HOW IT MUST BURN THE GOPe: They couldn’t figure this out by themselves, so the voters are giving them a little remedial lesson. Stephen Moore explains, “America Trumped: Trump is the Anti-Obama in Every Way.”

It is striking that Trump is the anti-Obama in every way. Obama blames America first for every problem on the earth, from global warming to terrorism. Trump emanates love for America and pledges to “make America great again.”

Obama hates business. Trump runs businesses.

Obama is a pessimist. Trump is an optimist.

Obama is an elitist. Trump is a populist.

Obama ‎is a college professor and a community organizer. Trump is a job creator and a profit maker.

Obama is incompetent. Trump is a professional — he exudes competence. . . .

In February 1980 the Republican establishment said that a staunch conservative Hollywood actor could never be president ‎and he won two landslide elections. Trump isn’t Reagan — but he’s one of the most talented retail politicians in modern times. For nine months everyone has been underestimating this man, saying that he was surely going to go away. He’s not going away. He’s rising and proving his critics on the left and right dead wrong. That’s Reaganesque.

Cruz has many of these qualities, too, but may have narrower appeal than Trump. Both are populists, running on a long-overdue theme of patriotism. With either candidate, the GOPe is getting a long-overdue spanking.

THIS IS VERY BIG BREAKING NEWS: The Supreme Court has stayed the Obama Administration’s vastly overreaching Clean Power Plan:

The surprising move on Tuesday is a blow to the administration and a victory for the coalition of 27 mostly Republican-led states and industry opponents that call the regulations “an unprecedented power grab.”

By temporarily freezing the rule the high court’s order signals that opponents have made a strong argument against the plan. A federal appeals court last month refused to put it on hold.

The plan aims to stave off the worst predicted impacts of climate change by reducing carbon dioxide emissions at existing power plants by about one-third by 2030.

Appellate arguments are set to begin June 2.

The decision to stay the regulation was along ideological lines, 5-4.

WELL, YES AND NO: Sarah Wright, the chair of a group called Unmarried Equality, writes in the Washington Post,  “Why It’s Time to Stop Glorifying Marriage.”

In an era when the average American now spends the majority of his or her life unmarried, it is time to stop glorifying and privileging marriage to the total exclusion of all other patterns of family formation, caregiving relationship, living arrangement and property ownership. Despite its ubiquity, marriage is exactly “one size does not fit all.” Yet at the same time, the high price of being single in the United States is a well-known fact of life. What’s a thinking person to do?

For the majority of children now born outside of marriage, (estimated atroughly half of births today), the ramifications of growing up in an unmarried household are generally immediate and negative: Increased poverty is all but guaranteed. At the same time, promoting marriage at taxpayer expense to solve this problem has been a colossal boondoggle. For starters, there was little demand from its target audience, not to mention that marriage has a nearly 50 percent failure rate. . . .

In fact, public support for people who constitute functional but poor families of any type should be based entirely on need. If the body politic ever reaches consensus on comprehensive immigration reform, for example, marital status could be replaced by citizenship as the basis for doling out various benefits. This is in line with more recent suggestions that the state remove some of the benefits attached to marriage and give them to those who need them most. Another option would be to expand the definition of family to encompass more than just romantic unions, and to extend the benefits of marriage to the unmarried, including the advantages that accrue through Social Security and tax law.

Or, the state could leave the marriage business altogether. Various red states moved to eliminate all marriage licenses as recently as last year, in anticipation of and reacting to the Obergefell gay marriage decision. Just last month, a Republican lawmaker in Indiana introduced a bill that would abolish marriage licenses in the Hoosier State. . . .

Privatizing marriage is an idea that draws together strange bedfellows — fromlibertarians to feminists; liberals to conservatives; and academics to clerics. Yet what binds our common view is the notion that personal relationships are best defined by individuals themselves. Since we all engage in various contractual agreements everyday, the basic concept is hardly new.

Abolishing marriage as a legal category would not eliminate the institution, which has enduring appeal for many people. What it could bring is a real understanding that unmarried families exist and that unmarried adults deserve full representation in society — not just a little extra love around Valentine’s Day.

The writer is correct in her observation that marriage isn’t for everyone. I (sadly) know too many people who are married solely for their own convenience (usually financial), and not because of any notions about love, fidelity or devotion. And hey, I understand how such marriages can be rationalized based purely on self-interest: Who wants to lose half of the assets they’ve worked hard to accumulate just because they aren’t “in love” anymore?  On the other hand, when there is genuine love, or when there are children involved, marriage is non pareil.

The writer is also correct that the time may have come for getting the state out of the business of defining marriage. Now that the Supreme Court has made it clear that “the right to personal choice regarding marriage is inherent in the concept of individual autonomy,” the scope of this “right to personal choice” regarding marriage presumably cannot be arbitrarily defined (and thus limited) by the state.

If one’s own happiness and individuality leads to loving two, three, or even four people at the same time, what right does the state have to prohibit polygamy? Now that the traditional procreative and corollary child-rearing justifications of one man, one woman marriage have been constitutionally dispensed with, there is no longer any principled constitutional basis for limiting marriage to two people. The Supreme Court in Obergefell desperately tried to use the phrase “two people” as much as possible, but logically, its autonomy-based analytical framework for recognizing same-sex marriage will not justify such numerical limitations in the long-term.

If the Constitution no longer allows gender or (presumably) even numerical limitations on state-sanctioned definitions of marriage, then perhaps it is indeed time for the state to get out of the marriage business altogether, leaving marriage as it was until about the mid-to-late 1700s: a private, usually church-sanctioned, status.

The times they are a-changin‘.

THE TRUTH ALWAYS COMES OUT, EVENTUALLY: For habitual liars–like the Clintons– this is a very scary prospect. Chuck Ross at the Daily Caller opines, “This Might be Why Hillary Won’t Release Her Goldman Sachs Speech Transcripts.”

As Hillary Clinton resists calls to release transcripts from her paid Goldman Sachs speeches, details of those events are emerging, and they aren’t good for the Democratic presidential candidate.

“It was pretty glowing about us,” one attendee at an Oct. 2013 Goldman Sachs event in Arizona told Politico about Clinton’s speech, which earned the former secretary of state $225,000. “It’s so far from what she sounds like as a candidate now. It was like a rah-rah speech. She sounded more like a Goldman Sachs managing director.” . . .

Clinton does have the ability to release the transcripts if she chooses.

Her speaking contracts — which went through the Harry Walker Agency — stipulate that the speeches be transcribed and that she retain rights to them.

She won’t be voluntarily releasing these transcripts. I am waiting for the audience-generated videos to emerge. I bet they’re worth a lot of money.

RELATED: Bill Clinton accuser Kathleen Willey to campaign against Hillary: “Willey is joining the Rape Accountability Project for Education PAC, or RAPE PAC, as its paid national spokeswoman, Reuters reported Monday. She will give public remarks and appear in political advertisements detailing claims of Bill Clinton’s past sexual misconduct.”

BUT IT WOULD MAKE TOO MUCH SENSE: Pressure on Lynch to Step Aside in Clinton Email Probe.

If the FBI finds sufficient evidence to launch a criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton or one of her top aides for mishandling classified information, Lynch’s Justice Department will have to decide whether to press ahead.

Even if no evidence of wrongdoing is found, Clinton’s many critics are unlikely to take the word of an appointee of President Obama’s and will doubt that justice has been served.

Already, top Republicans are calling for a special prosecutor to be brought in and evaluate the situation.

No. 2 Senate Republican John Cornyn (Texas) took to the floor of the Senate last week to call for a special counsel to be appointed “because of the conflict of interest by asking Attorney General Lynch to investigate and perhaps even prosecute somebody in the Obama administration.”

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) agrees that Lynch ought to consider a special counsel, a representative said, to reassure the country that decisions are made “without regard to any political considerations.”

The Justice Department, however, has so far declined the request.

“This matter is being reviewed by career attorneys and investigators and does not meet the criteria for the appointment of a special prosecutor,” department spokeswoman Melanie Newman said in a statement. . . .

Maybe this explains why Hillary is “one hundred percent confident” that nothing will come of the FBI investigation.

The current federal regulations relating to the appointment of a special counsel state that the Attorney General “will” appoint a special counsel when:

he or she determines that criminal investigation of a person or matter is warranted and

(a) That investigation or prosecution of that person or matter by a United States Attorney’s Office or litigating Division of the Department of Justice would present a conflict of interest for the Department or other extraordinary circumstances; and

(b) That under the circumstances, it would be in the public interest to appoint an outside Special Counsel to assume responsibility for the matter.

KEEPING AMERICA SAFE, OBAMA EDITION: Pentagon Orders Commanders to Prioritize Climate Change in All Military Actions.

The Pentagon is ordering the top brass to incorporate climate change into virtually everything they do, from testing weapons to training troops to war planning to joint exercises with allies. . . .

The directive, “Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience,” is in line with President Obama’s view that global warming is the country’s foremost national security threat, or close to it.

. . .

Climate change must be integrated in:

• Weapons buying and testing “across the life cycle of weapons systems, platforms and equipment.”

• Training ranges and capabilities.

• Defense intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance.

• Defense education and training.

• Combatant commander joint training with allies to “assess the risks to U.S. security interests posed by climate change.”

• Joint Chiefs of Staff collaboration “with allies and partners to optimize joint exercises and war games including factors contributing to geopolitical and socioeconomic instability.”

Yes, this makes sense. I can see why the President of the United States would direct our military to prioritize climate change, since all those military exercises, training, weapons tests, humvees and other military vehicles–not to mention actual weapons use–add to our carbon footprint, maybe as much as Air Force One or Obama’s limousine-and-SUV motorcade.

I mean, really, since climate change is a bigger threat than radical Islamic terrorism, we probably ought to just eliminate the military entirely. And the President should use a bicycle or sailboat to travel. The safety of the planet depends on it!

PERVERSITY PREVAILS: Dr. Peter Cook explains, “How Perverse Incentives Are Ruining Health Care.” It’s an eye-opening read about the present state of bureaucratic American medical practice.

MORE OF THIS, PLEASE: Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) and Congressman Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) have an oped in NRO, “A Stronger Congress, a Healthier Republic.”

The federal government is broken. And while there is plenty of blame to go around, only Congress can fix it.

We don’t mean this as an indictment of any one leader or party, because the dysfunction in Washington today has accreted over decades, under Houses, Senates, and presidents of every partisan combination, as well as the many different justices of the Supreme Court. . . .

The stability and moral legitimacy of America’s governing institutions depend on a representative, transparent, and accountable Congress to make its laws. For years, however, Congress has delegated too much of its legislative authority to the executive branch, skirting the thankless work and ruthless accountability that Article 1 demands and taking up a new position as backseat drivers of the republic.

So today, Americans’ laws are increasingly written by people other than their representatives in the House and Senate, and via processes specifically designed to exclude public scrutiny and input. This arrangement benefits well-connected insiders who thrive in less-accountable modes of policymaking, but it does so at the expense of the American people — for whose freedom our system of separated powers was devised in the first place.

In short, we have moved from a nation governed by the rule of law to one governed by the rule of rulers and unelected, unaccountable regulators. Congress’s abdication, unsurprisingly, has led to a proliferation of bad policy and to the erosion of public trust in the institutions of government. Distrust, also unsurprisingly, is now the defining theme of American politics. . . .

That is why we have joined with eight colleagues in the House and Senate to develop and promote a new agenda of structural reforms that will strengthen Congress and reassert its vital role in our society. We call it the Article 1 Project (A1P). . . .

First, Congress must reclaim its power of the federal purse. Our formal budget process, which dates to 1974, has fallen apart, and we must restructure it for a post-earmark world. We need to bring entitlement programs back onto the actual budget and bring self-funding federal agencies back under annual appropriation.

Second, we need to reform legislative “cliffs” that loom behind expiring legislation — at the end of the fiscal year and when the federal debt nears its statutory limit — to realign the incentives of the American people and their government.

Third, Congress must take back control of actual federal lawmaking. Today, the vast majority of federal laws are unilaterally imposed by executive-branch agencies. The bureaucrats in these agencies then serve as police, prosecutors, and courts in the ensuing cases. All major regulations should be affirmatively prioritized and approved by a vote of Congress.

Finally, we must clarify the law governing executive discretion, which right now allows presidents and federal bureaucrats to ignore or rewrite federal statutes, so long as they have a clever enough reason.

Yes, yes, yes, and yes to these four commonsense proposals. But they are only a small start in the right direction. Congress’s voluntary abdication of its legislative power since the early twentieth century is perhaps the single most significant flaw in our constitutional architecture– and one that the founding generation never foresaw. As James Madison expressed it in Federalist No. 48:

[I]n a a representative republic where the executive magistracy is carefully limited, both in the extent and the duration of its power; and where the legislative power is exercised by an assembly, which is inspired by a supposed influence over the people with an intrepid confidence in its own strength . . .  it is against the enterprising ambition of this department [the legislature] that the people ought to indulge all their jealousy and exhaust all their precautions.

Like Dorothy and her ruby slippers, Congress has always held the power to “go home” and restore the Constitution’s separation of powers. It can simply click its collective heels and, well, legislate, particularly in areas such as the power of the purse and passing statutes that carefully circumscribe (and limit judicial deference to) the unconstitutional “fourth branch” of the administrative state.

Of course the success of the Article I Project (or any similar effort) will require either: (1) a President who does not veto any such laws (i.e., a Republican President); or (2) a veto-proof supermajority of two-thirds of both chambers of Congress (i.e., a House and Senate comprised of at least two-thirds GOP members). Sadly, the Democrats have shown zero willingness in restoring Congress’s constitutional power, and have indeed cheered President Obama’s incessant executive power grab.

OBAMA TO PROPOSE UNDERMINING OBAMACARE?: Yep, you read that right. The Washington Examiner is reporting that President Obama’s budget proposal is expected to include a narrowing of Obamacare’s so-called “Cadillac tax” of 40 percent on benefits-rich health insurance plans.

Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Jason Furman and chief economist Matthew Fiedler wrote that the budget, to be published next week, will propose raising the threshold for the cost of plans affected by the tax.

The change, they wrote, will prevent the tax from “creating unintended burdens for firms located in areas where health care is particularly expensive.”

The Cadillac tax was made law as part of the funding for Obamacare. It is also intended to slow the growth in health care costs created by the existing incentives in the tax code. . . .

While the tax is popular among economists, it is opposed by unions that have bargained for costly expensive plans as well as by business groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Congress and is generally viewed unfavorably in Congress. Congress voted in December to delay the imposition of the 40 percent excise tax from 2018 to 2020.

No one ever thought the Cadillac tax was politically sustainable, long-term, precisely because of the vigorous opposition by unions, who give so generously to Democrats every election cycle.  So it was always a “fake” revenue raiser for Obamacare. The problem, however, is that the Cadillac tax is one of the largest revenue sources within Obamacare–an estimated $108 billion over a ten-year period.

When you narrow, or eliminate, this revenue source, suddenly Obamacare becomes much more expensive than the rosy “deficit reducing” bill of goods sold to the American people. As Obama told the American people in his address to a Joint Session of Congress on health care in September 2009:

And here’s what you need to know.  First, I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits — either now or in the future.  (Applause.)  I will not sign it if it adds one dime to the deficit, now or in the future, period.  And to prove that I’m serious, there will be a provision in this plan that requires us to come forward with more spending cuts if the savings we promised don’t materialize. . . .

Now, add it all up, and the plan I’m proposing will cost around $900 billion over 10 years — less than we have spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and less than the tax cuts for the wealthiest few Americans that Congress passed at the beginning of the previous administration.  (Applause.)  Now, most of these costs will be paid for with money already being spent — but spent badly — in the existing health care system.  The plan will not add to our deficit.

Of course, this promise–that Obamacare would not add to the deficit–was completely false. But when you begin to narrow or repeal Obamacare’s major revenue-raising provisions such as the Cadillac tax, the deficit problem grows even worse.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m certainly not advocating for keeping the Cadillac tax, or any other provision of Obamacare. The whole thing was a massive, ill-considered jumble from day one, and it should never have been rammed through Congress via reconciliation. We are all now literally paying the price of such a raw political maneuver.

But when the namesake of Obamacare begins to propose repealing/narrowing the most significant revenue generating provisions of his own (only) major legislative achievement, you know something is seriously rotten in the state of Denmark. Obama is (predictably) throwing a bone to the Democrats’ union constituency, but it only emphasizes how Obamacare was and still remains, at its core, nothing but a stinky pile of crony capitalist payoffs to every single affected sector of economy. Even Obamacare’s Cadillac tax “punishment” of high-value union health plans turned out to be a ruse.

WELL, HE’S A FOX GUARDING THE HENHOUSE: I’m referring to President Obama, who has a constitutional duty to faithfully execute the law, making him the chief guardian of the rule of law.

Obama’s track record on fulfilling this constitutional duty has been consistently abhorrent–the worst in history–so perhaps this is merely another transgression that will trigger a collective yawn from the mainstream media. But nonetheless, Andy McCarthy cogently explains “Obama’s Growing Conflict of Interest in the Clinton Email Scandal.”

[C]lassified information so pervades the thousands of pages of e-mails communicated through and stored on Mrs. Clinton’s unsecured, homebrew server system that the court-ordered disclosure process has ground to a halt. . . .[I]t turns out [her emails] were so threaded with classified information that the State Department and intelligence agencies have fallen hopelessly behind the court’s disclosure schedule: The task of reviewing the e-mails and redacting the portions whose publication could harm national security has proved much more complicated than anticipated. Thousands of remaining e-mails, and any embarrassing lapses they contain, will be withheld from voters until well into primary season.

So egregious have the scandal’s latest developments been that a critical State Department admission from last week has received almost no coverage: Eighteen e-mails between Mrs. Clinton and President Obama have been identified, and the government is refusing to disclose them. The administration’s rationale is remarkable: Releasing them, the White House and State Department say, would compromise “the president’s ability to receive unvarnished advice and counsel” from top government officials.

Think about what this means. Not only is it obvious that President Obama knew Mrs. Clinton was conducting government business over her private e-mail account, the exchanges the president engaged in with his secretary of state over this unsecured system clearly involved sensitive issues of policy. Clinton was being asked for “advice and counsel” — not about her recommendations for the best country clubs in Martha’s Vineyard, but about matters that the White House judges too sensitive to reveal. . . .

If the administration is refusing to disclose the Obama-Clinton e-mails because they involved the secretary of state providing advice and counsel to the president, do you think those exchanges just might touch on foreign-government information, foreign relations, or foreign activities of the United States — deliberations on which are presumed classified?

Will anyone in the press corps covering the White House and the State Department ask administration officials whether this is the case? .  . .

To summarize, we have a situation in which (a) Obama knowingly communicated with Clinton over a non-government, non-secure e-mail system; (b) Obama and Clinton almost certainly discussed matters that are automatically deemed classified under the president’s own guidelines; and (c) at least one high-ranking government official (Petraeus) has been prosecuted because he failed to maintain the security of highly sensitive intelligence that included policy-related conversations with Obama.

From these facts and circumstances, we must deduce that it is possible, if not highly likely, that President Obama himself has been grossly negligent in handling classified information. He discussed sensitive matters on a non-government, non-secure e-mail system that could easily be penetrated by foreign governments (among other rogue actors). By doing so, he left an electronic- and paper-trail that was outside the government’s tightly secured repositories for classified information. He also personally indulged, and thus implicitly endorsed, Clinton’s use of private e-mail to do government business.

Law enforcement investigations are supposed to proceed independent of political considerations, but I’d wager few people believe the decision whether to indict Mrs. Clinton will be made by Attorney General Loretta Lynch alone. It will be the president’s call. In making it, he may face a profound conflict of interest. A prosecution of Clinton might expose that Obama engaged in recklessness similar to Clinton’s, albeit on a far smaller scale. Moreover, Clinton would likely argue in her defense that the president, who is ultimately responsible for safeguarding classified information, not only authorized Clinton to use private e-mail but knowingly used it himself in order to communicate with Clinton.

I’m not so sure about the “far smaller scale” conclusion. But that aside, gosh, I’m shocked that an inexperienced, insouciant, and narcissistic President would be so careless with our national security. And so corrupt.

THE REAL IOWA HEADLINE IS REPUBLICAN TURNOUT: While everyone is disputing how to spin the post-Iowa momentum–did Hillary “really” win, or did Rubio “really” come in second–the real headline is that the turnout numbers suggest strong Republican enthusiasm and significantly depressed Democratic enthusiasm:

Eight years ago, when Clinton was the favorite to defeat Barack Obama and John Edwards in the caucus, around 220,000 Democrats turned out. The Democrat turnout was almost double the Republican turnout, a clear sign of Democrat enthusiasm after 8 years of the Bush Presidency.

This year, however, just over 170,000 Democrats turned out to caucus, in a contest that was widely regarded, and broadcast by the media, as a nail-biter. Despite a massive turnout operation by the Clinton campaign and record-breaking rallies from Bernie Sanders, Democrat turnout dropped around 25 percent from 2008.

The Republican turnout was around 180,000, the highest turnout in its history. It is also the first time more Republicans turned out when both races were contested.

Indeed, the Republican turnout of 180,000 was about 60,000 more than the turnout in 2012, which was itself a record Republican turnout.

Overall, the Republicans experienced a 50 percent increase in turnout over 2012, whereas the Democrats experienced a 23 percent decrease.

If this enthusiasm gap continues through the general election, the Democrats will really need to work overtime on voter fraud to have a decent shot at the White House.

“PROGRESS”: University of Connecticut building racially segregated dorm for black males. Ah, sweet