Florida Sen. Marco Rubio redeemed himself during the Saturday GOP presidential debate. All eyes had been on Rubio following his disastrous debate performance ahead of the New Hampshire primary, which made him appear like a robot who could only repeat talking points.
Rubio was able to speak specifically and intelligently on a range of issues from foreign to domestic policy. His opening answer about the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and the need to nominate a new justice who is a strict constitutionalist, reminded everyone why he was once seen as the eventual nominee even when he wasn’t leading in the polls.
“Someone on this stage will get to choose the balance of the Supreme Court, and it will begin by filling this vacancy that’s there now,” Rubio said. “And we need to put people on the bench that understand that the Constitution is not a living and breathing document. It is to be interpreted as originally meant.”
Rubio was not asked as many questions as some of the other candidates, which had been the norm in previous debates, but when he did respond, he showed he had actual knowledge of the subject matter, like on foreign policy and the threats America is facing.
THE WAPO’S FEELINGS ARE HURT: “What was the most important thing for readers of Washington Post to see on the front-page of the paper Sunday morning? A headline focusing directly on the death of Antonin Scalia? No. In bold, large font, the Post declared, ‘Supreme Court Conservative Dismayed Liberals.'”
As somebody once said, the best tribute to a conservative life well led is an angry Times or Post obit — and as Scott Whitlock of NewsBusters adds, not surprisingly, the Gray Lady is also plenty thrilled that Justice Scalia is no longer around to give their core readers — and writers — the vapors.
Ding! Notification on phone. Pick it up: Scalia’s dead. Stare at the phone for a while. Tell self: don’t go on Twitter.
Go on Twitter.
Ah, the halcyon innocent days of three hours before, when one’s view of humanity still contained a few atoms of hope and charity, before the phrase “by their tweets shall ye know them” came to mind again.
And in a much lighter vein, a look at video mash-ups, the very early days, that time when Nick and Nora Charles solved a crime involving Robbie the Robot, for no other reason than both The Thin Man and Forbidden Planet happened to be MGM properties.
CAN MILITARY DISCIPLINE SAVE THE VETERANS ADMINISTRATION? Congress must decide soon whether to renew, expand or end the five-year-old Lovell Federal Health Center in North Chicago. It’s a jointly operated hospital that is both staffed and serves veterans and active-duty military personnel.
Among other successes, the center sees patients within one day of their requests for appointments – quite a contrast to the proliferating VA hospital horror stories of vets dying while waiting to see doctors, according to Luke Rosiak of the Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group.
But here’s the bad news, Rosiak reports: “It is unclear to what extent the current Congress will embrace the larger vision set into motion years ago. Sen. Johnny Isakson , chairman of the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, refused to say whether he even knows about the massive experiment, much less what his opinion on replicating it nationwide it might be.”
GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz said in an interview broadcast early Sunday that the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia underscores the stakes in the 2016 race.
“We are facing our fundamental rights in the balance,” the Texas senator said on NBC’s “Meet the Press,“ citing “abortion on demand,” “religious liberty” and the Second Amendment.
When asked if the Senate has an obligation to at least consider a nomination that President Obama puts forward, Cruz responded, “Not remotely.”
“It has been 80 years since a Supreme Court vacancy was nominated and confirmed in an election year,” Cruz said. “There is a long tradition that you don’t do this in an election year. And what this means, Chuck, is we ought to make the 2016 election a referendum on the Supreme Court.”
“The Senate’s duty is to advise and consent,” he added. “You know what? The Senate is advising right now. We’re advising that a lame-duck president in an election year is not going to be able to tip the balance of the Supreme Court, that we’re going to have an election.”
He’s on solid constitutional ground. But although everybody thinks the Supreme Court will be the big issue of 2016, my gut says it’ll be something else, probably an issue triggered by some disaster at home or abroad this summer.
President Obama’s expressed hope today in his weekly address “that we can avoid the political posturing and ideological brinksmanship that has bogged down this (Supreme Court nomination) process, and Congress, in the past” runs against another historical first for the 44th president: his unique role in history as the first US President to have ever voted to filibuster a Supreme Court nominee.
So while there is little indication Republicans intend to filibuster President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, the GOP will likely invoke the President’s unique history whenever he calls their tactics into question.
THE PRESS IN HILLARY’S PURSE: Then-Atlantic editor Marc Ambinder “did exactly as he was told,” Rod Dreher writes at the American Conservative. “Ambinder is by no means alone. Sounds like [Philippe Reines, Hillary’s press secretary] is very good at his job. Can’t imagine why people have so little trust in the Washington media…”
Democratic presidential hopefuls Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton are flooding Nevada with volunteers ahead of this week’s key nominating contest but they face a problem – the addresses, phone numbers and other personal data they need to reach many voters are out of date.
Nevada, which is more than a quarter Latino, was one of the states worst affected by the 2008 financial meltdown, with hundreds of thousands of families unable to pay their mortgages and forced to move in a crisis that by some estimates hit minorities twice as hard as whites.
Well, it hit people of all races whom banks shouldn’t have given mortgages to in the first place, and their myriad defaults set-up a chain reaction that did indeed lead to the 2008 financial meltdown. But since Reuters wants to play the “name that party” game who initially lit the fuse? The would-be future “first gentleman,” aka William Jefferson Clinton:
The Clinton administration has turned the Community Reinvestment Act, a once-obscure and lightly enforced banking regulation law, into one of the most powerful mandates shaping American cities—and, as Senate Banking Committee chairman Phil Gramm memorably put it, a vast extortion scheme against the nation’s banks. Under its provisions, U.S. banks have committed nearly $1 trillion for inner-city and low-income mortgages and real estate development projects, most of it funneled through a nationwide network of left-wing community groups, intent, in some cases, on teaching their low-income clients that the financial system is their enemy and, implicitly, that government, rather than their own striving, is the key to their well-being.
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Looking into the future gives further cause for concern: “The bulk of these loans,” notes a Federal Reserve economist, “have been made during a period in which we have not experienced an economic downturn.” The Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America’s own success stories make you wonder how much CRA-related carnage will result when the economy cools.
And we all remember how that turned out in the fall of 2008. So if the foreclosure crisis is indeed snarling potential voters for Hillary, well, karma can really be a Hillary sometimes, can’t it?
Related: “This election is beginning to look a lot like 2008,” Nicole Gelinas of the Manhattan Institute writes in the New York Post. “But this time, it’s the leading Democrat who’s getting tripped up by it, not the leading Republican,” adding “The leading Republican is a guy who forces banks to their knees when his casinos go bankrupt. People like this.”
There are two stacks of papers in Utah Senator Mike Lee’s office that should cause all Americans to pause. One stack is 400 pages; the other is over 80,000 pages. The short stack is all of the laws Congress passed in 2014. The 11-foot tall tower is all federal regulations.
Senator Lee and other members of Congress see this disparity as indicative of not just a growing government, but an erosion of the separation of powers. They are correct. When James Madison authored Federalist 47, he gave voice to a sentiment shared widely by the Founders: consolidating executive, legislative, and judicial power into one entity is “the very definition of tyranny.”
To preserve self-government, the Constitution separated those powers into three branches. As new laws may restrict liberty, separated power ensures that one faction of society cannot run roughshod over another. Debate, compromise and consensus should ensure that any new regulations are enacted with wide public agreement.
Today, the 80,000-plus pages of federal regulations reveal the extent to which Congress has surrendered its lawmaking power to the administrative state. With one-sentence delegations to agencies, telling them to regulate “in the public interest,” Congress has given bureaucrats a free hand to craft rules regulating much of the economy and daily life.
This should be an election issue. But lots of the GOP is fine with the administrative leviathan.
“Last night, like many in our community, I watched newly released footage of Dr. Melissa Click directing a verbal assault against members of the Columbia Police Department during the homecoming parade in October 2015. Her conduct and behavior are appalling, and I am not only disappointed, I am angry, that a member of our faculty acted this way. Her actions caught on camera last October, are just another example of a pattern of misconduct by Dr. Click—most notably, her assault on one of our students while seeking ‘muscle’ during a highly volatile situation on Carnahan Quadrangle in November. We must have high expectations of members of our community, and I will address these new revelations with the Board of Curators as they work to complete their own review of the matter.”
[In] his 2000 book, The America We Deserve Trump noted Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction and targeted Iraq strikes had little impact on their overall capabilities. The Donald said the best course might be against Iraq to “carry the mission to its conclusion.”
Wrote Trump:
Consider Iraq. After each pounding from U.S. warplanes, Iraq has dusted itself off and gone right back to work developing a nuclear arsenal. Six years of tough talk and U.S. fireworks in Baghdad have done little to slow Iraq’s crash program to become a nuclear power. They’ve got missiles capable of flying nine hundred kilometers—more than enough to reach Tel Aviv. They’ve got enriched uranium. All they need is the material for nuclear fission to complete the job, and, according to the Rumsfeld report, we don’t even know for sure if they’ve laid their hands on that yet. That’s what our last aerial assault on Iraq in 1999 was about. Saddam Hussein wouldn’t let UN weapons inspectors examine certain sites where that material might be stored. The result when our bombing was over? We still don’t know what Iraq is up to or whether it has the material to build nuclear weapons. I’m no warmonger. But the fact is, if we decide a strike against Iraq is necessary, it is madness not to carry the mission to its conclusion. When we don’t, we have the worst of all worlds: Iraq remains a threat, and now has more incentive than ever to attack us.
In August 2004 Trump turned loud and vocally against the war in an interview with Esquire, more than a year after it started and it was clear after the initial successes an insurgency was developing.
Or as Tennessee state Senator Frank Niceley tweets: “So, the question for Mr. Trump would be: was George Bush lying about WMD or following Trump’s advice?”
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