People I know were angry. They were tired of being told they were racist and bigoted as they went about the business of mowing their lawns, writing college tuition checks and working their jobs as cops, secretaries and teachers’ aides. They kept being told they needed to look inward, examine their sins and judge themselves guilty. They had not forgotten when Barack Obama was running for president in 2008 and his wife, Michelle, said, “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country…”
So now we have President-Elect Donald Trump. I supported him because he promised to curb regulations, cut taxes and appoint constitutionalists to the Supreme Court. I supported him because Mrs. Clinton doesn’t have what it takes to turn around a stagnant economy or stand up to the special interests that block innovation.
.. The real danger Mr. Trump poses is the undermining of our politics — the norms that sustain our liberal democracies. His campaign was based on a divisive politics of identity. Ideals of equity, equal rights, diversity and inclusion were submerged under the weight of a rhetoric that raised racial and ethnic tensions and inflamed passions against imagined enemies — Mexican immigrants, Chinese exporters, Muslim refugees.
Illiberal democracy has been the bane of several nations around the world. Under Mr. Trump, the traditions in the United States of checks and balances and of rule of law will be tested seriously.
The political danger will be greatly magnified by Mr. Trump’s likely economic failure. He comes into office as the putative leader of middle and lower classes who feel they have been left behind. He has raised their expectations in ways that he cannot meet. There is little chance that incomes at the middle and lower end of income distribution will receive a large boost under his policies. The manufacturing jobs that have left will not return no matter how tough Mr. Trump’s trade policies get. These jobs have disappeared for good, largely thanks to technological changes, and not trade.
.. When the full scale of his economic disappointment sinks in sometime during his term, Mr. Trump may well react in the time-honored fashion of global populists like President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. To keep his base mobilized and insulate himself from economic troubles, he may take shelter in an intensified form of the identity politics that worked so well for him during the presidential campaign. This would rip American society further apart along racial and ethnic cleavages.
The ugliness that characterized politics during the presidential campaign may be nothing compared with what may be yet to come.
.. Now it looks like a warning shot. When Justice Antonin Scalia died in February, Donald Trump was among the first to call for stonewalling President Obama’s choice to fill the seat.
.. Since 1900, had the Senate ever refused to confirm a nominee in a presidential election year as a result of the impending election? The answer was no (even if Mr. Cruz tried to argue, against the facts, that Justice Anthony Kennedy wasn’t confirmed in the election year of 1988.) The Republicans’ refusal to grant Judge Garland a hearing or schedule a vote was in fact unprecedented.
It was a new kind of hardball.
.. When they assumed Hillary Clinton would win, Republicans including Senators John McCain of Arizona and Richard Burr of North Carolina talked about blocking Democratic Supreme Court picks indefinitely.
.. It’s hard to see how any Republican paid a price for radically altering the norms for Supreme Court appointments. Mr. Trump helped point the way, and the voters rewarded him and those who followed.
.. I believed, and still believe, that he is a man with a disordered personality and authoritarian tendencies. My job is to give him a chance to prove me wrong; his job is to prove me wrong.
.. The way he mistreats people will be normalized.
.. The Republican Party will fundamentally change, from a conservative party to one that champions European-style ethnic nationalism.
.. “Some say God moves in mysterious ways. I say, God grants humans the freedom to move in even more mysterious ways.”
Heritage calling for Supreme Court blockade if Clinton wins
The conservative group Heritage Action is pushing Republican senators to keep the Supreme Court at eight justices if Democrat Hillary Clinton is elected president.
In a Thursday morning briefing at the Heritage Foundation’s Washington headquarters on Capitol Hill, the group said Republicans should embrace the idea of leaving the Supreme Court without its ninth justice, perhaps for as long as five years.
.. Republicans who are more willing to compromise, including Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, believe the party should hurry to nominate Garland in the lame-duck session of Congress if Clinton wins on Nov. 8. The Flake argument is that Clinton would likely nominate a younger and more left-wing justice than Garland, so if Trump loses, Republicans are better off confirming Obama’s nominee.The Heritage Foundation, a group that enjoys significant sway on the right, wholly rejects such thinking. They want Republicans to get comfortable making the case that the court can function just fine with eight justices.
.. If Democrats win control over the Senate, the likely new majority leader, Charles Schumer(N.Y.), could deploy the so-called nuclear option for a Supreme Court nomination. That would mean changing Senate rules to allow nominees to be confirmed with a simple majority of 51 votes instead of the 60 required to break a Republican filibuster. It’s an extreme move, but not unimaginable given the stakes.
If Republicans hang on to the Senate, however, they can cause huge headaches for Clinton if enough of them buy into the Cruz-Heritage approach.
.. Many predicted that Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) would suffer electorally because, as chairman of the Judiciary Committee, he didn’t give Garland a hearing. Grassley has already proven those pundits wrong and looks like he’ll easily win his race
Donald Trump Reveals Evangelical Rifts That Could Shape Politics for Years
“Those men have never spoken for me or, frankly, anyone I know,” saidMs. Hatmaker, the author of popular inspirational Christian books.
.. The fault lines among evangelicals that the election of 2016 has exposed — among generations, ethnic groups and sexes — are likely to reshape national politics for years to come, conservative Christian leaders and analysts said last week in interviews.
.. To these pragmatic players, the election boiled down to only two issues, both that could be solved with Supreme Court appointments: stopping abortion and ensuring legal protections for religious conservatives who object to same-sex marriage.
.. “I do not think there’s any way to get evangelical women in any force to show up for Donald Trump at this point,” Mr. Moore said.
.. Several polls show that Mr. Trump is underperforming among evangelicals compared with previous Republican nominees, who commanded about 80 percent of the white evangelical vote. Mr. Trump received 65 percent to 70 percent of white evangelical support
.. “the millennial generation has a lot less patience for Trump.” Of the 33 influential millennial evangelicals she profiled for a cover story two years ago, she says she can now find only one, Lila Rose, who is pro-Trump, and even she has been publicly critical of him.
.. The student body president, Jack Heaphy, as well as some students interviewed on campus, defended Mr. Falwell and Mr. Trump.
.. “I believe the vast majority of students on campus will be voting for Mr. Trump on Nov. 8 — not because he’s the perfect candidate, but because his policies align most with the viewpoints of students,” Mr. Heaphy said.
.. “It’s inconceivable that someone could run an organization named the Family Research Council and support a man like Donald Trump for president,” said Matthew Lee Anderson, 34, the author of several books and the blog Mere Orthodoxy.
GOP plots early wake-up call for Clinton
Looking past Election Day, Republicans sketch plan to stymie a President Hillary Clinton agenda.
If elected, Clinton would likely become the first Democrat since Grover Cleveland to enter office without control of both houses of Congress.
.. Clinton would likely enjoy the shortest honeymoon period of any incoming commander in chief in recent history
.. “What that would leave her with is an absolute imperative to govern from the center,”
.. “A lot of us would like to hold her accountable for the failures, but we are holding our fire,” Schake said. “It’s because all of us are afraid of Trump. If she wants to maintain our support after, she’s going to have to address our policy concerns about the economy and America’s role in the world.”
.. Hillary Clinton, being a multi-decade partisan who fought tooth and nail with Republicans and called them her enemy, is uniquely ill-suited to having a honeymoon period if she wins.”
.. the focus will be on her domestic agenda, “which is not in any way bipartisan.”
.. Republican operatives on the Hill, for instance, are already planning to block Clinton’s agenda by strategically targeting individual Democratic senators who will be up for reelection in 2018. “Take Joe Manchin in West Virginia,” explained one GOP operative of the strategy. “If Hillary puts up an anti-coal, pro-EPA judge for the Supreme Court, the smart play is to start pressuring him with an advocacy campaign to vote no.”
.. the left will be pushing Clinton to begin her administration by “daring Republicans to oppose her” on big-ticket items like expanding Social Security and instituting debt-free college.