If Trump leaves office prematurely for any reason, President Pence will immediately be denounced as far worse. In fact, it would happen before he even took office. In fact it’s already happening. That this is true is testament to the fundamentally unprincipled nature of the Left.
.. I have long concurred with many of the points the Left makes about Trump, and some of those points are becoming more salient by the day. He really does seem frighteningly erratic, unprepared, sloppy. It’s hard to believe he would provide reassuring leadership in the event of a foreign-policy crisis. And it’s possible he committed obstruction of justice with respect to James Comey’s investigation of Michael Flynn.
.. His promotion would make progressives reach for the old playbook: Attack as a dangerous theocrat who hates women, minorities, and gays.
.. Opposition to abortion, or even opposition to government funds being directed to the nation’s leading abortion provider, will be recast as posing a supreme danger to “women’s health.”
.. But Pence will be called even more abnormal because he deflects questions about evolution as beyond his pay grade.
.. the ludicrous attempt to tie the secular, non-moralizing Trump to the neo-Puritan misogynist dystopia imagined in the new TV series The Handmaid’s Tale will be recharged
.. Pence will be labeled an extremist for being part of the American Christian majority.
Kristoff: Abortion and Contraception
The best way to reduce abortions is to help young women access LARC contraceptives (70 percent of pregnancies to young, single American women are unplanned). That’s what Planned Parenthood does, along with combatting cervical cancer, which already kills one American woman every two hours. I understand the passions that abortion raises, but this move will inadvertently increase the number of abortions, as well as cancer deaths. How is that “pro-life”?
Tomi Lahren Was Made for the Trump Era
The rising TV starlet might have run afoul of social conservatives. But with her wide reach and trademark sass, her future could be positively Trumpian.
.. she’s pro-choice
.. I’m for limited government, so stay out of my guns, and you can stay out of my body as well.”
.. Beck, Lahren’s boss, questioned Lahren’s libertarian bona fides as a zealous Trump supporter
.. Trump is anything but libertarian.
.. high-speed rant style with “Final Thoughts .. little jalapeño poppers of bravura bile clock in at just 30 seconds, and are perfectly suited to social media
.. Lahren’s departure from TheBlaze might contain clues for the future of conservative media in the age of Trump and beyond, and even for the Republican Party.
.. most in conservative media are impotent to censure the president himself for his betrayal of signature conservative positions, they can flex some muscle by smacking down Lahren
.. a suggestion of what could happen, ideologically, if the GOP is ever emboldened .. to take Trump to task for his disregard of both civil liberties and family values.
.. on track to be the Samantha Bee of the right
.. the ironies that interest her concern “snowflakes” and “participation-trophy” types
.. she admitted that Trump’s on-tape comments about groping women didn’t “look good
.. “Don’t go around acting holier than thou about this, like you’ve never heard anyone say anything like that before.
.. “When will those in black communities take a step back and take some responsi-damn-bility for the problems of black communities? Because it seems to me blaming white people for all of your problems might make you the racist.”
.. grew up in a military family in South Dakota
.. with decades of sass ahead of her, Lahren is rumored (without clear evidence) to be in Fox’s sights
.. Mindful of her senior-citizen base, Lahren has made her home not primarily on Snapchat or even Twitter but on venerable old Facebook.
.. Facebook is a perfect place for her to perform for Tea Partyers and older conservatives, leaning on her love of guns and country to come off as the dream daughter—like Ivanka Trump, but country and not snooty.
.. tacit pact with Beck: He could give her the conservative white-old-man seal of approval and then she would be allowed to be spicy and pro-Trump, which in turn would be evidence of Blaze’s big tent.
.. Beck is a genuinely principled conservative, and his commitments to both family values and libertarianism made Trump—multiply-married, genital-grabbing, pro-choice in some interviews—insupportable, and finally appears to have made Lahren insupportable, too.
.. many uneasy bargains .. are being tested now
.. If Ryan’s tax reform, or Pence’s desired overturn of Roe v. Wade, come to nothing, how much more will they be willing to sacrifice for this rogue president?
.. there are libertarians, who have quarrels with Trump.
There are family-values types, who have quarrels with Trump.
And then there is Trump—a reality star who darkens his skin and lightens his hair and says whatever gets the biggest response
.. She’s trying to be Trump.
David Souter Killed the Filibuster
control of the Supreme Court functions as a somewhat delayed reward for winning ideological battles at the presidential level, and then as a check on the next ideological coalition as it’s taking power.
.. Thus judicial appointees of the pre-New Deal era restrained Roosevelt’s liberalism for a time, and the judicial appointees from liberalism’s New Deal-Great Society heyday continued to advance liberal causes even as the Democratic coalition fell apart.
.. it was Souter who was the real outlier, Souter who really prevented the long era of Republican appointees from putting restraints on social liberalism, Souter who made today’s judicial battles seem more existential to the right than to the left.
.. Souter was sold to George H. W. Bush by his chief of staff, John Sununu, and the moderate-to-liberal New Hampshire Republican Warren Rudman as an easy confirmation because he lacked a paper trail.
.. Souter spent a brief time voting with the conservatives, then cast one of the crucial votes to uphold Roe, then swiftly evolved into as reliable a liberal as Bill Clinton or Barack Obama could have ever hoped to appoint … and then, as the by-then-inevitable coup de grâce, retired under Obama, allowing Sonia Sotomayor to take his place.
.. Had Souter simply voted like a typical Republican appointee — not in lock step with Antonin Scalia, but as an institutionalist, incrementalist conservative, in line with the current chief justice, John Roberts — then it’s likely that Roe v. Wade would have been mostly overturned in the 1990s, returning much of abortion law to the states, and that the gay rights movement would have subsequently advanced through referendums and legislation rather than a sweeping constitutionalization of cultural debate.
.. This, in turn, would have dramatically lowered the stakes of judicial politics for many Republican voters