The Weekly Sift

Hillary Clinton’s big victory in New York on Tuesday didn’t just stop Bernie Sanders’ momentum, it closed off the last plausible scenario for his nomination — the one where a big finish to the primary campaign diminished Clinton’s pledged-delegate lead to such insignificance that it motivated super delegates to jump on the Bernie bandwagon.

But the Sanders campaign has always been about more than just personal ambition: It started at a time when his nomination seemed hopeless, and his supporters seem to be in no mood to go home just because it seems hopeless again. So what’s the next step? What continuing goal makes this more than just a campaign that came up short, like Martin O’Malley’s or Marco Rubio’s?

So: Bernie or bust? Jill Stein? Leading his followers back to Hillary for a stop-Trump campaign in the fall? Setting up the progressive movement to take over the Democratic Party in some future election cycle? Or something else? I’ll discuss the possibilities in “Beyond Bernie 2016”, which should post sometime between 9 and 10 EDT.

The other big thing that happened this week was that Gov. McAuliffe restored voting rights to Virginia’s 200,000 ex-cons. Giving convicted felons more political power may sound iffy on the surface, but in an era of mass incarceration and a racially biased judicial system, a lifetime ban on felon voting rights is actually a major factor in voter suppression, which I’ll review in a second featured post “Why You Should Care About Felon Voting Rights”. It should appear in the 10-11 range.

The weekly summary will discuss Trump’s attempt to pivot towards the general election, a call to end the blasphemy of Saturday Night Live (with links to said blasphemy, of course), Prince, and a few other topics, before closing with a massive flow chart guiding you through NPR’s list of the 100 top fantasy and science fiction novels (in case you were running out of things to read).

This week I mostly look away from the presidential race and turn to the Senate and the courts. The huge Republican Senate class of 2010 is up for re-election, so there are lots of opportunities for Democrats to flip the four (if they keep the White House) or five (if they don’t) seats they need to gain control.

For me personally, the one to focus on is obvious, since my local race in New Hampshire is considered a toss-up, the Democratic candidate (Maggie Hassan) has been a good governor, and the Republican incumbent (Kelly Ayotte) is supporting Mitch McConnell’s refusal to grant Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland the fair hearing every other nominee has gotten.

But what if you’re not in one of the five toss-up states where Senate control is likely to be decided? Or you are, but your local candidate doesn’t give you the kind of feeling you want from a politician that you go all-out for?

Well, the Koch brothers aren’t sitting out the Senate races just because their guy in Kansas looks safe, and you shouldn’t either. You may not have millions to sprinkle all over the country, but your money travels as well as theirs does, and in this era of cheap long-distance, you can phone bank for anybody.

One of this week’s featured articles “What Can You Do About the Senate?” takes you through the races that will decide whether Mitch McConnell keeps his veto power over the next Supreme Court justice, and makes suggestions for who you might help, depending on what you want to accomplish.

That link between the legislative and judicial branches is the theme of this week’s other featured post, “The Broken Senate is Breaking the Courts”. Merrick Garland is not a unique example. The Republican Senate is refusing to process the Democratic president’s nominees at all judicial levels, creating a long-term threat to the rule of law. That problem sounds abstract, but it could easily show up in your life.

The broken Senate article is pretty much done and should be out momentarily. The what-to-do article still needs some work, so let’s picture it coming out around 10 EDT. The weekly summary — where I will end up saying a few things about the presidential race, as well as Mississippi’s new entry in the very competitive most-bigoted-state contest — should follow by noon.

Lots of news this week: Brussels, Cuba, the continuing presidential campaign, and so forth. But the featured post is about none of them. (My thinking about terrorism hasn’t changed since “Terrorist Strategy 101“, and I’m resisting the temptation to turn the Sift into a stop-Trump blog. My opinion of Trump is already out there in “Trump is an opportunistic infection“, “Peak Drumpf” and last week’s “Tick, Tick, Tick … the Augustus Countdown Continues“.) Instead, the featured post will be “Buying Back American Democracy”, about the campaign reform legislation that is still possible after Citizen’s United — immediately, without a constitutional amendment.

Some backstory about that: The weekend before the New Hampshire primary, I had the good fortune to be among the handful of people sitting around two tables at a Manchester coffee shop, listening to Rep. John Sarbanes of Maryland and my congresswoman (Rep. Annie Kuster) talk about Sarbanes’ proposed Government By the People Act. I thought at the time that more people should know about this, but week after week my planned article got nosed out by more time-sensitive pieces. So this week I decided to ignore the breaking news and finally post it. Look for it sometime before 9 EST.

And rest assured, the weekly summary does wade into the news, before closing with Ireland giving America a tough girl-to-girl talk about that bad boyfriend she’s been hanging around with lately.

I stopped myself from writing a Trump-centered featured article for the third straight week. I know the buzz was all about the cancelled Chicago rally and the potential for violence whenever he speaks, but I’m trying to resist being trolled. I think it’s completely within Trump’s power to generate a new reason to talk about him every week, and I refuse to do that from now to November.

So this week’s featured article is a step back from the news cycle, or maybe a tangent off of it. I start with a debate question Don Lemon asked Bernie and Hillary, and rather than argue that one of them answered better than the other, I try to answer it myself: What are my racial blind spots?

The weekly summary starts with a meditation on the tendency for my attention to get captured by bright shiny objects like Trump or speculating about polls, and the need to occasionally take a step back to make sure this is really ME thinking, rather than the news cycle thinking through me. Having done that, I still have to discuss violence at Trump rallies and what’s going on in the primaries, but I hope I’m doing it with more perspective.

I also have another guns-make-safer link, a comment on President Obama’s rising job approval, and a conversation I had with a low-information voter, before closing with an amusing take on what our election process must look like from, say, Finland.

This week, big victories by Trump in Nevada and Clinton in South Carolina set the stage for tomorrow’s Super Tuesday primaries, and have pundits speculating about whether the nomination races are over or not.

But while those sound like similar situations, the possibility that it may be too late to stop Trump is causing far more anguish among Republicans than anything Democrats might be feeling (or would be feeling if Sanders were threatening to sew up the nomination).

All sorts of metaphors are floating around about what Trump represents to the Republican Party. (“hostile takeover” seems to be one of the most popular.) In this week’s featured post I suggest one I find more accurate: “Trump is an opportunistic infection”, the kind that only people with compromised immune systems are vulnerable to. Mainstream Republican candidates can’t get any traction against Trump because over the last few decades the Party has systematically de-legitimized all the fact-checking and expert opinion and separation-of-reality-from-fantasy necessary to take him down. So the GOP’s problem is not just one guy: Unless and until they figure out a way to restore the immune system of their base, they’ll be vulnerable to Trump-like infections in all future elections as well. That post is pretty much done, so it should appear shortly.

In the weekly summary, I’ll examine whether the shift in pundit opinion is justified: Is it all over but the shouting? Is it likely to be over tomorrow? (Probably not, I think, though Trump and Clinton are on the verge of building significant leads.) I’ll also discuss an interesting poll demonstrating the variability of people’s opinions about single-payer health care, and what that means for the viability of Sanders’ signature proposal. Also, Nate Silver’s crew discusses the polls showing disturbing levels of racism among Trump supporters, Obama floats a strange Supreme Court trial balloon, and we’ll close with a Game of Thrones mash-up. Expect that around 11 EST or so.