After hearing and reading many Republican efforts to lower the stakes involved in the choice of a replacement for Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court, I offered this cautionary analysis at New York:

As Washington, D.C., girds its loins for the biggest Supreme Court confirmation fight since 1991 (when the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill saga riveted the country), conservatives are already working overtime to lull progressives to sleep by claiming fears a Kennedy replacement would help form a five-justice bloc ready to unravel abortion rights are exaggerated. The Wall Street Journal editorial board is offering the template for other “nothing to see here” takes:

“[T]he predictions of doom for abortion … rights began within minutes of Anthony Kennedy’s resignation last week. These predictions are almost certainly wrong.

“[T]his is what Democrats and their media allies always say. They said it in 1987 when Justice Kennedy was nominated. They said it in 1990 about David Souter, again about Clarence Thomas in 1991, John Roberts and Samuel Alito in 2005, and Neil Gorsuch in 2017. They even claimed the Chief Justice might overturn Roe because his wife is a Roman Catholic. Mrs. Roberts is still waiting to write her first opinion.”

Actually, “they” didn’t say that about Roberts or Alito or Gorsuch. Yes, the likelihood that these nominees would someday take advantage of the opportunity to overturn or greatly modify Roe v. Wade were factors in the debates over their confirmation, but nobody argued abortion rights were in imminent danger from placing any of them individually on the Court. During the period when Kennedy and Souter and Thomas joined the Court, there was every reason to fear that abortion rights were fragile, until Souter and Kennedy (along with Reagan nominee Sandra Day O’Connor) formed a new if narrow majority in the 1992 decision in Casey v. Planned Parenthood.

It is no exaggeration to say that the current era of conservative judicial politics really began with backlash against the “perfidy” of Republican-appointed justices like Souter and Kennedy and O’Connor in reinforcing abortion rights. That is why Donald Trump won so much conservative street cred by creating an official, exclusive list of SCOTUS prospects that would be vetted by the fiercely anti-Roe legal activists of the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation. Here’s how legal journalist Jeffrey Toobin described the views of chief Trump judge-vetter Leonard Leo, who is on leave from the Federalist Society:

“According to Leo, the vast majority of abortions are a consequence of voluntary, consensual sexual encounters, an opinion that influences his view of the procedure.’We can have a debate about abortion,” he told me. “It’s a very simple one for me. It’s an act of force. It’s a threat to human life. It’s just that simple …’

“As Edward Whelan, a prominent conservative legal activist and blogger, wrote recently, ‘No one has been more dedicated to the enterprise of building a Supreme Court that will overturn Roe v. Wade than the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo.'”

The odds of a secret supporter of abortion rights sneaking through a process that leads from Leo to Trump (who promised explicitly to produce a Court that would overturn Roe) are more than zero, but they are extremely low.

Like some other naysayers about the threat to Roe, the Journal editorial places a lot of stock in conservative respect for judicial precedents:

“The liberal line is always that Roe hangs by a judicial thread, and one more conservative Justice will doom it. Yet Roe still stands after nearly five decades. Our guess is that this will be true even if President Trump nominates another Justice Gorsuch. The reason is the power of stare decisis (or precedent), and how conservatives view the role of the Court in supporting the credibility of the law.”

Roe’s survival has in fact become steadily less, not more, certain, for the very simple reason that over the years one of America’s two national political parties has been completely taken over by politicians who want to see it reversed. The once-robust tribe of pro-choice Republicans is about to become extinct in the U.S. House, and is limited to two senators. The official position of the GOP as expressed in its national party platform goes far, far beyond reversing Roe and embraces enshrining fetal personhood in the U.S. Constitution. Now we have a Republican president whose relationship with conservative activists and particularly to white conservative Evangelicals depends heavily on an agreement to conduct a counter-revolution on the Court, a Republican Senate, and a judicial selection system created to root out constitutional heresy. Yet the Journal would have us believe it just won’t happen because it hasn’t happened yet.

Yes, it’s true the post-Kennedy Court with a second Trump justice might not overturn Roe and Casey immediately. They certainly don’t have to go the whole hog in order to significantly restrict abortion rights. The truth is that the Court experienced another key inflection point in 2016 in the Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt case in which Kennedy was one of five justices who headed off a massive wave of TRAP (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers) laws being enacted by Republican-controlled state legislatures. A new justice replacing Kennedy could instantly form a majority ready to give a green light to state laws that could make the theoretical right to an abortion a dead letter in many red states with abortion clinics being run out of business. To look at it another way, runaway TRAP laws (justified by spurious health requirements) could create a practical situation much like the pre-Roe environment, when women needed the means to travel to more liberal states to secure an abortion.

Still, the possibility of a full reversal of Roe — at once or in stages — should not be underestimated. Yes, stare decisis (the judicial principle of respect for Supreme Court precedents) will complicate the process, but it’s hardly a straitjacket once a majority decides to overturn a precedent believed to be wrongly decided. As even the Journal notes, the Court just got through overturning a 40-year precedent in the Janus v. AFSCME labor case. Conservative justices, moreover, have in recent years arguably transformed constitutional law on a host of subjects ranging from campaign finance to voting rights to regulation of businesses. Even the Roberts Court’s most famous decision that disappointed conservatives, the NFIB v. Sebelius case on Obamacare, reversed decades of Commerce Clause precedents.

The reality is that conservatives have grown used to hiding the ball on Roe v. Wade and abortion policy — a habit that parallels the old (and still enduring) claim of Confederate apologists that the Lost Cause was about states’ rights rather than slavery. Democrats shouldn’t buy one any more than the other.

Addressing the SCOTUS fight, Eric Levitz notes at New York Magazine that “Fortunately for Democrats, the arguments that could ostensibly sway Collins and Murkowski are roughly the same as those that the party wishes to disseminate to female swing voters in suburban congressional districts this fall: Supporting the Republican Party is a threat to your health, and every woman’s reproductive autonomy….Whether that message will do more for the Democrats than a high-profile fight over Kennedy’s replacement will do for GOP turnout is unknowable…The Democratic Party’s initial turnout advantage derived from its base’s eagerness to rectify a traumatic loss — and the Republican base’s complacency, in the face of triumph. In all likelihood, Kennedy’s replacement will be confirmed more than a month before the midterms. Conservatives will have locked in a far-right majority; liberals will be reeling from nightmare visions of Roe’s imminent demise. It isn’t hard to see how such circumstances could exacerbate the GOP’s turnout problem, rather than mitigating it….In the first generic ballot poll taken after Kennedy’s retirement, Quinnipiac University puts the Democratic lead at nine percentage points — three points higher than it was in early June.”

Although Democrats failed to prevent the enactment of one of the largest transfers of wealth from working Americans to the already-rich in history, a.k.a. the Republican tax bill, Dems do have an opportunity to make it a potent election issue.  As Seth Hanlon writes in “How the Tax Act Embodies the Republican Culture of Corruption” at The American Prospect, “Last year, Gallup found that 63 percent of Americans believed that upper-income Americans pay too little in taxes, and 67 percent believed that corporations pay too little. Last fall, as the tax push began to heat up, more than twice as many Americans wanted to raise tax rates on large businesses and corporations as Americans who wanted to lower them. Even most Republicans wanted to either raise corporate tax rates or keep them where they were. These preferences are not terribly surprising at a time when both after-tax corporate profits and inequality are at record highs…The end result was a tax law that, by slashing corporate taxes, imposing a broad-based tax increase on individuals, and sabotaging the health-care system, produces shocking results in the long term: By 2027, 83 percent of the benefits flow to the top 1 percent, while most households actually see their taxes go up. Only a political system deeply corrupted by corporate political spending could have produced such a result.”

Medicaid expansion is a leading midterm issue in Georgia and other states where Republicans have obstructed it. At The Upshot, Aaron E. Carroll, a professor of pediatrics at Indiana University School of Medicine who blogs on health research and policy at The Incidental Economist, provides an update, “Finally, Some Answers on the Effects of Medicaid Expansion,”which Democratic campaigns in these states may find of interest: “Since the start of Medicaid expansion, 77 studies, most of them quasi-experimental in design, have been published. They include 440 distinct analyses. More than 60 percent of them found a significant effect of the Medicaid expansion that was consistent with the goals of the Affordable Care Act…Only 4 percent reported findings that showed the Medicaid expansion had a negative effect, and 35 percent reported no significant findings…After the Medicaid expansion, insurance coverage improved and the use of health services increased…The evidence to date is — if anything — positive. As Olena Mazurenko, the lead author of the systematic review, wrote to me, “With dozens of scientific analyses spanning multiple years, the best evidence we currently have suggests that Medicaid expansion greatly improved access to care, generally improved quality of care, and to a lesser degree, positively affected people’s health.”

I agree with the argument that the Democratic midterm elections strategy can’t be all about Trump. At the same time, however, it can’t not be about Trump to some extent, given the congressional Republicans support of his worst policies and the statistical relationship between presidential approval rates and midterm election outcomes. All of which makes Pulitzer Prize winner David K. Johnston’s New York Times article, “How to Make Trump’s Tax Returns Public” of extra interest. Johnston writes of obtaining Trump’s tax returns, “The attorney general could, however, easily gain that authority. All that’s needed is for Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the New York State Police or the state Department of Taxation and Finance to make a request, and the authority would be granted to her…A state or county criminal investigation that begins with abuse of the Donald J. Trump Foundation need not be limited to violations of charity and election law. It can also examine his personal and business tax filings and, in the process, lawfully put his tax returns in the public record.”

Among the longer-term strategic considerations Democrats should be thinking about is adding a little sunshine to the ways ballots are counted across the nation. In his NYT letter to the editor, Jonathan D. Simon, author of “CODE RED: Computerized Elections and the War on American Democracy,” makes a frequently-overlooked point that merits consideration, regarding the way we count votes in American elections: “If we want our democracy back — if we want to ensure that it is the people, not the programmers or hackers, setting our national direction — we must insist not just on the right to vote but also on the right (and the duty) to count those votes in public.”

Amanda Marcotte shines a light on the destructive distortions about immigrants that many Americans still embrace. As Marcotte writes at Salon (via Alternet), “…native-born citizens drastically overestimated how many immigrants there are. Native-born Americans estimated that 36 percent of the population were legal immigrants, when the reality is around 10 percent…less than 1 percent of immigrants to the United States are from North Africa, but respondents estimated it was closer to 8.5 percent. About 4 percent of come from the Middle East, but survey respondents put the number closer to 12 percent. Only about 10 percent of immigrants are Muslim, but Americans guessed it was over 22 percent. And while more than 60 percent of immigrants are Christian, respondents estimated the number to be less than 40 percent…Only 5.5 percent of immigrants are unemployed and 13.6 percent live in poverty, but native-born Americans put the numbers at 26 percent and 35 percent, respectively…Conservatives, unsurprisingly, had more distorted views than liberals. Low-skilled workers who work in industries that employ a large number of immigrants also had more distorted views. Interestingly, however, high-skilled workers who also had a large share of immigrant colleagues — such as computer programmers — while still off in their estimates, were closer to the mark.”

At npr.org Kelsey Snell and Scott Detrow see a healthy mix of both progressives and moderates invigorating the Democratic party, “Looking back at the party’s key electoral victories over the past year, many Democratic leaders see a theme: Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, Alabama Sen. Doug Jones, and Pennsylvania Rep. Conor Lamb are all low-key centrists who campaigned on local issues and an overall message of competence and outreach…Joe Trippi, a top strategist on the Jones campaign, sees that approach as the best way for Democrats to take back the House. “When you get that confrontational tone, what you do is drive people to their corners,” he said…But while moderates are advancing in this year’s most critical House districts and Senate races, there’s no question that Democratic energy overall is shifting to the left…”We have had real success in moving the ideology of the Democratic Party to be a pro-worker party to stand up to the billionaire class,” Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said. Surveying the political landscape, the independent senator and his political advisers see a much different party than the one whose nomination Sanders ran for in 2016.”

The following post by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

I posted about this a while ago but the release of new and interesting data by Pew is a good reason to revisit the topic.

Here are three things we know about the American public and immigration.

1. The American public is becoming more favorable, not less favorable, toward immigration. In fact, the public is not only more favorable but it is now at historically high levels of favorability toward immigration and immigrants. New Pew data tell us:

* The percent saying legal immigration should be decreased has gone down fairly steadily from 53 percent in 2001 to 24 percent today, while the percent saying it should be increased has gone from 10 to 32 percent. Even among Republicans there’s been a 10 point fall in the “decreased” percentage and a 7 point rise in the “increased” percentage.

* 69 percent of the public says they are “sympathetic” toward undocumented immigrants who are in the US illegally. This includes a 48 percent sympathetic/49 percent unsympathetic view among Republicans.

* Overall, by 71 to 20 percent, the public believes immigrants mostly fill jobs US citizens don’t want and by 65 to 26 percent, they say undocumented immigrants are no more likely to commit crimes than US citizens. The analogous figures among Republicans are 57-30 and 46-42.

* The public overwhelmingly believes (67 percent) that giving people who come to the US illegally a way to gain legal status does not constitute a “reward” for wrongdoing. Just 27 percent endorse the reward for wrongdoing perspective. Even among Republicans, the split on this question is very close to even (46/47).

* Finally, fewer and fewer people say they are bothered by encountering immigrants who speak little English. Currently, the not bothered/bothered split is 73-26. And 59 percent of Republicans put themselves in the not bothered category.

2. The places with the most immigration tend to be the ones least supportive of Trump and a hard line on immigration. Conversely, of course, if the exposure to immigrants is limited, that tends to correlate with high support for Trump and being hostile to immigration. And yet…despite a public that’s trending favorable toward immigrants, especially in areas where they are common, we have the third thing we know about the public and immigration:

3. Anti-immigrant feelings now have more political salience than they have had a very long time and that is hurting the Democrats. It is clearly the case that for an important minority of–primarily white noncollege–voters, they feel intensely enough about this issue to respond positively to anti-immigrant messages and candidates. Trump would not be President if this were not true. And Trump and the GOP–as their conduct this election cycle underscores–clearly hope they can continue to use this issue to keep these voters away from the Democratic party, a strategy that has worked to perfection in Rustbelt and other declining areas of the country.

Can the Democrats resolve this immigration paradox so they do not suffer politically for being pro-immigrant in country that is increasingly pro-immigrant? We shall see. But it would appear they need to think carefully about how to reach voters outside of blue America who do not start with the presumption that all immigration is completely beneficial. They may have concerns about it, both cultural and economic, despite holding at least some positive feelings about immigrants and immigration (as the Pew data on Republican immigration views suggests). It would be wise for Democrats to take these concerns seriously and not reflexively tar such people as “racist”, which, as Thomas Edsall noted in his most recent New York Times column, simply drives them into Trump’s hands .

Otherwise,the immigration paradox is likely to continue, and continue to hurt the Democrats.

The recent craziness in the U.S. House, and the horrible images of kids in cages from the border, have not been good for the GOP. But as I explained at New York, there could be a lot more trouble where that came from.

With the dismal failure of two House Republican immigration bills in the last couple of weeks (bills that were doomed in the Senate in any event), there’s a sense that the Great Immigration Debate of 2018 in the GOP is over. After all, a lot of the recent agitation on the issue in the House was motivated by the desire of two different factions of Republican lawmakers — the moderates led by Representatives Jeff Denham of California and Carlos Curbelo of Florida, and the hard-liners centered in the House Freedom Caucus — to get their views on record before the November midterms. Everybody got to vote on the hard-core Goodlatte bill and the slightly less draconian compromise proposal — nicknamed Goodlatte II — so that’s all that had to happen, right?

Maybe, but maybe not. There are several future developments that could force the issue back into the limelight:

(1) A renewed bipartisan push to vote on Dreamers and more. The latest flurry of failed legislative activity in the House was successful in one limited respect: it did indeed head off a discharge petition (a rare procedure to bypass committees and the congressional leadership) that some of the GOP moderates were pushing — with the support of the entire Democratic caucus — that would have forced votes on a whole spectrum of immigration proposals, with the original DREAM Act being the most likely survivor of the process. Now that it has led to yet another dead end, it’s possible the discharge petition idea could come back.

If that looks like it could happen, you can expect Paul Ryan and the leadership to shout and scream about the perfidy of giving the godless Democrats power over the House floor schedule, at the risk of damaging vulnerable members like Denham and Curbelo, who are needed to keep the gavel out of Nancy Pelosi’s hands. Ultimately opponents of bipartisan immigration legislation would rely on VERY LOUD Trump promises to kill any such abomination should it arrive at his desk.

(2) A renewed uproar over the Trump administration’s treatment of migrant families. When the crisis over family separation at the border blew up in late June, it looked momentarily like Congress would be forced to act to stop the separations — until the president abruptly acted with an executive order that at least temporarily reversed his administration’s toxic policies. If the growing realization that kids are still being detained (just with their parents) revives the big public furor, and/or the courts strike down Trump’s executive order, the pressure for legislation could ramp right back up. But it’s not at all clear that any of the necessary parties to a quick legislative fix (House Republicans, Senate Democrats, or Trump) would go along with a narrow bill instead of insisting on tying it to some broader objective. As Politico reports, Trump might not go along at all:

“Although top White House officials support such a fix, one told POLITICO that he wasn’t sure the president would sign anything without getting concessions from Democrats. Indeed, a House GOP source said Trump was asking for wall money to be included in any standalone legislation keeping families together — a nonstarter for many lawmakers.”

If as some observers suspect, Trump and his top immigration adviser Stephen Miller exult in border chaos and think the prominence of the immigration issue is a good way to motivate the GOP base heading toward the midterms, then the odds of a border fix could go way down. But that would not eliminate the pressure on congressional Republicans to do something.

(3) The courts force a DACA crisis. The family-separation issue isn’t the only one where action in the federal judiciary could force immigration into the headlines and onto the congressional agenda. The long-simmering conservative legal challenge to Obama’s original DACA executive order — which created a protected category for immigrants who came to the U.S. illegally as children — could reach at least temporary fruition as well, as Rachel Bade explains:

“A conservative-leaning federal court in Texas is expected to rule on the constitutionality of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program as early as mid-July, pushing the issue to the fore again.

“The case, brought by Texas and several other Republican-dominated southern states, could contradict a previous court’s decision that halted Trump’s move to end DACA. The result could be that Dreamers again face the risk of deportation unless the Supreme Court — or Congress — weighs in.”

Trump could again use the peril to Dreamers as leverage to demand his own shifting but politically explosive set of immigration policy goals. And the status of Dreamers as the most politically attractive subcategory of undocumented immigrants will again put vulnerable Republicans on the spot.

(4) Trump threatens a government shutdown. Even if Republicans avoid a crisis forced by public opinion or the courts, their own president is perfectly capable of generating one all by himself, and has already threatened to do so. In March and again in April, the president publicly suggested killing must-pass appropriations legislation at the end of September (when the omnibus appropriations measure he grudgingly signed runs out) if he doesn’t get full funding for his border wall. And it apparently came up again in June during a private meeting on spending plans, as Burgess Everett reported:

“Trump fumed at senators and his own staff about the $1.6 billion the Senate is planning to send him this fall, according to two people familiar with the meeting. Trump wants the full $25 billion upfront and doesn’t understand why Congress is going to supply him funds in a piecemeal fashion — even though that’s how the spending process typically works….

“The president said at the meeting that if Congress doesn’t give him the resources he needs for border security, he will shut down the government in September, according to one of the people familiar with the meeting. He did not give a specific number, but has been fixated on getting the $25 billion in a lump sum.”

Even if the Trump threat comes and goes with his moods or negotiating strategy, it could place immigration policy back on the front burner in Washington whether or not other Republicans want it there. And it’s not just Trump, of course, who has tunnel vision about immigration: Breitbart News, many conservative activists, and a sizable chunk of the party’s electoral “base” won’t be happy until deportations soar.

So congressional Republicans can run from the immigration issue, but they sure can’t hide.

“Democrats have recruited, nurtured and funded dozens of veterans aiming to unseat Republicans in November,” report Dan Merica and Annie Grayer in “‘Country over party:’ Democrats turn to veterans to take back the House“at CNN Politics. “The strategy cuts against the common Republican attack that most of the military leans red and Democrats want a less robust military, a refrain repeatedly pushed by President Donald Trump…A key force behind the effort has been Seth Moulton, a 39-year old congressman from Massachusetts and former Marine Corps officer. Through his political action committee Serve America, Moulton has backed veterans running for House seats across the country, elevating people like Feehan, Chrissy Houlahan in Pennsylvania and Gina Ortiz Jones in Texas…The number of veterans in Congress has been on a steady decline ever since the 1971, when an astonishing 72% of member of Congress and 78% of Senators were veterans. The current veteran representation in Congress has hovered around 20% for almost a decade, a historic low for the deliberative body.”

Paige Winfield Cunnngham puts the SCOTUS fight in sharper focus in “The Health 202: These are the five senators to watch in the Supreme Court nomination fight,” and observes: “…Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska are back in the spotlight as the Senate gears up to confirm a new Supreme Court justice. Along with three Democratic senators from red states — Joe Donnelly (Ind.), Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), all of whom are up for reelection this year — they make up the five senators whose votes will most aggressively be courted in the knockdown fight over President Trump’s nominee to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy…Assuming Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who is undergoing treatment for brain cancer, can’t make it to Capitol Hill, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) will have a one-vote margin to confirm Trump’s nominee for the high court, who is expected to move the court significantly rightward on a host of issues from abortion, to gay rights to voting issues. So McConnell either needs all 50 Republicans on board with his plan — with a tie-breaking vote from Vice President Pence — or he’ll be depending on the support of two Democrats if Collins and Murkowski defect. Both women did vote to confirm Justice Neil M. Gorsuch last year — but the stakes were significantly different then. Gorsuch replaced the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, while Trump’s next nominee will replace Kennedy, the court’s longtime swing vote.”

E. J. Dionne, Jr.’s column, “This is the fight of our lives. Here’s how we win it,” brings the strategy into focus: “With Republicans in control of the Senate, the odds favor anyone President Trump picks to fill Kennedy’s seat. But as the mass mobilization to preserve the Affordable Care Act demonstrated, progressives can win battles in the Senate if Democrats hold together, and if a handful of Republicans are convinced that going along with their party will have high political and substantive costs. There is no choice but to mobilize…Moderate and liberal voters who had not weighed court appointments heavily in their ballot-box decisions may do so now that the threat to Roe is not theoretical but real. This could also further boost turnout among women strongly opposed to Trump, whom Democrats are counting on this November.” In addition to winning over Republican Senators Collins and Murkowski, “Democratic senators will have to stay united, and opposing a Trump pick could be difficult for those on the ballot this fall in pro-Trump states. That’s particularly true of three who voted to confirm Justice Neil M. Gorsuch and who, along with Collins and Murkowski, met with Trump last week: Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota and Joe Manchin III of West Virginia…They need to be prepared to make a broader argument about how the lives of the people they represent will be affected by the radical nature of conservative jurisprudence.”

From Deva Woodly’s article, “An Electoral Vision for Black Lives: If the Democratic Party really wants to engage black voters, it should take its cues from the organizers already on the ground.” at Dissent: “Research shows that the Democratic Party is growing less white, and further, that white Democrats are increasingly concerned with racial justice. In 2009, 81 percent of black Democrats, 50 percent of white Democrats, and 49 percent of Latinx Democrats agreed with the statement “the country must do more to give blacks equal rights.” A Pew survey taken last fall showed that those numbers have dramatically increased, now 90 percent of black Democrats, 80 percent of white Democrats, and 76 percent of Latinx Democrats believe that advocating for racial justice should be a top political priority. This shift in opinion did not come out of nowhere. It is the result of movement work—a nearly four-year push, via mass direct action and purposeful social media campaigns highlighting stories and images of the unjust murder that black people endure at the hands of police (including when their fellow white citizens use the police as a weapon). The broader public awareness and protest campaigns of the movement are ongoing and simultaneous with the electoral work, each making it more possible for the other to succeed.”

Also at Dissent, Adam Gaffney discusses Canada’s journey to health security and frames the “Single-Payer or Bust” health care reform movement: “By providing a single tier of coverage to all, regardless of wealth or station, with automatic enrollment, comprehensive benefits, and no cost-sharing, single-payer provides a distinct—and more egalitarian—vision of universality. Although the analogy is loose, this can be seen as a sort of universal healthcare “from below.” In contrast, a patchwork approach to universal coverage, which incorporates a privatized hierarchy of different levels of coverage, without comprehensive benefits, with varying degrees of cost-sharing, perhaps undergirded by a restored government “mandate” to buy insurance, can be seen as a type of universal healthcare “from above.” And it constitutes a far narrower vision of universal coverage that falls short of the full universality that our fractured and increasingly unequal society urgently requires.”

The New Yorker’s John Cassidy writes, “In terms of messaging, Ocasio-Cortez isn’t as much of an outlier as she might appear. Although many prominent Democrats seem to be talking mainly about Trump—to the point that they can barely see straight—that preoccupation is partly an artifact of the media’s focus. In a world of all Trump all the time, Democrats who bring up other things don’t get much coverage. The fact is that many Democrats are concentrating on the same issues that Ocasio-Cortez emphasized during her campaign: health care (she supports Medicare for all), housing, education (like Sanders, she favors free tuition at public universities), wages, and jobs (she has advocated for a federal jobs guarantee)….Listen to the speeches of Senator Sherrod Brown, of Ohio; or of Stacey Abrams, who is running for governor in Georgia; or of Beto O’Rourke, who is challenging Ted Cruz in Texas; or of Conor Lamb, who won a special election in western Pennsylvania earlier this year; or of Mikie Sherrill, a former Navy pilot who recently won the Democratic primary in New Jersey’s Republican-held Eleventh Congressional District. To be sure, these Democrats are attacking Trump and talking about immigration and the Supreme Court. But their main focus is on promoting social and economic empowerment for people living in their districts.”

“We’re not moving off our long-held belief that House control is something of a 50-50 Toss-up, but our seat-by-seat handicapping is only getting better for Democrats,” writes Kyle Kondik at Sabato’s Crystal Ball. “Today’s seven ratings changes are all toward the Democrats, and the overall ratings now show 208 seats at least leaning to the Republicans, 199 at least leaning to the Democrats, and 28 Toss-ups. To win the House under the current ratings, Democrats would have to win two-thirds of the Toss-ups. In the event of a good Democratic environment in the fall, that would not be unreasonable to expect.”

“Want to Increase Turnout? Make It Easier to Vote at Home,” writes David Atkins at The Washington Monthly. “Both red and blue states have been implementing what is perhaps the most effective method of increasing voter turnout: mail voting. Counties and states that have moved to full vote-at-home programs have seen turnout increase, often dramatically….A new report prepared by Pantheon Analytics on behalf of our own Washington Monthly on the effects a mail-vote-only program in Utah shows significant turnout increases…In the 2016 general election, twenty-one counties in Utah administered voting entirely by mail, while eight counties administered traditional polling place-based voting. Using vote propensity scores to control for voters’ pre-existing differences in likelihood to vote, we show that the advent of vote-by-mail increased turnout by 5-7 points. Low-propensity voters, including young voters, showed the greatest increase in turnout in vote-by-mail counties relative to their counterparts in
non-vote-by-mail counties…There is much more information available at the newly created National Vote-At-Home Institute, including turnout improvements in North Dakota, Minnesota, Alaska, Nebraska, and elsewhere. Many other states including Maryland to Hawaii to Wyoming will be implementing similar programs.”

Sean Iling interviews David Faris, author of “It’s Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority” at vox.com and asks him what Democrats should do about the filibuster. Faris’s answer: “Yeah, I think they should eliminate the filibuster in the first month of the next Democratic administration, if it even survives that long. I think it’s another anti-democratic procedure in the Senate. We already have a constitutional framework that is deliberately difficult to work around to get policy change, and then you add a supermajority requirement in one of the two national legislatures? It’s just bananas. There’s no other country on the face of the earth that has a supermajority requirement to make routine legislation.” Iling and Faris discuss a range of other reforms in Faris’s book, including, packing the courts, creating more progressive states out fo California and statehood for Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico.

In the wake of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s bombshell retirement announcement, a lot of strategic re-calculations are underway. The most immediate involves the 2018 midterm elections, as I discussed at New York:

There is no question that the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy is one of the biggest political stories of 2018, and it will duel for attention with the fall midterms. It is a little less clear how the two big stories will intersect.

Democrats are calling on the White House and Mitch McConnell to delay the confirmation of a new justice until after the midterms, citing the rhetoric McConnell used in 2016 to deny Obama nominee Merrick Garland a timely vote:

My @SenateGOP colleagues should follow the rule they set in 2016 not to consider a SCOTUS nominee in an election year. Sen McConnell would tell anyone who listened that the Senate had the right to advise & consent, & that was every bit as important as POTUS’ right to nominate.

— Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) June 27, 2018

If Republicans bent to this logic, the midterms would become, in part, a referendum on the Supreme Court, probably to an unprecedented extent given the gravity of this particular appointment. But so far they have shown zero interest in any sort of delay in getting a second Trump justice onto the bench, with McConnell planning confirmation hearings in August and a Senate debate and vote as soon as possible thereafter.

So if a new justice is in fact confirmed in September or October, will the saga actually affect voting in November?

Nate Silver addressed that question today, and found no clear answer. He stipulates that any development that equally stimulates the two parties’ bases could on balance help the GOP:

“If the midterm elections look more like the special elections we’ve had so far this cycle, in which Democratic turnout significantly outpaced Republican turnout, the GOP is very likely to lose the House and the Democratic wave could reach epic proportions. But without that enthusiasm gap, control of the House looks like more of a toss-up, at least based on the current generic ballot average.”

Since on balance Republican voters have shown more concern about SCOTUS than Democrats (as reflected in 2016 exit polls), a national obsession over the topic might goose GOP turnout disproportionately. But if the confirmation fight is all over by the time voters vote, will it still matter?

“[A]ssuming Trump has his choice confirmed by the Senate before the midterms, the Supreme Court will arguably be more of a backward-looking issue in 2018 than it was in 2016. I say “arguably” because Kennedy probably won’t be the last justice to retire under Trump; liberals Ginsburg and Breyer are retirement risks, as is conservative Clarence Thomas. Still, in 2016, voters were deciding on an open Supreme Court seat and not just the prospect of further vacancies.”

While it’s uncertain how much the SCOTUS fight will affect the midterms, the midterms could most definitely affect the SCOTUS fight. The last thing the large group of Democratic senators running in pro-Trump states need right now is a vote that could either infuriate the GOP’s right-to-life base or discourage anti-Trump Democratic voters. Three of them who are especially vulnerable — Joe Donnelly, Heidi Heitkamp, and Joe Manchin — voted for Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation.

At this point, the strategy for McConnell & Co. is pretty obvious: Proceed with the confirmation process as quickly as possible (The Hill noted today that confirmation of the last four justices took between 66 and 87 days), preserving the option, if the final vote looks dicey and/or something newly controversial about the nominee pops up, of pushing the whole thing into next year and then making the midterms a referendum on abortion and other constitutional issues for real. Even in the current environment, the Senate landscape gives Republicans a reasonable chance of adding to their slim margin in the upper chamber, as evidenced by this startling datum:

Fact: if all '18 election results were an 8% pro-Dem uniform swing vs. '16 prez results, Dems would gain 44 House seats & lose 4 Senate seats.

— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) April 13, 2018

If the SCOTUS confirmation fight reaches its potential decibel level, it’s possible ears will still be ringing when early voting begins in October.

From Michael Tomasky’s op-ed, “The Right Has Won the Supreme Court. Now What?” at The New York Times, which presents three things Democrats need to do:

First of all, they need simply to reflect on their recent history and understand why they’re in this situation. The time to play hardball was 2016. Maybe there’s nothing they could have done, given that the Republicans ran the Senate. But consider this counterfactual….We might not be in this situation if they’d played for keeps in 2016.

Tomasky provides a plausible ‘what if’ scenario, which makes a case that a stronger Supreme Court nomination than Merrick Garland, the 43-year old California Associate Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, would have had a better chance against the likes of McConnell and company. Further,

The second thing the Democrats have to do is fight this nomination to the bitter end. Maintain, even if it’s manufactured, some aura of optimism and eagerness for the battle. Mr. Schumer said all the right things Wednesday afternoon, but if you watch the video, you’ll see he wasn’t exactly breathing fire…Democratic and progressive groups will have ample opportunity to pressure the four or five Republican senators who might become no votes. If the Democrats press Mr. Schumer’s hypocrisy argument effectively, public opinion could turn in their favor, even in some of those key Republican senators’ states. Unpredictable things happen all the time, especially in Trumpworld.

Sometimes you have to fight like hell, even when the odds are bad. Democrats have to show that they have a pulse, they are not going to cave and they are ready to rumble against the GOP’s betrayal of democracy. In addition,

Yes, chances are the Democrats will lose this one, which brings us to the third thing they must do. They need to get their core constituencies to understand the stakes and to vote with the Supreme Court, and really all federal judges, at top of mind…And don’t forget Robert Mueller, the special counsel, or think he isn’t relevant here. If he issues a report in July or August, as many now expect, and if that report presents evidence that Mr. Trump did indeed obstruct justice, Mr. Schumer and the Democrats can make a strong case that a president governing under such a cloud — who might yet be found to have colluded with Russia in his election — has no business making Supreme Court nominations. That nominee, if confirmed, may well be ruling on matters relating to the investigation of the president. No, it’s not clear that will work as a gambit. But if the situation were reversed, the Republicans would try it.

Democrats simply have to do a better job of making the Supreme Court a constant consideration of our national politics. Yes, the odds against stopping Trump’s coming nomination are formidable. But let’s not fail to leverage the educational opportunity of this political moment, which can set the stage for victory on November 6th — and beyond.

Democrats should study this impressive ad, produced by Naomi Burton and Nick Hayes of Means of Production, “a media production company that works exclusively for the working class.” The ad has been credited with influencing the upset Democratic primary victory (NY-14) of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and its messaging, technical innovations and story-telling techniques could be effective in other ads against Republicans in the closing weeks before the November elections:

In his article about the ad at The intercept, Zaid Jilani writes, “The video is tightly produced, crafting a narrative about an organizer-candidate who has the same sort of working-class background that is representative of the majority of New York’s 14th Congressional District…What you may be surprised to find out is that the video was produced not by Hollywood video production veterans or high-dollar political consultants, but by a ragtag pair of socialists based in Detroit.” It was “one of the most viral campaign videos of 2018.” Jilani adds,

Hayes was hesitant to disclose the campaign’s exact budget for the commercial, but told The Intercept that the entire project cost less than $10,000. Costs were kept low because virtually everyone in the ad was a community member, a volunteer, or a member of Ocasio-Cortez’s family. Much of the video was produced simply by following Ocasio-Cortez around during the campaign. The closing shot of the film is set in an apartment.

…The success of the video shoot raises the question: Why do candidates spend so much money on high-priced consultants who produce boring, safe videos, when ideologically aligned, camera-savvy activists can do it quicker, cheaper, and with more vitality?

Ocasio-Cortez adds in a tweet that “One great thing about our campaign video: not a single consultant was involved…I wrote the script. My family is the closing shot. That’s my actual bodega.” It will be an even greater thing if the ad inspires other young filmmakers to get involved in grass roots campaigns to elect Democrats on November 6th.

From “Don’t want a right-wing Supreme Court? Do everything you can to stop it.” by E. J. Dionne, Jr. at The Washington Post: “And now things stand to get even worse because of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s retirement. He was, at least on some occasions, a moderating force. His replacement by another conservative hard-liner in the mold of Justice Neil M. Gorsuch would give right-wing interpretations of the law free rein…On Wednesday, in what might be seen as a companion to the Citizens United decision that enhanced the influence of corporations on our political life, the majority voted to undercut organized labor’s ability to fight back. In Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees , it ended the practice of public employee unions automatically collecting fees from nonunion members on whose behalf they negotiate contracts, tossing aside 41 years of settled law and crippling the broader labor movement…It is equally clear — not only on Trump’s travel ban but also on issues related to voting rights, labor rights and gerrymandering — that the Republican Five on the nation’s highest court have operated as agents of their party’s interests.”

Dionne adds, “You might ask: What’s wrong with all these 5-to-4 partisan decisions? Well, there is the matter of the Republican majority in the United States Senate not even permitting a vote on President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the court, allowing Trump to fill the seat with a Republican. Every 5-to-4 conservative decision is (in the parlance of judges) the fruit of a poisonous tree of unbridled partisanship…All the recent talk about civility should not stop opponents of a right-wing court from doing everything in their power to keep the judiciary from being packed with ideologues who behave as partisans…There is nothing civil about rushing a nominee to replace Kennedy before the midterm elections. And no rule of civility demands the confirmation of justices who would leave an abusive president unchecked and use raw judicial power to roll back a century’s worth of social progress.”

McConnell held a Supreme Court seat open for a year, insisting no Justice be confirmed in an election year without voters having a say. This was a terrible precedent but one he will need to live with. Dem Senators must insist — absolutely no confirmation until after the midterm.

— Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) June 27, 2018

Aaron Blake’s “The Democrats Are in Dire Straits” at The Fix takes a more pessimistic view for Democrats: “Even worse, while Democrats appeared primed to win back one or both of those chambers this November, that momentum has been arrested. It could be further arrested by the enthusiasm created by a new conservative Supreme Court justice just before Election Day…Democrats are basically powerless to prevent that from happening. They drew closer in the Senate thanks to an unexpected win in the Alabama special election, leaving Republicans with a bare 51-49 majority and just one vote to spare to confirm their nominee. Democrats will fantasize that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) or Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) will take a stand with them. But that’s likely fanciful; it is much more likely that some of the 10 Democrats seeking reelection in red states will cross party lines in the name of being reelected. With Supreme Court nominees needing just a majority thanks to a series of machinations in recent years, the math is just not there.” But rather than be demoralized by doomsayers, Democrats should make the most of it to energize their base and challenge political moderates of all parties to vote for Democrats in the midterms as a way to restore some needed checks and balance to our government.

“Democratic pollster Geoff Garin said, “The stakes for Democratic voters in this election already were extremely high, and the Supreme Court vacancy supercharges all of that,” note Phillip Rucker and Anne Gearan at Post Politics. “Party officials now hope to use the Supreme Court vacancy as a tool to mobilize progressives, giving them a cause other than their dislike of Trump to volunteer and vote for Democratic candidates…“If there was ever any question whether the November elections would be the most important of our lifetime, Justice Kennedy’s retirement should remove all doubt,” Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez said in a statement…“We need all hands on deck to stop the Court from taking a vicious, anti-worker, anti-women, anti-LGBT, anti-civil rights turn,” [Sen. Chris] Murphy said in a statement.”

Not that Justice Kennedy was a genuine centrist, but he was the closest to the center on the high court. Looking forward, Nan Aron, president of Alliance for Justice,  explains why “No one on Trump’s short list is fit to replace Kennedy” at The Hill: “So the stakes for this next Supreme Court nomination are enormous. And none of the people on Trump’s “short list” of some two dozen potential nominees, a list that Trump has already acknowledged as a product of the Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation, gives us confidence, No one on the list seems likely to be free of the intense political bias toward the ruling class that judicial nominees of this administration possess in spades.” Aron notes the extremist views of four short-listers and adds, “It should worry us that these judges are at the head of the line for appointment to a court where the future of health care and environmental protection, along with the rights of women, people of color, LGBTQ people, workers and consumers are literally on the line…This Supreme Court nomination will engender the most epic battle over such a nomination that this country has ever seen. Count on it.”

The New York Times editorial, “With Kennedy Gone, Justice Must Be Won at the Ballot Box,” reccomends a heightened midterm effort from progressives: “Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, who put up that blockade despite the damage it inflicted on two branches of government, is celebrating now. He knows he has an open road to confirming whomever he and the Federalist Society want on the bench. Of course, it would take only a couple of Republican senators — say, Bob Corker and Jeff Flake, both of whom are retiring and have been very critical of Mr. Trump, or Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, who have supported abortion rights — to force the president to pick someone who at least approximates a moderate…Do not for a moment underestimate the importance of getting out and voting in November. Four years ago, only 36 percent of Americans cast ballots in the midterm elections. Had more people showed up, the Senate may well have remained in Democratic control, Mitch McConnell would not be the majority leader and Judge Merrick Garland would now be Justice Garland. In the days and months ahead, remember this.” If every crisis contains both dangers and opportunity, Democrats may find that they get more GOTV leverage from the Kennedy retirement than does the GOP.

Much progressive energy that will be poured into the midterm elections over the next 4+ months will come from voters who are alarmed by the likelihood of coming SCOTUS assaults on reproductive rights, civil rights, gun safety, the Affordable Care Act, environmental protection and other reforms. But Democrats must also make a stronger case that no future Supreme Court Justices win confirmation if they have a history of opposing worker rights, a consideration that has been barely mentioned in many recent Supreme Court confirmation battles. As Duke Law professor  Jedediah Purdy writes in his NYT op-ed: “When it comes to economic inequality, today’s Supreme Court is not only failing to help, it is also aggressively making itself part of the problem in a time when inequality and insecurity are damaging the country and endangering our democracy…What is at stake is whether American democracy can overcome the new Gilded Age of inequality and insecurity. The justices, meanwhile, are part of the problem: In Janus and other rulings, they have retrenched on the side of private power and budgetary austerity. A different law of economic power will have to wait for a different court, and that will come only through winning elections. Those victories get more uphill every year, thanks in no small part to the current court.”

At The Nation Sean McElwee argues that “Democrats Must Stop Pretending the Supreme Court Is Apolitical: The party has largely avoided talking about the radical nature of the Roberts Court” and urges    stronger messaging: “My think tank, Data for Progress, has been studying messaging on the Supreme Court from elected Democrats, on social media and other channels. We found that Democratic senators tweet less frequently about the Supreme Court than Republicans. “In a political climate where Democrats have been relying on the integrity of the Court to serve as a check against a malicious executive branch and an ineffective legislative branch, Democrats seem to avoid discussion of the courts,” said Data for Progress senior adviser Hanna Haddad, who assembled a data set of every tweet from every senator from January 2017 through June 2018…Jon Green, a co-founder of Data for Progress, studied tens of thousands of newsletters sent by members of Congress since mid-2009, which were compiled by political scientist Lindsey Cormack. “Democrats are less likely to mention the Supreme Court than Republicans. And when they do mention the Court, it is more often to celebrate liberal decisions than it is to alert their subscribers when the Court has sided with conservatives,” Green said. “If this pattern is consistent across other channels of communication between the party and its voters, it could contribute to a misperception of the Court’s ideological alignment among the Democratic base…So there’s room for Democrats to take a more aggressive tone when talking about the Supreme Court and judicial nominations—and it’s badly needed.”