Hillary 2016? Wait And See

At some point, I'm going to have to say something about the possibility of Hillary Clinton running to be Barack Obama's successor, should he get a second term. And why not say a little bit of that now?

It can only be a little bit, because we haven't seen the Hillary 2016 campaign yet, and we don't know what kind of situation we'll be in then. Will the Supreme Court go nuts and overturn the ACA, and Hillary be supporting Medicare for All, a carbon tax, and free universal pre-K education? Then I'm very likely to support her. Will Hillary rehire Mark Penn, take herself to have the primary in the bag, and run a cautious centrist campaign in preparation for the general election? Then I'm against her, as we'll certainly have better candidates. In any event, a whole lot more has to happen before reasonable people can make up their minds.

Just as the 2006 and 2008 elections left the Republican Party with a fairly weak presidential primary field, they left us with plenty of excellent young Democratic Senators whom I'd be happy to see in a presidential race. I like Hillary well enough, but it's far too early for people on the left to have their minds made up.

It is a good time to give an early endorsement to the "Texts from Hillary" tumblr, however.

Different Parties, Different Goals

I realize it's the job of politicians to project confidence, but when I see Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) confidently predicting that the Court will uphold the ACA 6-3, I can't help but think that Pelosi, Obama, and really everyone else trying to point out that the individual mandate originated with the Heritage foundation and represent a tremendous compromise, are all playing one game, in which the goal is to enact sound, centrist public policy, and craft a legal argument based on existing based on existing precedent (to which, it should be noted, the Court is not necessarily bound), while basically every elected Republican and the conservative Justices are playing another game, in which the goal is for the Red Team to beat the Blue Team and therefore nothing else matters.

When Guns Aren't Outlawed, Dirty F***ing Hippies Will Have Guns

Over at Balloon Juice, Betty Cracker flags the difficulty local governments in the Tampa area are having in preparing for the Republican convention, noting that all sorts of paraphernalia are banned from the protest zone, except for actual firearms, thanks to a ban on firearm bans courtesy of Rick Scott, the NRA, and the Florida Legislature.

Oops.

It's worth noting that the quickest way to enact restrictions on walking around while carrying a gun is probably for the "wrong" kinds of people to start carrying firearms, causing a freakout among the people who wrote the laws in the first place.

Health Care Reform: What Now?

After all the work Democrats did getting health care reform through every veto point (five committees, a 60-vote Senate, House passage twice, the Senate again, presidential signing) it's sickening to think about having the Supreme Court just throw it out. The fact that the individual mandate was showing up in mid-1990s Republican health-care proposals won't give Scalia or Alito or Thomas any affection for it. Dahlia Lithwick says she doesn't know which way things are going to go, and if she doesn't, neither do I.

My guess has been that Kennedy is the decisive Justice, and we get a 5-4 decision. I've heard some people say that Roberts will vote with the majority if Kennedy does, which I guess I wouldn't rule out -- for all I know, Roberts might not care to vote with the right-wingers if the law is going to get upheld anyway. But that still makes Kennedy decisive.

If I have any idea how health care reform efforts should proceed if the Supreme Court strikes down the whole law, it's via Medicare expansion. Medicare for All should be a goal that our presidential candidates announce support for. (I could easily see the incentives in primaries supporting this -- if the other candidates aren't willing to go there, you should go there and people will like you better.) The reach is always further than the grasp, so next time we're in power, we end up having to make a bunch of compromises with interest groups and pass Medicare for people under 25 or something, and then a couple decades later the middle of the donut gets filled in.

Again, losing this court case will be an awful defeat. Scott Lemieux is right as far as I can tell -- there's no silver lining here. But the thing I tell myself about these things is that at one point, America had slavery. People were allowed to own other people, buy them, whip them, and sell their children. And somehow, that stopped. Having a disastrous health care system is going to be easier to fix than slavery. I don't even think we'll have to fight a bloody war with over a half million casualties. There might be setbacks that destroy millions of person-years of work, but what you do after the setbacks is start committing person-years to another shot at making things better.

ACA, SCOTUS, and Activist Legitimacy

J. kelly Wright isn't walking through that door,
at least not until activists start taking court
appointments seriously

I agree with Scott Lemieux that, should the Supreme Court overturn the Affordable Care Act (as I think seems likely at this point), the Court as an institution will not suffer a crisis of legitimacy. While the current polling on the Constitutionality of Obamacare is almost certainly a result of the public discourse on the subject, the end result means that a large portion of the electorate will be perfectly fine with a decision that overturns the law. As an institution, the public views the Supreme Court as one of the more trustworthy American institutions, certainly more trustworthy than Congress or even the Presidency, and Gen Y is considerably more deferential to authority figures than the Boomers or Gen X.

What should happen (and, if there is any justice in the world, will happen), whether or not we end up with a nakedly partisan ruling, is that liberal activists will start taking judicial appointments much more seriously. And I don't mean "get more lawyers to join the American Constitution Society" seriously. I mean rank-and-file activists need to start making support for progressive court appointments a sine qua non for political candidates. If courts are going to be a purely political institution, they need to be a purely political institution to both parties, not a political institution for one and a political-technocratic institution for the other.

Over the past three decades, the right has made devotion to the Republican (let's not call it conservative when it comes to court appointments) political agenda a prerequisite for judicial postings. This is not to say that Republican judicial appointees are incompetent partisan hacks; some are, but a great many are competent partisan hacks, well versed in the techniques of using the means of legal sophistry to achieve right-wing policy ends. It's time for Democrats to start doing the same thing. No more appointing mushy moderates to district courts because that's what the home state Senator is a Republican or a mushy moderate Democrat. The President's job will be to appoint the most progressive judges he can find; the job of the Senate Judiciary Committee chair and the Majority will be to round up votes from recalcitrant Western and Southern Democrats. And it will be the job of rank and file political activists to once again emphasize to their elected officials that this is a priority, the way it was a priority in the New Deal Era for labor unions, or in Civil Rights Era to African-Americans. If politics is the slow boring of hard boards, restructuring the courts may be the hardest board out there. It's time to get cracking.