Ted Cruz misses another shot at glory

Elephants have long memories, and they won't forget how Lyin' Ted refused to play the game.

In the most dramatic, off-script moment in a Republican convention that’s been full of them, the second-place finisher in the party’s contest didn’t endorse the man who bested him—effectively launching his own 2020 presidential bid in the midst of Donald Trump’s effort this year.

He refused to endorse the Republican Party’s nominee, merely congratulating him on winning the nomination and not so much as mentioning Trump’s name thereafter. “We’re fighting,” Cruz told the crowd, “not for one particular candidate or one campaign.”

In November, the Tea Party senator said, “vote your conscience… vote for candidates up and down the ticket who you trust to defend our freedom and to be faithful to the Constitution.”

He did not say that Trump was this man—and the crowd noticed, loudly booing him at various points during the speech. “I appreciate the passion of the New York delegation,” Cruz responded at one point.

Trump himself seemed to notice as well, as he entered the convention hall and took a seat with his family a few minutes before Cruz finished his speech.

The entrance drew raucous applause, as many delegates turned their backs on Cruz to face Trump and cheer him. Trump sat there, stone-faced, as Cruz continued his remarks. Not once during the address did Trump or his family clap.

The Intercept breaks it down with a handful of videos recording the uprising.  This is going to cost Ted something dearly at some point, whether in four years as he consolidates his bid for the White House again, or in some circumstance that comes sooner in the Congress.  Even Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan played along with the charade of the convention.  Ted's going to be on an island somewhere ... with a small gaggle of supporters.

Though his last rally was months ago, there was a familiar feeling in the air Wednesday afternoon at a riverside Cleveland restaurant as the senator held a thank-you event for his supporters. There were familiar faces and familiar, campaign-trail-rhetoric.

Cruz fired up his crowd—and seemed to revel when the restaurant crowd erupted into boos at the mention of Trump. The timing was perfect. “Our party now has a nominee...” the senator began.

Just as Cruz brought up Trump for the first time, the mogul’s private jet—with “TRUMP” emblazoned on its side, clearly visible from the ground—flew into view over the nearby Cuyahoga River.

At the sight of the plane, the crowd started booing so loudly that Cruz nearly had to shout as he cracked a joke about the outburst of disdain toward his party’s presidential nominee.

“That was pretty well orchestrated,” Cruz quipped. He called out to his former campaign manager, Jeff Roe: “Jeff, did you email them to fly the plane right when I said that?”

Ted Cruz speaking to supporters, who then see Trump plane fly by and erupt into boo's #RNCinCLE pic.twitter.com/zItOne35SF

— Alexa Corse (@AlexaCorse) July 20, 2016

The afternoon gathering brought the old Cruz crew back together; a number of long-time Cruz staffers were there, including John Drogin, Tyler Norris, Catherine Frazier, and Roe. Other Cruz boosters attended as well, including Wisconsin state Senator Duey Stroebel, Virginia state Senator Dick Black, Rep. Louie Gohmert, and former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli.

[...]

“I don’t know what the future holds,” Cruz began at one point, lingering for a moment on the thought.

His supporters filled the silence.

“2020! 2020!” they shouted.

I have never been able to discern the differences between Cruz and Trump, save for the fact that Trump's people early on in the campaign said that because of his wealth, Hair Furor couldn't be bought off like all the rest of the DC crowd.  They appear to be wrong about Trump's income bracket, which is probably why he's been so secretive about his tax bracket, but  once again, truth and facts don't deter them.  And the conservative Christian bloc fell in line behind Drumpf as well, a demographic Cruz was surely counting on.

The GOP lesson for us this cycle is there is no discounting the motivation of bigotry. And the louder and more strident the hate, the farther it resonates.

So four years away and with a myriad of Clinton failures yet to come, I don't see a Ted Cruz 2020 campaign making up much electoral ground on a Hillary re-election bid.  Maybe W Bush is right.

Fifth Circuit rules TX voter ID law violates VRA

But does not quite strike the law from the books.  Here's Rick Hasen to explain.

In 203 pages of opinions, the 5th Circuit, sitting en banc, issued an opinion holding that Texas’s voter identification law, one of the strictest in the country, violates section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

[...]

The bottom line is that the majority of the 5th Circuit has done what the panel opinion had originally held: there is a remand on the question whether Texas acted with a discriminatory purpose, but there is enough evidence of a discriminatory effect so as to render the Texas id law a Voting Rights Act violation.

BUT, and this is a big but, the remedy is NOT going to be to strike the Texas voter ID law as a whole, but instead to fashion some kind of relief that give people who have a reasonable impediment to getting an id the chance to get one. This might be like the affidavit requirement just approved yesterday in the Wisconsin case, or something else (like an indigency exception affidavit). Further, given the timing of the election, the trial court has to craft some kind of interim relief and then can figure out a more comprehensive solution after the next election.

BUT, BUT there is a very strong dissent from the 5th Circuit’s most conservative members, and that might give Texas a reason to go to the Supreme Court to try to get this emergency interim relief stayed.

BUT, BUT BUT: the Supreme Court has now lost Justice Scalia, and at best Texas could hope for only 4 votes to reverse what the 5th Circuit has done. Indeed, I’m not sure that even Justice Kennedy/Chief Justice Roberts would be on board. If the court ties, the 5th circuit en banc decision stands.  (There’s also the possibility of an argument that the interim relief ordered for this election comes too late under the Purcell Principle, but given that the 5th Circuit acted just within the soft July 20th deadline the Supreme Court set, I think the plaintiffs will be safe in this regard).

FINALLY, these kinds of softening devices are not all they are cracked up to be, and there’s lots of evidence they are not used by lots of voters who need it. (I discuss this disjunction between theory and practice in Softening Voter ID Laws Through Litigation: Is it Enough?, Wisconsin Law Review Forward (forthcoming 2016; draft available). One of the 5th Circuit judges, Judge Higgonson, concurring, has a footnote reading: “I also disagree with the opposite criticism that this interbranch engagement ameliorates too little, though that argument is contributory. See Richard L. Hasen, Softening Voter ID Laws Through Litigation: Is it Enough? ...

This is a win for the plaintiffs, no doubt, but not nearly as good as getting the law thrown out for everyone.

Hasen cautions that attorneys are still pouring over the ruling, and more interpretations/potential 'relief' possibilities are forthcoming from him and others.  So we'll update here when that happens.

The Texas Tribune timelines the long and winding legal road to this point.

The literal shitshow in Cleveland

It's understandable that some of those in attendance at Quicken Loans Arena Tuesday evening were on the edge of their seats; they might very well have had to rush to the toilet at any moment.

A gastrointestinal outbreak that could be norovirus has spread to almost a dozen GOP staffers from California at the Republican National Convention.

The show must go on.

The second night of the 2016 Republican National Convention centered on the GOP disdain for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

While Tuesday’s theme was billed as “Make America Work Again,” almost everyone who appeared on stage offered criticism for Clinton, bashing everything from her email scandal to her accent. A video called “Hil-LIAR-y” played early in the evening, and there was vigorous fault-finding with her resume.

There was far more focus on the contempt for Clinton than on any admiration for Donald Trump, who was formally named the Republican nominee for president earlier in the evening and briefly appeared via video, thanking supporters.

Several of the night’s big-name speakers barely acknowledged Trump, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who said Trump would sign Republican-backed bills and fill the seat of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, but little else about the business mogul.

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) mentioned Trump only twice during his 10-minute speech, while House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) mentioned the newly minted nominee once.

This was expected.  Ryan and McConnell are putting on a brave face, having desensitized their own nausea at the prospect of their majorities in Congress going down with the Trump-tanic in November.  And Chris Christie reminded us again that he was once a federal prosecutor, livening up a morose crowd with a mock trial of the Democratic nominee.

“We’re going to present the facts to you, as a jury of her peers, both in this hall and in living rooms around our nation,” the former 2016 presidential candidate said in opening his address to the Cleveland convention Tuesday night.

“I’m going to render a case on the facts against Hillary Rodham Clinton,” he continued.

Christie made the case that Clinton’s character and her record as secretary of state disqualify her for the nation’s top job, specifically accusing her of “ruining Libya,” being a terrorist apologist for not naming an al-Qaeda affiliate in Nigeria a terrorist group for two years and linking that to the “Missing Girls,” and turning previous words of praise for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad against her.

“She fights for the wrong people, she never fights for us,” he said.

As Christie made his "case," delegates on the convention floor periodically broke into chants of “Lock her up, lock her up!”

But it was Ben Carson who went off script and delivered the most searing and Biblical condemnation, pulling out the old "she's the devil in disguise" routine. 

In a bizarre, meandering departure from his prepared remarks, Dr. Ben Carson suggested that electing Hillary Clinton would be the same as endorsing the devil himself.

Speaking near the end of Day Two at the Republican National Convention former rival of nominee Donald Trump, Carson brought up Saul Alinksy, the community organizer whose work Hillary Clinton wrote about while at college in Wellesley.

“Her senior thesis was about Saul Alinsky,” said Carson. “This was someone that she greatly admired and that affected all of her philosophies subsequently. Now interestingly enough, let me tell you something about Saul Alinsky: He wrote a book called “Rules for Radicals.” On the dedication page, it acknowledges Lucifer, ‘the original radical who gained his own kingdom.’”

“This is a nation where our founding document the Declaration of Independence talks about certain inalienable rights that come from our creator,” Carson continued. “This is a nation where our pledge of allegiance says we are one nation under God. This is a nation where every coin in our pocket and every bill in our wallet says ‘In God We Trust.’ So are we willing to elect someone as president who has as their role model somebody who acknowledges Lucifer? Think about that.”

Carson has been the conduit for evangelical Christians throughout the 2016 cycle and has managed to channel that fervent support to Trump without any examination of the Republican nominee's glaring spiritual shortcomings. 

Carson’s riff on Lucifer was not part of his prepared remarks distributed to reporters earlier Tuesday night, nor did it appear on the teleprompter in the arena. But it was not the first time he has mused on a Hillary Clinton-to-Saul Alinksy-to-Satan connection. Just last month, Carson launched into a similar digression a the New York City gathering where conservative evangelicals met with Trump.

When asked by a reporter earlier Tuesday what he planned to talk about in his speech, Carson replied, “Only God knows the answer to that.”

The journalist's request for comment was referred to Carson's deity, but received no reply prior to Ben taking the stage.  At least the brain surgeon didn't plagiarize anybody, which was a controversy that arose again during another Trump's speech.

For the second night in a row, a speech given by a member of Donald Trump's family is raising eyebrows for lines previously used elsewhere.

Donald Trump Jr. in his headline address at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland delivered a near-exact repetition of a small part of an American Conservative article written by F.H. Buckley, titled "Trump vs. the New Class."

"Our schools used to be an elevator to the middle class. Now they're stalled on the ground floor. They're like Soviet-Era Department stores that are run for the benefit of the clerks and not the customers," Trump's son said in his speech Tuesday night.

The line in Buckley's article reads, "Our schools and universities are like the old Soviet department stores whose mission was to serve the interests of the sales clerks and not the customers." 

Some people don't think plagiarism is a big deal.  Those people are wrong.

This is why I don't think Hillary is going to name Julian Castro V-P; because of the prevailing concept of injustice that some crimes simply aren't based on the person who commits them.  Castro won't be prosecuted for violating the Hatch Act, you see, just as former HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius skated away from the same violation.  But like hers, his political career is probably over, and certainly any shot at a promotion.  "Clinton-Castro" feeds the repetitious and unfortunate narrative that certain people are above the law.  The more common examples of this outrage are the white police officers who shoot or strangle black people to death every week in this country, but those who protest the killings or videotape the encounters are convicted and jailed.

So while last night's RNC spectacle was hyperbolic and overblown, it wasn't a false narrative.

Day 3 will pick it up with V-P nominee Mike Pence, more of Trump's vanquished rivals (Scott Walker, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio), and the speaker most likely to go over the top, Newt Gingrich.  But if you decide to watch anything tonight, catch Cruz.  He's busy setting himself up for 2020.

Personally I never turn on my teevee for these productions; I just follow the #RNCinCLE Twitter feed.  It keeps my own gastric distress to a minimum.