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Because the death of Supreme Court Justice Scalia is such a monumental political event, I'm going to spend a second day speculating about how the nomination process is going to play out. In specific, there are two last-minute options that might get a lot of scrutiny in the coming months.
With the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the November election may decide the fate of all three branches of the United States government. That's a pretty unique situation, and it may boost turnout on both sides of the aisle. In most presidential elections, there's a wonky argument to be made about Supreme Court picks, but it's not usually so front-and-center with most of the voting public. Hardcore partisans tend to care deeply about this kind of thing, but the average voter usually doesn't think about it all that much in the voting booth. This year, things will obviously be different.
For those readers who weren't alive (or old enough) to experience the 1960s, this week we had somewhat of a history lesson, packaged as a Democratic debate. Now, part of why this happened is that the Democratic presidential campaign has entered into a "convince the minority voters" phase, since the upcoming two states to vote have a lot of Latino (Nevada) and African-American (South Carolina) voters. So there was quite a bit of attention spent on the Civil Rights era, which will continue right up to Super Tuesday, at the very least. We keep waiting for Bernie Sanders (or a moderator, for that matter) to bring up the term "Goldwater Girl" in a Hillary Clinton question, and last night would have been a dandy opportunity. But PBS held a much more "polite" debate, meaning lots of softball questions and ignoring any unseemly discomfort for the candidates (at least, for the most part).
Maybe I'm just loopy from staying up late to watch the Iowa returns trickle in, but this morning I had a pretty radical idea, after reading a statistic that several pundits pointed out in their post-caucus articles. Jeb Bush apparently spent $14 million in Iowa to receive a little over 5,200 votes. According to many pundits today, that works out to roughly $2,800 spent per actual vote (it's actually under $2,700 when you run the numbers, but whatever). Which caused my epiphany -- why not just hand that cash over to the voters themselves, and eliminate all the middlemen?
Honestly, how often is it that you get to write such a great headline? In a week that also included a Sarah Palin speech that dominated the news cycle (to say nothing of the late-night comic cycle), writing such snarky headlines is just icing on the cake, really. Good times... yes, good times indeed for Democrats watching the horrorshow that is the Republican presidential nomination process.
Federal land is currently being occupied by protestors. Or, according to some, by domestic terrorists. But pigeonholing these guys with either label isn't quite as easy as it might first seem. There's some history here that needs pondering before anyone decides exactly what to call the group and, more importantly, what to do about them. Because it is a little more complicated than it first might seem, at least for those who care about the concepts of fairness and consistency.
Welcome back to our annual year-end awards column!
Hillary Clinton is right. Last night, on Seth Meyers's late-night show, Clinton had this to say about Donald Trump's candidacy: "I no longer think he is funny." Earlier in the week, the Huffington Post announced that it was un-banishing Trump from the "Entertainment" section and would now properly cover him under "Politics." Arianna and Hillary are correct -- what started out as a hilarious joke is no longer even the slightest bit funny anymore.
Paul Ryan is now being hailed as the savior of the House Republicans. Whether he lives up to that lofty title should quickly become apparent. Changing leaders doesn't change the dynamics of the problem, so for all the praise Ryan is now getting he's still got an almost-impossible task in front of him. No wonder he didn't want the job in the first place. As the new House Republican savior, his main objective is going to be to save House Republicans from themselves.
After two seemingly-endless Republican debates, this week the Democratic candidates for president finally got their turn to face off against each other on national television. While the audience was smaller (since Donald Trump was not on stage), it was still a lot bigger than most political debates in the past -- over 15 million people watched on CNN, and a further million livestreamed it. This is up from the usual audience of 2-to-5 million, it should be noted, from years past.