It's June, which means that it is Supreme Court season once again. The high court's session wraps up at the end of June each year, and they usually hold back the most contentious cases until the very end. This year, there are two such big cases that could change American politics for at least the next decade or so. But in the meantime, the court has announced a few other decisions worth examining for their political impact as well.

The two cases everyone is waiting for are whether the Census Bureau can include a citizenship question on the main 2020 Census form, and whether the court will adopt a standard for what is and is not acceptable in terms of partisan gerrymandering. More on them in a moment. The decisions announced today dealt with: another bakery which refused to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple; a racial gerrymandering case; and the question of whether being tried by both a state and the federal government for the same crime constitutes "double jeopardy" or not.

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We have to begin by first ignoring all the rampant criminality spewing forth from the White House -- just for the moment, mind you -- to concentrate instead on looking forward, not back. Because we're less than two weeks away from the first round of Democratic 2020 presidential primary debates, and the Democratic National Committee just announced the lineup for the two nights.

Yesterday, they cut the field down to 20, which left four candidates out in the cold: Steve Bullock, Mike Gravel, Andrew Messam, and Seth Moulton. Today, they held the draw (our prediction: in future, the draw itself will be televised on C-SPAN...) and announced the lineup for each night. In doing so, the random nature of the draw conspired to almost entirely defeat the D.N.C.'s ultimate goal for holding such a draw in the first place -- not to have a "kiddie table" debate.

Learning from the response to the Republican 2016 debates, where candidates were separated into an "adult-table debate" and a "kiddie-table debate" (or, to be less caustic, an "undercard" debate) by their standing in the polls, the Democrats this time around decided to prevent this from happening by randomizing the process. Everyone who qualified would have a clear shot at both nights. They then refined this concept even further -- in an attempt to make the spread even more even -- by deciding to hold two draws, one among those in the top tier of polling and one among the lower. This way, the top tier would get divided evenly between the two nights, which would (they figured) prevent a single top-loaded debate from happening.

They figured wrong. Because out of the top five candidates in the current polls, four of them will be appearing together on the same night, while the other will be taking on a slate of all the lesser candidates on the other night. The only way they could have avoided this would have been to further refine their criteria so that (for instance) "out of the top four in the polling, two will appear each night," or something similar.

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President Donald Trump just made news by admitting what everyone already knew or suspected -- that he'd be just fine with Russia feeding him dirt on a political opponent during a presidential election campaign. He wouldn't see any necessity to inform the F.B.I. if a foreign government offered up negative information, and he furthermore insisted that any other American politician would do exactly the same thing. He's trying to normalize his own amorality, in other words.

To put it mildly, Trump is receiving some pushback. Democrats, of course, are outraged. But the interesting thing is that Republicans are also speaking out against Trump's position. In fact, no Republican senator has yet tried to defend Trump's position. Perhaps because he tried to rope them all in with his claims that congressmen routinely get dirt on their political opponents from Russia, but for whatever reason this was clearly a bridge too far for most congressional Republicans.

Democrats, from the presidential candidates on down, should make as big a stink about this as is humanly possible. But they should train their fire not only on Trump but also on his chief henchman in election interference, Mitch McConnell. Because McConnell is refusing to bring up any election reform bill in the Senate before the 2020 election happens. And, as Trump just proved beyond a shadow of a doubt, this means aiding and abetting any foreign election interference which may happen in the meantime.

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What do you do when reality doesn't match up with how you'd like things to be? For most of us, we either pursue some form of escapism (binge-watch television, drink to excess, book tickets to the International Space Station, etc.), or we just knuckle down and admit that reality can be a real bummer at times. Hey, that's life, right? But for Donald Trump, the easiest response is to just go right ahead and attempt to redefine reality into what he'd like it to be. After all, if millions of his followers can be hoodwinked into believing something that is patently false just on his say-so, then that gives it a sort of reality all on its own, doesn't it?

Case in point was the recent report by the New York Times that, when faced with rather dismal internal campaign polling numbers which showed him losing several key states to the Democrats (Michigan, Florida, etc.), Trump instructed his campaign staff to just outright lie about the numbers. Furthermore, Trump then began insisting that not only was he ahead in every single state they've ever polled, but also that Trump's numbers are actually now the best they've ever been. Trump is nothing if not a big fan of superlatives. But outside Trumpworld, this has to be seen as nothing short of a world-class cabin cruise down that famed river in Egypt, "De Nile."

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Donald Trump has one go-to tactic in what passes for his political toolbox: personally create a crisis, rail loudly about it and make threats, and then "solve" the crisis and claim it was the biggest victory of all time. He's used this tactic over and over again, and he really doesn't care who pays the price for his political flim-flam job -- Dreamers, farmers, manufacturers, consumers, or anyone else. But an interesting thing just happened with his most recent deployment of flim-flammery: absolutely nobody bought it this time around. The media didn't fall for it and the public certainly didn't fall for it. Maybe this boy has cried "Wolf!" once too many? Because it certainly feels like something has changed.

Perhaps it was the constricted time scale which helped usher in this newfound skepticism. The entire "crisis" only took place over roughly one week's time, from beginning to end. Usually Trump counts on people forgetting that he personally caused the crisis in the first place, which (if successful, especially in the media) allows him to focus everyone's attention on his "solution" to the crisis (which usually consists of some form of going back to the status quo ante). But when the whole charade happens within a single week, it's downright impossible not to remember what (and who) started it.

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The field has been set, the cattle calls have begun, and the first debate round is looming on the horizon. In other words, the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination contest has moved into a new phase. If the polls can be believed, the people of Iowa are once again taking their "first in the nation" status seriously, and have begun examining the candidates much more closely than voters in other states. That should come as no surprise, since almost all the candidates are now investing heavily in doing well out in corn country. At least, the ones who have raised enough money to invest heavily in any state, that is.

Campaign News

The big news over the weekend was a new Des Moines Register poll, which showed only seven of the 24 candidates getting any sort of traction at all with Democratic voters. Joe Biden led the field with 24 percent, while three others were neck-and-neck in the battle for second place: Bernie Sanders (16 percent), Elizabeth Warren (15), and Pete Buttigieg (14). The other three who moved the needle at all were: Kamala Harris (7), Beto O'Rourke (2), and Amy Klobuchar (2). The other 17 candidates all registered at a single percentage point or worse.

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Something's wrong from the moon, my friend
Something's wrong from the moon
As I look down at you, my friend
Something's wrong from the moon

-- Crack The Sky, "Nuclear Apathy"

Well, we certainly never thought we'd use that particular lyric as a headline, but it's just too tempting to pass up this week. Because President Donald Trump just tweeted the following bit of wisdom:

For all of the money we are spending, NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon -- We did that 50 years ago. They should be focused on the much bigger things we are doing, including Mars (of which the Moon is a part), Defense and Science!

Um, OK. Let's just examine what absolute lunacy this tweet is. Firstly, Trump himself has been the one pushing NASA to get back to the moon as soon as possible. Even stranger, the Moon is not actually "part" of Mars. It just isn't. It's a long way from Mars.

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In may ways, this is going to be an irreverent article. Just to warn everyone up front. I didn't really have time to write a new article today (for reasons unrelated to politics), so I went searching for a column to re-run. I went back and read every column I had posted around June 6 throughout the years, and was kind of embarrassed that I'd never written explicitly about D-Day before. The closest was when I wrote an introduction to a column when President Barack Obama attended the 70th D-Day memorial ceremony, but this was really a column originally written for Memorial Day. I found other interesting columns (as I always do when traipsing through the site archives), including the interview I did in 2008 with then-Senate candidate Al Franken. And I found one article that just made me laugh, so I thought I'd run it again today for anyone else out there who might be in need of a smile.

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Even Richard Nixon never dreamed that his "madman theory" tactic would become the entire playbook for a United States president on any foreign policy issue, but that's where we now find ourselves, apparently. Nobody -- including even his own closest aides -- has any idea what Donald Trump is about to do next. Will he slap a five percent tariff on Mexico next Monday, or is it all just a big bluff to increase his leverage in trade talks? Nobody knows. White House aides say one thing, and the president then contradicts them within hours. Then they say something different, and Trump contradicts that, too. Sometimes Trump seems incredibly determined to levy a new tax on imported Mexican goods no matter what the outcome, and sometimes he seems like it's all just a giant ruse. Welcome to "madman trade theory," in other words.

Trump professes a love for tariffs, and he's certainly used them with abandon before. But then again, he has also threatened many other tariffs which have never actually materialized. With respect to Mexico, a few months back Trump was threatening to "shut down the border" completely, but then he quickly backed off this threat after seeing an enormous political backlash against the idea. Tellingly, the issue under contention then was the same one he's using now to threaten a new tariff -- Mexico's handling of immigrants heading for the U.S. border. But any analysis of past performance is essentially meaningless when it comes to Trump, since he makes all his decisions on the fly and off the cuff, without even a rudimentary understanding of the possible ripple effects such knee-jerk trade policy has on the economy. So it's really anyone's guess how this spat will play out.

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The 2020 Democratic primary calendar has experience a shift of Biblical proportions since this time around "the last shall be first," at least out here in California. I know that's not entirely accurate, but it's close enough. In 2016, California was one of the last states to hold its primaries, on June 7. This time around, the guaranteed early-voting states (Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada) will technically be first, but California will now be among those states in the "first among all the others" category, voting on Super Tuesday in early March. Since California is somewhat of an 800-pound gorilla when it comes to the sheer number of delegates, this is going to shake up the campaign strategies of all the Democrats running. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is open to interpretation, though.

California has flirted with being an early-voting state before, with mixed results. The Sacramento politicians absolutely hate the early schedule, because for them a June primary means a shorter general election season, meaning less money has to be raised for the campaign chest. But whether they like it or not, this time around we will hold our primary early. Way early. First in line, in fact.

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