What the nomination of Merrick Garland says about Garland — and Obama; Brazil is getting crazy fast; remember how there were primaries yesterday?
Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.
TOP NEWS
This guy is your sacrificial SCOTUS lamb

Mark Wilson/Getty Images
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President Obama nominated DC Circuit Court Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court today. Republicans are almost certainly not going to confirm him.
[Vox / Dylan Matthews]
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Garland is an impeccable moderate. That's the point: Obama deliberately chose the nominee that would make Republican opposition look least justifiable.
[The Atlantic / Garrett Epps]
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SCOTUSBlog's Tom Goldstein took a pretty exhaustive look at Garland's long career on the bench back in 2010, when Garland was first considered for a Supreme Court seat. Goldstein's conclusion: Garland is mostly a moderate liberal, with a conservative streak on criminal justice stemming from his time as a prosecutor.
[SCOTUSBlog / Tom Goldstein]
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There are already two prosecutors on the bench. Garland also doesn't add diversity in his race, gender, law school (Harvard), or religion — which officially means he fails the diversity test set by his predecessor, Antonin Scalia, who was upset that there wasn't a single Protestant on the Court.
[FiveThirtyEight / Leah Libresco]
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(The New York Times tried to spin Garland's perspective as diverse because he comes from the Midwest. I (Dara) am from the Midwest and think that is ridiculous.)
[NYT / Sarah Almukhtar]
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But Garland's very standardness is what makes him hypothetically unobjectionable — the sort of judge that Orrin Hatch might say Obama ought to nominate but wouldn't. (Hatch did say that, just last week.)
[TPM / Allegra Kirkland]
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Is Obama's squeeze play paying off? Maybe. Several senators have agreed to meet with Garland. But some of them have already said they won't support his nomination before the election.
[TPM / Katherine Krueger]
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But it's worth taking this moment to contemplate: Barack Obama, faced with one of the last consequential decisions of his presidency, chose the path that would split the GOP rather than motivating his own party.
[Polyarchy / Lee Drutman]
Keep an eye on Brazil

Victor Moriyama/Getty Images
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You may recall that last week, Brazil's former prime minister was detained in the country's spiraling corruption scandal. Well, now he's been named President Dilma Rousseff's chief of staff.
[The Guardian / Bruce Douglas]
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Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known as Lula, is expected to take over policymaking. In the Wall Street Journal's words, he'll be president "in all but name."
[Wall Street Journal / Reed Johnson and Paulo Trevisani]
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That might not be great news for financial stability — the head of Brazil's central bank is rumored to be quitting in protest of Lula's return.
[Bloomberg / Filipe Pacheco, Paula Sambo, and Ney Hayashi Cruz]
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That's not great, given that Brazil is in the middle of a very long and increasingly dire recession.
[Washington Post]
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This isn't just about policy, though. By entering the government, Lula is effectively shielded from prosecution (he would have to be prosecuted by a special court, and trials there take years).
[NYT / Simon Romero]
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That sudden immunity is enraging to the growing number of anti-government protesters in Brazil — like the ones who held the biggest protest in the country's history on Sunday, as rumors of Lula's return began to circulate.
[The Guardian / Bruce Douglas]
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All of this is to say that things might be getting very crazy in Brazil very quickly. This is a story to keep an eye on this week.
[Andrew Downie via Twitter]
The primaries near their endgame

Angel Valentin/Getty Images
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Hey, remember those elections last night? Here's how they went: well for Hillary Clinton, well for Donald Trump.
[Vox / Dylan Matthews]
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Last night was bad for Bernie Sanders. His campaign maintains the calendar only gets easier from here. But the math is just too much to overcome: He can officially be counted as a long shot.
[Politico / Edward-Isaac Dovere]
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It's to the point where the relevant questions become: What Sanders will ask for in the party platform in exchange for dropping out? (A question whose answer Ryan Lizza hints at here)...
[New Yorker / Ryan Lizza]
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...and what Sanders supporters will do with all this energy they've harnessed. Matt Yglesias suggests turning their attention to down-ballot races.
[Vox / Matt Yglesias ]
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And after the primary defeats of local prosecutors in Chicago and Cleveland who'd come under fire for protecting police after shootings, that strategy might look mighty appealing.
[BuzzFeed News / Adam Serwer]
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On the Republican side, last night marked the long-awaited demise of the Marco Rubio campaign. Zack Beauchamp says if you're feeling sorry for Rubio, you shouldn't.
[Vox / Zack Beauchamp]
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Not that Ted Cruz or John Kasich have much of a chance either. This race is so over that when Donald Trump said he wouldn't debate next week, the debate got canceled.
[Washington Post / Callum Borchers]
MISCELLANEOUS
Sorry, closing apps on your phone doesn't actually make your battery last longer. [Wired / David Pierce]
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As you can see from this PBS video profile of a Donald Trump volunteer with prominent white supremacist tattoos, what's really driving his support is economic uncertainty.
[Gawker / Jordan Sargent]
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Meet Vasily Klyukin, the Russian billionaire turned sci-fi novelist responsible for some of the worst unbuilt architecture ever sketched.
[CityLab / Kriston Capps]
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New Hampshire could soon require judges to inform juries of their right to find defendants not guilty even when it's clear they committed the crime.
[Gavel to Gavel / Bill Rafferty]
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The final recording of "Strawberry Fields Forever" was made by literally splicing two very different versions of it together and seeing what happened.
[NY Mag / Dan Reilly]
VERBATIM
"I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things." [Donald Trump via Politico / Eliza Collins]
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"An earlier version of this article misspelled in one instance the name of a village in India where the family of Sri Srinivasan once lived. The village is Mela Thiruvenkatanathapuram, not Mela Thiruvenkanathapuram."
[NYT / Ellen Barry]
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"Making the rounds on social media today is an essay that then-student Jacques Derrida had written in English class entitled 'Shakespeare’s Idea of Kingship.' … 'In this essay you seem to be constantly on the verge of something interesting,' the unknown grader wrote, 'but, somewhat, you always fail to explain it clearly. A few paragraphs are indeed totally incomprehensible.'"
[Critical-Theory / Eugene Wolters]
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"Many relevant questions could be asked about a tweed suit for a horse, which, in this case, is a retired racehorse named Morestead. Does a horse need a suit? Does a horse like to wear a suit? Does the horse know that tweed is the fabric of choice at the Cheltenham Festival, which began Tuesday?"
[Washington Post / Karin Bruilliard]
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"The lesson, Wey quotes Wey as saying, is that 'perception matters more than facts or reality.'"
[Bloomberg Businessweek / Dune Lawrence]
WATCH THIS
The kiss cam, behind the scenes [YouTube / Phil Edwards, Joss Fong, and Joe Posner]

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