This was the latest conservative onslaught against voting rights. A high-powered effort to dismantle more than a half century of one person, one vote jurisprudence. But the Supreme Court shut it down today in an 8-0 decision. Tierney Sneed has the details.
It is, or should be, a general rule of thumb that top industry CEOs often have no better understanding of fiscal policy or macro-economics than the average man or woman on the street. But the CEO often thinks she does, which is the problem. In a sense, this shouldn’t surprise us. A good CEO knows his business and industry inside and out. He might also know various policies that could facilitate the growth of individual businesses. But the entire economy, macro-economics, fiscal policy, currency policies – none of that is just a really big business, certainly not a really big business in your industry. It is a qualitatively different thing altogether. But we often don’t get that. CEOs definitely tend not to get it. Again, this should be a rule of thumb – not because business leaders know nothing about national economic policy but because they don’t tend to know much more than other comparably educated people, only they think they do.
Unanimous Supreme Court solidifies principle of one person, one vote. All good, right? Mostly good, yes.
But if you’re used to picking through the dissents (or in this the case the concurring opinions) of the conservative justices, looking for the clues to the next conservative legal attack on this or that longstanding precedent, you saw something in Justice Alito’s concurrence to give you pause — unless you’re one of the architects of the current conservative grand legal strategy, in which case you might have had a gleam in your eye.
Tierney Sneed reports.
There was clearly a sea change in elite perception over the week I was away on vacation. Before I left, Donald Trump was still considered the overwhelming favorite for the Republican nomination. Now it’s considered at best a 50-50 proposition. And there’s an evolving consensus that if he can’t clinch the nomination on the first vote, he’s finished. This change is not based on nothing. Beyond the chatter of Trump’s supposed ‘worst week ever’, it does seem likely that he’ll lose the Wisconsin primary tonight. (Notably, there is as yet only the slightest if any negative impact on his national poll support.) A Wisconsin defeat will have a symbolic impact. More importantly, it will make it another notch more difficult for him to get to the 1237 delegates required to secure the nomination on the first convention ballot.
Polls close at 9 PM eastern. Join us for the results as they come in.
Predictions from political betting sites are very much ‘take them with a grain of salt’ things of course. But I’ll note that as of this moment, BetFair.com is showing Donald Trump with a 40% chance of winning the GOP nomination and Ted Cruz with a 32% chance. (This site converts the current odds to percentages.) Again, there’s no magic to these sites. They’re best seen as accurate projections of what we might call informed conventional wisdom.
Ryan Johnson, executive director of the Fairness Project and expert on economic inequality, is joining Hive members for a live chat on Friday at 2 p.m. ET. Have questions about the $15 minimum wage battle, the wage gap, etc.? Drop them in here and join us on Friday afternoon for the chat.
From John Judis …
One clear lesson from yesterday’s results in Wisconsin. It’s time for Hillary Clinton and her boosters in the commentariat to stop calling on Bernie Sanders to withdraw. Agreed that he has a very small chance of winning the nomination, but he has some, and he and his supporters are entitled by the American system to get their message heard until the clock really strikes 12. (See Clinton vs. Obama in 2008.) More important, Clinton herself needs to keep campaigning against Sanders. The Wisconsin primary removed the main rationale for Sanders to drop out — that Clinton needs to focus on Donald Trump. After Wisconsin, we don’t know anymore who the Republican nominee is. It’s a moving target. If anything, the Democrats might consider secretly boosting Trump, because he would be a lot easier to beat in the fall than a candidate like Paul Ryan or even Ted Cruz (who, believe me, will shift to the center if he gets the nomination).
GOP rep from Wisconsin is pumped about November, says Wisconsin’s new voter ID (voter suppression) law will help Republicans win.
Ross Douthat has an interesting piece in the Times looking at the slow motion train wreck heading into Cleveland. Particularly, he disagrees with a post I wrote a week ago (“Hell to Pay“) in which I said that whatever the technicalities and bylaws of the nomination process, these paled in the face of the legitimacy iceberg Republicans would face if they essentially tossed out the primary and caucus voting process in favor of an establishment figure like a Paul Ryan or Mitt Romney. Now, I’d quibble a bit with Ross’s suggestion that I’m ‘surprised’ by this turn of events. That’s not what I said. But the core point of disagreement is a valid one and one that’s worth exploring.