A few times in the last month, I’ve been asked who I think Hillary will select for a running mate. Normally, I’m just waiting for some poor fool to ask me this question because I’ve always got a short list in my head, with pros and cons for each.  But, this time, I had nothing.  I actually had to do Google searches of Democratic governors.  Because, the Democratic party’s bench is really thin these days at almost every level. The Democrats won literally everything in 2006 and 2008 and then gave almost all of it back in 2010 and some more in 2014.   As important as the presidency is, the Democrats really, really need a strong showing down-ballot in as many states as possible in November.

The Republicans are careening toward catastrophe at the top of the ticket, but it’s easy to rattle off attractive potential vice presidents.  They are teeming with people like Nikki Haley, Rob Portman, and Jeff Flake who would be attractive candidates.  Except with Trump likely at the top of the ticket, no serious Republican is going to want the number two slot, and my guess is that Trump will have to find some latter-day Sargent Shriver who has nothing else to lose.  Time to start scouring the list of former Republican mid-western governors.  Or Carly Fiorina.  Yeah, she’d take it in a heartbeat.

Also, Trump knows that he’s likely to be impeached, and so would be foolish to put anyone on the ticket with him who would obviously be a better president.

So, back to the Democrats. They’d give anything to put a Latino on the ticket, but despite being the party of diversity, they don’t really have a Latino office holder of suitable stature or charisma.  It’s so bad that insiders are floating the name of Tom Perez, the Secretary of Labor, who has never held elective office.  Julian Castro has serious political talent, but Mayor of San Antonio and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development for under two years is hardly a compelling resume to be a heart-beat away from the presidency.

The Republicans have, or had, a surfeit of Latino options just in one state.  Current and former New Mexico governors Susana Martinez and Brian Sandoval would have a lot to offer to the ticket.  Except that Martinez apparently got absolutely plastered on December 14 at a party with her staff and friends at a hotel in Santa Fe and started throwing empty bottles out of the hotel window.  Sandoval has immense political talent and is a serious guy—Obama floated his name as a replacement for Scalia on the Supreme Court—but his problems are even worse than Martinez’s.  He’s pro-choice, pro-Obamacare, and pro-immigration reform.  This guy’s a Republican?  He’s my pick for Hillary’s running mate.

At the end of the day, the vice presidential pick is all about chemistry with the person at the head of the ticket.  The first time we all saw Clinton and Gore together, it was obvious how formidable they would be. And then, their first day on the campaign bus, the bus got stuck in some soft earth where it was parked.  And Bill and Al in shirt sleeves jumped out of the bus and helped push it out.  Two broad-shouldered young men from the South leaning into the future.

So, my top three picks for Hillary in no particular order:

Deval Patrick:  Former two-term governor.  Very good on the stump. The black vote has been huge for Hillary in the primaries.  Was actually surprised he didn’t run for President this time.

Elizabeth Warren:  A month ago, I didn’t think that Hillary would pick a woman because, like, we thought that Hillary would bring the excitement of a possible woman president.  But, somehow, she’s carved out a persona that combines the ineluctability of Nixon with the stolidity of Walter Mondale.  So, Warren would add excitement to the ticket and expand the gender gap. She’s been on the attack against Cruz lately so maybe she’s auditioning for the part.

Tim Kaine:  The safe choice.  Great resume.  Very good on television and a great campaigner. Could help make a difference in Virginia. But, he would open up a senate seat in that state that the Democrats could ill afford to lose.

Trump will pick Carly.  .. Or some end-of-the-line conservative like Mike Pence of Indiana.  Or Lee Iacocca or whatever.  And burn the Republican Party to the ground.

Who are your picks?

The presidential races are the top draw for today’s primaries in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Delaware, and Rhode Island.  But, 2016 also features a full slate of House races and a third of the senate up for reelection.  For serious political junkies, congressional and gubernatorial elections are where the real action is.

Today features two important primaries, one in my former home state of Pennsylvania, where former representative Joe Sestak faces off against Katie McGinty.  Sestak lost a very winnable senate race to Pat Toomey in 2010 and is looking for a rematch. The White House and the Democratic establishment is supporting McGinty.  Media coverage suggests that Sestak is not getting establishment support because he’s an “outsider”, but the reality is, he was a terrible candidate in 2010 and would almost surely lose to Toomey in 2016.  Democratic pols who I know in Pennsylvania are all supporting McGinty.

The other hotly contested Democratic senate primary is in Maryland where two respected members of congress, Chris Van Hollen and Donna Edwards, vie for the Senate seat of the retiring Barbara Mikulski.  The seat is likely to remain Democratic so this one could decide who is the next Senator from Maryland. The elections to Van Hollen’s and Edward’s House seats feature scrums of Maryland Democrats spending enormous sums of money for a House primary race.

Having grown up in Pennsylvania, I always pay special attention to that state’s politics.  Until recently, the PA primary was held in June and so usually the races were just about decided by the time the campaign focused on PA.

Obviously not so this year.  A few posts ago, I wrote about how I remembered PA’s arcane primary rules working in 1984.  With the PA primary tomorrow, I thought I’d explain how the GOP primary in PA will assign delegates.  But, it’s even more obscure than I thought.  And never mattered in an era when the national conventions were just big t.v. shows.  But, this year, Pennsylvania could be pivotal to deciding if Trump can win on the first ballot.

Pennsylvania has 54 Republican delegates.  Voters cast ballots for candidates whose names appear on the ballot.  The winner of this contest receives 17  state-wide delegates who are bound on the first convention ballot to vote for the winning candidate.  The remaining delegates are apportioned by congressional district.  With each district getting three delegates.  And here’s the kicker, these congressional delegates are not bound to any candidate on the first convention ballot.   They are free agents from the start.  So, while Trump is heavily favored to win tomorrow, he could still come out a loser in the delegate race when the dust settles and the horse-trading is done. A pretty great time to be, say, a county commissioner in Pennsylvania looking for a job in Harrisburg or D.C.

I realize I just put the words “thrilling”, “civics” and “lesson” in the same headline. I’m sure that’s going to drive a lot of traffic.

But, that’s how I see the last few years in politics.  Anyone over forty grew up in a relatively stable moment in our politics and government.   For a while there in the eighties and early nineties, so few members of the House and Senate lost re-election that a very serious effort to enact term limits for federal legislators had significant support in the country.  We just took for granted that we understood how our government worked.  And that it always would work.   But, recent events remind us just how much of a miracle it is that this thing functions at all.  And that, in some ways, government by the people is a consensual illusion that we all conspire to keep going. Until we don’t.  For example, here’s a list of a few things we thought we knew, but now we know we don’t.

The Speaker of the House is a powerful person:  We remember legendary figures like Sam Rayburn.  Will anyone ever have that much power again in this country? Tip O’Neill.  Even the forgotten ones like Carl Albert exercised great authority.  One of the many, many rewarding parts of Robert Caro’s biography of LBJ is how Caro shows Johnson’s genius for creating political power.  When Johnson became Minority Leader in 1953, the Eisenhower Administration was having difficulty moving its program through a Republican congress.  Johnson, seeing his opportunity,  put together coalitions of Republicans and Democrats that enabled the Eisenhower measures to advance through congress.  He was both daring and subtle, and he moved the ball.  And created political power in a minority leader’s job where it hadn’t existed before.

Imagine if John Boehner had done something similar?  If, realizing that he had no chance to manage the more radical elements of the House GOP, he had forged a working majority with “moderate” House Republicans and Democrats?  It might have cost him his Speakership, but would that have been any worse than his shuffling off to retirement, having accomplished nothing?

The president appoints supreme court justices.  There is of course, no actual definition of what “advise and consent” means.  It’s just always been assumed that the congress will review and approve a nominee unless they have some unique disqualification.  The Garland situation is well discussed.

But, consider this.  If and when Hillary defeats Trump, and assuming the GOP keeps the Senate, what’s to stop McConnell and Grassely from just refusing to consider her nominee to replace Scalia?  What if they just refuse?   What’s she going to do?  Sue them? How many Republican senators would actually lose their seat two years later by refusing to replace Scalia with a liberal justice?  How many Republican senators would face a primary challenge if they allowed a liberal justice to replace Scalia?   Likely, Hillary would just make the appointment, note that the senate has declined to advise or consent, and then have the newly appointed justice show up for work one fine Monday morning.  And, what would John Roberts do in that case?  Start the normal orientation process?  Or ask the security guards to escort Mr. Garland to the parking lot?

I vote for someone and, you know, I kinda thought that I voted for them:  As Mr. Jones noted, we are all learning about the 50 different arcane systems we have for choosing presidential nominees.  As I noted in a comment on Mr. Jones’s post, when I worked for Gary Hart in 1984 in Pennsylvania, I learned that, while PA voters do vote for candidates, those votes are non-binding.  Voters need to vote for individual delegates whose names appear on the ballot under the presidential candidates.  It was an insanely difficult thing to explain to voters when you usually have about 8 seconds of their time to ask them to vote for your candidate.

Long-time readers of our blog know that it grew out of a correspondence that Laska, Mr. Jones, and I shared back in February when we were shocked and panicked by Mr.  Trump’s electoral success and appalled at the apparent collapse of the GOP at the presidential level.   Given that, it’s surprising we haven’t posted about Trump yet.  So, I’ll go ahead and break the ice.

I think we were all consumed with terror at the prospect of President Trump back in February and early March. But, no one can maintain that level of emotional anxiety forever. And, then Mr. Trump lost a string of primaries and it looked like he might be a spent force.  And, we are all just tired of him and hoped he would go away.  But, his big win in New York changed all that.  And if he wins PA, CT, Delaware and Rhode Island on Tuesday, he’s more than back in the saddle.

He’s going to win the GOP nomination.  And then he has a 50-50 chance of beating Hillary.  I know, polls show her beating him in places like  Utah and Mississippi.  But, she’s a terrible campaigner, and he’s a showman, and so anything can happen.

If he wins, I think, one of two things are likely.  The first is some type of military coup d’état, with Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi holding a press conference and announcing a Biden-Romney interim government.  Two, respected party elders who can run the government until new elections are held.

The second, more likely, option is that he takes office and immediately provides some pretext for the House to move articles of impeachment. And then the mother and father of all show trials in the senate.

I realize how canned-foods-stacked-in-my-basement crazy these ideas of military coups, interim governments, and show trials sound.  But, ask yourself.  If one year ago, I had said that Donald Trump would be the Republican nominee for President of the United States, would I have sounded any less crazy?

Following up Laska’s post about Biden and stretch goals and the need to use the presidency for bold things.  It made me think of LBJ’s first speech as president. It was a national address to both houses of congress and occurred only a few days after the Kennedy assassination.  The purpose of the speech was to re-assure the nation about the continuity of government and the peaceful transition of power in the face of a national tragedy.

If ever there was a time for a safe speech, this was it. But, Johnson decided that he was going to put civil rights front and center of the speech.  Apparently, he met with his aides and writers late one night before the speech.  They were worried about the focus on civil rights.  The president only had so much political capital.  They worried about associating “the prestige of the presidency” with the civil rights protestors.  Johnson cut off the conversation by asking, “what else is  the presidency there for? ”

He went on to make the speech in which the new President of the United States adopted the language of the dispossessed and declared, “We shall overcome.”  Johnson knew to go big or go home.

I was reading Caro’s account of this speech a few years ago when Biden made news by breaking from his talking points and declaring that same sex marriage should be legal.  Thereby forcing Obama to do the same.  And now, same sex marriage happens every day and hardly anyone bats an eye.

 

 

 

My first response to Harriet Tubman being on the $20 bill was, ok, sure. Black. Woman. Check and check the diversity boxes.  Then I realized all I knew about her was her name.  And all we have, and will have, on the $20 bill is a nineteenth–century photo of an unsmiling old lady.

But, then I started to read about her. She was, of course, a slave. One time, a white man was pissed off at another slave and threw a two-pound weight at him. Missed him. Hit her.  Fractured her skull.  She was back in the fields two days later, still bleeding from her head.  She suffered epileptic-like seizers the rest of her life.

She made a daring escape from slavery. “Daring.” Like, there was any other kind of escape from slavery?  And, after that, she returned to slave-holding parts of Maryland, at enormous personal risk, to help other slaves escape to freedom on the Underground Railroad.  She carried a revolver and meant to use it.

There’s an about-to-be-famous woodcut image of her during the Civil War. In her forties.  Wearing what must have been a brightly colored head scarf and brandishing a rifle.  This image would have been explosive in 1963.  Or now.  But, in 1863 . . . .

This should be the image for the new twenty. Uniting both 14^th Amendment and 2^nd Amendment supporters in common cause.

In 1865, on a train in the North, the conductor asked her to move to a less desirable seat. A hundred years before Rosa Parks, she refused.  The conductor and two white passengers then wrestled her out of her seat and broke her arm in the process.

She helped lead Union troops in an armed assault on plantations along the Combahee River in South Carolina. An estimated seven hundred slaves broke and ran for freedom when they heard the steam whistles from the Union boats.  Broke and ran while their erstwhile masters vainly fired hand guns in the air and cracked bull whips.  And when the about-to-be-free slaves reached the Union boats they saw among the soldiers a black woman with a rifle. Badass.

 

The three of us started this blog based on a correspondence we maintained throughout the late winter and early spring.  We were not only aghast at the rise of Trump and Cruz and the seeming collapse of the GOP at the presidential level, but also alarmed at what seems to be pending constitutional crises almost everywhere we look.  Thus, the title. Not quite the end of the world, but, maybe the end of many institutions and assumptions about government that we all take for granted.

We decided to move this conversation to a blog where friends and other interested observers could join in.  Would love to hear from Republicans as well as Democrats and even from a Trump supporter.

Looks like a Broadway hit will keep Alexander Hamilton on the ten dollar bill.  And Andrew Jackson is getting bumped from the twenty.  There are many arguments to drop Jackson from the currency–mostly dealing with what we’d today call crimes against humanity  against Native Americans– but not least among them is that Jackson hated the idea of paper money.

His entire second term was dominated by a blood feud with Nicholas Biddle, president of the Second Bank of the United States.  Jackson’s contractionary monetary policy wrecked the economy shortly after he left office, making his hand-picked successor, Martin Van Buren, a one-term president.  I could make the case that if you don’t like Jackson, the worst thing you could do to him is leave him on the $20.