LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: SOTU Day, ‘Andy’s office’ is Empty and Much, Much More. “Presidential-hopeful Senator Kristen Gillibrand (D-NY) is bringing the wacky Mayor of San Juan. Some politicians will be bringing members of the DACA crew. Some will not show up at all. The left will also offer no less than six different responses to Trump’s speech.”

I’ll drunkblog SOTU tonight, with the able assistance of the Hot Mic crew.

THEY THOUGHT THEY’D GET AWAY WITH IT, AND THEY THOUGHT THEY’D BE REWARDED FOR THEIR MALFEASANCE: Victor Davis Hanson: Hillary’s ‘Sure’ Victory Explains Most Everything.

The traditional way of looking at the developing scandals at the FBI and among holdover Obama appointees in the DOJ is that the bizarre atmospherics from candidate and President Trump have simply polarized everyone in Washington, and no one quite knows what is going on.

Another, more helpful, exegesis, however, is to understand that if we’d seen a Hillary Clinton victory in November 2016, which was supposed to be a sure thing, there would now be no scandals at all.

That is, the current players probably broke laws and committed ethical violations not just because they were assured there would be no consequences but also because they thought they’d be rewarded for their laxity. . . .

If we consider the mentality of government elite careerists, we see that the election-cycle machinations and later indiscretions of Strzok and Page were not liabilities at all. They were good investments. They signaled their loyalty to the incoming administration and that they were worthy of commendation and reward.

Hillary Clinton’s sure victory certainly also explains the likely warping of the FISA courts by FBI careerists seeking to use a suspect dossier to surveille Trump associates — and the apparent requests by Samantha Power, Susan Rice, and others to read surveilled transcripts of Trump associates, unmask names, and leak them to pet reporters. Again, all these insiders were playing the careerist odds. What we view as reprehensible behavior, they at the time considered wise investments that would earn rewards with an ascendant President Hillary Clinton.

Yep.

THE WEEK: “America’s Constitution is terrible. Let’s throw it out and start over.”

As Steve Hayward writes in response, “It’s Official: Liberals Hate Constitutional Government.”

KOREAN WAR RETROSPECTIVE: Engineers tackle damaged bridge a Chosin Reservoir, December 1950.

RELATED: Loading rockets on Corsairs, September 1950.

THEY’RE NOT MISSING IT. THEY’RE TRYING TO MAKE SURE EVERYONE ELSE MISSES IT: Mollie Hemingway: Media Is Missing “Something Huge” Happening At FBI.

You had Bruce Ohr, who was demoted twice.

You had Peter Strzok, who had to be taken off the case.

You had Baker, who is gone, and Rybicki, also.

This is quite a collection of people, obviously, there is something huge going on. And I think a lot of people in the media are missing this very large story. Perhaps this memo will help us learn a little bit more about what it is that is causing these changes.

Well, in the immortal words of Jim Treacher:

MICHAEL BARONE: All that you — and Justice Anthony Kennedy — need to know about redistricting and gerrymandering.

Does gerrymandering matter? Not as much as you might think. You’re sure to be wrong if you take at face value the rhetoric of liberals who seem to place most of the blame for Republican majorities in the House of Representatives on partisan map-making.

I have argued repeatedly — in December 2017, September 2017, July 2015, October 2014, September 2014, January 2014, and February 2013, that redistricting is less important in securing Republican congressional and legislative majorities than demographic clustering — the fact that Democratic voters are increasingly concentrated in black, Hispanic, gentry liberal and university areas.

That’s because Democrats’ huge majorities in districts dominated by such voters do nothing to elect Democrats in the remaining districts. A party with clustered constituencies is inevitably disadvantaged by a system of equal-population legislative districts. That conclusion is confirmed by the research of political scientists Jowei Chen (University of Michigan) and Jonathan Rodden (Stanford), as reported in the New York Times in 2014, and it was confirmed once again last week by the work of David Wasserman and three colleagues at FiveThirtyEight in their Atlas of Redistricting. . . .

Wasserman and his colleagues, FiveThirtyEight journalists Aaron Bycoffe, Ella Koeze and Julia Wolfe, have produced splendid work. It should be required reading for anyone interested in understanding redistricting, and for those — including Justice Anthony Kennedy — who hope there is or think there must be some easy answer, some computer algorithm or legal formula, which will guarantee fair, non-partisan redistricting. There isn’t.

The best solution, and one I have long advocated, is strict application of the equal-population standard adopted by the Supreme Court in 1964, which limits more stringently than most observers think the ability of redistricters to benefit their party or faction. This also has the advantage of being easily, ministerially (a legal term) enforced by the courts in a non-partisan manner.

All I know is that when gerrymandering benefited Democrats, it was just only of those hilarious political shenanigans that happen. It wasn’t until it looked like it might benefit Republicans that it became an Urgent Threat To The Republic.

ANALYSIS: TRUE.

And in general, the high-horse reaction to the Trump presidency is particularly irritating because of its admixture of dishonesty, incompetence, and deep sanctimony. I mean, I know we have the worst political class in our history, but do they have to work so hard to prove it?

BUT THE NARRATIVE! Two men who were in the US under the DACA program are arrested for ‘human smuggling’ in San Diego.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: California teacher slams military members as ‘lowest of the low’ in classroom rant caught on video.

Shades of John Kerry’s infamous 2006 “You know, education, if you make the most of it, if you study hard and you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq” line in 2006 at Pasadena City College.

JOEL KOTKIN: The Screwed Millennial Generation Gets Smart.

Despite the hype from the press and urban planners, millennials are following in the footsteps of previous generations by locating on the periphery major metropolitan areas and Sun Belt cities, most of which are simply agglomerations of suburbs.

This pattern seems certain to accelerate as millennials enter their thirties, the age when contemporary populations tend to marry, settle down, and have children. To be sure, notes Pew, more 18- to 34-year-olds now live with their parents than with spouses or significant others for the first time since the question was first asked in the 1880s. But when they do leave the nest, albeit later than in previous generations, they are becoming adults whose collective decisions are not so different from those of their parents.

Nice to see them normalizing.

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: Here’s How Reports of Trump’s Stormy Daniels Affair Gave SHARK CHARITIES a Boost Worldwide.

METAPHOR ALERT: UChicago faculty denounce plans for Obama Presidential Center: ‘object-lesson in the mistakes of the past.’

BYRON YORK: A Tale of Two Memos: The GOP Memo tries to discover what the FBI was doing; the Dem memo is about knocking down the GOP memo.

WELL, GOOD: North Korea, Under Sanctions Strain, Dials Back Military Exercises. “Winter maneuvers are less extensive than in previous years; restrictions on fuel imports are seen as having an effect.”

The North Korean maneuvers, which typically run from December through March, were slow in getting started and are less extensive than usual, according to American officials familiar with intelligence reports and experts outside the government.

One possibility is that restrictions on shipments of oil and refined petroleum products to North Korea imposed by the United Nations have led the country, which has one of the world’s largest standing armies, to conserve fuel by cutting back on ground and air training exercises.

“Where this will have an effect is on ground-force readiness,” said Joseph S. Bermudez Jr. , a military analyst for 38 North, a website on North Korean affairs run by Johns Hopkins University’s U.S.-Korea Institute. “Military units have to train to maintain their proficiency.”

Still, military analysts inside and outside the government cautioned that the development hasn’t yet led to a dramatic decrease in the North’s military capabilities. There also appear to be no signs that sanctions are limiting North Korea’s push to strengthen its nuclear and missile arsenal.

This is no time to go all wobbly.

REPORT: McCabe Stepped Down After Pressure From FBI Director.

FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe stepped down from his post after facing pressure from FBI Director Christopher Wray to leave the position, The New York Times reported Monday.

Wray reportedly said he was concerned about an inspector general report about McCabe and other top Department of Justice officials’ actions during the 2016 presidential race.

The FBI was investigating both Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of State and the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia at the time.

Wray offered for McCabe to be moved to another job at a lower level, but McCabe instead chose to leave the bureau.

McCabe’s departure had been anticipated for some time, and The Washington Post had reported he would retire in March.

But the announcement that he was stepping down on Monday was a surprise, and the Times reported that FBI employees learned of the development from the news as the FBI did not announce the exit internally.

You know, various anonymous sources have been saying that a housecleaning at DOJ and in the intelligence agencies was coming this spring. I was skeptical, but . . . .

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Historically black colleges and universities struggle with rock-bottom graduation rates.

ANDREW MCCARTHY: Rod Rosenstein Is Shirking His Duty to Supervise Robert Mueller. “Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has been AWOL for seven months. We seem to have forgotten that Mueller answers to Rosenstein — and Rosenstein seems only too happy to have us forget.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Rankings Scandal Unfolds At Temple Business School. “U.S. News has announced what may be the most egregious case yet: Temple’s online MBA has been ranked #1 for the past four years, based in part on its reporting that 100% of its entering students took the GMAT. Only 20% of its 2017 entering class did so.”

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