Vox Sentences: Obama sacrifices Merrick Garland on the altar of GOP intransigence

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

• 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]

• 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]

• 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]

• 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]

• (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]

• 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]

• 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]

• 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

• 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]

• 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]

• 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]

• That's not great, given that Brazil is in the middle of a very long and increasingly dire recession.

  [Washington Post]

• 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]

• 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]

• 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

• Hey, remember those elections last night? Here's how they went: well for Hillary Clinton, well for Donald Trump.

  [Vox / Dylan Matthews]

• 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]

• 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]

• ...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 ]

• 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]

• 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]

• 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]

• 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]

• Meet Vasily Klyukin, the Russian billionaire turned sci-fi novelist responsible for some of the worst unbuilt architecture ever sketched.

  [CityLab / Kriston Capps]

• 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]

• 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]

• "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]

• "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]

• "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]

• "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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