PN-G bamatex

... and maybe I was onto something when I put Nikki Haley, who was previously expected to endorse Jeb Bush, on Rubio's short list.

Well, I guess I have to take Mike Lee off of Cruz's short list for VP picks now.

All fair points. In truth, there's no way of knowing. But, I'll add this food for thought: watching the the social media war so far this year, the two GOP campaigns that have, in my opinion, generally made the best use of social media have been the Cruz and Paul campaigns. For all his trouble getting millennial support, there are massive Facebook groups dedicated to bringing together evangelical voters for Senator Cruz on Facebook. They've definitely focused on that element of their campaign.

This was released by the Rubio campaign's South Carolina Facebook page this afternoon. Obviously, there's no proof that the Cruz campaign had anything to do with it. That said, a similar Facebook attack on the Rubio campaign happened in Iowa right before the caucus there took place, and I can't think of anyone else who stands to gain anything from taking votes from Marco and giving them to Ted, except maybe the Democrats.

I'm not the expert on this, so take what I say with a grain of salt. But I've talked about it a lot with a friend who did finance for one of the presidential campaigns (not the one that was a student here last semester), and this is how I understand it. Super PACs are, by law, required to be separate from the campaign, and are not allowed to coordinate with the campaign. In reality, though, the line of separation often isn't as absolute as it's supposed to be. It's not uncommon to see people who once worked on the campaign working on the PAC, or who once worked on the PAC taking a position with the campaign, or a top campaign donor founding or holding some kind of leadership position in the PAC, or people who worked with the candidate or a top-ranked campaign official in previous capacities taking a position with the PAC, or something of the like. In my opinion, PACs are often just there to do the dirty work the campaigns don't want to be directly tied to. If Candidate A wants to be positive, often times the negative attack ads against Candidates B and C will be run by one of the PACs that support Candidate A, instead of by Candidate A's campaign itself. This isn't always the case, but it happens a lot. The PACs try to complement the campaign strategies. PACs do often take massive donations from companies. The whole reason PACs exist is to absorb the corporate donations that the campaigns themselves can't take because of federal campaign spending limits, so it's not unusual for them to take donations from companies. What stands out to me here is that a "high number" of companies are backing this PAC, but it's raised virtually no money; it's the second worst PAC in terms of fundraising of any of the major GOP candidates. That means lots small donations are coming in from lots of companies, as opposed to large donations coming in from a smaller number of companies, as is usual with PACs. That raises my suspicions about what's going on. Are there just a bunch of mid-sized and small corporations backing Cruz, or are people using shell companies to channel donations to the PAC? I don't know, but I would find it odd if a guy whose wife works for Goldman Sachs, who took out loans from Goldman Sachs and Citibank to finance his original Senate campaign and who I personally know is recruiting former officials with major financial institutions to both donate to and staff his campaign is getting a bunch of small corporate donations as opposed to a few big ones. Where CNN's concerned, while I understand suspecting bias, CNN can't change the facts, just the way it presents them. At the end of the day, a pro-Cruz PAC with some peculiar characteristics still had an ad attacking Rubio pulled off the airwaves by media group's legal department. As for who I support, I've said openly that I'm a Rubio fan in prior posts. My mail-in ballot is already filled out and waiting for me to drop it off at the post office with the box beside Rubio's name filled in. He's my candidate. But that's really beside the point. I didn't vote for Cruz in the Republican Senate primary back in 2012. I voted for Dewhurst, in part because I felt Dewhurst had proven himself a capable, policy-oriented legislator during his tenure as Lieutenant Governor, and in part because even back then, I had my own reservations about Cruz, a Bush administration official suddenly turned Tea Party conservative. Since Cruz took office, he's only really done one thing in the Senate that I find praiseworthy, which was defending gun rights after Sandy Hook. Other than that, his term in the Senate, in my (admittedly unpopular on this site) opinion, has been an abysmal failure. Frankly, the only reason I think conservatives have trouble finding blemishes on Cruz's record is because there really isn't that much of a record to find blemishes on. It is completely void of policy achievements. In that sense, he's a conservative Senator Barack Obama circa 2008. Like Obama during his four years in the Senate, Cruz has passed no major legislation, has proposed no real legislative solution to any of the country's pressing problems, and has no objective success to his name. Literally all he's done is filibuster until he was blue in the face, force a government shutdown, change his positions on various issues the moment controversy cropped up around them (another one of Obama's real talents), voted to make massive cuts in defense spending and criticized every element of the national leadership at every available opportunity (something Obama was quite skilled at as a senator as well, though Obama was never as aggravated or direct and played nicer with his own party). Cruz's sole policy initiative was the amendment he proposed to the immigration reform bill, which he now distances himself from as an attempt to kill that same bill, another Cruz claim I find hard to believe having watched Cruz during the debates for that very amendment. And despite not even trying to get something done, he still has the audacity to attack other candidates for trying to find solutions and actually getting things done. I get being anti-establishment. Four years ago, I wasn't particularly happy with the Republican establishment, myself. I still consider myself to be outside the party mainstream, even though it's moved much closer to where I stand than it used to be. On that note, in terms of policy alone, I align more with Cruz than any other candidate except Rubio. But there's a difference between being anti-establishment and being outright obstructionist. Cruz is the latter, and it seems apparent to me that he's assumed that role for no other reason than to lay the groundwork for a campaign for the presidency that rests on that very persona. Throw in suspect campaign practices, and I just plain don't trust the guy. It's for that very reason that despite agreeing with them less, I would vote for Bush, Kasich, and Carson all before I would vote for Cruz if Rubio weren't in the race. As much as I dislike Donald Trump, if it were between he and Cruz, I would still have reservations about voting for Cruz. And if Cruz (or Trump, for that matter) gets the nomination, I may, for the first time in my life, consider supporting someone other than the Republican candidate for the presidency. Above all else, that's the part that really concerns me. Me, a millennial that's been a Republican literally all his life, being put in a position where I have to entertain the possibility that Gary Johnson could get my vote. I'm not the only one facing that decision. The GOP has more support among millennials right now than I think it's ever had. The economy sucks, recent college graduates are looking for jobs to pay off all this student loan debt and the social progress fatigue the country had in the late seventies is setting back in. I've personally been surprised at how many people my age have expressed openness to voting for a GOP contender. Rubio and Kasich both have surprising amounts of millennial appeal, and Rand, as we all know, was almost exclusively supported by millennials. Jeb's even managed to get a little of it despite his last name. About a week ago, I was shocked when I gave a Hispanic UT law student a ride home and he, who I would characterize as a moderate, told me out of the blue that if Rubio got the nomination, he'd vote for him in a heartbeat. The number of ostensibly anti-GOP students saying things like that has actually thrown me off; I'm not used to having somewhat popular political opinions among others in my generation. But we're at a point right now where two of the three frontrunners for the GOP nomination would squander every bit of that millennial support. I go on Facebook, Twitter or GroupMe (that's a group messaging app) right now and almost every political meme I see from another millennial is aimed at one of three people: Trump, Cruz and Hillary. I go to arguably the most conservative major law school in the country (I realize that comes as a surprise in reference to UT; understand that I'm referring to the law school, not the undergraduate campus, where the political climate is very, very different). The UT chapter of the Federalist Society, the organization for conservative lawyers and law school students, is the second largest in the country, behind only Harvard, a law school with three times as many students as UT. The ratio of conservative and liberal law school students, at least in my class, has almost reached parity. UT publishes the nation's most prominent conservative law review, the Texas Review of Law & Politics, and the Federalist Society chapter here has more members than the American Constitutional Society, its liberal counterpart. The only law school in the country that's arguably more conservative is the University of Chicago, which is really more libertarian than anything else because it takes a hardcore economic approach to everything, and which also happens to be the alma mater of our current dean. Needless to say, I come into contact with more conservative law students on a daily basis here than I would anywhere else. Of all of those conservative students in my 1L class whom I interact with regularly (probably 35-40), only one of them supports Ted Cruz (this isn't the one that worked on the Cruz campaign and got kicked out of UT; I'm not counting him here), and he openly admits that his support is at best lukewarm. Only two are going for Trump, and I feel fairly certain they're just doing it to get on everyone else's nerves. The rest all support Rubio and Kasich, with a few Jeb Bush fans and a fair number of libertarians still trying to get over Rand dropping out. I shake up old GroupMe conversations among my friends at Alabama, which is where I went to undergrad and happens to be one of the most conservative public universities in the country, and the distribution is the same. You look at Cruz's millennial outreach page on Facebook, and he's got less than 3,000 likes. I've seen candidates for student government get more likes than that. It's the worst millennial outreach effort of any of the major candidates except Donald Trump. This general disdain among millennials for Cruz, in my experience, hasn't been over his platform positions; his platform isn't worlds apart from Rubio and bears some similarities to Paul, both of whom enjoy varying degrees of popularity among millennials. It comes down to his personality - the smug smile, the squeamish voice, the condescending tone, the presumptuousness, the unworkable attitude in the Senate and the reputation for suspect tactics practiced by his campaign and its affiliates. This likability problem isn't limited to millennials, either. Cruz has banked his entire campaign on winning evangelical and Tea Party voters, basing the strategy in a study done by the RNC after Mitt Romney lost suggesting that several million such voters stayed home in 2012. The thinking in the Cruz campaign is that if they can organize a grassroots effort to get those voters, they can win the primary and the general election. The problem with that strategy is that (1) there's not enough voters out there who fall in those categories to win with them alone, (2) Cruz has so over-leveraged himself with that specific element of the GOP that he's got no crossover appeal, and (3) he doesn't even do that well among those voters. The fact that there aren't enough evangelicals to carry the Cruz campaign alone is exactly why he didn't win New Hampshire and why he's not in first place in South Carolina right now. It's also evident in the polls pitting him against Democrat nominees in a general election. In addition to making a play for millennials that's failed in epic proportions, Cruz also tried to make a play for libertarians in the last days of the Rand Paul campaign. He did such a poor job that Rand's wife called him "two-faced," and, after Rand had already dropped out, Ron Paul went on a speaking tour not to urge libertarians to vote for anyone specifically, but instead to urge them to vote for anyone but Ted Cruz, echoing Iowa's governor in the days leading up to the Iowa primary. Cruz can't seem to get a single endorsement from any elected Republican official except a handful of Congressmen and Texas state officials. Nobody in the Senate - not even close Cruz friends and, in the past at least, political allies Mike Lee and Jeff Sessions - has endorsed Ted Cruz. And perhaps worst of all, despite his almost singular focus on evangelicals, Cruz can't even win a majority among them. In Iowa, the most evangelical-dominated state in the first four GOP primary states, Cruz only won 26% of evangelical voters. Trump, who is perhaps the worst candidate for evangelicals of all time, and Rubio, who hasn't emphasized his evangelical bona fides nearly as much as Cruz has, both came within five points of Cruz's lead. One of the other longtime evangelical candidates in this race, Rick Santorum, endorsed Marco, not Ted, upon dropping out of the race, and the other major evangelical player in the GOP race, Ben Carson, is caught in the middle of a blood feud with Cruz over Cruz's dirty tactics. All of this leads me to believe that Cruz's status as a frontrunner is purely a function of the GOP field being so jam-packed; if it weren't for so many other candidates being in the race and slicing up other voting bases within the party so many ways, I don't think Cruz would be a serious contender. I come to that conclusion before even beginning to take into account my own experiences with Cruz campaign officials. So, long story short, when I boil this down to the facts, I don't see a "consistent conservative" or a strong presidential candidate. I see a candidate with no real record, no real experience, a reputation for brinkmanship behavior and inflammatory rhetoric, a serious likability problem, no crossover appeal to speak of and problems getting support even within his own base. He's got electability issues, favorability issues, consistency issues, personality issues, and if I'm being totally frank, authenticity issues. I see him as neither capable of winning the presidency, nor the right person to be president.

One of the things I noticed at the end of the debate Saturday night was that when the candidates were all shaking each other's hands, Carson didn't shake Cruz's. Instead, the two just looked at each other. Cruz gave his normal grin and Carson gave the closest thing I've ever seen to a look of contempt on Ben Carson's face. I thought that was a telling moment. Then I saw the article below and realized exactly why Carson had that look on his face: [Hidden Content] In addition to this article, which contains the voicemails the Cruz campaign left on the phones of Cruz supporters in Iowa the night of the caucus, I also came across another I found interesting: [Hidden Content] I've heard of campaigns sending cease and desist letters for "slanderous" political ads before. I've never heard of a television station's legal counsel considering the letter's accusations substantive enough to take the ad down. What that means is that whatever it is the Cruz PAC's political ads said about Rubio in the ad, the station taking the money for the ads thought they were far enough off the mark - far enough beyond the normal embellishment you see in political ads - to invite too much risk of a lawsuit. That's pretty eye-opening. Throw in the fact that the Cruz PAC that created the ad, perhaps ironically named "Stand for Truth," is having its donations funneled to it through "a high number of companies" - a move that I can only guess is designed to obscure the identities of the actual donors - and things just get that much more suspect, in my opinion. Donald Trump is just about the last person on earth I want to agree with right now. But he's onto something here.

He's just now getting on your nerves?

The porn star thing is, in my opinion, just plain funny. You have to acknowledge the humorous irony in a porn star appearing in a prominent commercial for one of the leading evangelical candidates in the presidential race. As an indicator of the kind of candidate Cruz is, though, I don't find it that substantive. The ad was probably proposed by some firm of advertising consultants, approved by the Cruz PR staff, and then contracted out by the ad firm to a studio to make, which contracted with talent agencies to find actors. The Cruz campaign itself was more than likely three degrees of separation removed from the screening process for actors and actresses. That said, I've said in this thread before and will repeat now my reservations about the Cruz campaign. I know staff for the Cruz, Rubio, Sanders, Clinton and now defunct Paul campaigns very well. I consider some of them dear friends, and I consider some of the others to be the kind of people that are exactly what's wrong with American politics. With regard to that latter group of people, I don't believe the Cruz campaign has a monopoly, but I believe it has more than its fair share of the market.

You're right. I didn't include the clause about exceptions. Because it's not relevant. In your hypothetical, Congress isn't exercising its power to create exceptions to the constitutional requirement that the Supreme Court have only appellate jurisdiction over the specified types of cases, it's effectively ignoring that constitutional rule. If your proposal were approved under that exceptions clause, it would expand the definition of an exception to the extent that exceptions could, from that point on, altogether dispense with the rules they apply to. The purpose of an exception is to allow for limited deviations from a general rule in specific circumstances as deemed necessary by the body empowered to make those exceptions, not to undermine or simply do away with the rule altogether. Imagine if we used such a broad approach with the other part of that clause, which has to do with regulations. If Congress can regulate the high court's proceedings with respect to those types of cases, can it extend the meaning of regulation to the extent that it bans the high court from hearing those kinds of cases? Would that not undermine - indeed, altogether implicitly abrogate - the constitutional requirement that the Supreme Court have appellate jurisdiction over those types of cases? Such a proposition would be absurd. So too is the case with its "exception" counterpart. The application of Congress's power to regulate in this context is, in principle, no different than the application of the power to create exceptions you advocate for in that post. On an aside, I'm glad to see you finally went and looked up the text I cited to. I applaud the improvement. Is this for real? It's hard to say that nobody else on this site knows for a fact that I am who I say I am given that I've been posting here since I was a sophomore in high school, not to mention that I'm a site moderator, that I've met some of the users on this site in person, and that I'm related to two of them, one of whom also happens to be a moderator.

I can see you didn't look up the text of the sections of the Constitution I cited. I apologize for assuming you had the wherewithal to research the portions of the Constitution I cited for yourself. I suppose we'll have to do this the old fashioned way. Constitutionally, Congress does not have the right to withhold pay from a Supreme Court justice or any federal judicial appointee. Article III, Section 1 of the Constitution states, in no uncertain terms, that "[t]he Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts... shall, at stated Times, receive for their Services, a Compensation, which shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office." So, no, Congress cannot, by simple majority vote, choose not to pay the justices. In whatever appropriation Congress makes, it is required by the text quoted above to ensure that each of the justices receives pay commensurate with or in excess of the salary appropriated to them in previous budgetary acts. If Congress wished to reduce the justices' pay, it would require a constitutional amendment altering that clause in some way, which would require Congress to propose such an amendment with a two-thirds vote of both houses, and would then require the approval of three quarters of the states, per Article V. That's correct. You said that Congress could "get rid" of SCOTUS justices, specifically that Congress could "with a simple majority vote [to] set membership on SCOTUS at 1." And I showed how such a move would not be, as you put it, "in complete agreement with The [sic] Constitution," citing all of the relevant language thereof. Since you failed to look that language up for yourself, I will make the text plain here. Article I, Section II of the Constitution states unequivocally that the House "shall have the sole Power of Impeachement," and is complemented by Article I, Section III, which gives the Senate "the sole Power to try all Impeachments," requires "the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present" to reach a conviction, and limits "Judgment in Cases of Impeachment" to a select few sentences, of which "removal from Office" is expressly listed. The power to remove any federal appointee from office, much less a Supreme Court justice, is not enumerated anywhere else in the Constitution, and is not authorized by the Constitution under any other circumstances. Therefore, your contention that Congress could "with a simple majority vote [to] set membership on SCOTUS at 1" is flatly unconstitutional unless, as I pointed out in my original post, Congress voted to create a statutory limit on the number of justices on the high court, which would be unenforceable if Congress were to enact it today because of the constitutional provisions herein outlined and would not become enforceable until the number of justices was naturally reduced to that number by deaths, retirements, impeachments and removals (which have never happened) and, presumably, presidential appointments to the bench that went unconfirmed by the Senate - a process that would almost certainly take decades and that would likely prove unsustainable given the volatile nature of Congress. As your various statements apply to the lower judges, I explained how that would not only be a horrific idea in terms of policy implications, I also argued that it would be unconstitutional. Once again, seeing how you've failed to look up the relevant provisions of the Constitution which I cited in my post, I'll proceed to use the explicit language of the Constitution. You argue that the one provision of the Constitution you cite on this matter gives Congress discretion to establish lower courts altogether. I tell you that this provision is perhaps better characterized as giving Congress discretion not to set up lower courts, but rather in how to set up those lower courts. To reiterate what I stated in my previous post while paraphrasing Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution, "[t]he judicial Power [of the federal judiciary] shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority;—to all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls;—to all Cases of admiralty and maritime Jurisdiction;—to Controversies to which the United States shall be a Party;—to Controversies between two or more States;— between a State and Citizens of another State,—between Citizens of different States,—between Citizens of the same State claiming Lands under Grants of different States, and between a State, or the Citizens thereof, and foreign States, Citizens or Subjects." This has always been interpreted to mean that these ten types of cases may only be heard in federal courts; the state courts have no power to hear them at all (except for under very limited exceptions in a very limited set of circumstances under one of these categories, for the record). Article III, Section 2 goes on to say that in "all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party," - in other words, only two of the those ten types of cases - "the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction," and that in "all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction." This means that in regard to the other eight types of cases mentioned in Article III, Section 2, the state courts are expressly barred from taking action, and the Supreme Court may not be the first forum in which they are litigated, effectively requiring that these cases be litigated in a lower federal court. These provisions, taken in tandem, effectively mandate that Congress set up some system of lower federal courts, and effectively limit Congress's discretion under "Inferior Courts" clause of Article I, Section 8 which you earlier quoted to how lower courts are set up under the Supreme Court and how many of those courts are established, foregoing the question of whether they are constituted or not altogether. This is basic textualism. Antonin Scalia would agree with this. I am so glad you brought up President Obama's legal education. More on that later. In the meantime, checks and balances would hardly be effective against a single Supreme Court justice in whom, under your hypothetical scenario, all of the judicial power of the federal government would be vested. The job of the judiciary is to interpret the laws which Congress writes and the president executes. A well versed judge - indeed, any well versed lawyer - is very, very good at playing with legal interpretation. It doesn't matter how Congress writes its laws, or how the president intends to execute them; their powers of interpretation are wholly subservient to those of the judicial branch, which is charged with that duty by its mission and its very nature. When a law is interpreted a particular way by the highest court, Congress can do little to alter it besides either repealing the law or wholly redrafting it in some way. The potential for abuse of that power is normally curtailed by the presence of multiple justices on the Supreme Court, who naturally hold each other accountable since no individual justice can set court dogma unilaterally and the weight of an opinion is dictated by the number of justices which join in it. That said, in your hypothetical, there aren't multiple justices on the Supreme Court. Indeed, there aren't even multiple appointees in the entire federal judiciary. If your plan was somehow implemented, there would be nobody within the judicial branch capable of holding the single Supreme Court justice accountable by any means. Furthermore, we've established that this justice can't be arbitrarily removed (i.e., removed for carrying out his duty to interpret the laws, even if done poorly or selfishly) or have his pay docked, and that the only checks the president and Congress really have over the judiciary under the Constitution are limited entirely to their respective powers of appointment, confirmation, impeachment, and trial and removal through the impeachment process. This is why I say that having the full power of the judiciary manifest itself in a sole Supreme Court justice would be the closest thing to a monarchy you could possibly have in the United States. You are correct. Barack Obama was a constitutional law professor. And as a constitutional law professor, Barack Obama knows both the canons and the history of constitutional interpretation very, very well. That is why he knows, just as well as I do and hopefully (though I doubt) just as well as you do, that the history of constitutional interpretation on the Supreme Court has been, overwhelmingly, a history of the construction of the Constitution to justify, not to strike down, federal laws and executive actions. Nine times out of ten, when reviewing a federal act of some kind, SCOTUS upholds it, and Barack Obama knows that. That is why he is expertly pushing the boundaries of what's constitutional in American jurisprudence; he knows that if he throws out executive order after executive order that falls right in the middle of the gray area between explicitly constitutional and explicitly unconstitutional, he's going to win more court battles than he loses, and expand the powers of the presidency more often than not. Luckily, we have a much more conservative court now than in years past, and he hasn't been as successful as previous presidents in doing this (one of the reasons, on a philosophical aside, that I favor a strong court over a weak one as you apparently desire). But, it's unforeseeable how long that luck will hold, which makes it all the more important that a Republican win the White House in 2016. Since my academic status has apparently been brought into question, I suppose I'll reiterate here what most longtime users on this board already know. I am currently a law student at The University of Texas School of Law. This semester, I'm taking a constitutional law class under Professor Sanford Levinson, one of the nation's most widely renowned constitutional scholars, who received his Juris Doctor at Stanford and his Ph.D. in Government at Harvard. He's previously taught at Yale, the nation's most prestigious law school, and authored a number of books on constitutional law. This is my third constitutional law class; my two previous constitutional law classes were taught by one of Levinson's former students, who received his Ph.D. in Government Affairs at UT.

If it's Rubio (which I think is most likely and who I'll personally be voting for next month barring disaster), you can just about bet the house Kasich will be the VP selection. There's a possibility Nikki Haley or Suzanna Martinez might get it, but I don't see Rubio passing up on a popular Governor of one of the most important swing states in the race and a running mate whose long list of accomplishments over three decades in politics can almost immunize him from attacks over experience. If it's (God forbid) Trump, I have no idea who ends up as the VP pick. It wouldn't surprise me if Kanye West was his running mate. If it's Cruz, he'll need to recruit someone from one of the more moderate factions of the party to appeal to independents, and it's probably best if that someone's from a swing state. Rubio would be the first person I'd make the offer to, because Rubio's more than conservative enough to keep the base happy while still bringing a surprising amount of appeal to independents given his political leanings. Rubio also can't run for reelection to the Senate at this point, so he might be desperate enough to take it if he really wants to stay in politics. If Rubio shot it down, Kasich would be my next offer. Experienced, accomplished and also from an important swing state, though he's significantly more moderate and may upset some portion of the base. That said, I'm really not sure he would take it either. I think Cruz's only real options are Mike Lee or Jeff Sessions, and I'm not sure either of them bring him any real help in the race. Lee would probably be more palatable to independents and generally does well in favorability ratings, but he's from a deeply red state and doesn't have the appeal to independents of a Rubio or a Kasich. Sessions is in the same boat and doesn't have the favorability ratings. While we're at this, on the other side of the aisle.... If it's Hillary, the smartest move she could possibly make is to pick up one of the two Castro brothers (the San Antonio ones, not the Havana ones). I'd go for Joaquin, but I'd also take who I could get if I were in her shoes. That said, it's Hillary we're talking about, and she's locked in a showdown for the nomination she didn't really expect. It would not surprise me at all if she made some deal somewhere with someone for a big-time endorsement and gave up her right to choose her own running mate in the process. It could literally be anyone of any significance in Democratic politics. If it's Bernie, it wouldn't really surprise me to see Elizabeth Warren end up on the ticket, and that would certainly be his smartest move. It would smooth over the ruffled feathers of the party's feminists, who will not be happy over Hillary's loss, it will shore him up against attacks over age and being out of touch and it will attach him to a bright, young, energetic, female senator with a lot of populist appeal that will nicely complement his own. The only drawback is that she, like Bernie, is from a deeply blue New England state, but she might be able to overcome that if she plays on her Oklahoma and Texas roots. If it's not Warren, he might do well to pick one of the two Castro brothers, but I suspect Bernie's too ideologically inclined to pick one of the party's more moderate members. But, I don't know who is other options would be.

You'll have to forgive me for not seeing your other "explanations" in other threads. I so rarely get the time to post any more that I don't pay as much attention to the board as I used to. Thus, I haven't seen any of them. In any case, I have to hand it to you. I have seen some crazy posts on this site over the years, and in particular in this section of the site. Yours absolutely takes the cake. Let's start with the number of justices. You say that Congress has the power to limit the number of justices with a simple majority vote. You could not be more incorrect. The only manner in which Congress could vote to do anything with regard to the number of justices on the bench is by voting not to confirm an appointment of the President to the high court, in which case only the Senate has a say (see Article II, Section 2), or by voting to impeach and remove a justice from the court, in which case the House would first be required to vote to impeach and the Senate would then be required to try and convict a justice of something before removal could take place (see Article I, Sections 2 & 3). There is no part of Article I, which delineates the powers of Congress, that by any stretch of the imagination gives Congress the power to unilaterally and arbitrarily reduce the number of justices on the Supreme Court with a simple majority of votes in either or both houses. The most Congress could constitutionally do is set a statutory limit on the number of justices that can sit on the high court, but if that statute limited the number to anything less than the nine justices who are on the court right now, it would be an unenforceable statute until the number of justices naturally came down to meet the limit due to retirements, deaths or impeachments and removals, the last of which has never happened in our entire history. So, to put it simply, your proposal to reduce the number of SCOTUS justices is not only radical and arguably absurd, it's patently unconstitutional. Now that we've established that Congress does not have the power to reduce the number of SCOTUS justices at will, let's discuss your plan to get rid of all of the lower federal courts. To put it simply, that would be an absolute, unmitigated disaster. There are two angles I can take with this: the policy angle, and the constitutionality angle. I'll start with the policy angle. There are certain areas of law in which the states have little to no say. Some of those areas of law have been completely usurped by the federal government by statute. I'll assume for the sake of argument that if we're getting rid of all the lower federal courts like you want us to, we're returning those subjects to the states. That said, most areas of law where the federal government has original jurisdiction were not usurped from the states by statute, they were delegated to the federal government by the Constitution itself. Examples include bankruptcy, immigration and naturalization (see Article I, Section 8), and cases involving any state and citizens of another state, citizens of different states, any two states, US citizens and foreign nationals, the maritime industry, the federal government or any agent thereof as a party to the case, treaties, foreign governments and international law (see Article III, Section 2). Tens of thousands of such cases are filed in federal district courts every single year; last year alone, more than 270,000 civil cases - just civil - were filed in federal district courts. If you have your druthers, a single court would be responsible for adjudicating every last one of those cases. That would bring the entire federal judiciary to a screeching halt, which would in turn have massively detrimental economic and political effects. You might as well tell the American people justice is dead at that point. Furthermore, if you could shut down all the lower courts and the Supreme Court could somehow find a way to handle all those cases, all of American justice would be in the hands of nine people as opposed to the 874 federal judicial appointees we have today. Not only does that reduce the thoroughness with which justice would be doled out, it severely curtails the ability of the courts to assess the ramifications of how the law is applied and make adjustments as necessary, and concentrates an immense amount of power - quite literally all of the power to determine what the law means - in the hands of just nine people. If, on top of that, Congress were to reduce the number of SCOTUS justices to one as you desire through attrition or some means that's actually constitutional, that power to interpret all of the American body of law would be even more focally concentrated in the hands of just one man, who would be entitled to serve until retirement, conviction for a crime or death. That, in my opinion, would be as close as you could possibly get to a having a monarch under the United States Constitution. That brings me to the argument over the constitutionality of what you're proposing. The Constitution mandates that the Supreme Court have original jurisdiction over only two of the areas of law constitutionally reserved to the federal judiciary; over all the others, the Supreme Court is required to have only appellate jurisdiction, which means that the Court can't hear or decide the case first, it can only review the findings of a lower court (see Article III, Section 2). So, in effect, the Constitution mandates that Congress set up some system of lower courts to hear these cases, because it prohibits state courts from hearing them, and prohibits the Supreme Court from being the first to hear them, effectively rendering your proposal unconstitutional on its face. Now, with all of that said, I have to get back to reading my constitutional law textbook because, ironically enough, I have my constitutional law class in the morning.

Can you explain precisely what you mean by that?

You know, I have to admit, you stumped me for a moment with that accusation. I hadn't seen anything about anyone in the Rubio campaign pushing the narrative that Carson was dropping out, and it's rare that things like that elude my attention. Finally, after three or four Google searches, I came up with a single hit. One person put out a tweet saying that the Rubio campaign was pushing the narrative that Carson was dropping out. That person's name is Conrad Close. He's a freshman at Georgia Southern University, fresh out of a homeschooling program and looks like he couldn't be more than fifteen years old. His sole connection to the Rubio campaign is that he got one of the little freeware "I'm Voting Rubio" graphics off the internet and incorporated it into this profile picture on Twitter. You can see his Twitter profile here: [Hidden Content] And the article that picked up on his tweet can be found here: [Hidden Content] He later deleted the tweet, and explained that he was nowhere near Iowa nor had any firsthand information from the Rubio campaign indicating that they believed Carson would drop out or that they wished to disseminate information to that effect. Nothing I can find suggests he's actually involved in the Rubio campaign in any way or even that he's anything more than just your average, casual Rubio supporter. Where did he get the idea that Rubio was pushing that narrative, you ask? He says he thought he saw it somewhere on Twitter. After doing some digging on Twitter, I personally can't find anything he could have gotten that idea from, so I'm left to believe the kid misread something. It's worth pointing out, on that note, that there's no Rubio campaign memo or official Rubio campaign literature of any kind suggesting that the Rubio campaign wanted to spread the belief that Carson was dropping out, unlike Cruz, whose campaign did in fact put out just such a memo. The only reason this is even notable right now is that one of the conservative grassroots media orgs picked up the kid's tweet and ran with it, and that drew attention from Rush Limbaugh on air, who apparently didn't do any real fact-checking first. So I ask you, what's more concerning? Some homeschooled kid in Swainsboro, Georgia starting a rumor based on something he misunderstood from out there in the Twitterverse, or a presidential campaign putting out a dishonest memo about a rival presidential candidate to all of its supporters and a high-ranking, professional PR advisor to that same campaign tweeting an overt lie, and then trying to cover up that lie by lying again to claim that the first lie was told by a separate rival presidential candidate? I think we both know the answer to that.

I hate Donald Trump. I really hate Donald Trump. The few political Facebook posts I've made in the course of this primary have been anti-Trump. The man's inconsistent and, in my opinion, certifiable. And for that reason, it really, really gets under my skin that I have to say this, but.... In this one case, Donald Trump's right. He's exaggerating - what Ted Cruz's campaign did wasn't "cheating" per se, but it was patently dishonest, and Trump is right to call him on it. All the photographic evidence is out there. If you haven't seen it, you can find it at the link below: [Hidden Content] Cruz's campaign took a CNN headline and misconstrued it in a way that implied Carson was getting ready to drop out of the race in an official campaign memo sent to all registered Cruz supporters in Iowa. I've seen a few reports (none of which are cited in the article linked to above) that contained statements from Iowa caucus-goers to the effect that Cruz representatives verbally informed Carson supporters that Carson would drop out of the race after Iowa and urged them to reconsider voting for Cruz on those grounds, though I'm skeptical of the veracity of those reports given that similar evidence hasn't been incorporated in the reports of more notable news sources. One of Cruz's PR officials, a man named Dan Gabriel (who himself is a suspect character in my opinion), took it a step further in claiming on his personal Twitter account that he had confirmed the rumor with a Carson campaign insider. Gabriel has since deleted the tweet, but he failed to do so before screenshots were taken. In subsequent tweets, he tried to play it off as though the Trump campaign had started the Carson rumor. Despite the explicit evidence to the contrary, he's stuck to that narrative. There's no sign that the Cruz campaign has taken any steps to distance itself from Gabriel, to reprimand Gabriel or even to quiet Gabriel's dishonest attempt at blame-shifting. Having been around campaigns for a while now, one thing I've learned is that you can get a strong sense for the type of person a candidate is by the type of people he puts on his campaign staff. This isn't the first time I've seen a high-ranking Cruz campaign official do something dishonest. One of Cruz's high-ranking millennial outreach and fundraising officials was a student in my section at UT Law last semester, and without going into more detail than I should, was forced to depart from the law school under less than amicable circumstances. The brief glimpse into the inner workings of the Cruz campaign he offered to myself and other conservatives at this law school was, if anything, alarming to all of us. I have yet to see anything of a similar nature or which invokes the same kind of concerns through my contacts in the Rubio, Sanders or (now suspended) Paul campaigns. To be totally frank, I have friends in the Hilary campaign, and they haven't sent this many shivers up my spine. Take this as a friendly word of advice from a fellow Southeast Texas native with a little insider knowledge: it would be wise to take the skeptic's approach in assessing Ted Cruz as a presidential candidate.

On the contrary. I mentioned a prominent Republican politician whose fiscal practices I absolutely abhor. What I'm telling you, though, is that he's the exception, not the rule. Do you hold the entire group accountable for a the actions of a small number of its members? Particularly when that behavior has largely been curtailed compared to past circumstances? You're forgetting that more than half of that debt has been accumulated since the Democrats' control of Congress started in January of 2007. I'm not saying that we can accumulate that much debt with a "bunch of well-intentioned conservative politicians," I'm saying the exact opposite. And the numbers prove me right. You say that the Republicans can do more. The bottom line is, the deficit has decreased by more than a trillion dollars - roughly two thirds - since the Republicans took the House back five years ago. By every objective measure, cutting that much spending while running up against an obstructionist in Harry Reid for four of those five years and an extremely adept, extremely politic Barack Obama for all five of them is truly a remarkable accomplishment.

You say that as though the Republicans are responsible for the deficit soaring so high to begin with. We've covered that. They're not. The deficit made its meteoric rise when the Democrats had undisputed, unchallenged control of the two branches of government that have any control whatsoever over spending. It's only been since the Republicans have seized partial control of one of those branches that the deficit has come toppling down. The job's not finished, but it's not fair to ignore the massive amount of progress that's been made. You bring up a fair point about the members of Congress who maneuver earmarks into budget bills with assured passage that they then emphatically vote against because of supposed objections to pork. Richard Shelby is the master of that game, and it drives me crazy. But while that problem is significant, it's not endemic. Earmarks have to be inserted in committees, and even then, it's hard to add them if you're not a ranking member. That's a process that's only open to a select few members of the party, even less of whom actually invoke it. In essence, you're holding the entire Republican delegation responsible for the actions of a select few of its ranking members. Doesn't that violate the tenet of individual responsibility? On timing, though, I couldn't disagree with you more. The budget for FY 2016 was proposed in May of 2015, a full four months before it was due. The only reason it took so long was because the President is very good at (and frankly, very hypocritical about) playing obstructionist and getting away with it. Furthermore, the Republicans technically aren't supposed to propose budgets at all. The Budget & Accounting Act of 1921 requires the president to submit the first draft of the budget to the House for consideration. President Obama, unfortunately (but not surprisingly), has been somewhat lax with that responsibility. It's truly a testament to Republican fiscal responsibility that in a time of physical crisis, the Republicans have, to the fullest extent of their legal authority, taken it upon themselves to draft budgets in spite of the president's hesitance to fulfill his legal duty, in addition to doing so so far in advance of their deadlines.

This exact statement is why I want to go issue by issue with this debate. You've given me a characterization of the party based in what portion of the political spectrum you think it generally covers. You haven't told me why. There's no way we can have a discussion about that unless you give me reasons for why you think that.

A "true" conservative wouldn't vote for a budget that included a $60 Billion reduction in the deficit, almost entirely comprised of cuts to healthcare, education and welfare spending? You say that a "true" conservative would rather shut down the government than pass the FY 2016 budget that was adopted. I'll remind you that when the budget was passed, it not only narrowly averted another government shutdown, it also prevented the federal government from defaulting on its debt, which it was on the verge of doing. My understanding of conservatism includes absolute fidelity to the constitution, and I believe yours does as well - in fact, I believe that's one of the underlying, unifying principles of all the variations of conservative philosophy at the moment. Section 4 of the Fourteenth Amendment makes it absolutely clear that for the federal government to default on its debt would not only trigger financial calamity, it would also be patently unconstitutional. If what you're saying is true, then a "true" conservative would rather explicitly violate the United States Constitution than pass a budget that is ostensibly at least somewhat favorable to his own cause. And while we're at this, what is "true" or "pure" conservatism? One of the things I love about the GOP and the conservative side of the political spectrum in general is that, in my view, there's a greater degree of intellectual conservatism. Put simply, there's room for people of like minds, values, principles and experiences to have genuine, reasonable disagreements on a given issue. Does that disagreement make one a "true" conservative and other not? On this very site, there is a tendency among many of the conservative posters to laud the independent thinking on our side of the aisle and decry what they perceive to be monotonous, "sheeple" thinking on the other. Aren't we encouraging that very thing on this side of the aisle when we distinguish ourselves as "true" or "pure" conservatives from other genuine conservatives over marginal differences of opinion?

To answer the questions about federal benefits, regulations and programs like Social Security, Medicaid and the military.... Occasionally, you see studies passed around regarding the "return on investment" for individual states, or, in other words the total amount of federal money spent in each individual state for every dollar of federal tax revenue collected from that state. You can find the ROI metric for each state from 2015 here: [Hidden Content] According to this, the federal government spent 79 cents in Texas for every dollar of tax revenue collected from Texas last year. That means that 21% of federal tax revenues coming from Texas is spent in one of the other 49 states, the District of Columbia or abroad. Texas is, by a wide margin, a tax donor state. Now, is it true that Texas is an overwhelmingly tax-averse state? Absolutely. It's highly probable that Texas would be forced to institute an income tax to sustain a national government, which is itself the most unpopular, economically burdensome form of taxation and a particularly abhorrent idea in this state, as well as replace other federal taxes such as the payroll tax. Would the people of Texas like that idea? Ostensibly, absolutely not. That said, if Texas were to become its own country, in theory, Texas could implement its own replacements for federal taxes at 79% of the rates the federal government normally charges Texas citizens, and raise every penny of federal funding it would lose as a result of secession. And that's just if Texas wants to replace every penny of federal funding. It's no secret that state government in Texas is incredibly efficient; for the last 40 years, elected and appointed officials in this state have displayed incredible skill in finding ways to save money. In theory, it's possible, and perhaps even likely, that a national Texas government would find a way to provide every single one of the services the federal government currently provides to our citizens at reduced cost, which would allow the state to levy even lower replacement tax rates. Therefore, the question on taxes isn't so much whether Texans would be willing to bite the bullet and accept new Texas taxes as a condition of independence. It's really whether Texans are willing to accept a reduction in their taxes of at least 21%, possibly more, in addition to national sovereignty. Offer any Texan that deal, and I'd bet good money they'd take it. Where the military's concerned, the other metrics listed in the same table at the link I've provided suggest that a significant portion of that 79 cents goes to military personnel, bases and contracts in Texas - a larger portion than in most other states. That shouldn't surprise anyone. Texas is home to Fort Hood, the largest military installation on Earth, as well as Fort Bliss, all of the military bases in San Antonio, a handful of Coast Guard and Naval installations on the coast, and numerous major defense contractors, among other important military resources. Approximately one out of every nine US military servicemen and women is from Texas, and an independent Texas would, undoubtedly, make a strong military a national priority. While the United States (I'm assuming, for the sake of argument, that a United States would continue to exist comprised of the other 49 states in this hypothetical scenario) would undoubtedly remove whatever military resources it could take with it from an independent Texas, the physical installations themselves can't be picked up and moved, and the new Texas government would likely seize those properties for itself. I doubt many of those defense contractors would be willing to pick up and leave a new nation anxious to get started building a premier military, either, particularly if Texas is more open to exporting military equipment and technology than the United States has traditionally been. Add in that big chunk of change from the reduced replacement taxes and a dose of old fashioned, Texas arms-stockpiling philosophy, and you've got a recipe for one of the largest, most effective, most advanced military forces on the planet right here in the Lone Star State Republic.

Really? Are you sure about that? The biggest complaints levied about the budget over the last ten years were the size of the deficit and the fact that for the first six years of the Obama presidency, no budget was passed. I'll tackle them separately. The deficit began its cataclysmic rise in FY 2008, which started in October of 2007 with the first budget approved by the Democrat Congress that won a majority in the 2006 elections and took office in January of 2007. The deficit reached $1 Trillion for the first time in FY 2009, which began in October of 2008 and was the first fiscal year administrated by the Obama administration, ending in September of 2009. The deficit was bolstered first by TARP, passed by a Democrat congress and signed by a Republican president in late 2008, and then ARRA, passed by a Democrat Congress and signed by a Democrat president in February of 2009. The deficit would hover in a range of $1.3 to $1.4 Trillion until FY 2012, the first fiscal year administrated by the Obama administration after the Republicans won the House - the critical centerpiece of the Congressional budgeting process - in November of 2010 and officially took over in January of 2011. The deficit has done nothing but decline since that point. The second issue underlies the first. Congress did not perform its constitutional and statutory duty to pass a budget for six whole years. Neither Nancy Pelosi's House nor Harry Reid's Senate passed a budget for FY 2010 or FY 2011. When the Republican-led House took office in January of 2011, John Boehner's first order of business was getting a budget passed for the upcoming FY 2012, and he did exactly that. Unfortunately, Harry Reid refused to so much as take up that budget for a debate, much less a vote. The exact same thing happened again for FY 2013, FY 2014 and FY 2015. Thanks to Harry Reid's shocking refusal to carry out the budget process required by the constitution and outlined in the Budget & Accounting Act of 1921, Congress was forced to fund the federal government entirely through a series of recurring stop-gap resolutions for six years straight. It was not until May of last year, after the Republicans took the Senate away from Reid, that the first budget of the Obama administration was passed. That budget, by the way, included massive spending cuts. The critical thing to understand here is that, constitutionally speaking, the power of the purse lies with Congress. People think the deficit rises and falls based on which political party the White House belongs to. In truth, that's only a secondary factor. Spending, deficits and federal fiscal responsibility generally have correlated with who has control of Congress for the last 25 years. This case is no different. When the Democrats had outright control of Congress from January of 2007 to January of 2011, federal spending ballooned to all-time highs. When control of Congress was divided after that and eventually returned to the Republicans altogether in January of 2015, spending fell dramatically. Is the budget perfectly balanced? No, but it's roughly a third of what it was five years ago. That is significant progress, and you have the Republicans to thank for it. Personally, if (and hopefully when) we take the White House and have total control of the federal government, I think we'll find a way to balance it outright. Until then, we still have a Democrat president to deal with. Next.

Yes, the GOP is conservative. I welcome any one of you to pick any single issue where you think the GOP in general has not taken a conservative stance, and I will gladly debate you on it.

In theory, Texas could make it on its own. In fact, I would grade it as a high probability of success for Texas as its own country if we meet two conditions. The first is good leadership (I think we have a mix of good and bad at the moment). The second is how we would structure our national government, which is dependent on the first. As it stands right now, I would rate our current bureaucratic structure as very well set up for national governance. I would not, however, say that our judicial structure is, and our executive branch could use some retooling at the top as well.

[Hidden Content]

Are you really sure about that? I've already talked about the inherent differences between this situation and the Baltimore and Ferguson riots. Now let's talk about a situation that's about as closely analogous to Oregon as I can find: Waller County after the death of Sandra Bland. Members of the Black Lives Matter movement, the New Black Panther Party and various other black activism groups spent weeks in front of the Waller County Jail in the wake of Sandra Bland's death. They didn't riot as was the case in Baltimore and Ferguson; they were decidedly more peaceful. Much like the Bundys in Oregon, though, they carried around rifles and other firearms in an open and intimidating manner, using angry rhetoric and calling for others to join them. There are really only two differences between Oregon and Waller County: where the Bundys seized the building, the Sandra Bland protesters stayed in the parking lot, and where the Bundys have only called for "fellow patriots" to "stand up to the federal government," we know for a fact that the Sandra Bland protesters openly called for the murder of police officers with eerie and unsettling, albeit impersonal, specificity. Did the Waller County Sheriff's Department, or any other Texas law enforcement agency for that matter, make any move that would inhibit or disperse the Sandra Bland protesters? No. Not at all, in fact. While those protests lasted for days, the Waller County Sheriff's Department remained largely disengaged from it and went about business as usual. About the only difference between the two reactions has been the amount of media attention devoted to the two of them; the Bundys have gotten an incredible amount while the Sandra Bland protesters got little to none. The bottom line is, excessive force wasn't called for in Waller County, and it isn't called for at the moment in Oregon. It was called for in Baltimore and Ferguson. This isn't a matter of race, it's a matter of the actions the groups have taken. Nothing the protesters did in Waller County warranted a forced dispersal, nor does anything the protesters in Oregon have done yet. The things done by the rioters in Baltimore and Ferguson did.