2016 Feb 19^th

The big news today is the tiff between Donald Trump and the Pope. (That sounds like the lead in for a SNL skit.) It seems that the Pope on his way home claimed that building walls to exclude people wasn’t Christian that Christians were to be inclusive and that wall builders weren’t Christian. Whopee! The commentariate grabbed at that like a starving dog grabs a bone. Trump jumped right in there too and said that the Pope had no right to comment on his religious beliefs. Of course the Pope, as far as I know, initially didn’t mention Donald Trump. His point, assuming an accurate translation, was that Christianity, and Christians, wish to be inclusive. Pushing for a wall to keep people out, a mainstay of Trumpism, doesn’t fit that very well so of course Trump took umbrage. This tempest in a teapot could have been avoided by suggesting that Trump’s wall building was not a Christian act but that Trump, himself, might still be a fine Christian gentleman. That would have been “inclusive” for the Pope.

Will Trump suffer at all from this joust with the Pope? That is most unlikely: Popes do not score well with evangelical Protestants, particularly southern evangelicals. Some even see the Pope as the anti-Christ. This particular Pope has been accused of being an interloper because the resignation letter from his predecessor had a mistake in its Latin wording. (The paranoia of humankind is surely genetic.) At least in South Carolina, which is to vote tomorrow, the Catholic population is just about 9 percent, so even if the Catholics in South Carolina swarm to the Pope’s defense against Trump it will be a meager swarm. (This percentage has been increasing recently due to an influx of Latinos.) Pope or no Pope, Trump seems to be slipping in South Carolina; he still leads Cruz, the evangelical’s favorite, but Cruz is closing fast. Perhaps Trump’s reference to the Host as eating his “… little cracker” is catching up with him.

Then we have the possibility of a recess appointment of a Justice to the Supreme Court. As the name implies, when the Senate is in recess, that is when they have not met for three consecutive days, they are officially in recess and the President can make an appointment to the court and the Senate can do nothing about it. The problem is that the Senate can choose to convene for just a couple of minutes very two plus days and thus never actually be in recess. It only takes a couple of Senators to pull this off. If they mess it up and really do let three days go by and the President makes an appointment the Senate can simply vote to terminate that appointment when they reconvene. They will, however have to vote on that appointee. If The President just sends a nomination to the Senate they can legally sit on that nomination as long as they like.

The Republicans are pinning their hopes on holding on to the Senate and winning the Presidency.  With Trump ascendant that’s a very long shot.