Presumptuous Politics : Jun 27, 2016

Monday, June 27, 2016

Liberal Press Cartoons

Trump camp scrambles to shape up before GOP convention

Republicans are sprinting to shape up Donald Trump's presidential campaign before the party's national convention in three weeks, even as leading members of the party carry a deep antipathy or outright opposition to his claim on the GOP nomination.
His campaign chairman said Sunday there's a hiring spree in 16 states and the campaign is working with the Republican National Committee to solidify other matters. Paul Manafort said Trump is not all that involved in the race to organize an offensive against Democrat Hillary Clinton and catch up to her massive fundraising advantage.
"The good thing is we have a candidate who doesn't need to figure out what's going on (inside the campaign ) in order to say what he wants to do," Manafort said on NBC's "Meet the Press." "We have our campaign plans in place. We have our budgets in place."
What Manafort described as a "new phase" for the campaign -- a shift from the primaries to the general election -- was a forced reshuffling of an effort hobbled for weeks by infighting, Trump's statements about a judge's ethnicity and a massive fund raising deficit to Clinton's cash-raising Goliath. Trump began June with $1.3 million in the bank, less campaign cash than many congressional candidates. The $3 million he collected in May donations is about one-tenth what Clinton raised.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Sunday that Trump can't win the presidency unless he can compete with Clinton on the financial front.
"He needs to catch up, and catch up fast," the Kentucky Republican said on ABC's "This Week."
Despite the stated support for Trump, antipathy toward him projected from the Sunday shows and beyond.
A few hundred delegates to the Republican National Convention are pushing to change the rules and make it possible for them to vote for someone other than Trump.
Many congressional Republicans are skipping the gathering in Cleveland altogether, the latest being Rep. Mia Love, R-Utah, according to the Salt Lake Tribune. Former presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush are not attending. And 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney, one of Trump's most outspoken Trump critics, has opted to spend July 10 through July 21 elsewhere.
Trump has said he doesn't want support from them, but also groused that overall support from Republican leaders has been lacking.
On the matter of staffing, there's evidence the Trump campaign is having trouble attracting some political veterans who are reluctant to sign on to such a late-starting and tumultuous campaign.
McConnell refused to say on Sunday whether Trump is qualified to be president. And he suggested that the GOP platform would not reflect Trump's ideas, including restrictions on Muslim immigration to the U.S.
"It's my expectation that the platform will be a traditional Republican platform, not all that different from the one we had four years ago," McConnell replied.
With just three weeks to go until the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, the Trump campaign and the RNC are laboring to set up staff in what Manafort said were 16 states in which the campaign aims to compete heavily. He said the campaign will announce more about staffing this week, an effort to reassure people that Trump's unorthodox campaign is viable.
On Sunday, Manafort sought to calm the angst, describing a partnership between Trump's campaign operation and the Republican National Committee that goes beyond the RNC's traditional role of raising money for the GOP nominee. He said the transition to the general election is complete -- but the details have not necessarily been made public.
"We are fully now integrated with the Republican National Committee," Manafort said. He said this week the campaign will announce "people who are taking over in major positions in our national campaign, as well as in our state campaigns. We're organized in all 16 states that we're going to be targeting as battleground states."
McConnell and other Republicans said they got the first glimmers of reassurance this week when Trump fired former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski in what Trump described as a change of direction from the GOP primaries to the general election. Lewandowski was at the center of the campaign's most corrosive internal battles, which Trump allowed to fester for months.

Man featured in Elizabeth Warren's anti-Trump ad voted for Trump

Michael Levin’s photogenic, mixed-race family appears straight from central casting for the modern American middle-class family, seemingly the perfect choice to be featured in Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s video for MoveOn attacking presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
Just one problem: Levin is not anti-Trump. In fact, he voted for the billionaire businessman in the Massachusetts primary.
“On Monday I got a text from a friend who said, ‘Hey, I just saw you in the new Warren video attacking Trump.’ And I thought, ‘You've got to be kidding me,’” Levin told "Fox and Friends" on Sunday. “I watched the video, and to my shock and surprise, there I was.”
Levin and his family are featured in two clips about 2:30 into the Internet video. In the first, he’s helping his daughter strap on a bicycle helmet. In the second, Levin and his wife are shown gazing into the distance. Warren’s voiceover during the clips declares: “They pay their fair share.”
Anything Levin pays comes from his job as a writer. He’s contributed to The New York Daily News, Politico, The Huffington Post, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. He told "Fox and Friends" that he's written about Trump and 10 seconds of research would have revealed his actual feelings about the Manhattan mogul.
“I’m certainly not anti-Trump,” he said.
When Levin voted in the Massachusetts primary on March 1, he even brought along his bicycle-riding daughter.
“The little girl you saw in that video actually came with me to the polls with her siblings to watch me vote for him,” Levin said.
So how did Massachusetts' Warren and MoveOn get it wrong? Levin said they simply never asked him. The clip, he said, originated from an Al Jazeera special several years ago about the American family which he agreed to be part of. The Al Jazeera logo is still visible in the lower left corner of the MoveOn video.
“And apparently it's still up on YouTube,” Levin said. “And I think the Warren people just googled ‘American Dream,’ found us, and said, ‘What a nice mixed-race couple. They're probably sort of working-class people.’”
Levin said he hasn’t been contacted by Warren since the video hit the web.
“There were no such calls, and I only found out after the video had gone viral,” he said. “I think about 12 million people have now seen me actually assenting – or appearing to assent – to her position on Trump.”

Supreme Court set to rule on abortion clinic restrictions

The Supreme Court on Monday is poised to once again enter the fray on the abortion issue, an already divisive subject complicated by election-year politics and a split bench that may lack the votes to rule definitively.

The high court will wrap up its work for the summer by issuing a judgment on how far Texas can go to regulate abortion clinics in the state, and whether those provisions have the effect of limiting first-trimester abortions guaranteed by the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling. Texas reproductive clinics are asking the justices to keep their facilities open in the face of the state restriction.

Activists on both sides of the issue are expected to rally outside the court when the ruling is announced.

A 4-4 tie would sustain the lower court's ruling, meaning a default victory for Texas, and likely for similar laws in other nearby states, including Louisiana and Mississippi. But no legal precedent would be established, leaving continued uncertainty nationwide. The Supreme Court could later hear new arguments in the case, when a ninth justice has been sworn in to replace the late Antonin Scalia.

Tied rulings are becoming common for the post-Scalia court. The justices last week ruled 4-4 on a closely watched immigration case, dealing a setback to President Obama's executive action to shield millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation.

Scalia, who died in February, was perhaps the most outspoken of the current justices in regards to the abortion issue. A year ago, he, along with three other conservative members of the court, opposed issuing an order delaying enforcement of the Texas law while the case was being appealed.
The four liberal justices -- along with swing vote Justice Anthony Kennedy -- gave a temporary victory to the clinics in that case, allowing them to remain fully operational. It suggests there may now be five votes to ultimately strike down the Texas restrictions.
The oral arguments from March were especially tense, though. Kennedy asked tough questions of both sides and did not tip his hand on how he would ultimately vote.
If upheld, all clinics performing the abortion procedure in the state must operate as certified "ambulatory surgical centers" regulated under the same standards as hospitals. Another challenged provision would force doctors performing abortions to first obtain admitting privileges at a nearby hospital.

Lawmakers in the state's Republican-majority legislature have said the regulations contained in the 2013 law -- known as H.B. 2 -- would improve patient care and safety.

Abortion rights groups counter that the law is designed to make it nearly impossible to operate an abortion clinic in Texas. Only nine or 10 such health centers would qualify to stay open, and large areas west and south of San Antonio would have no full-time abortion providers.

The Center for Reproductive Rights had sued Texas, on behalf of a coalition of abortion clinics.

A federal judge initially concluded the "ambulatory surgical centers" requirement was unconstitutional and imposed an injunction. But a federal appeal court ruled largely in favor of Texas. The clinics then asked the justices to finally decide the matter.

"There was a lot of talk at arguments about what impact this has on clinics," said Thomas Dupree, a former top Justice Department officials in the George W. Bush administration, now a private appellate attorney. "So it could be the court is working behind the scenes to fashion some sort of compromise resolution where they basically punt, at least for the time being on the constitutional issue, and send the case back for more evidence gathering" by the lower courts.

But some court watchers on the progressive side worry what a tie vote would mean in the short term.

"It will definitely be a dramatic example of the problems of having a mere eight-justice court," said Elizabeth Wydra, president of the Constitutional Accountability Center. "And if the court splits 4-4 they will leave in place a difference of opinion, in the circuits [courts] below. That means women would enjoy their fundamental rights differently based on the state in which they live and this is not how our Constitution works."

A Fox News poll from August revealed an even public split on the abortion issue, which has inevitably become enmeshed in presidential election-year politics.
Among registered voters, 47 percent surveyed favor abortion rights or consider themselves "pro-choice" while 46 percent oppose the procedure or are "pro-life."

The number of abortions is at the lowest level since the Roe v. Wade decision, according to research from the Guttmacher Institute. The number remained steady at about 1.1 million reported procedures in the year 2011, down about 25 percent since the all-time high in 1990. Since the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, about 53 million legal induced abortions were performed through 2011.
What the Supreme Court decides Monday could ripple across other states and in Washington. The court has not ruled substantively on the abortion issue since 1992, when the justices said any such law could not place an "undue burden" on women's access to abortions. The swing vote, as in previous cases, came from Kennedy. It appears inevitable his vote will again prove crucial in the Texas dispute.
This appeal could effectively be set aside as a political and legal issue in 2016 if the high court is unable to muster a binding majority. By next spring, a new president, and possibly a new member of the high court would then reset the abortion debate in a post-Scalia era.

Clinton says 'experienced leadership' needed to avoid troubles Britain faces

The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton on Sunday spoke for the first time publicly about Britain’s vote to exit the European Union and took a jab at the presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump in the process.
Without mentioning him by name, Clinton, speaking at the annual gathering of the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Indianapolis, said “steady experienced leadership” is what the U.S. needs to avoid the kinds of troubles Britain now faces.
"We need leaders ... who understand how to work with other leaders to manage risks, who understand that bombastic comments in turbulent times can actually cause more turbulence and who put the interest of the American people ahead of their personal business interests," Clinton said.
Clinton called the vote for Britain to leave the 28-member bloc a sobering reminder that “what happens around the world has consequences that can hit home quickly.”
"Our priority now must be to protect American families and businesses from the negative effects of this kind of tumult and uncertainty," she added.
Clinton was piling onto Trump after her campaign accused Trump of caring more about how Britain’s decision to leave the EU would benefit his bottom line more than how it would affect the U.S. economy.
Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook said Trump’s reaction showed that he’s not a good fit to serve as president, despite acknowledging the parallels between the anti-establishment movement that sparked the Brexit vote and Trump’s rise.
"Hillary Clinton looks at this through the lens of how it's going to affect middle-class families, Donald Trump through the lens of how it will help his bottom line,” Mook said on “Fox News Sunday.”
The Clinton campaign also released a national television ad earlier Sunday that showed Trump speaking about the vote and how it could affect business at his golf course in Scotland.
"Every president is tested by world events, but Donald Trump thinks about how his golf resort can profit from them," the ad said.
Trump has widely backed the “Leave” movement and called the decision to depart the EU as an example of people “trying to take their country back.”
Striking back against the scathing advertisement, Trump said Clinton used poor judgment in backing the “Stay” campaign.”
"Clinton is trying to wash away her bad judgment call on BREXIT with big dollar ads," Trump said on Twitter.