The Importance of Donald Trump

Until a valid birth certificate is submitted, along with all the other bare minimum variables/requirements validated, is there a valid president, or has this role been null and void the entire time? I wonder.

That's a reasonable strategy if turnout is fixed and you have a unimodal distribution of political views.

With, e.g., a bimodal distribution and turnout affected by enthusiasm, you actually want to pick a candidate as close as possible to the peak on your side of the distribution rather than a centrist.

While either of those models is ridiculously simplified, there is lots of reason to believe that the real distribution of political views and real electoral behavior is more like the second than the first.

And if its like the second but those on the far extreme, even if smaller than those near the local peak, have more extreme enthusiasm swings based on candidate suitability -- then it may make sense actually chose candidates more extreme than the near peak.

Not really. Obama's policies are a lot more like Clinton than either Bush (the closest thing to "right-wing presidents" on either side of 20 years ago) -- including doing some of the things the right-wing opposed Clinton's efforts to do or move toward (both domestically, like Health Care Reform, and in foreign policy, like normalizing relations with Cuba.)

> If Reagan or Eisenhower were running they today would be considered extremist left wing communists far too liberal to ever be elected.

Well, modern Republicans might see a candidate with their views that way, though Reagan was pretty significantly to the right of Obama, who manifestly is not "far too liberal to ever be elected".

It can; as noted in the article, it's been used in the '90s and '00s, as well as long ago, and for things much more fundamental than a right conjured by the Supremes from the "penumbras" and "emanations" ofother parts of the Constitution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griswold_v._Connecticut).

Note that ultimately the Supremes are just a group of 9 men and women (who e.g. all went to the Harvard or Yale Law Schools...). The President, Executive and the Congress can simply ignore them, impeach them, etc., they just can't cut their salaries ("The Judges ... shall, at stated Times, receive for their Services, a Compensation, which shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office.").

then, sure, it's curious why a Republican Congress would not start to take those two steps. For me, I don't know.

Curious indeed; I assume at 0th approximation that the majority of them, if not the vast majority, don't give a damn about what they were ostensibly elected to do.

Or perhaps prefer not being called bad names by the rest of the establishment for doing that, in which case we're a lot closer to understanding Trump's appeal.

In other words, the Supremes and lower Federal courts provide an important political function by allowing politicians in the other two branches of government to claim their hands are tied on a whole bunch of issues where they'd otherwise have to take a real stand and maybe afterwards have to spend more time with their families.

Typo correction: my 9th grade civics class was in 1975, not a few years before the death of William the Conqueror ^_^.

The only use listed in the '00s in the linked article was an attempted use which was (as identified in the article) unsuccessful, as it was itself struck down as a violation of habeas corpus.