Springtime for Grifters

As it happens, Mr. Carson lied. He has indeed been deeply involved with Mannatech, and has done a lot to help promote its merchandise. PolitiFact quickly rated his claim false, without qualification. But the Republican base doesn’t want to hear about it, and the candidate apparently believes, probably correctly, that he can simply brazen it out. These days, in his party, being an obvious grifter isn’t a liability, and may even be an asset.

.. The report found that the bulk of the money these PACs raise ends up going to cover administrative costs and consultants’ fees, very little to their ostensible purpose. For example, only 14 percent of what the Tea Party Leadership Fund spends is “candidate focused.”

 

.. Current estimates say that Mr. Carson, Mr. Trump and Mr. Cruz together have the support of around 60 percent of Republican voters.

.. There was a time when Mr. Rubio’s insistence that $6 trillion in tax cuts would somehow pay for themselves would have marked him as deeply unserious, especially given the way his party has been harping on the evils of budget deficits.

.. But the Republican base doesn’t care what the mainstream media says. Indeed, after Wednesday’s debate the Internet was full of claims that John Harwood, one of the moderators, lied about Mr. Rubio’s tax plan. (He didn’t.)

The Scary Specter of Ted Cruz

Cruz’s law degree is from Harvard and he did his undergraduate work at Princeton, where the 250-year-old debating club that he belonged to is called the American Whig-Cliosophic Society. Cruz’s wife is on leave from a job with Goldman Sachs.

Keep that in mind when he rails against the establishment and the elites. And remember that when someone is as broadly and profoundly disliked as Cruz is, it’s usually not because he’s a principled truth teller.

 

The Republicans’ Ugly Revolt

OVER the last two decades, through Bob Dole and George W. Bush and John McCain and Mitt Romney, it has become an article of faith that the Republican presidential nominee is a person blessed by, or acceptable to, the party’s establishment, meaning the elders, the bankers, the cool heads, the deep pockets.

 

.. If the electorate really is more defiant than ever, Bush is done. Scott Walker and Rick Perry are already gone. Voters, it appears, prefer someone brattier.

Someone like Ted Cruz.

“He’s perfectly positioned himself to own that space when Trump and Carson disappear,” said a Republican operative who is among the smartest analysts I know. “He’ll be a force to be reckoned with. I think that he has a very clear path to the nomination, as much as that horrifies me.”

Breaking Down Ted Cruz’s Plan for Supreme Court ‘Retention Elections’

Most important of all, at a time when Republicans find winning 270 electoral votes in a presidential race challenging, how could conservatives be sure that the justices they prefer — Scalia, Thomas, Alito — would be retained under this proposal?

He says Cruz had been contemplating the issue of reining in judges who read their personal ideological preferences into the Constitution for a long time, and this is only one of several options he’s examining.

.. “If the federal judiciary were to borrow a structural element from the states, I’d go with term limits rather than retention elections,” Shapiro says, pointing to a plan proposed by Steve Calabresi, one of the founders of the Federalist Society, to institute staggered 18-year terms for Supreme Court justices, with a new vacancy arising every two years. That system would guarantee each president two appointments, and end the practice of justices remaining on the court for three decades or more.

After what von Spakovsky calls “the worst week of Supreme Court decisions I can remember since I’ve been in Washington,” the standard claim of GOP presidential candidates that grassroots conservatives need to elect them to ensure the nomination of strict constructionists no longer holds water.

.. Republicans “should only nominate individuals who have proven they are conservatives in hard fights in court, in academia, and in the public square, and have stood up to attacks and the kind of unfair, low-handed criticism that is typical of the mean, vicious Left, and have not backed down.”