. Dismiss labor, dismiss energized rank-and-file Democrats, and dismiss the ability of the Donkey Party to find suitable candidates like Lamb, and you’re well on the way to underestimating the likelihood of a Democratic wave in November.

Yes, a lot of things can change between now and then. But we are now seeing a regular pattern of Democratic over-performance in special elections — whether they ultimately win or lose — spanning the entire Trump administration so far. This election may just be another data point among many, but put them together and they unambiguously show big trouble for Trump and his party. To paraphrase Frank Sinatra, if they can’t make it there (in southwest Pennsylvania), they can’t make it anywhere. And it’s time they woke up and smelled the bitter coffee.

As of this writing, Saccone still hasn’t conceded, despite his cause looking hopeless. But it could be some time before his party recovers from this one.

As a transplanted Georgia Cracker who now lives in California, I am acutely aware of the low mutual esteem between the President of the United States and the citizens of the nation’s largest state. So his impending trip to California led me to explain it all at New York.

For a president who managed to spend $13.5 million on travel in one year, Donald Trump actually doesn’t get out that much. As the reigning expert on the subject explains, his travel is mostly limited and predictable. He mostly travels to his other homes:

“’He seems to be traveling a lot, but so much of it seems to be traveling to second homes,’ said Brendan Doherty, a political science professor at the U.S. Naval Academy who tracks presidential travel.”

If you expand the definition of “second homes” to hotels he owns, then that covers an awful lot of his travel:

“Except for foreign trips, Trump has spent only one night of his presidency at a hotel he didn’t own. Last August, he slept in Phoenix after a rally before leaving for Reno the next morning.”

While Trump has certainly had the means throughout his life to develop and indulge sophisticated travel tastes, his habits as president are more in keeping with the persona he’s developed as a salt-of-the-earth dude whose interests beyond work are limited to golf, rasslin’ matches, beauty pageants and the occasional white nationalist rally. As the expert Doherty put it: “He seems to like to go places where he’s already very popular or is likely to get a raucous welcome.”

These precedents are freshly relevant as Trump prepares for his first trip to California next week. It’s notable for a couple of reasons. First of all, this is the latest in a presidency that a POTUS has ventured into California since FDR. Back then, of course, presidential trips to the West Coast involved long train trips, not quick flights. And California was not what it is now: a demographic, economic, and political behemoth. From a political perspective alone, the state has 55 electoral votes, a big batch of competitive House districts, and a vast number of campaign donors that give it a reputation as a “political ATM.”

The state also has a reputation, however, as a bastion of the Resistance, and a place where Trump is profoundly unpopular. His trip does not seem well designed to change that perception:

“Sources familiar with Trump’s plans say he is expected to visit California to the US-Mexico border to look at border wall prototypes in the San Diego area.”

Trump critics in California are referring to the trip sardonically as a “border wall hallucination tour.” And hallucination or not, a border wall is not an idea Californians like: a survey last fall showed them disapproving of it by a 73/24 margin. So why is Trump rubbing their noses in it?

This seems to be part of an administration-wide effort to treat the nation’s largest state not as an object of loving persuasion but as a target, and as a demon-figure for the edification and excitement of people in Trump Country. Here’s how CNN sums it up:

“President Donald Trump and his administration have very much tied his political efforts to California by essentially declaring a policy war on the Golden State. On immigration, legalized marijuana, climate change and more, California is the chief policy foil of the White House.”

That strategy was underlined earlier this week when the attorney general of the United States chose to travel to Sacramento to shriek at state officials and the mayor of Oakland about California’s “sanctuary” policies that let local law-enforcement officials choose to limit cooperation with ICE.

Now the idea of California being the source of all evil is hardly novel in the annals of conservative agitprop, at least since the GOP lost its grip on the state in the 21st century. With the state’s economy booming and the state’s budget in balance, it’s not as easy as it used to be to claim the place is one big dystopia. But on the cultural front, there’s always an audience for those who claim California is a hellscape of hippies and sodomites and snooty Hollywood and Silicon Valley elites and illegal aliens, all plotting to destroy the American Dream.

It’s not entirely clear how California Republicans feel about their state becoming a comprehensive punching bag for their administration in Washington. Some represent constituencies that don’t like hippies or immigrants much more than Trump does. But all in all, it can’t be helpful for them that POTUS and his representatives only come to California to attack it.