Tag Archives: Marco Rubio

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What, precisely, does ‘original intent’ mean?

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founders

U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio tonight paid glowing tribute to the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

The praise came while Rubio was taking part in the Republican presidential debate.

He said something that struck me as, well, fascinating. Rubio said Scalia’s legal brilliance was rooted in his belief that the U.S. Constitution is not a “living document,” but that the Constitution should be interpreted precisely as the founders intended.

I don’t believe for one second that Justice Scalia wanted to roll back the advances that came about in the many years since the founders wrote the Constitution — in the late 18th century.

However, if Rubio’s praise of Scalia is to be taken literally, it seems fair to wonder: Does he believe the founders were right to deny women the right to vote, or that African-Americans should be enslaved?

Of course he doesn’t.

However, we can see the discrepancy — in my view — in the debate over whether the Constitution is a living document. The argument of those who favor the so-called “original intent” of the founders breaks down.

Why? Because of the many reforms approved in the 200-plus years since the Constitution was ratified, the document does indeed evolve as our nation has evolved.

It’s alive, man.

 

national news, political news

As GOP field thins out, so might Trump’s support

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An interesting dynamic might be unfolding as the Republican presidential field continues to thin out.

It involves Donald J. Trump and the support he’s been able to get so far.

I believe it’s fair to ask: Who are the voters supporting the dropouts going to endorse?

The GOP field now is down to seven candidates; it started out at 17, if you’ll recall.

Some of the so-called “establishment” candidates have packed it in. The latest significant casualty was New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. Others have gone by the wayside and none of them appears to be friends of Trump, who’s managed to insult his way to the top of the GOP heap.

I’m wondering if Trump’s support now will dwindle as Republican voters who were loyal, say, to Christie, or Mike Huckabee, or Rick Santorum, or Bobby Jindal start looking around for someone else to support.

Ted Cruz is mining the ultraconservative voters. Marco Rubio, although now severely damaged by the battering he took in the most recent GOP debate, is on the hunt for the same folks. John Kasich, my favorite Republican, also is beginning to gather some steam. Jeb Bush also could find himself thrust into the game.

All of these individuals stand to gain from the remnants of support that rallied around the candidates who’ve departed the campaign trail.

Where does that leave Trump? With his base of support, comprising voters who somehow are infatuated with the candidate’s brashness and don’t seem to care one little bit that he doesn’t seem to possess a political philosophy on which he would govern.

Let’s just watch this thing continue to play out.

I’ve seen the polls that show Trump still leading in South Carolina. However, as we’ve seen in previous election cycles, the Palmetto State is where the GOP campaign has been known to get nasty … as in real nasty.

I’m now wondering how well Trump will hold up when the mud starts flying.

 

 

national news, political news

Gov. Christie goes out with a bang

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As I ponder the latest round of exits from the Republican Party presidential primary field, I am struck by the nature of one departure in particular.

So long, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, but your bowing out is one for the books.

It’s not the statement you made. It was fairly typical.

It was your final act on the stage.

Christie managed to inflict potentially mortal political wounds on Sen. Marco Rubio during a ferocious exchange in advance of the New Hampshire primary. He exposed Rubio’s lack of experience and his robot-like demeanor. Christie questioned whether Rubio had the chops earned during his single term in the Senate to ascend to the highest office in the land.

He did a masterful job of skinning a competitor alive.

What happened then? Rubio finished far back in the field in the primary that was won by Donald J. Trump. As for Christie, he got zero bounce for his effort. He, too, finished in single digits.

I am sorry to see Gov. Christie leave the race. He’s one of the grownups in the GOP field that’s still being dominated by Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz.

At least, though, another man is now making some noise: Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who has emerged as my favorite Republican running for president. Heck, he might even be my favorite candidate … period!

But today, however, I want to doff my cap to the fiery, feisty New Jersey governor who went down swinging.

 

national news, political news

Both major parties seeing huge transformation?

Horserace

I spent most of my day in airports and on airplanes today, so I was a bit out of the political loop.

Until I got home.

Then I found out that Donald J. Trump won the Republican primary in New Hampshire in a yuuuuge way. I also found out that Bernie Sanders buried Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary.

What does it mean?

Beats the devil out of me.

I’m not going to suggest just yet that both major political parties are in the midst of a major makeover.

Sanders’ win was expected, given that he is a virtual favorite son, as he represents next-door Vermont in the U.S. Senate. Clinton admitted as much earlier this evening when she conceded the New Hampshire primary to Sanders.

On she and Sanders will march to South Carolina, where a hefty African-American voter base is expected to give Clinton a built-in advantage.

Now, what about them Republicans?

Trump won by a lot. Perhaps the bigger tempest will occur among those who finished behind Trump. John Kasich finished in second place. Now the Ohio governor becomes the latest favorite of the GOP “establishment wing” to challenge Trump. What happened to Marco Rubio? Or Ted Cruz? Or Chris Christie?

As I finish up this post, I am hearing reports on cable TV news that Christie’s bid might be over. He savaged Rubio at the latest GOP debate, which appears to have inflicted near-mortal wounds on the young senator from Florida. Christie, though, didn’t get the bounce he expected. He’s heading for New Jersey, the TV talking heads report, to consider his options.

Look, I’ve noted already that some serious balloting is yet to occur. We’ve got the Super Tuesday event in early March, which includes big, bad Texas taking part in that primary donnybrook.

Will these results determine the future of both major political parties? Perhaps.

However, so help me, this election is impossible to chart with semblance of certainty.

 

national news, political news

Now it’s Marco Rubio in the bulls-eye

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It’s interesting to me how the center of attention among the Republican presidential candidates keeps changing.

Donald J. Trump? Step aside for now. Ted Cruz? Take a seat. Ben Carson? Well, your time might be up anyway.

Today’s target appears to be Marco Rubio, the young senator from Florida who this evening took some heavy incoming fire from Chris Christie . . . among others.

It’s a moving target.

Perhaps eventually the center of attention will settle on one individual. My guess is that it’ll be either Trump or Cruz. With GOP candidates dropping out after poor finishes, the field of candidates will narrow and the “targets of opportunity” will be reduced accordingly.

I was particularly amused by Christie’s attack line this evening when he chided Rubio for his canned-sounding responses to questions. He’s too rehearsed, too polished, too scripted, Christie seemed to say. The young senator — who’s not seeking re-election this year — needs to have an executive job, Christie said, like being a governor, a job Christie holds in New Jersey.

Indeed, some media are reporting this evening that the remaining governors and former governors in the GOP field — Christie, John Kasich of Ohio and Jeb Bush of Florida — took particular delight in unloading on the others who don’t have that kind of government “executive experience.”

Frankly, I cannot blame the governors for taking umbrage at the success some of these others are enjoying in this campaign — at the expense of the governors. I mean after all, we’ve seen several governors and ex-governors already drop out: Rick Perry, Bobby Jindal and Scott Walker all have tossed in the towel.

Now, though, the target du jour is Sen. Marco Rubio, the latest poster boy for the so-called “establishment wing” of the Republican Party.

New Hampshire’s primary is set for Tuesday. Voters in both parties will be casting actual secret ballots in secure polling places for the individuals they believe should become the next president.

After this first round of voting, the question is likely to become: Who will be the next candidate to take the heavy fire?

 

national news, political news

Comparative politics: alive and well

Negative

A euphemism for negative campaigning can be termed as “making comparisons” among opposing candidates.

OK, so the campaigns for president in both political primaries are getting negative.

The two Democrats still standing for their party’s nomination — Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders — are demonstrating the differences between them in terms of experience and philosophy.

The same can certainly be said of the remaining Republicans. They, too, are going after each other with ferocity. No one not named “Trump” wants Donald Trump to be the nominee. Ted Cruz isn’t getting much love, either. Now we have a third front-tier candidate, Marco Rubio, who is taking opponents’ fire.

Honestly, I am intrigued by it all.

I normally dislike intense negativity in these political campaigns. I prefer to hear what candidates will do for me, not necessarily how they differ with someone else.

This election cycle, though, is providing some fascinating discussion among the candidates.

It’s revealing the type of men and women who are seeking this great office. It is telling us about their psyche, their personalities, what makes them tick; it’s revealing where their “hot buttons” are located.

Clinton and Sanders are showing us tonight how different they are from each other. I am glad that their party’s nomination fight has been reduced to just two of them.

I remain hopeful that the Republican primary will continue to cull the weaker candidates from the still-large herd of hopefuls. It’s hard for me to keep up with all the stones being tossed in so many directions from so many sources.

Still, it’s educational to watch.

It’s also rather entertaining.

 

national news, political news

Trump was the biggest loser

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Donald J. Trump doesn’t like to be called what he calls others.

Loser.

This morning, though, he is.

The real estate mogul/reality TV personality finished second last night to Ted Cruz in the Republican presidential caucuses in Iowa. Cruz the Carpet Bomber knocked Trump down to second place by 3 or so percentage points.

It might be that Trump’s larger embarrassment — if he’s capable of feeling it — is that third-place finisher Marco Rubio damn near caught him.

Two junior U.S. senators — Cruz from Texas and Rubio from Florida — put Trump into a kind of a political fecal sandwich, which ought to have taken some of the swagger out of Trump’s campaign strut.

Ought to, yes?

Well, time will tell us pretty quickly whether it did.

Trump is heading to New Hampshire to carry on his GOP primary campaign, right along with Cruz, who vanquished him in Iowa and Rubio, who almost did.

I still don’t believe Rubio should have sounded so, um, victorious last night as he crowed about his third-place finish. Cruz and Rubio still finished ahead of him.

However, there are ways to spin this in a way that should give Trump plenty of pause as he marches on.

I am not going to speculate on what might have caused Trump’s failure to finish first, which he all but guaranteed. His stiffing of the Fox News debate? His phony pandering to evangelicals? His continuing insults to just about anyone who disagrees with him? The absolute absence of a sophisticated policy — on anything?

It might be one of those things. Or all of them. Or, perhaps, none of them. There might have been just a visceral dislike for a guy whose glitzy New York style just doesn’t play well with the corn-fed Middle Americans who comprise Iowa’s voting  population.

The next chapter in in this saga is about to unfold.

On to New Hampshire!

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Nice seeing you, Iowa; on to New Hampshire!

iowa_caucus

I’ve just shaken the dust loose from a night’s sleep and discovered the results of last night’s Iowa caucuses.

Two things jump out at me.

First, Ted Cruz’s victory well might be a hollow one for the Republican Party.

Second, Hillary Clinton didn’t win a thing last night.

Cruz thumped Donald J. Trump — yes, thumped — with a pretty convincing victory in the Republican caucus. Sure, a 4-point win isn’t yuuuge in conventional terms, but this ain’t a conventional election season.

Trump has boasted all those glowing poll numbers and all but guaranteed — a la Broadway Joe — a victory. His two-minute concession speech last night spoke volumes, though, about what happened.

The evangelical vote turned out for Cruz. They came “home” to Cruz, who’s really one of them, unlike Trump, who pretended to be one of ’em.

Why might a Cruz win in Iowa portend trouble for the GOP? He is a patently unlikable man, according to those who work with him in the U.S. Senate. He seems like a dedicated family guy; he might even be someone you’d want to talk to informally.

However, he talks a bit too brazenly about “carpet bombing” the Islamic State and putting “boots on the ground” in the Middle East.

OK, he makes me uncomfortable. That’s clear. It’s my own bias, which I admit to readily.

Hillary Clinton’s victory declaration was hollow.

Clinton declared victory. Is that right? How can she do that? She was tied with Bernie Sanders in the Democratic caucus.

If anyone can declare a “moral victory,” it would be Sanders, the indy/Democrat from Vermont who once trailed Clinton by a zillion percent in the polls. Yet he finished with nearly as many votes and delegates as she did.

Sanders now takes his “big mo” to New Hampshire, which is next door to Vermont. He’ll win there. Then the road show heads for South Carolina.

Clinton had better hope she keeps Sanders within sight as they move into the Deep South. She’ll need the African-American vote to put her over the top as the campaign then moves into some serious regional primary contests, which include Texas, in early March.

Honestly, I was hoping some of the other Republicans would do better. I am pulling for John Kasich to snap out of it; I once had hope that Jeb Bush might get ‘er goin’.

Oh yes, Marco Rubio? He declared victory, too, on the GOP side. He finished third. But that was good enough in young Marco’s mind to declare that he’s the man to beat.

Memo to Marco: You have to get more votes and delegates than anyone else to make that claim.

One final thought: All this analysis of Iowa might not matter.

If the Iowa caucuses are supposed to gauge the mood of the country, then we would have had President Huckabee or President Santorum watching all of this from the Oval Office.

It’s a marathon, folks. The candidates have just made the first turn.

national news, political news, religious news

Iowa uncertainty brings new dimension of weirdness to race

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It’s been said repeatedly for many election cycles that evangelical voters are key to the success of candidates seeking to win the Iowa presidential caucuses.

Republican candidates play to the evangelical voter bloc, realizing the critical role that devout Christians play in the Iowa political process.

The 2016 caucuses are almost here and, as has been the norm this time, some political traditions have been turned upside-down.

Cruz in trouble in Iowa

Consider this: The one-time favorite of Iowa Republicans, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, is now essentially tied in that state by none other than Donald J. Trump.

Cruz is supposed to be the golden boy for evangelical voters. He’s their guy. He’s the self-proclaimed “dependable conservative.” But now his support has eroded as Trump has gained ground and as U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio has risen as well to compete with Cruz for the evangelical vote.

What’s staggering to me, though, is why Trump is faring so well among those deeply devout voters. Trump has demonstrated repeatedly that his expressions of faith sound, well, less than authentic. The “Two Corinthians” gaffe is a small, but still significant, demonstration of what I mean.

Trump talks about the Bible the way one talks about a Louis L’Amour western novel. “It’s a great book,” he says.

Well, I don’t know how this initial contest is going to finish on Monday. It’s only one vote, after all, in a long series of contests that candidates in both major parties will have to face as they fight among themselves for their parties’ presidential nomination.

But the idea that the vaunted evangelical vote is up for grabs with a candidate such as Donald Trump competing for it just boggles my mind.

I’m going to stay tuned for this one to play out.

 

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Newspaper endorsements: do they matter?

newspapers

Near the end of my career in daily print journalism, I began to question the value of newspaper “endorsements.”

We didn’t really even like to refer to them out loud as endorsements. We preferred the term “recommendations.” We’d recommend a candidate of our choice while understanding that voters are independent thinkers — or so they say — and wouldn’t take whatever the newspaper said as gospel.

These days I’m beginning to wonder about voters’ independence. The plethora of social media and big-money advertising are having the kind of influence on voters’ thought process that, well, newspaper endorsements might have had a half-century or longer ago.

Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry perhaps demonstrated better than anyone in recent times how newspaper editorial endorsements’ value has diminished.

When he ran for re-election in 2010, Perry announced he wouldn’t even talk to newspaper editorial boards. He’d go straight to the voters. He didn’t need no stinkin’ newspaper editors’ approval.

How did Gov. Perry do at the ballot box that year? He thumped Republican primary opponent Kay Bailey Hutchison — no slouch as a Texas politician herself — and then clobbered Democratic nominee Bill White that fall. White, by the way, garnered virtually every newspaper endorsement there was to get in Texas — including from the Amarillo Globe-News, where I worked as editorial page editor; it did him virtually no good at all.

So now, in this presidential election cycle, newspapers are weighing in. The “influential” Des Moines Register endorsed Republican Marco Rubio and Democrat Hillary Clinton in advance of the Iowa caucuses. Over the weekend, the Boston Globe endorsed Clinton as the neighboring New Hampshire primary approaches.

There will be others coming along as the campaigns proceed along the long and winding road toward the parties’ conventions. Newspaper editors and publishers will extend the invitation for the candidates to make their cases. Some of them will accept; others will follow the Perry model.

In the end, however, none of these endorsements — or recommendations — likely will be decisive.

Voters are getting their heads filled by ideologues on both sides of the divide. Their minds are made up.

What’s more, during the more than three decades I practiced my craft in daily journalism, I never heard first-hand any voter say they changed their mind on an election based on a newspaper endorsement.

Maybe they’re out there.

Back to my initial question: Do these endorsements really matter?