"Sen. McConnell vows that the choice of a successor to Justice Scalia, given the historic and long-reaching nature of the choice, should be that of the new president, whoever he or she may be. This is brave and defiant talk; unfortunately brave Republican talk often dissolves under pressure. Sen. McConnell must buck up the courage of his troops when they hear the sound of the guns. Everything is riding on it."

"Justice Antonin Scalia, who died Saturday, was not just a conservative icon. He was also a great public servant and one of America's clearest legal thinkers. His opinions, dissents and questions in open court were full of his sharp wit and colorful expression. He was a great jurist and will be sorely missed. ...

"Scalia's pet peeve was the modern tendency to frame every perceived wrong as something that had to be unconstitutional. He believed that in constantly ascribing new and hidden rights to a document that did not contain them, justices were turning the Supreme Court into a super-legislature that dictated cultural norms, rather than a true judicial panel. ...

"The idea of a 'living' or 'evolving' Constitution repelled Scalia. In his view, it represented a backdoor way of letting unelected judges substitute their own values for those of the people who made the decisions to vote and ratify the Constitution and its amendments. 'The risk of assessing evolving standards,' he wrote in one dissent, 'is that it is all too easy to believe that evolution has culminated in one's own views.'"

"Guerrilla videographer James O'Keefe and his Project Veritas team have for years documented just how easy it is to commit voter fraud in states ranging from Minnesota to North Carolina. In 2012, his undercover exposes at the polls convinced the New Hampshire legislature to pass a bill mandating that voters show a government-issued ID -- even college ID cards are acceptable. If voters have no form of ID, they can sign an affidavit and still have their vote counted. The votes needed to approve the bill over the objections of then-governor John Lynch were provided by his fellow Democrats.

"This year's presidential primaries were the first in which the ID law was fully in effect, so O'Keefe returned to New Hampshire to see how it was working out. He didn't find the long lines and confusion predicted by liberal critics, but his undercover team found out just how easy it still is for non-residents to vote. He released a video documenting his findings.

"The video shows poll workers advising Project Veritas journalists how to skirt the rules in order to vote as non-residents. Bernie Sanders campaign staffers are shown encouraging undercover journalists to claim false addresses in order to vote in the primary. (No matter how easy the undercover journalists found it would be to cast an illegal ballot, they stopped short of actually doing so.)"

"President Barack Obama's former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) believes Hillary Clinton should drop out of the presidential race to clear the way for the probe of her private email server by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

"In an exclusive interview with The Daily Caller News Foundation, Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn (Ret.) said he thought the former Secretary of State should leave the Democratic presidential race: 'I think Hillary Clinton, for the good of the country, should step down and let this FBI investigation play out.' ...

"'This is unbelievable,' Flynn said. 'I don't think anybody should be talking about her being potentially the next President of the United States.'"

"The Supreme Court halted the EPA's major anti-global warming initiative late Tuesday evening, dealing a major blow to President Obama's hopes of overseeing a green energy transition in his final year in office.

"The 5-4 decision by the court puts the Environmental Protection Agency's regulation on hold while a lower appeals court hears states' challenge to the rules.

"More than two dozen states sued to stop the rules, which were intended to control greenhouse gas emissions from existing power plants. ...

"While Tuesday's stay isn't a ruling on the actual merits of the EPA's regulations, energy industry backers said it suggested a majority of the justices are skeptical of what Mr. Obama did."

"Watching last Thursday's debate between Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, one might have thought a Republican had been in the White House for nearly eight years.

"Hearing their complaints about the economy (bad), discrimination (rampant), health care (too many without it), unemployment (too many not working or working at low-paying jobs), it appeared hope had died and change is all we have left in our pockets.

"To hear these two ultra-liberals tell it, we are a horrible, miserable, evil nation. We are bigots, we are greedy because we won't surrender more of our income to the government gods, we hate anyone who isn't white, male and heterosexual, and we want to deport everyone who isn't a Christian.

"I wouldn't want to live in a country like that, would you? But that is not who we are. It is only who Democrats think we are."

"The Pentagon is ordering the top brass to incorporate climate change into virtually everything they do, from testing weapons to training troops to war planning to joint exercises with allies.

"A new directive's theme: The U.S. Armed Forces must show 'resilience' and beat back the threat based on 'actionable science.'

"It says the military will not be able to maintain effectiveness unless the directive is followed. It orders the establishment of a new layer of bureaucracy -- a wide array of 'climate change boards, councils and working groups' to infuse climate change into 'programs, plans and policies.'"

"As most of the political world has been focusing on the presidential race, Obamacare has gotten off to a rocky start in 2016. This could be a major drag on Democrats come November.

"On Thursday, the Department of Health and Human Services reported that fewer than 13 million individuals signed up for Obamacare plans for 2016. ...

"This is significantly lower than the 21 million individuals the Congressional Budget Office initially projected the law would signup in 2016, below the downwardly revised 13 million CBO projection, and effectively flat from a year ago. ...

"This means that for the months, weeks, and days leading up to the election, the Democratic presidential nominee and all of the party's Congressional candidates are going to have to contend with news of sky-rocketing rates coming from Obamacare as insurers struggle to make the business profitable. Considering that Republicans owe their current House and Senate majorities to Obamacare, this should be a scary thought for Democrats."

"During the Cold War, the Soviet Union funded 'peace movements' throughout the west - because for the Soviets 'peace' meant 'the absence of opposition'.

"In our time the new peace movement is Islam. And so we are told today, from the podium of a mosque with 'extremist' 'links', that the very word Islam means 'peace'. Actually, it means 'submission' - ie, the absence of opposition.

"The only difference between then and now is that instead of being chanted by scrofulous hippies protesting outside a Nato air base the old line's being peddled to us by the President of the United States. Odd."

"[W]e have a situation in which (a) Obama knowingly communicated with Clinton over a non-government, non-secure e-mail system; (b) Obama and Clinton almost certainly discussed matters that are automatically deemed classified under the president's own guidelines; and (c) at least one high-ranking government official (Petraeus) has been prosecuted because he failed to maintain the security of highly sensitive intelligence that included policy-related conversations with Obama. ...

"Law enforcement investigations are supposed to proceed independent of political considerations, but I'd wager few people believe the decision whether to indict Mrs. Clinton will be made by Attorney General Loretta Lynch alone. It will be the president's call. In making it, he may face a profound conflict of interest. A prosecution of Clinton might expose that Obama engaged in recklessness similar to Clinton's, albeit on a far smaller scale. Moreover, Clinton would likely argue in her defense that the president, who is ultimately responsible for safeguarding classified information, not only authorized Clinton to use private e-mail but knowingly used it himself in order to communicate with Clinton."