Big reason why Cruz is struggling: reputation among GOP voters has collapsed in 7 weeks. https://t.co/r1ChGoEKIU pic.twitter.com/CTqY77BZPU
— Taniel (@Taniel) February 28, 2016
Sessions endorsement is an absolute kidney punch for Cruz. He frequently cites his team-up with Sessions on immigration.
— daveweigel (@daveweigel) February 28, 2016
If Sessions thought Cruz could win, he wouldn't be making this endorsement. That's the message here.
— daveweigel (@daveweigel) February 28, 2016
As he's done throughout the day, Cruz says he believes he and Trump will take a "big chunk" of delegates tomorrow + others won't come close.
— Patrick Svitek (@PatrickSvitek) March 1, 2016
According to the Texas Tribune, Cruz might not win his home state tomorrow, although of course he’s conceding nothing. Donald Trump is riding high, the GOP “Establishment” has chosen Rubio as its Official Not-Trump Candidate, but short of assassination Ted Cruz will never go away.
As a lazy blogger, I’d say he’s got too much invested in his old man’s phantasy of Ted Cruz, God-King come to save America from Satan and his liberal minions… not to mention the sweet grift available to any semi-plausible national candidate in this weird election cycle. Bloomberg Politics has a more pedestrian explanation of “Why Ted Cruz Probably Won’t Drop Out, No Matter What”:
Ted Cruz has had a disappointing few weeks since winning the Iowa GOP caucuses. He was outshone by John Kasich in New Hampshire. Then he lost South Carolina to Donald Trump, a state rich in the conservative evangelical voters who were supposed to be his ticket to the nomination, before placing third in Nevada’s caucuses. Cruz was overshadowed by Marco Rubio in Thursday’s debate. And talk is rife on cable news that he soon could, and probably should, drop out of the race.
But dropping out would violate the logic of Cruz’s whole political career. And anyone acquainted with his character and ambition should probably assume, as I do, that he won’t. Although his odds of winning the nomination are long, Cruz is bound to do what’s best for Cruz…
Read the whole thing, but: Ted’s in it for Ted, not ‘principle’ or ‘the good of the party’; he’s made so many enemies within that party he knows they won’t offer him any sweeteners if he does quit, but hanging in until the convention might give him leverage; worse comes to worst, a full-scale ‘practice’ run might be useful in the future…
… It’s very possible that, if he becomes the Republican nominee, Trump would get shellacked in November, setting off a period of anguished introspection for the party. Conservatives would vow never again to nominate a non-conservative for the highest office. “This is Ted Cruz’s ace card,” says Steele. “Going back to 1996, conservatives in the party have always felt that we’ve lost these presidential contests because we’ve not been true to the cause by nominating someone who will fight for the cause.”
For a large segment of the party, the savior would be obvious. And Cruz, having never wavered, would find himself right where he wanted to be, once he realized, in March 2016, that he wouldn’t be the 2016 Republican nominee: at the front of the pack to challenge Hillary Clinton in 2020.
Just in case you needed to feel any worse about the future of our battered republic.
Mandalay
You never stop.
prob50
Hey, if you stuck Ted’s head between the blue line and the green line pretty soon it would appear to be strangling him when the “not honest %” started passing the “honest” %
Ah, would that it t’were.
schrodinger's cat
Oscar Kitteh is all dressed up to give a speech.
ETA: Ted Cruz can DIAF.
Frankensteinbeck
Ha ha ha ha ha! Yes, like their last period of anguished introspection, when they realized they need to reach out to minority voters.
p.a.
Yes because running against an incumbent pres is such a route to success. Gotta hope for a perfectly timed recession, substantial 3rd party showing, and international hostage crisis. Easy peasy.
prob50
@Frankensteinbeck:
They apparently have confused “kicking in the ass” with “reaching out to”. An easy mistake for the “reality challenged”.
Nate Dawg
Funny how their stunning losses always provoke the same response: WE NEED TO BE EVEN *MORE* CRAZY!!!!!
I mean, how do you even explain that?
BillinGlendaleCA
@Frankensteinbeck:
Maybe it’s just me, I don’t think they’re doing it right.
Omnes Omnibus
@Nate Dawg: “That ball can’t land on black every time. I’m doubling down. Get it all back at once.”
BillinGlendaleCA
@p.a.: Make sure you add in an internal party primary battle.
boatboy_srq
@BillinGlendaleCA: Helps if they don’t use brass knuckles.
boatboy_srq
Hmm. Down twenty points on the H&T arc in a mere six weeks. Is it possible that the GOtea rank and file are wising up? Or is this merely proof that Cruz’ grift is too transparent to endure?
rikyrah
How is he even running? He is NOT a natural born citizen of this country. But, nope…he will not drop out. His ego wouldn’t allow it.
oldgold
“Setting off a period of anguished introspection for the party..”
The nation will be lucky if it amounts to even a comma.
prob50
@<a href="#comment-5687Omnes Omnibus:
theBuhjaysus
Cruzing for a bruising. He’s got Texas and that’s it. As the conservative’s conservative, I wish he’d win the nomination this year and get plastered in November. That would finally kill the theory that R’s haven’t run a true conservative and hopefully that would be the end of Ted’s public life.
Jay C
So does Ted Cruz, or any sentient creature for that matter, think that four years on, his face is going to be any less the “most punchable in politics” ?
? Martin
I think the GOP is having their race extinction burst. That doesn’t mean that the GOP will become extinct (far from it) but it means that the GOP superego is coming to terms with the fact that there is institutional racism that needs to be dealt with, so the GOP id is compelled to scream ‘nigger’ as loud as it can.
This is probably going to get MUCH worse. On the upside, the odds for Dems should improve.
Lolis
As a person who lives in Texas, I can say that early voting will make it harder for Donald Trump to win here. People began voting here almost two weeks ago so I think Cruz got a lot of banked votes from that. I would love it if Trump beat Cruz in Texas. Cruz is the worst.
PeakVT
Ted Cruz is not gonna be ignored.
p.a.
@efgoldman:
Magnetism: WTF?
redshirt
From the anecdote department, my father has been a life long Republican and went Fox crazy in the past ten years and he’s not voting for Trump, wonders if he’ll vote at all this election for the first time in his life, and said tonight that “his party has left him”.
It was all wonderful to hear.
He says he’s for Cruz, which is a whole ‘nother bag of worms. But Cruz ain’t winning the nomination.
Roger Moore
@p.a.:
Aliens!
mclaren
I’m loving this race more and more every day. Theocratic megalomaniac Ted Cruz determined to stay in the race until the bitter end, sowing dissension and creating havoc in the Republican party while splitting off votes from the plutocratic megalomaniac Donald Trump…
Deeeeeeee-lightful!
As the sharks eating each other make the multitudinous waters incarnadine, I’m sitting back with a jumbo size bucket ‘o popcorn to enjoy the show.
Mike in NC
If psycho Ted Crud decided to leaves politics, he’d have a lucrative career as TV villain on shows like Gotham or Criminal Minds.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@redshirt: when I thought there was no way Trump could win the nomination, I thought we might be looking at a record number of write in votes from immigration obsessives who would want to vote against Jeb. Now I wonder if we won’t see Trump causing a record number of write ins for a whole bunch of different candidates.
PeakVT
@Nate Dawg: Shorter: Groupthink can continue for a long, long time, usually until a new external force destroys the group because said group’s groupthink prevents it from adapting.
Longer: Read The March of Folly by Barbara Tuchman.
TheBuhJaysus
He’s the wingnut’s wingnut. I’d love to see him win the nomination and get pummeled in November. At least the kooky theory that the GOP hasn’t run someone “conservative enough” would be proven to be utter nonsense.
RaflW
Hahahahah. Nope.
TheBuhJaysus
Sorry for repeating myself….I thought my original comment was eaten by my phone.
redshirt
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: He’s really despondent about Trump. We’ve had an agreement since 2012 not to discuss politics, but he brought it up. He’s depressed and I love it. I’ve been feeding him Rubio small penis jabs and the like, all subtle like since.
One less vote for the R’s is a vote for Good.
I was surprised because before he brought it up I assumed he’d be on the Trump bandwagon, but he viscerally hates him. It’s ideal.
I’m feeling REALLY good about this election.
redshirt
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: He’s really despondent about Trump. We’ve had an agreement since 2012 not to discuss politics, but he brought it up. He’s depressed and I love it. I’ve been feeding him Rubio small dick jabs and the like, all subtle like since.
One less vote for the R’s is a vote for Good.
I was surprised because before he brought it up I assumed he’d be on the Trump bandwagon, but he viscerally hates him. It’s ideal.
I’m feeling REALLY good about this election.
Mike J
@RaflW: A period of anguished introspection? I posted a Nikki Haley quote on the previous thread:
prob50
@TheBuhJaysus: Well, some things just can’t be said often enough.
RaflW
@Mike J: I saw that when Jay Rosen tweeted it out earlier today. I love it! It would be a gaffe, except people are paying approx zero attention to Nikki Haley in these chum-filled GOP waters.
mclaren
@Nate Dawg:
This is actually easy to explain, and in fact I have repeatedly explained what’s going on, and what’s more I predicted the current escalation of GOP craziness.
What’s going on is a well-known effect in group psychology known informally as “evaporative cooling.” When a group with fanatical beliefs encounters a real-world situation that collides head-on with their belief system, there’s a strong tendency for the group members who are the weakest believers to bail out. This leaves only the most extreme fanatics. Over time, repeated incidents that challenge the group’s belief system leads to a vicious cycle which reinforces only the most unhinged fanatics, producing a group whose beliefs grow increasingly extreme over time.
This results in group polarization, the well known tendency of groups to make decisions more extreme than any of its individual members’ beliefs. In fact, as this trend runs to its outermost limit, you wind up with bizarre situations like juries who hand down verdicts of which each of its members disapproves.
The study of cults has shown this effect repeatedly. See the article “Evaporative cooling of group beliefs,”
Source: “Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs,” Eliazer Ydkowsky, Less Wrong blog, 7 December 2007.
This also explains why the lynch mob kneejerk vituperation of the Balloon Juice commentariat is so ill-advised. Reflexively screaming “Fuck you!” and “You’re insane!” at anyone who dissents even moderately from the Democratic party groupthink common unwisdom — say, by suggesting that since both Hillary and Sanders are unlikely to be able to get most of their policies through an obstructionist Republican congress, it doesn’t matter much whether Democrats voter for Hillary or Bernie in a practical sense, so they might as well double down and vote for the most progressive candidate like Sanders — represents a very bad strategy. It has the effect of pushing out people who are more left-leaning, which considerably narrows the base of the Democratic party and significantly restricts the range of the discussion.
As history has shown, dissent is the only known way of reliably identifying and fixing errors made by groups. So lashing out at people who dissent from the Hillbot groputhink in these discussions puts the Democratic party on the same death march toward extinction as the Republican party is already on. Namely, without gadflies and outside-the-box thinkers who are willing to point out flaws in the group’s thinking, the group tends to march lockstep off a cliff, serenely confident of its own incorrect wisdom. We have seen where this has taken the Republican party. The Democrats would unwise to follow the Repubs’ bad example.
? Martin
@redshirt: More or less same with my mom. Being from NYC, Trump is of a type we too well understand. I don’t think most Americans know that type. She’ll never vote for him. She’ll never vote for Clinton. I suspect she’s holding out for a 3rd party.
I think Trump winning the nom is going to cause her to rethink the GOP a bit.
TheBuhJaysus
Grandpa Munster unnerves me the most.
Union-busting Kasich as the voice of reason and moderation???
Fuck all these guys. They are all an amazing sight to behold.
? Martin
@mclaren: That is the most coherent thing you’ve ever said – by miles. So much so that I wonder if someone hacked this account.
The Lodger
@oldgold: The party? Introspection? Has to be a colon.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
He got over 50,000 votes
As a left-wing activist, he hosted a politically oriented radio program on WBAI and ran as Green Party candidate for Governor of New York in 1998. In that race he sought to be listed on the ballot as Grandpa Al Lewis, arguing that he was most widely known by that name. His request was rejected by the Board of Elections, a decision upheld in court against his challenge.[16]
Despite this setback, he achieved one of his campaign objectives. His total of 52,533 votes exceeded the threshold of votes set by New York law (50,000) and hence guaranteed the Green Party of New York an automatic ballot line for the next four years (see election results, New York governor). He said that, with no political machine and no money backing him, the likelihood of winning the governorship would be like climbing Mount Everest barefooted.
prob50
@mclaren:
I don’t really mean it. I just like saying it.
Seriously, though, the study makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the details and logic lesson.
TheBuhJaysus
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I was referring to Ted Cruz. Who’d you think I was referring to?
Punchy
I wont be as worried in 2020, after Teh Hillz puts 3 new justices–average age, 42–in the SCOTUS. Unless Ted, Eh? wants to defy the 3rd branch of gubbmint, he wont have much flexibility to completely fuck the Republic.
RaflW
@TheBuhJaysus:
Yeah, this is the part of the whole GOP pole vault to the right that bugs me terribly. Politicians who a dozen years ago would have been correctly identified as seriously conservative, even reactionary, are now mainstream, and folks like Kasich are ‘moderate.’
Awful.
And Bernie Sanders mild forms of democratic socialism are not the lefty equivalent. He’s doing an important thing, helping to pull just a tad on the Democratic rope, but nothing like what has happened on the other side.
The Other Chuck
@TheBuhJaysus: Since when has a theory being completely discredited ever stopped the GOP?
gf120581
@mclaren: Or on a more simple level, this saying, “Conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed.”
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@TheBuhJaysus: just kidding. for some reason you reminded me that Grandpa Al ran for office, though I thought he had run for President on the old and (I think) short-lived Reform ticket.
Which made me think of Perot. I’d been wondering if he was ill, since he seems to have lost the taste for the political spotlight. Turns out he launched a political website in 2008 and endorsed Romney in 2012. I’m a political junkie and I have no memory of him being mentioned in a long ass time. Sic transit gloria cable news.
mclaren
@? Martin:
Since I’ve repeatedly made essentially this same post over the last several years, the result can only be that you’re not paying attention.
Incidentally, this all plays into Hegel’s theory of opposites. Hegelian historicism has gotten a bad rep, and deservedly so for the most part — but Georg Hegel’s theory of social change does boast one insight. Hegel thought that social change ran in pulses, with groups starting out espousing one set of beliefs and eventually winding up believing in almost the exact opposite of those beliefs as their beliefs became increasingly extreme. This seems accurate to me, though the rest of Hegel’s social teleology does not.
Consider, for example, how the Republican party started out. Initially it was the radical party in U.S. politics, a party strongly in favor of the rights of minorities — abolitionists found a natural home in the early Republican party. Teddy Roosevelt made the Republican party a haven for people who believed in breaking up and/or regulating large business monopolies in the early 20th century.
By the 1940s, however, the Republican party had come to stand for just about the exact opposite of those early beliefs. Taft Republicans in the 1940s espoused deregulation of businesses (the opposite of Teddy Roosevelt’s trust-busting) and non-intervention in WW II even though millions of minorities were being sent to the gas chambers.
What appears to happen is that pushing a group’s beliefs to the their uttermost extreme eventually makes them reverse. If you start out believing in minority rights, over time you wind up identifying more and more minorities whose rights are important to safeguard. In the limit, this produces a situation where essentially everyone’s rights must be safeguarded, leading to the infamous 2016 Republican response to “Black lives matter,” namely, “All lives matter.” The belief system has been pushed to such an extreme that it turned inside out.
This appears to happen to all groups over time. Although it has gotten a bad reputation due to its associatioin with Soviet communism, Hegel’s dialectic theory of history is actually worth considering when we observe the kind of radical internal contradictions riptiding through imploding political parties like the Republians in 2016.
Hegel’s dialectic theory of historical change, simply put, says;
1. Everything (read “everything in politics” here) is transient and finite, existing in the medium of time.
2. Everything (read “all political parties and political movements”) is composed of contradictions (opposing forces).
3. Gradual changes lead to crises, turning points when one force overcomes its opponent force (quantitative change leads to qualitative change).
4. Change is helical (spiral), not circular (negation of the negation).
It’s interesting to me that in this pivotal moment for the Republican party, and American politics in general right now, some left-leaning communist-oriented political analysts would probably do a much more incisive job of explaining what’s going on by using Hegel’s dialectic system. But since that mindset has largely been purged from American mass culture and American mass media, we’re left to fall back on weak-tea sops like “unexpected changes are occurring in the Republican party” and “we’re seeing a realignment in U.S. politics.” Yes, certainly, but the important question is why. Hegelian dialectical historicism gets at some of the causes for that in ways that conventional pabulum like “America is a center-right nation” or “general election voters tend toward the middle” really doesn’t explain.
TheBuhJaysus
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I had no idea who Grandpa Al was…
Perot brings back the notion of 3rd party coming into play here after Trump cleans up tomorrow and the next level of panic/scrambling begins to take hold of the #nottrump crowd.
Punchy
@mclaren: my only nit to pick is with the term “Evap cooling”. What you’re describing is distillation. Evap is passive; requires no significant heat. Distillation is concentrating the supernatant due to changing conditions (i.e., heat). In yer example, “heat” is the confounding fact/discovery….
boatboy_srq
@efgoldman: I can’t decide whether he’s blind to his unelectability, or en route to his own personal Gethsemane.
mclaren
@gf120581:
Not so much, really. That quip is a variant of the infamous Communist claim that “communism cannot fail, it can only be failed,” and it results from the belief that communism rests on an infallible historical dialectic that represents a basic law of nature.
As we now know, there are no historical “laws of nature.” And the efforts of Republicans to re-create a form of the Soviet historical dialectic in which “globalized capitalism” replaces “soviet communism” as the alleged inevitable direction of historical change have run aground on the 2009 global financial meltdown, as well as on the obvious limits of globalized capitalism when it bangs up against the limits of resources in earth’s biosphere.
It doesn’t take a far-left Marxist-Leninist fanatic to realize that when scientists say all ocean life will get fished out of the seas by 2050 at the current rate of global fishing growth, capitalism has hit an endpoint. Whatever the fishing industry does after 2050, it cannot possibly rely on continued growth. The same is obviously true of other major natural resources, like forests, fresh water, oil, and so on.
But since conventional capitalism depends on limitless growth, we’ve got a serious problem. I would suggest that these kinds of internal contradictions are now causing the Republican party to explode. That stupid chant at the 2004 Republican national convention “Drill, baby, drill!” is obviously not the solution to a globalized capitalist which is now hitting the outer limits of our earth’s resources, and even the dullest Republicans have begun, dimly, to recognize that.
This leads to a crisis in the identity of the Republican party. If more globalized capitalism is not possible, what does Republicanism mean? What does the Republican party stand for?
In the same way, the collapse of unions due to automation + offshoring + Uber-ization of work into temp jobs mediated by smartphones &c. is also creating a crisis of identity in the Democratic party. If jobs are getting automated out of existence so fast that traditional solutions like strengthening unions are no longer viable and instead Democrats would have to push for more radical solutions like a guaranteed minimum income, what does that do to the identity of a Democrat? How does one now identify oneself ideologically as a Democrat?
I have quipped more than once that the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union proved that communism does not work as a social or economic system, and the 2009 collapse of the world economy is now proving that globalized capitalism does not work as a social or economic system. This creates crises of identity for both political parties much larger than any momentary problem of ideology or personality.
GregB
@Mike J: Nikki, you mean a hacky opportunist like you will have to do some introspection?
God forbid.
? Martin
@mclaren:
I’ll admit I don’t stay awake at night scouring BJ for your every post.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Seems to me the energy for RW third party would have to come from either the nativists or the Fundies, he had the former at the escalator descent and for reasons I can’t quite get, he’s got the latter (ETA: or at least seems to– they don’t talk to me). My only explanation is they trust him to stay flip-flopped in a way they didn’t with Romney, or even McCain, even though that’s one of the very, very few issues he’s been consistent on.
ETA, again: anybody see, on the Hayes show, the old guy at the Trump rally saying he wasn’t bothered by the David Duke/KKK thing because “we’re the same age”, he repeated it as if to say, “I remember the good old days…”
? Martin
@mclaren:
Except that very same globalized capitalism has reduced poverty at a tremendous rate. Yeah, the collapse was pretty shitty for the US middle class (also known as the global 1%) but there’s a billion people better able to feed and shelter themselves.
mclaren
@Punchy:
Good point.
amk
@p.a.: no, it’s electricity.
Fair Economist
This has been conventional wisdom for a while, but looking at the second and third choices of the current candidates shows it’s not true. If either Rubio or Cruz drop out, it narrows the gap between the last guy and Trump BUT it pushes Trump closer to or over 50%. At present the only hope for the Republicans to stop Trump is for Rubio, Cruz, and probably even Kasich, to stay in the race and do fairly well, That will create a contested convention, which would be able to nominate somebody besides Trump after the first ballot.
With anything like current polling, the only current candidate with any chance of a majority of pledged delegates is Trump.
? Martin
@Fair Economist: And should Trump hit that 50%, he’s a lock because after tomorrow, everything is winner take all. Making Super Tuesday effectively the race for the President of the Confederacy may be looked at in hindsight as a terrible, terrible idea. Probably illustrative for everyone else, though.
mclaren
@? Martin:
That’s the global wage arbitrage argument for globalized capitalism. The problem with global wage arbitrage is twofold, though. The first problem is that most of the increased economic growth in India and China and other third-world countries has gotten sopped up in corruption. That’s creating social tensions so intense in China that they’ve had to embark on massive crackdowns — and even then, the situation doesn’t seem to be getting much better because corruption is so deeply embedded in the Chinese and Indian economic systems that the so-called “fleas” are killing the system.
The second problem with global wage arbitrage is that if you’re telling people in first world countries like America that their wages are going to drop until they get somewhere above the nominal wage in a country like India, the only way to make that work in America is if Americans live like people in India. I.e., in huts with dirt floors, with no running water, with no sewage services, etc. Americans are not going to tolerate that. It’s just not politically viable to say that Americans can be made to tolerate that.
Exhibit A: “Yelp Employee Fired After Public Post To CEO Saying She Can’t Afford Food”. If this is what globalized capitalism now means, then globalized capitalism is dead. This can’t continue. This is the practical reality of international wage arbitrage, and it’s fueling the Bernie Sanders campaign and the Occupy movement, and it’s not going away.
divF
@mclaren:
Orson Welles, Lady from Shanghai
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I suspect even the dimmest Mittlet and drunkest Bush rolled their eyes at this one
TheBuhJaysus
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
For DT Jr everything is “as it should be.” Of course it is.
pseudonymous in nc
Ted Cruz sounds like an amalgamation of almost every foil in every classic Warner Brothers cartoon: a little bit Elmer Fudd, a little bit Porky Pig, a little bit Daffy Duck, a little bit Marvin the Martian.
Mingobat f/k/a Karen in GA
@? Martin: I’m from Brooklyn. Trump is just a slimmer, more orange version of my brother-in-law.
Calouste
@Fair Economist: The fractured vote definitely benefits Trump, because most Republican primaries are far from proportional, and the winner gets significantly more delegates than his share of the vote. However, the mistake many people make, including the pundit formerly known as the statistician Nate Silver, is assuming that all the people who don’t vote for Trump now, won’t vote for him when their preferred candidate drops out. Obviously this is not the case, as a quick look at the polls will tell. And there is no reason why for example a supporter of anti-establishment candidate Cruz would prefer establishment candidate Rubio over anti-establishment candidate Trump, if Cruz were to drop out.
prob50
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Fxt.
alan
@mclaren: Outstanding post re evaporation of the reasonable leaving distillated extremists.
I too want an open carry open convention and if we get one I am buying a second TV.
Ruckus
@Nate Dawg:
I mean, how do you even explain that?
You think that being batshit fucking crazy allows them to make any sane decisions? I don’t see your maths here.
pseudonymous in nc
@mclaren: I’m not convinced by the Hegelian reading, especially some of your formulations. But it’s an interesting departure point.
Perhaps it’s better to say that no belief system survives contact with power untouched. And that once it operates from a position of power, it will adjust its beliefs to repel challenges rather than give up power.
That touches on something Atrios said today, which is that Drumpfismo (for now) operates outside the institutional power structures of the GOP, and also points to why certain institutional figures like Hee-Haw Sessions are willing to endorse him.
RaflW
@mclaren:
And I’d say also that more American Christianity isn’t at all likely given younger generations dislike for such things, and in that respect, too, What does the Republican party stand for?
Shakti
@rikyrah:. He is a natural born citizen of the United States at his birth (through this mother who was a US citizen). That’s not his problem. His problem is that he was a natural born citizen of Canada at birth under their laws as well and there’s no precedent for it in our history. It’s a genuine constitutional question. Does being a dual citizen of the United States and another country at birth mean that you’re a natural born citizen who is eligible to be POTUS? After all the whole reasoning behind excluding naturalized citizens from running was this suspicion of their potentially divided loyalties, so why wouldn’t the same reasoning apply to dual citizens?
Want a laugh? Read this.McCain had a lot of problems people glossed over.
Ruckus
@RaflW:
What does the Republican party stand for?
A very good question. Currently, the easy answer is money and the power to keep it all for themselves. But that answer really only works for the power base of the republican party. For a good portion of them it’s hate, in the form of racism and misogyny. For the rest it’s religious fundamentalism. Now of course the Venn diagram here has a lot of overlap, especially in the hate and religious divisions.
AnotherBruce
I would crawl across a thousand yard field of shit to vote against Ted Cruz.
But then again, if I have to crawl across that field, I might as well rip his larynx out.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Shakti:
As did his predecessor in the Senate Barry Goldwater. He was born in AZ before it was a state.
IANAL, but I think McCain’s(and Goldwater’s) cases are stronger since they were born in US territory; where Failgunner Ted was born on foreign soil.
AnotherBruce
@mclaren: I gotta admit, mclaren is sounding pretty reasonable these days. Clearly the worm has turned.
Whisper in my ear some more, mclaren!
mark
OK, off topic here, We got a new little calico kitty yesterday. She is almost two years old. Got her from the cat recycle store.
We have been childless since Angel and Butt Crack passed on back in 2008 and 2009. Very hard to see them go. Very excited to have our new little baby though. It took a while to get over the last ones.
Steeplejack
@TheBuhJaysus:
If it’s still not clear, he was the actor who played Grandpa Munster.
Mary G
@mark: Congratulations! Love the “cat recycle store.” Have you named her yet?
mark
@Mary G: She is going to go by “Kitty”.
PIGL
On a happy note, I was Tal Wilkenfeld’s gig, earlier tonight in Toronto. She is genius.
mclaren
@AnotherBruce:
This really boils down to “When we all agree, mclaren sounds reasonable.” We all agree that the Republican party is cracking up and the Repubs are now so batshit insane they’re pretty much out of the running for the presidency, and it’s probably also going to affect their control of the senate and eventually the House.
The bigger question comes when we all don’t agree. What happens when Hillary gets sworn in and the Repubs continue their obstructionism? What should she do then?
What should the Democrats do about a House that is actively trying to break the democratic representative system?
There are some radical options. I hope Hillary takes ’em. For example, if the House continues to try to block the debt ceiling, the president can just declare the debt ceiling raised by executive order. It would be controversial, but legislating to raise the debt ceiling isn’t part of the constitution…it’s just a political habit we’ve gotten into.
A more extreme option if the senate continues to refuse to hold hearings on Hillary’s nominees would be for Hillary as president to give the senate a deadline (say, 60 days) and if the senate doesn’t hold hearings by that time, Hillary can simply declare the nominees confirmed by the legal principle silentia consenit — “silence gives consent.”
This isn’t crazy talk — such an option was proposed a couple years back in the Yale Law Journal. See “Can the President Appoint Principal Executive Officers Without a Senate Confirmation Vote?” Matthew C. Stevenson, 122 Yale L.J. 940 (2013).
To my mind these are the really interesting and controversial questions going forward. How should president Clinton deal with massive congressional obstruction to her agenda?
AnotherBruce
@mark: It always does take time, my friend.
? Martin
@mclaren:
That is a common phase for growing low-wage economies. It’s a problem, but there are almost no examples of it not happening.
And that’s just complete crap. Economies are not zero-sum as Republicans believe. Yes, the US will give up a little bit of growth, but just as raising the minimum wage creates more consumers, raising wages in India will do the same thing.
AnotherBruce
@mclaren: I’ve never heard of silentia consenit. But I know of the filibuster. If the Democrats win back the Senate as well as the Presidency, which at this point is fairly likely. They can give the Republican minority a long time to approve a Supreme Court nominee. But it won’t take long to paint them as obstructionists trying to close down the government. And really, this has never at least in recent history, worked out for the reactionary Republicans. Eventually if all goes well, dismissal of the filibuster will be used as a cudgel to beat their brains out. And really I will not be sad to see the filibuster destroyed. It’s an anti democratic tool.If every damn vote is an up and down vote, Democrats win almost every time.
Schlemazel (parmesan rancor)
This whole thing seems to be going toward the populist fascist denouement I figured it would. Trump (BTW – love the drumpfenator – IT WORKS!) can’t win & the reason – after the election – will for sure be he just was not a real conservative. Hell thats their excuse for Boy Blunders fiasco from 2000-08!. Of course the next administration , be it Clinton or Sanders, will be a compete and utter disaster according to the drum beat of the might wingnut wurlitzer. The natural savior (according to the nutbags) will be Cruz & pasta help us if that tinpot dictator gets within a mile of the oval office.
Mai.naem.mobile
I cannot even imagine a similar situation happening in the Democratic party as is happening in the GOP right now. Bayh,Breaux,Blanche Lincoln,Ben Nelson,Lieberman, Kim Davis,Kanye West and Dennis Kucinich running for the Dem POTUS nominee?
AnotherBruce
@Mai.naem.mobile: Thanks, that is a good laugh. I’m trying to think of the most ridiculous ticket of that bunch. But all I can think of is that Lieberman with VP Kim Davis would be an awesome ticket. I wonder if it would be David Brooks approved?
AnotherBruce
@Mai.naem.mobile: I honestly think the Wurlitzer wont survive this very well. They (particularly Fox News) have been trying to tear down Trump for awhile, and he just whistles past their graveyard. If I had to point out any entity that has been responsible for the Trump monster. I’m laying it on Fox. If Trump didn’t have small fingers, I would have liked him to choked the remaining life out of Roger Ailes.
J R in WV
@mclaren:
But the Soviet Union wasn’t Marxist Communism at all; it was a Leninist state taken over by a Stalinist strong man who ruled utterly without limits to his power. The failure of the Soviet Union only proved that the strong-man managed economy isn’t optimal over time, even when led by a politbureau that allegedly has the correct insight and power to rule the command economy.
We probably won’t ever see true Marzist Communism in the real world, just as pure capitalism won’t work to provide a society we would be willing to live in.
Ted Cruz probably would be intent upon creating a theocracy under his father’s religious guidance, either in person or via writings. This is of course not possible under the Constitutional government we currently operate under.
Which means Ted would need to either re-work those details in the Constitution that prohibit theocracy (First Amendment, and the Article prohibiting any religious test for office under the Constitution.) Talk about crazy times in an election!
Another Holocene Human
@theBuhjaysus:
That’ll be the day. I think this election is more evidence that the demo Cruz is pitching to has shrunk–c’mon, they were middle aged in 1980–and a slickster like Trump is all too good at peeling off the rabble who were never true believers (of Christianity, fundie style, or movement conservatism) in the first place.
I believe Trump did so well in the Northeast because he clearly ISN’T a fundagelical and they LIKE that. Also telling that Northeast GOPers don’t care that he’s a hate monster. Why GOP? Hate hate hate.
opiejeanne
@? Martin: There is a strange rule for the Republican candidates: the nominee has to win 8 states by at least 50%, as do any challengers at the convention. If not, the convention becomes contested (I think that’s the right word), so we could possibly get either Cruz or Rubio, or someone they pluck from obscurity.
BillinGlendaleCA
@opiejeanne: Rachel was talking about Kasich trying to win in a contested convention, won’t happen. The delegates are true believers in their candidates, there will be horse trading between maybe a Cruz and Trump, but no dark horses will emerge.
opiejeanne
@BillinGlendaleCA: You watched it too What a bunch of strange rules they changed to in anticipation of helping another Romney to the finish line.
Zinsky
People like Rafael Eduardo Cruz are similar to cockroaches – very hard to get rid of…
Another Holocene Human
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Think about why somebody is a fundie. Hatred and fear of the other is a big part of it. They try to frighten their children bad to keep them in but a big chunk always walk away. It’s not about doctrine, it’s about psychology.
McCain isn’t ruled by fear of the other. He’s had lots of little moments to lose the Religious Right.
(Trump hates who they hate. But, he does not yet have all of them. Cruz’ hints at turning the US into 16th cent Geneva is much easier to fap to for some fundies than dissing Mexicans.)
Another Holocene Human
@Shakti: I’ve been reading posts by lawyers recently, and they raise some serious questions with his “natural born” status. Basically, the SCOTUS would have to go back on over a century of precedent to find him natural born. And with Scalia gone, a partisan ruling is now not a foregone conclusion.
I am not an immigration lawyer, so I’m afraid I can’t explain any better than that. The analysis was really complicated and involved a lot of branching into different possible interpretations.
satby
@mark: Congratulations!
qwerty42
@theBuhjaysus:
No, they will just say “Well, maybe he was conservative enough, but it might have been better to be more friendly” … I dunno … something caused the failure and it cannot be “conservative”. Of course, there is this heresy going around that Republican rank and file are not (movement) conservatives. That they like that New Deal/Great Society stuff (and, heavens, are finding they like Obamacare too), and are perfectly happy to soak the rich to get them. War on Women continues, though.
cokane
Trump 2016 is going to be a blowout for the Dems. 2020 Cruz would also be a major loss. These guys just have no clue.
Barbara
@redshirt: I think Cruz is the candidate most likely to run as an independent in November. I don’t think it’s likely, because he would be burning his bridges as Senator. But unlike Rubio and Kasich, who are basically creations of the Republican Party, and who I expect to fall in line pretty quickly, Cruz has a specific world view — let’s call it Dominionist — and for him, someone like Trump is the antithesis of that world view, probably even the Antichrist — someone who will bend his principles any which way so long as victory is his. It’s like the Thirty Years War. When it ended, it was obvious to everyone with a brain that the only thing anyone was really fighting over was power, and religion was just one of its most convenient manifestations. If Trump is the nominee there is simply no way that the Republican Party can maintain itself as a party of conservative principles and traditional values.
Barbara
@Mike J: Yep, I noticed that too. Anything but self-examination!
evodevo
@efgoldman: Yes. This. I know personally at least a couple locals who ran for city council because “God told them to do it”. You can never underestimate the level of psycho in fundie Xtians. (I always want to ask them – what if you lose? Did God do that too??? Unfortunately, in the bibble belt, that rarely happens. The crazier the Xtian, the more likely they’ll be elected around here. And, Hey, Introspection … what’s that?)
Paul in KY
You’ve got to assume his family would rather want him out there on campaign trail, rather than interacting with them.
Shakti
@BillinGlendaleCA:
Check out the paper in my first comment; it’s fascinating. See, normally as people understand it today since McCain was born on an Air Force base, the Air Force base acts as US soil for natural born citizenship purposes.
However:
From the excerpt:
Senator McCain was born in 1936 in the Canal Zone to U.S. citizen parents. The Canal Zone was territory controlled by the United States, but it was not incorporated into the Union. As requested by Senator McCain’s campaign, distinguished constitutional lawyers Laurence Tribe and Theodore Olson examined the law and issued a detailed opinion offering two reasons that Senator McCain was a natural born citizen. Neither is sound under current law. The Tribe-Olson Opinion suggests that the Canal Zone, then under exclusive U.S. jurisdiction, may have been covered by the Fourteenth Amendment’s grant of citizenship to “all persons born . . . in the United States.” However, in the Insular Cases, the Supreme Court held that “unincorporated territories” were not part of the United States for constitutional purposes. Accordingly, many decisions hold that persons born in unincorporated territories are not Fourteenth Amendment citizens. The Tribe-Olson Opinion also suggests that Senator McCain obtained citizenship by statute. However, the only statute in effect in 1936 did not cover the Canal Zone. Recognizing the gap, in 1937, Congress passed a citizenship law applicable only to the Canal Zone, granting Senator McCain citizenship, but eleven months too late for him to be a citizen at birth. Because Senator John McCain was not a citizen at birth, he is not a “natural born Citizen” and thus is not “eligible to the Office of President” under the Constitution. (emphasis mine)
This essay concludes by exploring how changes in constitutional law implied by the Tribe-Olson Opinion, such as limiting the Insular Cases and expanding judicial review of immigration and nationality laws passed by Congress, could make Senator McCain a citizen at birth and thus a natural born citizen.
If McCain’s a natural born citizen by virtue of a statute after his birth, it’s surely possible I might be too if Congress or SCOTUS is so moved. :-p
Sourmash
That whole “Trump and I will split the delegates” reminds me of a benchwarmer who was sent in during the fourth quarter and hit two clutch three pointers for the win. His remark after the game? “I can’t wait to tell my grandkids about the time Michael Jordan and I combined for 57 points!”
Paul in KY
@mark: Congrats on new kitteh!!!
Paul in KY
@Another Holocene Human: I wouldn’t want that ruling to be ‘partisan’. If the little fuck is a natural born citizen, then let him run.
Karen
On TPM I read that Cruz and Trump are ganging up on Rubio to drop out of the race but didn’t Rubio finish in 2nd place in South Carolina? Is Cruz under the misconception that Rubio isn’t aware of that?