I have heard New York Sen. Chuck Schumer speak in person. He’s a blowhard, like most politicians. Not exactly a stemwinder. Now he has provoked the latest outrage du jour through intemperate speech. CNBC reports:

Chief Justice John Roberts issued a rare statement on Wednesday defending his newest colleagues, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, after Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer warned at a rally earlier in the day that the two Trump appointees would “pay the price” if they voted against reproductive rights activists.

“Justices know that criticism comes with the territory, but threatening statements of this sort from the highest levels of government are not only inappropriate, they are dangerous,” Roberts wrote. “All Members of the Court will continue to do their job, without fear or favor, from whatever quarter.”

The statement directly named Schumer but did not name Gorsuch or Kavnaugh. The court heard arguments on Wednesday in the first major abortion case since Gorsuch and Kavanaugh joined the bench, one of the most high-profile disputes of the term.

“I want to tell you, Gorsuch. I want to tell you, Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price!” Schumer said at a rally coordinated by the Center for Reproductive Rights around the arguments.

Sen. Schumer’s defenders have retorted that he didn’t actually mean it, he meant something quite different:

Justin Goodman, a Schumer spokesperson, said that the New York lawmaker’s comments referred to the “political price” Republicans will pay for confirming the two justices “and a warning that the justices will unleash major grassroots movement on the issue of reproductive rights against the decision.”

Justices of the Supreme Court are not elected; they are appointed for life. They cannot “pay a political price”. If Sen. Schumer’s intent was to say that Republicans will pay a political price if Roe v. Wade is struck down by the Supreme Court through decisions of Republican-appointed justices, he should say that was the case, apologize, and move on. If that was not his intent, he should be censured by the Senate and lose his minority leader role.

Threatening judges by name is a bridge too far. That President Trump says intemperate things is no excuse and, indeed, Trump has been chastised by Roberts for his intemperate speech directed toward judges. Our goal should be to lower the temperature not raise it. There are too many crazies with guns out there who will take such statements literally rather than figuratively.

Updated

Politico reports that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is expected to make a statement including the following:

Contrary to what the Democratic leader has tried to claim, he very clearly was not addressing Republican lawmakers or anybody else. He literally directed the statement to the justices, by name. And he said, quote, ‘if you go forward with these awful decisions,’ which could only apply to the court itself. The minority leader of the United States Senate threatened two associate justices of the U.S. Supreme Court. Period.

Sen. Schumer can and should issue a non-apology apology to defuse this situation.

Update 2

The editors of the Wall Street Journal remark:

Mr. Trump recently tweeted that liberal Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor should recuse themselves on cases involving his Administration. He was wrong and the Justices will ignore him too. But Mr. Schumer’s tirade takes bullying the judiciary to a new level, and all those who claim to believe in democratic norms should call him out.

Alternatively, if you believe that “democratic norms” are for suckers, full speed ahead.

I think that Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley has this one exactly right:

Mr. Sanders suggests he’s another Franklin D. Roosevelt, but FDR didn’t self-identify as a socialist or spend his political career challenging the Democratic Party establishment. Mr. Sanders’s policy positions put him closer to Eugene V. Debs, a prominent labor leader in the early 1900s. Like Mr. Sanders, Debs was an antiwar activist who opposed capitalism, wanted more wealth redistribution, and played the “working class” off against the “elites.” Mr. Sanders has called Debs “a socialist, a revolutionary and probably the most effective and popular leader that the American working class has ever had.” The Socialist Party of America nominated Debs for president five times between 1900 and 1920. He never won a state but did garner 6% of the vote in 1912.

Whatever small interest voters had in socialism got even smaller in the run-up to World War II. The Socialist Party won only 2% of the vote in 1932 and less than 1% four years later. The New Deal and Great Society programs swelled the size of government, but they didn’t make the socialist label any more popular. When Mr. Sanders first ran for the U.S. Senate in 1972 as a candidate of the socialist Liberty Union Party, he managed 2% of the vote. He would lose several more statewide races before becoming mayor of Burlington in 1981. He won a seat in Congress as an independent in 1990 and became only the third socialist ever elected to the U.S. House. The second one left office in 1929.

The left’s current flirtation with socialism reflects in part the failure of Democrats to address the economic concerns of their voters, and it’s of a piece with the right-wing populism that put the GOP through the wringer four years ago and landed Donald Trump in the White House. Mr. Sanders is betting that millions of Democrats thought President Obama was too conservative. He’s hoping that promises to make more stuff “free”—health care, higher education, housing—will entice Americans to accept enormous constraints on private enterprise and unprecedented government intervention in their lives.

I had that exact thought yesterday on hearing Sen. Sanders compared with FDR and had intended to write a post on the subject but Mr. Riley beat me to it. Sanders is no FDR. That such a thing could even be entertained is proof positive that we need a return to teaching American history in public schools, a history that isn’t one of class struggle and interest groups.

Here’s the meat of William Galston’s Wall Street Journal column:

In the past week, Joe Biden finally found his voice, summarizing his case simply and straightforwardly. As president, Mr. Biden says, he would focus his efforts on practical, achievable steps to improve people’s lives. He would work to repair America’s tattered alliances and renew its moral authority in the world. He would restore dignity and decency to the Oval Office.

Most important, Mr. Biden would do everything in his power to heal our divided country. The Republicans, he said on Monday night, are Democrats’ opponents, not their enemies. He believes that Mr. Trump has intimidated but not converted them. He will treat them with respect, as potential partners in a common enterprise. Within his own party, he has been mocked for raising the possibility that a measure of bipartisanship in still possible. No matter. As president, he would act as though it is and by so doing increase the possibility of its restoration.

Bipartisanship is essential, because little of what our country needs can be accomplished through executive orders and unilateral acts. We cannot possibly rebuild roads and bridges, or extend health insurance to all Americans, or reduce the burden of prescription drug costs, or reform the immigration system, unless Congress rediscovers the nearly lost art of legislation.

Maybe I’m just experiencing déjà vu but that sounds very reminiscent of the platform on which Barack Obama ran in 2008, only to turn his agenda over to a Congress with very different ideas.

What we really need is a national unity government. I feel safe in predicting we won’t get it.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal provide their assessment of the Super Tuesday primary results:

Hold the revolution. The Bernie Sanders takeover of the Democratic Party took a detour on Super Tuesday as Joe Biden’s political resurrection that began in South Carolina on Saturday continued in the Southeast and expanded into the Middle West and even Bernie Sanders country in the Northeast. Maybe President Trump wished too soon for Mr. Sanders as his opponent.

Literally in four days the Democratic race has turned upside down. Mr. Biden replicated his South Carolina coalition of African-Americans, Baby Boomers and center-left voters for a crushing victory in Virginia with 53.3% of the vote. He won North Carolina more narrowly, but his margin with black Democrats again made the difference. He also won Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Massachusetts, and by our deadline was competitive in Texas and Maine.

The former Vice President ran away with the vote among late deciders, which means he benefited from the rush of endorsements that followed South Carolina. The party is almost literally lifting the old war horse on its back despite his many gaffes and stumbles. The prospect of an avowed socialist at the top of the ticket has scared millions of Democrats into Mr. Biden’s arms no matter his liabilities.

His strong performance will keep him close to Mr. Sanders in the delegate count, though we won’t know how close until the results in California are clear. But his victories may be most important for restoring credibility to Mr. Biden’s argument that he is the Democrat who is best able to defeat Mr. Trump. His coalition so far is the closest to Barack Obama’s, and the turnout in Virginia was especially impressive at nearly double what it was in 2016. Trump campaign, take note.

I hope the Democratic National Committee takes note. If nothing else is clear, it’s clear that the party needs substantial reform. Bernie Sanders has a point in campaigning against the “corporate wing of the Democratic Party”. His support for leftist Latin American dictators and verbally supporting “democratic socialism” but proposing solutions that are much harder left socialism than that is not a move in the right direction.

But the politics for profit to which Democratic officials have become accustomed is on life support. That needs to change. Fewer aspirations and more simple competence would be nice. That doesn’t make a good sound bite or rallying cry but it is persuasive.

What should happen is that Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Michael Bloomberg should all drop out and throw their support to Joe Biden. Unfortunately, there is nothing in any of their backgrounds that would suggest they will do any such thing.

We’ll see within the next several days. Bloomberg may start running anti-Trump spots rather than pro-Bloomberg spots. Warren actually might drop out. The questions then will be to whom she throws her support and what those who presently support her do.

I have said for some time that the strongest Democratic ticket would be Joe Biden/Cory Booker. I still think so.

The results of yesterday’s “Super Tuesday” primary elections are still coming in so in many cases we still can’t say how many delegates each candidate actually received or even the percentage of votes received. At this point what seems to be true is that Sanders captured a majority of the votes in a very small number of states, maybe just Vermont and Utah, two of the whitest states in the nation, Biden captured a lot of votes and a lot of delegates across the country, and Bloomberg didn’t get a great deal for a half billion dollars of spending, mostly television advertising.

I think we have seen evidence supporting my theory of the election and refuting Bernie Sanders’s. Bernie Sanders’s theory of the election, enunciated often enough, is that he’s going to draw out a reservoir of progressive voters, many young, in numbers sufficient to win the nomination and defeat Trump in the general election. That is not materializing. New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg explains:

New political science research by David Broockman of the University of California, Berkeley, and Joshua Kalla of Yale erodes some of that comfort. Broockman and Kalla surveyed over 40,000 people — far more than a typical poll — about head-to-head presidential matchups. They found that when they weight their numbers to reflect the demographic makeup of the population rather than the likely electorate, as many polls do, Sanders beats Trump, often by more than other candidates.

But the demographics of people who actually vote are almost always different from the demographics of people who can vote. That’s where their analysis raises concerns about Sanders’s chances.

According to Broockman and Kalla’s figures, Sanders loses a significant number of swing votes to Trump, but he makes up for them in support from young people who say they won’t vote, or will vote third party, unless Sanders is the nominee. On the surface, these Bernie-or-bust voters might seem like an argument for Sanders. After all, Sanders partisans sometimes insist that Democrats have no choice but to nominate their candidate because they’ll stay home otherwise, a sneering imitation of traditional centrist demands for progressive compromise.

But if Broockman and Kalla are right, by nominating Sanders, Democrats would be trading some of the electorate’s most reliable voters for some of its least. To prevail, Democrats would need unheard-of rates of youth turnout. That doesn’t necessarily mean Sanders would be a worse candidate than Joe Biden, given all of Biden’s baggage. It does mean polls might be underestimating how hard it will be for Sanders to beat Trump.

“Given how many voters say they would switch to Trump in head-to-heads against Sanders compared to the more moderate candidates, the surge in youth turnout Sanders would require to gain back this ground is large: around 11 percentage points,” Broockman and Kalla write in a new working paper.

My theory of the election and electorate in contrast is that black voters are the Democratic Party’s most reliable voters and the candidate most likely to prevail is the one who can attract and bring out the black vote. That isn’t either Sanders or Warren.

What we are seeing so far supports another theory of what happened in 2018. Maybe what made the difference wasn’t a surge of young voters or minority voters but Republicans switching to support Democratic candidates in opposition to Trump. Sanders may be a bridge too far for those voters.

There’s an interesting article at CityLab by Sarah Holder on how Tulsa is luring young workers away from California and New York to Oklahoma:

Ukabam is a member of the first inaugural class of Tulsa Remote, an initiative launched in November 2019 that pushed people untethered by office jobs to pack up and move to Oklahoma. Those like Ukabam who work remotely and got through the competitive application process were promised $10,000 in installments over the course of a year, plus cheap housing and an upgraded social infrastructure.

The program reflects a new economic development strategy that Tulsa is among the first to pilot. Traditionally, cities looking to spur their economies may offer incentives to attract businesses. But at a time when Americans are moving less frequently than they have in more than half a century, and the anticlimactic race to host an Amazon HQ2 soured some governments on corporate tax breaks, Tulsa is one of several locales testing out a new premise: Pay people instead.

Similar programs are being tried in Vermont, northwest Alabama, and most recently Topeka, Kansas, each with their own variations.

The rate at which people are moving for jobs is now the lowest in the post-war period. There will need to be a lot more successes and a lot more creative problems like Tulsa Remote to stem the hollowing-out of the country that’s presently occurring.

Well, it’s here. A third of the delegates to the Democratic National Convention will be elected today.

Here’s Ryan Lizza’s summary of the situation at Politico:

LOS ANGELES — On Sunday night, Bernie Sanders was endorsed by Chuck D in Los Angeles and Joe Biden was endorsed by Terry McAuliffe in Norfolk, Virginia. Chuck D is the 59 year-old founder of Public Enemy, self-described raptivist, and longtime supporter of left causes. He compared Trump to Hitler, warned the crowd of mostly millennials about corporate America, and sang the group’s most famous song, “Fight the Power.” McAuliffe, a Bill Clinton acolyte, is the former governor of Virginia and a prolific Democratic Party fundraiser. Speaking of Sanders, he told the crowd, “We don’t need a revolution, we need Joe Biden in the White House.”

Bernie Sanders is expected to do well today. What does that mean? Sen. Sanders frequently rails against the “corporate wing of the Democratic Party”. That’s about 90% of elected Democratic officials. It includes the mayor of Chicago, the president of the Cook County Board, the governor of Illinois, both of Illinois’s senators, and my Congressional representative.

I think the biggest question that may be answered today is whether Sen. Sanders will be able to garner a majority of delegates anywhere. To date his support has not extended materially beyond his support in 2016.

Yesterday Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar ended her campaign for the nomination for president of her party. In one sense it’s a shame. I probably would have voted for her when the late-arriving Illinois primary takes place on March 17. Illinois’s primaries are close primaries, by the way. In a statesmanlike move, she has endorsed Joe Biden for president.

Now the remaining candidates are Joe Biden, Michael Bloomberg, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren. As I’ve said before, I will cast my vote for a Democrat.