HUGH HEWITT: ‘Senators Will Lose Their Jobs If They Block The Blockade.’

“If I were a Republican — whether the Majority Leader all the way down to the county clerk — and every nominee I would say no hearings. No votes. Lame ducks don’t make lifetime appointments.”

“There is no precedent,” he continued. “And I will simply add, the base will not forgive anyone. Senators will lose their jobs if they block the blockade. There should be an absolute blockade on this.”

Yes, defections could lead to the end of careers; a failure could be the last straw for the already-imperiled Republican Party.

Plus:

Furthermore, he criticized Sen. Patrick Leahy , who earlier in the program claimed any act to block a nomination would ignore the Constitution.

“Patrick Leahy who was on here just earlier voted 27 times to block a vote to a Republican nominee between 2001-2003. Patrick Leahy created the conditions that he was decrying.”

Yeah, the hypocrisy here is pretty rank.

FOR A DEMOCRAT, THIS SORT OF MOCKERY ACTUALLY MATTERS: SNL Mocks Hillary’s Unsuccessful Efforts To Appeal To Young Voters.

I REMEMBER WHEN THE PEOPLE WHO SAID THIS WERE RACIST XENOPHOBES: Secretary Of State Kerry: Migrant Wave Poses “Existential Threat” To Europe.

SOME POST-SCALIA THOUGHTS: So it seems likely that the choice of a Supreme Court Justice to replace Antonin Scalia will be a major driving factor in the presidential election. And possibly even the major driving factor.

So if choosing a Supreme Court Justice is that important why not just have elections to fill the slot directly?

There are lots of important characteristics in a presidential candidate, and who he or she will pick for the Supreme Court is only one of them. But to the extent that that drives voters’ choices, it means that other important topics — economic philosophy, national defense, etc. — will get short shrift.

Also, with people living longer, these kinds of choices happen less often, and are more important when they do. How about electing Supreme Court Justices to a single 18-year term? It would bleed a lot of drama out of presidential elections, and force voters to think more about the Court directly.

Plenty of states have elected supreme courts, and they don’t seem to work any worse than states with appointed supreme courts, though they do seem more protective of things like the right to arms, which the public values more highly than the elite of the bar. That doesn’t seem so awful.

REMEMBER THIS WHENEVER THE DEMS START GOING ON ABOUT DISENFRANCHISEMENT: DNC Chair: Superdelegates Exist to Protect Party Leaders from Grassroots Competition.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Antonin Scalia left us wisdom in dissent.

THE PRESIDENTIAL RACE HAS A NEW FOCUS FOR BOTH PARTIES: 2016 is Now About Replacing Scalia.

FLASHBACK: Senate Democrats in 1960 pass resolution against election-year Supreme Court recess appointments.

Related: On Election Year Supreme Court Vacancies.

Also: Jonathan Adler: There is little precedent for a presidential election year Supreme Court vacancy.

And: David Bernstein: Antonin Scalia and the Fortas Precedent Just as the Senate refused to confirm Abe Fortas in 1968, the Senate is unlikely to approve any SCOTUS nominee until next year, after the presidential election.

“TRUTH” BLU-RAY REVIEW: GLORIOUS FRONT-ROW SEAT TO RATHERGATE, BIRTH OF NEW MEDIA: I’d credit 9/11 for creating the Blogosphere as we know it (and did so back in 2002, shortly before launching my own Instapundit-inspired blog), but John Nolte is spot-on otherwise in his review of the low-budget Robert Redford cri de coeur at Big Hollywood. As Nolte writes, the otherwise stillborn, agitprop-laden “Truth” contains an insight into the minds of Democrat activists with bylines at the last moment before they realized that new media existed and that leftwing propaganda couldn’t just be broadcast into the airwaves without pushback.

And for a CBS News Division born of original sin (at the peak of his ratings influence, Walter Cronkite painted GOP presidential hopeful Barry Goldwater as a Nazi sympathizer), it was a glorious comeuppance indeed. It also illustrated how myopic the view of the world from Blackrock was – Mary Mapes had no idea that conservative blogs existed, as she later admitted after being defenestrated by them.

AND BOY, DOES IT EVER: Why younger women love Bernie Sanders, and why it drives older women crazy.

This urgency that women should support Clinton so she can defend causes can come across as condescending to young women. A great example of this was when Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz said in an interview with the New York Times, “Here’s what I see: a complacency among the generation of young women whose entire lives have been lived after Roe v. Wade was decided.”

And for women like Steinem, who has been fighting for feminism her whole life and just turned 81, this may well be their last chance to see a women elected to office. As Steinem quipped on Maher’s show, “Most people my age are dead.”

So who’s the Party Of Old White People, again?

Related: Sugar Daddy Sanders and the Seduction of Socialism.

ROGER SIMON: Rubio the Comeback Kid in South Carolina.

SHE’S ALWAYS BEEN LUCKY THIS WAY: So many coincidences help Hillary Clinton in her email scandal.

Like with the coin-tosses!

WHAT KIND OF SUPREME COURT NOMINEE WILL OBAMA SELECT? “Obama says he will defy GOP, nominate Scalia replacement,” the Washington Examiner reports.

As Paul Mirengoff writes at Power Line, “I think that President Obama’s nominee to replace Justice Scalia will be dead on arrival at the Senate, regardless of whom Obama selects. I suspect that Obama will reach the same conclusion. If so, Obama will select the person whose rejection will provide Democrats with the most political ammunition.”

One of Bernie Sanders’ chief inspirations once advised sharpening the contradictions, a notion that Obama has built his whole toxic career on.

WELL, HATRED AND CONTEMPT ARE FORMS OF CARING: Andrew Cadman: Does anyone care about white working class boys?

WHO DISLIKES OBAMA MORE — CONSERVATIVES OR LIBERALS? “There’s a reason why Hillary Clinton, campaigning as the guarantor of Obama’s third term, just got smoked by a kooky geriatric. Bernie Sanders is catching on in part because he tacitly concedes that Obama has been a dud.”

WHY ROMNEY LOST, IN ONE SHORT VIDEO: “Open borders cuts both ways — they come in, and (some) of us go out. In this case, manufacturing jobs on their way to old Monterey,” aka Mexico.

CULTURE CLUB: How Media Makes A Meme.

To understand the heavy lifting media is undertaking in attempting to make Bernie Sanders a plausible candidate for president, you have to understand who exactly Bernie Sanders is to begin with.

Sanders is a kookily proud outsider and self-declared Democratic Socialist who joined the House of Representatives in 1988 and the Senate in 2005. In the quarter-plus century he’s served in federal office, only 3 bills he’s sponsored have ever made it into law. Otherwise, he was that guy you would occasionally see yelling about rapine capital or the unnecessary proliferation of deodorant brands to an empty chamber of Congress on C-Span during midday break sessions. And this has been Bernie’s professional life for the past 35 years. Get up. Go to Congress. Fight with Lamp. Declare victory.

But Barack Obama’s election on charismatic socialist-lite soundbites packaged like a can of Pepsi commercial moved the needle further away from the moderate middle of the political Left that saw consecutive defeats by George W. Bush. And as culture-media has embraced the anti-capitalist rhetoric of astroturfed protest movements like Occupy, Climate March, and Black Lives Matter, the political left is ripe for a populist moment, even if the only available standard-bearer is the shabby retiree arguing with you over the last sack of quinoa/lentil mixed-blend grains at Whole Foods.

If a suitable ambassador for that message won’t present themselves, culture media will create one. Sanders doesn’t know his Reddit from his Snapchat but he doesn’t need to.

As Bernie Sanders waited backstage of the Ellen show, a program producer was seen doing everything in her power stopping short of using a cattle prod to get Bernie to lighten up and dance (this was Ellen DeGeneres’ ongoing schtick for guests). He clearly wasn’t having any of it, and after he was introduced, he managed a few side steps and hand waves before reverting immediately back into “NO TOUCH” mode.

These tiny moments are parlayed into memes and gifs of “Bernie as old-man-hippie hipster” that thrive on social media, and are then picked up by a sympathetic cultural mainstream media desperately trying to either relive or re-engineer the 1960s. The “social upheaval narrative” is just too alluring to pass up for them, especially when their own generation finds itself without a truly great social cause of its own. The lost decade of the Obama era is ending in a little less than a year and the far-Left quadrant of the media knows their pop-culture rockstar is hitting the exits with restively populist agitation brewing on both sides of the political aisle. College campuses and Hollywood have gone #FullCommunism with the silent approval of a President more interested on who the Best Actor Oscar goes to than how many heads ISIS is cutting off this week. Wall Street’s corporate darling Hillary Clinton, thinking the White House was hers for the taking, has once again found a jaded Left-wing commentariat desperate for Somebody To Love putting her on notice that this is not the party, nor the media she and her husband left behind.

This is why GOP donors would be much better off putting their money into media properties than into flushing it away in political contributions.

I THINK WE’RE ALL WONDERING THAT:  Now that Justice Scalia has died, what will Congress do?

LIBERTY’S NEMESIS, THE UNBRIDLED EXPANSION OF THE STATE: Turning back the leviathan of the administrative state.

LET THEM DRINK PERRIER: Emails: Despite knowing of lead in water, EPA planned to let Flint keep drinking it into 2016.

THE ADMINISTRATION FROM ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND: The Pentagon’s vile ‘divided loyalty’ rules for Jews.

THE POLITICAL ORIENTATION THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS NAME: The media’s blindness to Bernie’s socialist extremism is telling.

INSOMNIA THEATER (AUDIO EDITION!): Today’s post features the podcast interview I did with the Cato Institute this week on “The Drive for Campus Speech Codes,” in which I explain how the Department of Education is the “secret engine” behind some of the wackier cases of campus censorship. The interview concludes my recent Cato Unbound debate, where University of Chicago Law School Professor Eric Posner, George Washington University Law School Professor Catherine J. Ross, and I each took turns writing essays on the topic of free speech on campus.

As you can see from our back-and-forth, Ross and I agreed on quite a bit, while Posner and I disagreed on most things. I actually started to get the impression that he wasn’t even reading my essays—just the titles, and basing his responses on that. See for yourselves and check out the entire debate over at Cato Unbound—curious to know what you think.