Month: May 2014

by Patrick Appel

David Graham warns observers not to read too much into Mitch McConnell’s win last night:

[H]ere’s what this tells us about the Tea Party-establishment war, and what my colleague Molly Ball calls The Dynamic, the national theme that explains all races: Probably not much. What it shows is that it’s not enough to challenge an incumbent from the right in a red state. It’s not even enough for the incumbent to be very vulnerable. The two cases where Tea Party candidates unseated sitting senators—Mike Lee in Utah and Richard Mourdock in Indiana—have come when the incumbent was caught off-guard and the challenger was a strong candidate. Neither was the case in Kentucky.

Michael Tomasky thinks this election is just a bump in the road for the Tea Party:

[W]hile 2014 is, to be sure, going to go down as a bad Tea Party year in electoral terms, we certainly can’t yet say the same of 2016—a much more important year, i.e. presidential.

In fact, as of today, what we can say about 2016, speculative as it may be, is that the tea party is if anything in the driver’s seat. The guy we’ve all taken to calling the GOP front-runner, Rand Paul, is a Tea Party guy. That simple fact alone hardly makes for anything I’d call dead.

Beyond Paul, numerous potential candidates are backed by the Tea Party or in some sense have that aura about them. Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Scott Walker—even Mike Huckabee, if he casts his lure [good] into the waters, will be fishing in the Tea Party pond for votes. Yes, there’ll be a Chris Christie or a Jeb Bush to represent the establishment. But if most of the candidates are flat-out Tea Party people or at least Tea Party-friendly creatures, that means to me that the pull of gravity in that primary season is still going to be pretty far to the right, and driven to some decent extent by Tea Party priorities. And let’s face it: If the party does nominate Paul, the Tea Party will have won the biggest prize in intra-party politics: determining the presidential nominee. So 2016 could well be a huge Tea Party year.

Ben Jacobs makes an important point has been made before:

[T]he lesson is not that the Establishment beat the Tea Party or vice versa but that the two are becoming increasingly similar. There aren’t primaries as there were two or four years ago with moderate mandarins like Mike Castle or Dick Lugar. Instead, the candidates from each wing of the Republican Party are starting to look more alike and taking positions on issues like taxes, immigration and climate change that would have been considered far right wing in George Bush’s GOP. The fights between establishment candidates and Tea Party candidates increasingly bear a greater resemblance to nitpicking theological disputes than to Rockefeller vs. Goldwater in ideological magnitude

.

Kilgore unpacks last night’s results:

According to the “Year of the Republican Establishment” narrative, it was the finest of nights for Mitch McConnell and his GOP elite friends. He crushed his own tea party opponent, Matt Bevin and the “Establishment” candidate for Senate in Oregon got lucky when a multi-faceted stalking scandal occurred after most voters had cast ballots by mail. And best of all, in a state where a wild primary threatened GOP calculations to take over the Senate, Georgia, the two “Establishment” candidates will meet in a runoff after snuffing potential Todd Akin clones Paul Broun and Phil Gingrey and possible trouble-maker Karen Handel.

It’s a nice picture, and welcome after the troublesome Senate results last week in Nebraska. But its linchpin, the Georgia Senate race, is a bit — actually a lot — more complicated than that.

One reason why:

It will be interesting to see how Georgia Tea Folk line up for the runoff. Herman Cain is already in Perdue’s corner. Late in the night, major Handel backer Erick Erickson said he’d support Kingston. In an unusually long runoff campaign (nine weeks), with both candidates having access to plenty of money, the steady drift-to-the-right that characterized the entire primary field could continue.

Molly Ball provides more background on the Georgia race. Nate Cohn considers the chances of Michelle Nunn, the Democrats’ nominee:

Ms. Nunn’s job could be made easier if Mr. Perdue or Mr. Kingston proves to be an especially weak candidate. Mr. Kingston, an experienced congressman, seems less likely to make a major mistake, but Mr. Perdue is a political novice.

Ms. Nunn’s chances, then, can’t be completely dismissed. Demographic change has pushed Georgia far enough that a Democrat could conceivably squeak out a narrow win if everything goes right. But there should be no mistaking this race for a true tossup. Ms. Nunn will need to match the best performance by a Democratic candidate for federal office in more than a decade, even though she’s not an incumbent and the state’s white voters have become more conservative. It is possible, but hardly an outcome to count on.

by Patrick Appel

Jay Michaelson worries that the recent state marriage equality rulings are on a collision course with the Supreme Court:

[T]he lofty rhetoric of these [state] decisions and their legal reasoning are a far cry from Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion in United States v. Windsor, which invalidated the Defense of Marriage Act less than a year ago. As a challenge to a state marriage amendment or law now seems destined to end up at the Supreme Court, probably in the next term, these discrepancies should be cause for concern.

Emily Bazelon isn’t fretting:

[T]he momentum raises a question no one would have dreamed of a year ago: Will gay marriage become the law of the land without the Supreme Court doing anything more? … Add it all up, including Pennsylvania, and we’ve arrived at 29 states where same-sex marriage is legal or on its way there unless an appeals court blocks it—past the halfway point and far past the tipping point. (Yes, 32 states still have laws or constitutional amendments on the books that deny marriage equality to same-sex couples. But those are the laws that are toppling like a line of dominoes.)

We’ve arrived here so much faster and more agreeably than anyone could have predicted even a year ago, when the challenges post-Windsor looked like they would split the district courts, take their time wending their way through the appellate process, and maybe arrive back at the Supreme Court in, say, 2017, safely after the next election. Instead, no judge wants to write the opinion denying the benefit of marriage. Judge John Jones of federal district court in Pennsylvania, who issued [yesterday’s] ruling, was endorsed by none other than Rick Santorum, beloved of the religious right. Judges aren’t supposed to rule by the polls, but that doesn’t mean they’re unaffected by the rising tide of public support, especially among young people. As Northwestern University law professor Andrew M. Koppelman said to Adam Liptak in the New York Times: “It is becoming increasingly clear to judges that if they rule against same-sex marriage their grandchildren will regard them as bigots.”

Dale Carpenter analyzes the PA ruling:

Unlike most other district courts recently, Judge Jones held that same-sex couples have a fundamental right to marry.  He held that the Pennsylvania couples were not seeking a “new” right but only participation in an old one, the right to marry.

Carpenter also points out that, “unlike most other district courts, he determined that sexual-orientation discrimination triggers intermediate scrutiny”:

This intermediate-scrutiny approach seems to me to be the most doctrinally grounded way to strike down bans on same-sex marriage. It leaves in place the deferential caste of rational-basis review. It also makes clear what every court seems to have recognized recently: that there is a long history of discrimination against gays and lesbians, that sexual orientation is unrelated to individual merit, that it continues to be difficult for homosexuals to get legal protection through the political process in many areas of the country, and that there is not an “exceedingly persuasive” reason to exclude gay couples from marriage (even if there is a jurisprudentially “rational” one).

John Culhane notes that the plaintiffs in PA “won on both liberty and equality arguments”:

Early on, the marriage equality litigation focused on the denial of equality to same-sex couples. That was thought to be a more sympathetic strategy than trying to claim that the fundamental right to marry (a liberty interest, constitutionally speaking) extended to same-sex marriages. That’s because the Supreme Court has sometimes defined “fundamental rights” quite narrowly and limited those rights to those who were historically protected. But increasingly, courts are finding that the fundamental right to marry means a right to marry the person of one’s choice, history aside. That’s what Judge Jones held, with pointed reference to Loving v. Virginia, where the high court struck down an anti-miscegenation law. That states had long barred interracial marriages didn’t make Virginia’s historical choice acceptable, and it’s no longer acceptable in the same-sex marriage context, either.

by Tracy R. Walsh

Steve Kandell, whose sister was killed in the World Trade Center, shares his conflicted experience touring the National September 11 Memorial & Museum:

I can feel the sweat that went into making this not seem tacky, of wanting to show respect, but also wanting to show every last bit of carnage and visceral whomp to justify the $24 price of admission – vulgarity with the noblest intentions. … I think now of every war memorial I ever yawned through on a class trip, how someone else’s past horror was my vacant diversion and maybe I learned something but I didn’t feel anything. Everyone should have a museum dedicated to the worst day of their life and be forced to attend it with a bunch of tourists from Denmark. Annotated divorce papers blown up and mounted, interactive exhibits detailing how your mom’s last round of chemo didn’t take, souvenir T-shirts emblazoned with your best friend’s last words before the car crash. And you should have to see for yourself how little your pain matters to a family of five who need to get some food before the kids melt down. Or maybe worse, watch it be co-opted by people who want, for whatever reason, to feel that connection so acutely.

Rosemarie Ward, noting that many of the items on display were donated by victims’ families, is more moved:

Throughout the space are segments of twisted steel, like sculptures. A fire engine from the back looks a bit battered, but the entire front cab is a ghost of mangled steel. A set of partially damaged concrete stairs nestle between an escalator and the museum’s main staircase. The so-called “Survivors’ Staircase” was an outdoor staircase that led some survivors to safety on nearby Vesey Street. In removing this staircase from the site, architects and archeologists treated it as carefully as an ancient relic. …

The audio and video clips of those who are lost, of those who remain, of construction workers, of firefighters, of ordinary New Yorkers, are very moving. The personal accounts, such as the one from John Napolitano whose firefighting son died that day, are hard to listen to. The last phone calls of those lost are devastating. The multi-media exhibits, designed by Local Projects, are particularly moving. In some places visitors are encouraged to make videos while at the museum, which will become part of the exhibit.

The museum is extremely well done. It offers solace to those who still mourn, and an education for those who were not yet born.

(Photo: Objects recovered from the World Trade Center site are displayed during a press preview of the National September 11 Memorial Museum at ground zero May 15, 2014 in New York City. The museum spans seven stories, mostly underground, and contains artifacts from the attack on the World Trade Center Towers on September 11, 2001 that include the 80-foot high tridents, the so-called ‘Ground Zero Cross,’ the destroyed remains of Company 21’s New York Fire Department Engine as well as smaller items. The museum opens to the public on May 21. By James Keivom-Pool/Getty Images)