Donald Trump is, without doubt, the leader of the Republican Party right now. He is cruising to the Republican presidential nomination and the party's base has rallied around him almost to the exclusion of all others. But below the level of Trump, there is a growing leadership vacuum in the party, as everyone scrambles to bend whichever way the Trump winds happen to be blowing at that particular moment, while still attempting to hold the party together. This lack of secondary leadership came to the fore this week in three notable ways.

Both houses of Congress have Republican leaders who proved to be either ineffective or downright incompetent this week. Neither one could hold his caucus together to get what they wanted done actually accomplished. In the House of Representatives, what they failed to accomplish was a red-meat MAGA move, while over in the Senate they failed to accomplish a centrist compromise with Democrats. So Republicans proved their incompetence in two different ideological directions at once, within the same week. Meanwhile, the chair of the Republican National Committee -- who is about as pro-Trump as can be imagined -- is about to be eased out of her position, because now Trump isn't supporting her anymore. That's a whole lot of disarray for a party heading into an election year, you've got to admit.

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Last night, Nikki Haley suffered an embarrassing loss in Nevada's Republican primary. But it wasn't the same embarrassing loss as she suffered in New Hampshire -- or will soon be suffering in her home state of South Carolina, for that matter -- since she didn't actually lose to Donald Trump. Instead, in what can only be called a truly meaningless primary, she lost (by a 2-to-1 margin!) not to a competing candidate but rather to: "None Of These Candidates." This is an option on Nevada ballots for voters to register their vote as a protest against the choices provided. Last night, Haley got 31 percent of the vote while "None Of These Candidates" got a whopping 63 percent. That is truly embarrassing, you've got to admit.

But as I noted, the whole thing was meaningless in the first place, since Nevada is also holding a Republican caucus, tomorrow night. The caucus (not the primary) will determine all of the state's delegates to the Republican National Convention. Trump wasn't on the primary ballot and Haley won't be on the caucus ballot (due to party rules prohibiting a candidate from being on both), so Trump is obviously going to sweep up all of Nevada's delegates.

But rather than dwelling on Nikki's woes, the amusing result out of the Silver State caused me instead to indulge in a rainy winter day's deluded daydream. Because what would happen if the entire country had this option -- not just for primaries but for the general election? And what if it were binding in a way Nevada's isn't?

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Donald Trump is still not king. That's the upshot of today's ruling from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, when stripped of all the legalese. He did not enjoy some divine right to do whatever he pleased while he was president, and he does not have some "Get Out Of Jail Free" card to use now that he is not president anymore. We are a country of laws, and everyone -- up to and including current and former presidents -- must obey them or ultimately have to face the consequences in a courtroom.

The ruling, from a three-judge panel, was both unanimous and brutal. Two of the judges had been appointed by Democrats while one had been appointed by a Republican, but they all agreed that Trump's claim of absolute immunity was complete bunkum. They shot down each and every claim that Trump's lawyers had made, and eviscerated the legal reasoning as being seriously flawed. It was a sweeping refutation of Trump's outlandish claims that everything he did as president is immune from any prosecution now and forever.

This is all as it should be, since Trump's lawyers really had to bend over backwards to even come up with their harebrained arguments. The appellate judges shredded this faulty reasoning fully and completely. So completely, in fact, that this may wind up being the final word on the matter.

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The key aspect of this, again, is: Are we as Republicans going to have press conferences and complain the border is bad and then intentionally leave it open?

-- Senator James Lankford
(chief GOP negotiator on the border bill)

As of now, things are looking like that's going to wind up being a "Yes," Senator Lankford. Now that Donald Trump is heavily weighing in against it, it may be completely impossible to pass any sort of border or immigration bill for the rest of this year no matter what it contains. Which would be a huge missed opportunity for Republicans, but they're perfectly content to just endlessly play politics with the issue without ever doing anything to solve the basic problems.

This is nothing new, by the way. The closest (up until this point) that Congress ever recently got to passing any sort of immigration reform (comprehensive or not) came under the presidency of George W. Bush, in 2007. Hammered out by a bipartisan group in the Senate, the bill then never passed, to Bush's great disappointment. As is the case now, Republicans revolted over the deal and decided to play politics instead. End result: no changes in the laws.

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New monthly employment numbers were released today showing a surprisingly-high 353,000 new jobs were created in January. The stock market is currently setting new all-time highs. The American economy has recovered from COVID far faster and far better than all other major countries, in fact. Inflation has come back down, gasoline prices are down, and wages are up (growing faster than inflation). Signups for Obamacare hit another record this year (outpacing last year's record by five million!) and America has the lowest uninsured rate in history. Domestic oil production is also setting records. So what are conservatives obsessed with in reaction to all this good news? Taylor Swift. No, really....

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In the Before-Times, back when Donald Trump was merely a minor television celebrity, anyone in politics or the media who openly espoused a theory that the Pentagon had for years been running a "psychological operation" (or "psy-op," which sounds so much cooler) to boost the fortunes of the most popular singer alive, and furthermore that because she and a star football player were now an item that the National Football League had (obviously!) conspired to advance his team to the Super Bowl (where the fix was already in for them to win) -- all so that the singer could then announce her endorsement of the sitting president -- would have been laughed off the national stage forthwith. The idea would have been considered no more than a product of the fever dreams of a conspiracy-spreading lunatic. The ravings of a nutter. Complete whackjobbery. "Tinfoil hats" would have been mentioned derisively, as America collectively guffawed at their craziness.

That was the Before-Times, though. Nowadays this insanity has gone mainstream... well, if you define "mainstream" as "prominent in the rightwing media echo chamber," that is. But what I have to wonder is whether the rightwing commentators and politicians and the MAGA world in general are truly going to go to war with the "Swifties." Because that seems to me to be a losing strategy.

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House Republicans moved a big step closer to one of their goals today, as they voted on articles of impeachment for Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Two articles of impeachment passed the relevant House committee on a party-line vote, and the full House could vote on the matter within days. This will fulfill a longstanding desire of the House Republicans to impeach somebody (anybody!) in Joe Biden's administration, and can be seen as a trial run for their real goal of impeaching Biden himself. This is all a purely political exercise, but that's certainly not going to stop them. The Republicans simply have no grounds for impeaching either one, but why let a little thing called the U.S. Constitution get in the way of their fun?

The Constitution sets a pretty high bar for impeachment. A federal officer must be shown to have committed: "Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors." Neither Mayorkas nor Biden has committed anything even remotely fitting that description. Republicans haven't even bothered to accuse Mayorkas with any such thing, they are going to impeach him instead for the high crime of not acting as if he were in a Republican administration. Which is not at all what the Founders intended, of course.

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Can the Republican House get anything at all done? That is a rather open question, seeing as how so far they haven't done much -- this has been the least productive Congress in at least the last half-century, maybe even more. And they've already unceremoniously booted out one speaker (which was unprecedented in American history) and they could easily decide to do so again. Which is why the next couple of weeks could be instructive.

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There is an interesting idea making the rounds in the political punditry world of late, and I have to say it is an intriguing one. Nikki Haley has a very slim chance of chalking up any wins in Republican primaries, either before or on Super Tuesday, so sooner or later she's going to have to bow to the inevitable and drop out of the GOP race. This will leave Trump as the Republican nominee, but what if this isn't the end of the campaign trail for Haley? Instead of disappearing, what would happen if Haley then ran as the No Labels candidate?

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A staggering amount of Republican hypocrisy is now on full display in Washington. Pretty much ever since Joe Biden took office, Republicans have been screaming: "Border crisis! It's a crisis! This crisis needs immediate action!" This has been reinforced in an enormous way by the rightwing media echo chamber, who features the "Border Crisis!" storyline on a nightly basis for its audience. Scary images of border-crossers are shown, the word "invasion" is tossed about willy-nilly, and the fearmongering of immigrants is paramount.

This week, a deal seemed to be nearing completion on some new border policies, worked out between Senate Democrats and Republicans. This deal may be unveiled next week (but then they've said that before so we'll have to see if one does actually emerge). The deal is part of a package that also contains military aid for both Ukraine and Israel. The Biden administration has been pushing hard to get this done, and is reportedly going to have to accept stipulations in the border deal that will be (to put it mildly) unpalatable to some Democrats. In simplistic political terms, the military aid will be a win for Biden while the border portion of the bill will be a win for Republicans. This is especially true because it would be the first border compromise which will not even address the problem of the "Dreamers." That's another political blow for Democrats.

In reality, however, the fact that a border deal could even be reached would be a big political plus for Biden -- even with the provisions that some Democrats are going to howl about. It would tend to defuse the issue a bit, heading into the general election campaign. Biden could (rightfully) claim that he supported the bipartisan deal in the spirit of "getting something done," which fits into his whole political persona very nicely. The deal would also have to be given some time to see if it is working, which would damp down all the "Border crisis!" hyperventilating from the right.

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