THAT MEANS IT’S WORKING: ObamaCare Insurers Considering Dumping Bronze Plans.

A MOTHER’S DAY REMINDER: A Little Mother Prevents Big Brother: “Motherhood is the first and last line of defense against totalitarianism. If you think this statement sounds over the top, you ought to ponder why the family has always been the ultimate target of tyrannical systems of government such as communism. Advocates of cultural Marxism tend to view families as akin to subversive cells that get in the way of centralized state power… That’s the best reason to celebrate Mother’s Day—perpetually.”

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1093.

IN HIS DEFENSE, SOME PEOPLE THINK HE WAS BLACKMAILED: How John Roberts Begat Donald Trump:

Not because his ruling in NFIB v. Sebelius—and last year in King v. Burwell, when the die had already been cast—allowed a hugely unpopular piece of legislation to survive and corrode our health-care system and economy. But because Roberts recognized that the Affordable Care Act was unconstitutional yet still saved it out of a misbegotten devotion to judicial restraint—under the guise of deferring to “the people.”

Sure, the chief justice cleverly wrote his opinion so it wouldn’t increase Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce and even cut it back under the Necessary and Proper Clause. He also ultimately upheld the individual mandate only by rewriting it into a “unicorn” tax—a creature of no known constitutional provenance that will never be seen again.

But by refusing to follow his own logic, to go where even Justice Kennedy full-throatedly went—I was in the courtroom to hear Kennedy passionately summarize a dissent that would’ve struck down the entire law—Roberts increased cynicism and anger at play-by-the-rules conservatives and decreased respect for institutions across the board.

The man’s twistifications drove the constitutionalist Tea Partiers into the arms of the populists—or made it easy for their populist instincts to “trump” their constitutional ones (pun unintended, but fitting). Why bother with the Constitution? Even when you’re right, you lose.

Indeed, if Kennedy had joined the liberals in their view that there are simply no structural limits on federal power, there would have been disappointment, but it would have been understandable given the conventional Left-Right rubric. But to lose in a wholly extra-legal way was a sucker punch, belying the idea that there’s a difference between law and politics and that the judiciary is an anti-majoritarian check on the excesses of the political branches.

Roberts essentially told would-be Trumpistas not to bother the courts with important issues, that if you want to beat Obama you have to get your own strongman—complete with pen, phone, and contempt for the Constitution. So they did.

And he thought he was protecting the reputation of the judiciary while doing it.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Federal Probe Eyes Possible Straw Donors to De Blasio Campaign, Sources Say.

THE REAL MINIMUM WAGE IS ALWAYS ZERO: Former McDonald’s CEO warns jobs will go to robots under $15 minimum.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: The State Of Our Union: The biggest deficits in the United States these days are not the ones grabbing the headlines.

The state of our union can be summed up pretty easily: Democratic policy ideas don’t work, and the Republican Party is melting down. From New York state, where Democratic power brokers are beginning to be herded into prison, where so many of them belong, to Chicago, where a civil war between Democrat-run public unions and the Democratic mayor rages even as the city’s finances fall apart, to the collapsing cities of Detroit and Flint, and on out to the high-speed rail boondoggle in California, the country is covered in the ruins of decades of “progressive” governance. Take Obamacare itself, a “reform” that is already making health care more bureaucratic and less affordable. Even as premiums and deductibles rise and the provider networks shrink, special interests like labor unions, insurance companies and hospital chains seek to rewrite its rules and regulations to achieve windfalls for themselves at the public expense. They will almost certainly succeed, and over time, Obamacare like other programs will become increasingly encrusted by sweetheart deals, carve-outs and other provisions that reduce its positive qualities while making it ever more expensive and bureaucratic.

The more “Democratic” an institution is these days, on the whole the less well it is working. What institution in the United States has been under Democratic control longer and more thoroughly than the failing public school systems of major cities? Or their police departments?

Yet against the backdrop of failing Democratic policies and institutions, the collapse of the Republican Party into political and intellectual incoherence is all the more striking. The Democrats, for all their inability to achieve their stated end of social progress through their chosen means of good governance, are clearly more competent at the essential business of party management than their GOP rivals. The failures of Democratic governance are so apparent, and the public unhappiness with the cronyism and inequality of interest group liberalism so deep, that organizing an effective opposition should be a fairly easy task—but even that basic objective has eluded the contemporary GOP.

Yep. Go back and read my 2006 GOP “pre-mortem” and you’ll see that the problem isn’t a new one. And reading back over Dennis Hastert’s bizarre support for William “freezer cash” Jefferson, I wonder if he was being blackmailed?

MEGAN MCARDLE: FOUR REASONS WHY TRUMP WON: “There are any number of explanations for what Trump is bringing out in the electorate. But the most compelling explanation also, curiously, gets the shortest shrift: He’s a celebrity candidate, and celebrity candidates break election models. Jesse Ventura in Minnesota, Arnold Schwarzenegger in California: these people bring out folks who don’t normally vote. In a low-turnout election, or a badly divided field, that’s enough to turn things in their favor. Celebrity candidate voters aren’t normal voters. Normal voters care more about policy than normal non-voters, care more about party identification, care more about ideology. Simply trying to transfer analysis of normal voters over onto the new people that celebrity candidates bring out to the polls doesn’t work very well, because you’re searching madly for clues to things that aren’t really there. This is why such candidates often surprise political scientists by winning.”

I’d add that Rubio destroyed his chances when he got in bed with Chuck Schumer. And I think Schumer was more interested in torpedoing Rubio’s career by sucking him into that deal than in the deal itself.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: How to make the U.S. collapse-proof. It’s an approach too drastic to ever be tried, though.

THE INSTAWIFE SAYS WHEN YOU LOOK AT WHAT THE KARDASHIANS HAVE DONE TO THE MEN IN THEIR LIVES, IT’S NICE TO SEE THEM HANGING OUT WITH FIDEL: Are the Kadashians Weapons of Mass Destruction for Cuba?

THE THIRD BIGGEST CAUSE OF DEATH IN AMERICA? Medical Errors.

FEEL THE BERN: Tow truck driver shows up to help stranded motorist until he sees multiple Sanders stickers on her car. Instead drives away, telling her, “Call the government.”

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Widespread Mental Illness Taking Over America, One Bathroom at a Time.

WE FOUGHT A WAR ON POVERTY. POVERTY WON: How The Liberal Welfare State Destroyed Black America.

Related: Van Jones Admits Dems Need Minorities to Remain Poor and Resentful.

More: How America’s Welfare System Hurts the People It’s Supposed to Help, from Reason TV:

(Classical reference in headline.)

HMM: How a FOIA Request into Hillary Clinton’s Emails Revealed a Criminal Investigation: Clinton had characterized the FBI’s investigation as “routine,” but the DOJ now refers to it as a “law enforcement proceeding.”

UNITY: Paul Ryan: ‘I’m just not ready’ to back Donald Trump.

Ryan said he hopes to eventually back Trump and “to be a part of this unifying process.” The first moves, though, must come from Trump, he said.

Ryan said he wants Trump to unify “all wings of the Republican Party and the conservative movement” and then run a campaign that will allow Americans to “have something that they’re proud to support and proud to be a part of.”

“And we’ve got a ways to go from here to there,” Ryan said.

They have until Cleveland.

CAMILLE PAGLIA: Dem strategists knew Trump was ‘most formidable’ challenge to Clinton.

In her latest Salon column (seriously, she’s the only reason ever to click on that website), outspoken social critic Camille Paglia suggests that “savvy Democratic strategists have surely known for months that [businessman Donald] Trump was by far the most formidable of Hillary Clinton’s potential opponents.”

Her evidence for this? The fact that Democrats (especially those in the media) have “been playing the race and riot cards against him to the max.” Included in the charges against Trump, of course, were accusations of sexism.

But Paglia suggests that, far from sexism hurting her campaign, Clinton has benefitted from the fact that she’s a woman (and Clinton takes great pains to remind everyone of that fact at every chance).

“At the early debates, for example, Martin O’Malley was paralyzed by his deference to her sacred womanhood and hardly dared raise his voice to contest her brazen untruths from three feet away,” Paglia wrote. “Meanwhile, in debate after debate, unconstrained by the sycophantic media moderators, Hillary rudely interrupted, talked over both O’Malley and Bernie Sanders, and hogged airtime like it was going out of style.”

Paglia also condemns those who claim sexism keeps women from running from office, suggesting it has more to do with women wanting to keep their private lives private.

“[Sen. Dianne] Feinstein and [House Minority Leader Nancy] Pelosi, to all reports, enjoy a rewarding private life that they do not want violated and blown to hell,” Paglia wrote. “But Hillary, consumed by her own restless bitterness, has no such tranquility. The wheels must grind! The future must be conquered! Past slights must be avenged!”

Hillary is boring and unappealing, as is her message. The press will try to carry her across the finish line anyway, but not with anything like the enthusiasm it had for Obama.

MODERATE MUSLIMS “UNCLE TOMS:” MEET THE NEW LONDON MAYOR WHO REPRESENTED 9/11 BOMBER.

As the New York Observer’s John Schindler tweets, “Somewhere, Enoch Powell is having a good laugh right now.”

JUST THINK OF THE MEDIA AS DEMOCRAT OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES AND YOU WON’T GO FAR WRONG: The New York Times profiles Ben “Lonesome*” Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, or as they dub him “The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign-Policy Guru,” who all but tells the Grady Lady their reporting stinks on ice:

The job he was hired to do, namely to help the president of the United States communicate with the public, was changing in equally significant ways, thanks to the impact of digital technologies that people in Washington were just beginning to wrap their minds around. It is hard for many to absorb the true magnitude of the change in the news business — 40 percent of newspaper-industry professionals have lost their jobs over the past decade — in part because readers can absorb all the news they want from social-media platforms like Facebook, which are valued in the tens and hundreds of billions of dollars and pay nothing for the “content” they provide to their readers. You have to have skin in the game — to be in the news business, or depend in a life-or-death way on its products — to understand the radical and qualitative ways in which words that appear in familiar typefaces have changed. Rhodes singled out a key example to me one day, laced with the brutal contempt that is a hallmark of his private utterances. “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

As John Podhoretz writes at the New York Post in response to Rhodes making perhaps the ultimate Kinsley gaffe, “Congratulations, liberals of the Washington press corps and elite organizations: You’re a bunch of suckers. We all know this because the Obama White House just told us so.”

Tough break, Juicebox Mafia; you did everything you could for Obama, but he and his staffers still have no respect for such cheap dates, especially as they kick back and play out the remaining string until January.

As for Rhodes’ foreign policy skills — or the lack thereof — Ace of Spades has you more than covered, as he fisks wide swatches of the article, including this passage:

His lack of conventional real-world experience of the kind that normally precedes responsibility for the fate of nations — like military or diplomatic service, or even a master’s degree in international relations, rather than creative writing — is still startling.

Gee, wait ’till the Times discovers who Rhodes’ boss is.

But wait, there’s more! “Obama’s Foreign Policy Guru Boasts of How the Administration Lied to Sell the Iran Deal,” Lee Smith writes at the Weekly Standard: “Those readers who found Jeffrey Goldberg’s picture of Obama in his March Atlantic profile refreshing for the president’s willingness to insult American allies publicly will be similarly cheered here by Rhodes’s boast of deceiving American citizens, lawmakers, and allies over the Iran deal. Conversely, those who believe Obama risked American interests to take a cheap shot at allies from the pedestal of the Oval Office will be appalled to see Rhodes dancing in the end zone to celebrate the well-packaged misdirections and even lies—what Rhodes and others call a ‘narrative’—that won Obama his signature foreign policy initiative.”

* Sorry, cheap joke. Though to be fair, the real Lonesome Rhodes spent his last days as an Obamacare pitchman, thus bringing his career full circle.

ROGER SIMON: Republicans Should Take a Time Out:

All branches should stop and think, not do anything definitive. It won’t hurt.  They can come out and be just as mean to each other in another week, destroy the party, start a third party, move to Canada, invade the Balkans,  whatever they want to do.  But maybe they won’t.  Maybe they have more in common than they think.  They should at least try to find out.

Read the whole thing.

ALEX ROARTY: The War On Trump Is Over: Some Trump critics now urge party to rally behind the seemingly inevitable nominee.

THIS IS CNN: Ashleigh Banfield Misinforms Viewers on NC Bathroom Law.

VEGAN GREEN WEENIE OF THE YEAR: Famous California vegan restaurateurs under fire over revelation they eat meat.

Steve Hayward of Power Line quips, “vegan death threat? What’s that like anyway? A sharpened cucumber? A frozen tofu brick through the window with rotting cabbage to knock you out? ‘Vegan death threat’ ranks right up there with ‘French military offensive’ on the oxymoron scale.”

Considering the terrorism done in the name of ALF and ELF (Animal and Earth Liberation Front, respectively) and other eco-extremists over the last ten years, I’m not sure I’d be so flippant about their dangers. Similarly, it doesn’t sound like the restaurant owners considered what sort of retribution they would face from their (presumably former) customers when they announced (via a blog post) they were no longer vegans.

Flashback: When Anti-Modernists Collide.