The above is how you know Jeb is losing.
Politico:
Jeb Bush doesn’t want birthright citizenship to go away, but he is calling for stronger enforcement for people who abuse it.
“If there’s abuse, if people are bringing — pregnant women are coming in to have babies simply because they can do it, then there ought to be greater enforcement,” Bush said on Bill Bennett’s conservative radio show, “Morning in America” Wednesday. “That’s [the] legitimate side of this. Better enforcement so that you don’t have these, you know, ‘anchor babies’, as they’re described, coming into the country.”
“Anchor babies” is a derogatory term used to describe children who are born in the United States to undocumented parents.
Erica Grieder:
As mentioned yesterday, more than half of the Republicans running for their party’s presidential nomination have seconded Donald Trump’s call to end birthright citizenship. A number of them, in fact, have previously expressed support for the idea, and polls have found a majority of Americans support ending birthright citizenship. Last night, arguing with Bill O’Reilly, Trump took things a step further, contending that the Fourteenth Amendment does not actually establish birthright citizenship: “I don’t think they have American citizenship,” he said, referring to children born in this country to non-citizen parents. He is not the first to offer this interpretation; Harry Reid, the Senate minority leader, took the same view of things in the 1990s, although he has subsequently recanted.
There are a handful of Republicans publicly standing up for the Constitution: Rick Perry, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and someone named George Pataki. But since they’re being outshouted at the moment let’s tackle this directly. Any child born in the United States is a citizen of the United States. The Fourteenth Amendment is clear. Here’s the relevant excerpt:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.
More politics and policy below the fold.
Politico:
Roger Stone, a former top adviser with Donald Trump’s campaign, took to Twitter on Tuesday to blast Republican pollster Frank Luntz for his profanity-laced tirade against the presidential candidate.
“Pathetic turd Frank Luntz begged @realDonaldTrump for corporate polling work - trashes Trump only after Trump declines,” Stone tweeted Tuesday afternoon.
Josh Marshall:
Ending birthright citizenship used to be an idea embraced on the far right of the House GOP caucus and bandied about by rightwing policy wonks. Trump has now not only made it a signature of his campaign. He's also pulling all the other candidates along with him. Now Bobby Jindal, Lindsey Graham, Scott Walker and others have all joined him. (Here's a good run-down of the list and what it means.)
It is difficult to convey just how mammoth a change this would be or how bad an idea it is. "Birthright citizenship" is at the core of the post-Civil War concept of American citizenship and the whole framework of rights and governance built around it. It's written into the 14th Amendment! It's what prevents us from having intergenerational resident non-citizen populations like they do in Germany and so many other countries.
Just as a practical matter it seems highly, highly unlikely anyone could pull that off since amending the Constitution is so difficult. On the other hand, conservative legal writers and polemicists are now saying you can just interpret the constitution differently and get rid of birthright citizenship that way. At National Review Online Andrew McCarthy crows that it's "not hard to read the 14th Amendment as not requiring birthright citizenship." Funny - except when you realize that in recent years it's usually only taken a couple years for plainly ridiculous far right legal theories to jump from the blogosphere to at least four votes on the Supreme Court.
In any case, that's not all!
Amber Phillips' Iran Senate whip count:
Current state of play
(Updated 3:46 p.m. on Aug. 19)
Yes or leaning yes (34 needed to uphold veto, keep the deal): 31
No or leaning no (67 needed to override veto, kill the deal): 57
Unknown/unclear: 12
Obama is going to win this one. Netanyahu and AIPAC are going to lose, and lose their bipartisan standing in the US to boot. Brilliant move.
Mark Blumenthal:
Many have predicted that Trump's summer surge will fade at some point, and past history shows that leaders in primary polls conducted a year before an election often end up losing their party nods.
But let's set those predictions aside for the moment. What if Trump holds his current 25 percent support from Republicans nationwide? That number is obviously enough to put him ahead in a field of 17 Republicans, and it may prove sufficient to win an early state contest should the field remain that large. But it is not nearly enough to secure a presidential nomination.
Here, Trump's frontrunner status hits a straightforward barrier: To become the nominee, a candidate must win the support of a majority of delegates to their party's convention. Twenty-five percent won't cut it.
Paul Waldman:
Now before the chants of “Clinton apologist!” begin, let me say that like many liberals, I have complicated feelings about Clinton, some positive and some not so positive. I’ve written many critical pieces about her in the past; I’ve even criticized her for setting up a private email server.
But we have to be clear about just what it is we’re looking for in this story.
Republicans are no doubt hoping that lurking somewhere in Clinton’s emails is evidence of a terrible crime she committed whose revelation will destroy her career forever and deliver the White House to the GOP for a generation. But just for the sake of argument, let’s assume that no such horror will be revealed. What do we have then? Well, we have the plainly foolish decision to use a private server for work email, which we’ve known about for months. Maybe you think that a person who would do such a thing is unfit for the presidency, or maybe you don’t (though that would disqualify Jeb Bush)....
The email story may not be the most ridiculous fake scandal in the history of the Clintons, because there’s a lot of competition for that title. As has often been the case, it was a poor decision Hillary Clinton made that got the scandal ball rolling. But there are only so many times you can ask “What is she hiding???” before you have to come up with something that she might actually be hiding.
Daily Beast:
Deez Nuts, the presidential candidate polling at 9 percent in North Carolina when pitted against Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, isn’t a real person. But Brady Olson, a 15-year-old who lives on a farm in Iowa and gamed the FEC filing system, certainly is.
Deez Nuts, the Independent candidate from Iowa, is polling at 9 percent in North Carolina for President of the United States.
Sadly, Deez Nuts does not appear to exist. But Brady Olson does.
“When I heard about the Limberbutt McCubbins story, I realized I could,” Olson tells The Daily Beast.