Justice Antonin Scalia was found dead at a resort in Texas this morning. I assume it was a heart attack. He was 79 and he never looked particularly healthy to me. It’s obviously a personal tragedy for those who knew and loved him. I’m not one of them. To me, he was just a really powerful man who did great damage to our country. Not that he was always wrong, but his ideology affected his rulings in a more grand way than most recent judges. And the last several years he wasn’t making a lot of sense — on or off the bench.

My concern is his replacement. Because other than raising Scalia from the dead and nominating that zombie to the Supreme Court, I don’t see the Republican controlled Senate allowing Obama to appoint anyone at all. And you know Obama: he’s never been one to nominate liberals to the Court. As I’ve noted many times, the Court used to have 5 conservatives, 3 moderates, and 1 liberal. Now it has only 4 conservatives. The Republicans will try to stop any replacement, hoping that they control the White House starting next year.

Think about the history here. Obama got to replace two liberalish justices with two moderate ones. And even that was treated by the Republicans as though he were staging a violent coup. The idea that Obama will get to replace a conservative firebrand like Scalia will be seen as totally unacceptable. And so they will try to avoid doing anything at all.

Republican’s Dangerous Moment Regarding Scalia

But here’s the interesting thing: this is a very dangerous game for them. If they allow Obama to put another moderate on the bench, they might be lucky. If Clinton is the next president, she will almost certainly have a majority in the Senate. And if necessary, the Democrats will be able to abolish the filibuster altogether, and allow Clinton to put the first truly liberal judge on the bench since her husband was in office. Do they really want to take that chance?

Well, the answer is clear: yes. They will definitely take that chance, because the Republicans are the “all or nothing” party. I look back with great glee to when, after winning re-election, Obama told Boehner, “You should have taken the deal I offered you back then.” That was the deal where Boehner claimed to get 98% of what he wanted and still turned it down. But this does make it all the more important that the Democrats win the presidency this year.

Think about this: with another moderate on the bench, the Court could hear another case that would allow it to reverse Citizens United. We would back away from the coming reverse on Roe v Wade. Scalia’s death could hearken much better times for millions of people in the United States. On the other hand, what is the worse case scenario? The Republicans don’t allow Obama appoint a new judge, and we get someone just as bad as Scalia. So this is a very hopeful day for liberals and a terrible day for conservatives.

Michael Hiltzik brought my attention to something interesting, The Conservative Case Against Expanding Social Security? It Was Based on a Math Error. In December, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a report that cheered conservatives. It stated that people on Social Security would end up making a lot more than was thought in retirement compared to the what they made at the end of their careers. Here’s Hiltzik, “To take just one example, the CBO reported in December that for the average retiree born in the 1940s, Social Security benefits would replace a healthy 60% of average late-career earnings. The new figure is only 43%.”

I probably didn’t notice the release of the original report because the Social Security argument that we get from conservatives is disingenuous. It doesn’t matter what the issue is, they will find a reason as to why it proves that we must cut benefits. Dean Baker and Mark Weisbrot wrote Social Security: The Phony Crisis over 16 years ago. But it could have been written today. The arguments they counter have not changed at all. So it is not at all surprising that conservatives took the fact that seniors would be “living it up” with a full 60% of their incomes while they were working.

The truth is that they might as well make the same argument using the 43% number. Hiltzik noted, “Personal finance experts generally say that it takes 70% of one’s working income to maintain a lifestyle in retirement.” And that tidbit comes from conservative Andrew Biggs, who was making the argument that 60% was excessively generous. So it really doesn’t matter: conservatives think what conservatives think; damn the facts!

But the really interesting thing is that Biggs wrote three articles on this subject recently. Two he has retracted because they were based on the CBO error. But one, he is not retracting because it didn’t use the CBO data. You see, Biggs has his own calculation that show that the CBO’s first estimate actually was the right one. That’s because there will literally never be any evidence that suggests that we are being stingy to our elderly population, because the conservative belief is that we shouldn’t do anything for seniors. They should just have really great investments like I’m sure Andrew Biggs has.

Social Security Attacks Get Worse As Need Increases

As the decades have passed, the conservative idea that people can plan for their own retirement has gotten worse and worse. And the reason for that is mostly because we’ve allowed businesses to do just what they want. So wages have stagnated. And benefits, in as much as people have them, have transferred from pensions to defined contribution plans, which have been a complete failure. Yet as workers’ other options erode, these conservatives want to destroy the fallback: Social Security.

Most people understand racism. When people are segregated, it is easy to vilify or discount “those people.” But it isn’t as well understood when it comes to economics. Those who write about economics are pretty far removed from the lives of the poor. We see this all the time with people like David Brooks who thinks that if the poor would just act more like the middle class their economic fortunes would improve. Sorry, but that ain’t the case and the only kind of people who make that case are people who start at the conclusion.

What’s more, the middle class is not doing very well in case this fact somehow slipped by. But it’s all part of the larger system: taking from the poor and giving to the rich. When people talk about means testing Social Security (as Biggs does), they don’t care about the money it would save the program, because it wouldn’t save much. They are just trying to head off an actually helpful solution like increasing the payroll tax cap. So again: the assault on Social Security benefits is, as always, just a fight to keep the taxes of the rich low.

Update (12 February 2016 8:14 am)

Dean Baker noted that this is not the first time that the CBO just happened to make mistakes that helped conservatives, Strike Three for the Congressional Budget Office? Social Security Retirement Income Projections.

On Friday, Paul Krugman wrote, On Economic Stupidity. It’s nominally about the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee (FOMC) and its independence. The Republicans really have shown a desire to destroy it since a Democrat has been in the White House. But while his attack on Republican economic stupidity is to the point, it is perfunctory. Yes, we know the Republicans are really bad. But let’s not forget who the real enemy is: Bernie Sanders. You see, Sanders voted for a bill that would make the Federal Reserve reveal the beneficiaries of its “special lending.” Clinton didn’t do this, which is a Very Good Thing. Krugman really should just put up a Hillary Clinton 2016 sign on his lawn and be done with it.

Dean Baker sees things a bit differently, but then, he has yet to show himself in the can for one candidate or another. He wrote, Paul Krugman, Bernie Sanders, and the Fed. And he made two points. First, he questions Krugman’s assumption (Lots of Krugman unstated assumptions these days!) that what Sanders did was wrong, “To my view, Sanders should be applauded for his actions on this front. It was a bipartisan effort that gave us more information about what went on in the crisis and the extent to which specific banks benefited from access to the Fed’s money.”

The FOMC Is Political

The second point is more interesting. The FOMC is made up of 12 members: 7 appointed by the government and 5 effectively appointed by the big banks. Right now, because of Republican blocking, there are only 5 government appointees, so it is an even split with a 10 member board. So the banks have undue influence, and the Republicans are able to give them even more influence.

Baker suggests we think about putting together a more diverse group on the FOMC, which includes labor unions, community groups, nonprofits. This might make the Fed more focused on full employment rather than its laser focus on low inflation. True, that would make the Fed a more political institution, but anyone who claims that the Fed is not a political institution is either naive or ignorant.

But Krugman is falling into a trap that he has spotted many times in others over the years. He has written a great deal about how the great “centrist” pundits claim that they have no ideology, when in fact they very much do. I want to be clear: everyone has an ideology. All Krugman is saying here is that he agrees with leaving the system the way it is. And indeed, it has worked well for him. People in the upper parts of the economy have done very well by the Fed because it really has done a great job of keeping the economy stable.

But if you are in the lower part of the economy, you have seen the down side of that stability: difficulty finding work, and low and stagnant wages when you do. But even Krugman admits that the bankers have too much clout at the FOMC. In a blog post following up on his column, he makes the case that the real problem is that people who hang out together tend to think alike, and that the problem isn’t “crude corruption.” I agree. But somehow, Krugman seems to think this works in Clinton’s favor too.

I’ll admit, Sanders has done a bad job of explaining this. I certainly don’t think that Clinton was “bought” by Goldman Sachs. Rather, she is of a type. Would she be in favor of changing the makeup of the FOMC? I don’t think so. Does that matter? Well, Paul Krugman certainly doesn’t think so. But that may just be because he is so laser focused on the true enemy in 2016: Bernie Sanders.

I first started reading Jonathan Chait not because of his analysis (which is usually pretty good) but because he’s a damned funny guy. But he doesn’t show it off as much as he used to. But yesterday, he was in fine form, Eric Cantor Shocked by Trump’s Victory, Also Everything That Has Ever Happened. Mike Allen had reported that Cantor made a bet that Trump would not win a single primary. Well, Trump has now won a primary. And it’s kinda hard to see how he doesn’t win at least a few more. In fact, he looks really good to win the nomination.

The joke in Chait’s article is that Eric Cantor has this habit of being horribly wrong about just about everything. When he lost his primary back in 2014, his internal polling apparently indicated that he was ahead by 34 percentage points! Can you imagine? It shows a shocking lack of management. Who did he have running his campaign? Did he have no ears on the ground checking to see if the folk were restless?

Not only this, Cantor lost a whole bunch of money in 2010 because he bet that interest rates would go up. Well, as pretty much any economist would have told him at the time: interest rates would stay low as long as the economy was weak. But among conservatives it was just “known” that inflation was going to go wild because stimulus blah blah blah and printing money blah blah blah. But how could Eric Cantor know? He was only House Majority Leader. It’s not like he was a sophisticated person.

Well, Chait brilliantly put together the absurdity that is Eric Cantor:

Eric Cantor Is Typical

Here’s the thing: Eric Cantor is not exceptional in being a hugely successful mediocrity. He is the rule. Cantor comes from money. But his success is mostly due to the typical kind of guy who is smart enough to get through college but socially stunted to the point of fitting in perfectly at Phi Sigma Kappa. And once you are a member of the club, well, you are set. A lot of people thought he got his $3.4 million job because of services rendered. I don’t really think so. I think it’s more the other way around: as a guy who was part of the club that knew despite his incompetence that he would get a multi-million dollar job offer, he just naturally did the bidding for his friends.

This is what continues to amaze me about America. So many people think this is a meritocracy. It is not at all. The vast majority of traditionally successful people I know are mediocrities. People are surprised when a successful businessman makes a boneheaded mistake. But the error these people make is in thinking that “success” in our plutocracy has much of anything to do with intelligence or even being successful. Because people like Eric Cantor will be successful — regardless of how many chances they have to be given.

With Bernie Sanders’ better than expected finish in New Hampshire, I decided to go and look at the road ahead. And what I found really confused me. I mean: really. Why the full freak out? Why did Gloria Steinem go off on the youngins? Why is there now apparently a whole industry for psychoanalyzing the youth of today and why they totally don’t get it? Because the road ahead looks bad for Sanders in terms of winning the nomination. Really bad. So why so much whining from the Clinton campaign?

Look: I understand that things can get out of hand. I know that Bernie Sanders is going to get a bump because of his win in New Hampshire. But have you looked at the polls in the upcoming states?! They are not good for Sanders. Here are the Real Clear Politics averages for the next few states:

• Nevada: Clinton +19.5
• South Carolina: Clinton +29.5
• Texas: Clinton +25.7
• Georgia: Clinton +41.6

The only one that Sanders has any kind of chance at is Nevada because it is a caucus state and there isn’t much polling and it is old. If Sanders does manage to win that, it will look bad for the Clinton campaign. But I just don’t see it changing things in Texas and Georgia. I don’t see how Bernie manages to win the nomination. The odds are stacked badly against him.

Has Clinton Campaign Harmed Itself?

At the same time, various Clinton surrogates have done much to alienate Sanders supporters — most especially young ones — and even more most especially young female ones. And for what?! Because even the smallest chance of Clinton not getting the nomination is totally unacceptable? It strikes me as total madness. And I know: some will say that I’m naive. They will say that Sanders has “momentum.” And I would say to those people: you don’t understand much about political science. There is no such thing as momentum. That’s a myth that was created by people on television so they could sound smart when talking about contests they really know little about.

Last summer, I found myself on a lot of liberal blogs with Clinton supporters and I talked a lot about how they should calm down. So this whole thing has been going on for a long time. And it doesn’t speak well of the Clinton campaign nor the Democratic Party. I think the Republicans have actually been better about Trump. At least they spent most of their time attacking him and not his supporters. What’s more, Trump is actually winning. He got twice as many votes as his nearest competitor in New Hampshire. And he looks poised to do it again in South Carolina.

What it reminds me of is the old saying, “Republicans fear their base; Democrats hate their base.” And I’m not just talking about Sanders supporters here. There’s this overriding idea that primary voters are idiots and can’t be trusted. They must be told what is for their own good! And the interesting thing is that the Democratic Party treats its base very much in the way the Republicans stereotype them treating the people of the nation. But as elected officials, Democrats do not do that; it’s the Republicans who try to control the lives of everyone who isn’t rich. But when it comes to campaigning, the Democrats seem to be lost.

If Sanders suddenly jumps ahead in South Carolina, then clearly I have misjudged the situation. If not, I don’t want to hear it. No whining from people 30 points ahead in the polls!

Brian Beutler wrote a slightly rambling article this morning, Will Marco Rubio’s Fragile Appeal Be Shattered in New Hampshire? It’s worth reading in full, but I want to focus on one small part of it where he talks about the reformocons.

For those of you who don’t know, the reformocons are conservative pundits who want to reform the Republicans Party and the conservative movement generally. I usually call them “reformish” conservatives after Ryan Cooper’s article on the subject. And the moniker is good, because they aren’t actually interested in reform. They aren’t the equivalent of the Democratic Leadership Council and they would never lead to the rise of “New Republicans.”

Reformocons Are Frauds

Instead, the reformocons are, as Mike Konczal put it, “more gestural than substantive.” Or as I put it, Reform Republicans Only Sound Reasonable — It’s in the Job Description. They fiddle around the edges, but mostly they just want to teach the Republican Party to talk nice and not offend people. When it comes to actual policy, they are as committed to the Randian utopia as Paul Ryan.

But in Beutler’s article, he noted that it was strange that the reformocons have gathered around Rubio. He quoted Michael Brendan Dougherty saying, “Rubio’s candidacy is essentially based on the premise that nothing from the George W Bush era has to change for the Republican Party.” Indeed! The one area where Rubio was supposed to be a moderate was on immigration reform. And if you are out of your teens, you must remember how hard the Bush administration fought for immigration reform.

Reformocons Hate Trump

The supposed basis of the reformocons is that they want the party to be less elitist and to try to make the economy work for the middle class. Well, who in the Republican primary is pushing that message? Certainly not Rubio who “alone proposes reforms (zeroed-out investment taxes, zeroed-out inheritance taxes, significantly reduced corporate taxes) designed to minimize (and in many cases eliminate) the tax liabilities of members of the Republican donor class.” No, the person that the reformocons should be backing is Donald Trump. Yet they hate him!

Given what I’ve already written, it shouldn’t be too hard to understand why the reformocons don’t get behind Trump: because they are frauds! Their reform agenda (such as it is) is designed only to keep the Republican Party competitive. And it isn’t as though they fear Trump won’t be an actual conservative. He proposed a ridiculously regressive tax plan (pdf). But it is other areas where it seems clear that Trump would actually do what the reformocons claim to want to do: help the middle class.

Obviously, Trump cuts against the number one thing that the reformocons want: a more “presentable” Republican Party. His outspoken xenophobia isn’t “nice.” But ultimately, the reformocons don’t get behind Donald Trump for the same reason that the Republican elites don’t: they don’t think he can win the general election. Because that’s all they really care about: winning elections so that the tax cuts on the rich continue to roll in and the reproductive freedom continues to roll out.