Scott Lemieux

I cringe whenever I see that the Roberts Court is taking a case like this: In theory, a criminal-law doctrine known as the exclusionary rule forbids prosecutors from using evidence obtained by the police as the result of an improper search. In practice, the rule has significant exceptions, like for evidence obtained in good faith […]

Dan Balz has an interesting article about the effect of Obama‘s focus on caucuses: Like Obama, Clinton threw everything possible into the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses, spending $20 million to $25 million on what turned out to be a losing effort. The experience seemed to sour the Clinton campaign on caucuses — she has repeatedly […]

Shorter Shorter Mark Penn, Union Buster (TM): “The states that vote for Obama are insignificant. In fact, the only states that count are our home state, California, Texas, and states that held straw polls we can retrospectively claim to be primaries, preferably with the candidate who would be soundly beating us if any of his […]

Lanny Davis argues that the superdelegates were intended to be an “independent” check on the whims of those meddling voters. I’m sure this will convince Clarence Thomas, but since I’m not an originalist it seems to me that delegates are free to vote by whatever criteria they choose, which includes doing what’s best for the […]

I think this correctly assesses the significance of Donna Edwards defeating Al Wynn in the primary last night, with the caveat that I get the sense that Wynn and a lot of blue dogs aren’t so much sellouts as just straightforward conservative hacks. Either way, while you have to live with blue dogs in conservative […]

Publius has a very useful post about the highly arcane system Texas uses to allocate delegates. He claims that some aspects of this will help Obama; the safer conclusion is that polls of Texas are unlikely to be very helpful in determining how many delegates each candidate will win. (I’m also not sure that, given […]

Via Matt W., the fact that the GOP has “progressed from 2000 where they refused to count Democratic votes, to 2008 where they are now refusing to count their own votes” is indeed very amusing. It’s bizarre for a party to just announce a winner in a close race before counting every vote, and you […]

I agree with Ezra that it would be unfortunate for the nomination to come down to superdelegates, and I would hope that the norm among many superdelegates would be to support a clear winner. A couple of additional points: The decision coming down to the superdelegates may not be quite as dire in practice as […]

Jack Balkin points us to this article in the WSJ defending John McCain on the question of judicial appointments. Part of the op-ed consists of the usual vacuous buzzwords like “judicial restraint” (although they at least avoid the usual procedure of decrying “judicial activism” and then proceeding directly to a claim that judges should strike […]

Brad Plumer reports that Karl Rove (and I sort of admire the spare elegance of Rove serving as an election analyst for Fox News; I mean, why not just skip the middleman) threw cold water on the idea of a McCain/Huckabee ticket. I have no idea who McCain will pick, and I understand the logic: […]