Scalia's Gift to the Donald

The passing of Justice Antonin Scalia, RIP, has helped to explain Mr. Trump's popularity.  Watch any news show, and you will see video of members of each party taking both sides of the late-term SCOTUS appointment "debate."  Clearly, the speakers are all full of shit.  Trump is also full of shit, but he is obviously no more full of shit than those he rails against, and he, unlike them, purports to be  deal maker.

The GOP idiot-in-chief is Mitch McConnell.  Surely, he would prefer a real Republican to Trump as his party's nominee.  The so-called establishment's best move is to show that its members actually can govern, that they are willing and able to make some sausage.  So what does McConnell do?  He declares, before the ink is dry on the death certificate of a man he should have revered, that he will not work with the President in any constructive way.  Eight years ago, McConnell said his main political goal - as if he had any other sort - was to defeat Obama.  He failed at that, even though he did make BHO's presidency less than successful on a lot of fronts.  It never occurred to him that he would lose his party by showing how little its leaders were interested in governing.

Joe Scarborough was lamenting the other day how ineffective the GOP had been despite controlling so many state legislatures and so many Congressional seats.  That, of course, is the problem.  The state legislatures gerrymandered their states, and the spawn of the gerrymander - moronic non-legislators - sit in those seats, not legislating.  Nothing gets done, so the people look for someone who doesn't look like the people who look like they are doing nothing.

In contemplating the uncontemplatable, I would say "Thank God for the Twenty-sixth Amendment," but I'm not sure even that could survive a successful Trump presidency.  Obama's greatest weakness, I think, is that he is greatly weak.  Would Lyndon Johnson have been rolled so easily?  I think people sense that Trump would happily call out the bozos in Congress.  If he can win Tea Party voters in the presidential race, he can sway them in the next mid-term.  (They're populists, not conservatives.)  I do not think Mr. Trump would make a very good President - I think he'd be an embarrassment - but he may give the do-nothing Congress the smack upside the head that it so desperately needs.  So maybe the golden hair has a silver lining.