Romney Looks to Wisconsin Primary for Closure

A victory over Rick Santorum in Wisconsin on Tuesday would effectively close the first phase of the primary season, senior Republicans say. It would leave Mr. Romney with not only a commanding lead in the race for delegates, but also a claim to have fended off energetic challenges across a range of battleground states with a disciplined and well-financed campaign effort.

Mr. Romney and his aides continue to work behind the scenes to win support from respected voices in the party and prepare in earnest to take on Mr. Obama. The campaign will soon start raising money for the general election, donors said, as well as drastically expand its Boston headquarters and build state operations across the country.

The Romney campaign is also taking steps to infuse the organization with seasoned advisers, Republicans said, and intensifying its research of prospective running mates.

“There’s been plenty of opportunity for debates and discussion,” said Gov. Terry E. Branstad of Iowa, who is among the Republican leaders eager to unite the party and concentrate on trying to win the White House. “We need to acknowledge and recognize that nobody is perfect, but there is going to be a very clear choice with the present administration.”

Mr. Branstad, who has remained neutral in the race, is one of several governors and party officials who say a victory in Wisconsin — where Mr. Romney leads in the polls — would be the time for Republicans to rally behind Mr. Romney.

Reflecting the growing impatience, Steven J. Law, president of the largest outside group planning to support Republicans this fall, Crossroads, said on Saturday, “Clearly there is a sentiment out there that the time is coming soon to really turn our full attention to Obama.”

Predicting an “incredibly tough election,” he added that “every day that Republicans are focused on anything other than Obama’s record is a day wasted.”

Party elders are discussing ways to help characterize Mr. Romney as the presumptive nominee — perhaps by the end of April — well before he reaches the 1,144 delegates needed to win the nomination.

That effort was helped along by the billionaire casino executive Sheldon Adelson, who, after sending $15 million of his family’s fortune to the “super PAC” supporting Newt Gingrich, was quoted by The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles last week as saying Mr. Gingrich seemed to have reached “the end of his line.”

Mr. Adelson did so after telling a number of Romney financial supporters who were at his Las Vegas mansion for the opening dinner of the annual meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition that he was ready to do whatever he could to help Mr. Romney become president and to deliver the Senate to the Republicans. (The dinner was previously reported by the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit investigative news organization.)

An attendee of the private dinner said in an interview that the general sense there was “that the page had clearly been turned” and that it was time to focus on the general election.

Yet while Mr. Romney and his aides are said to be growing increasingly comfortable — allowing their fund-raising team to begin taking the legal steps necessary to raise money for a general election fund — they remain mindful that his rivals retain some chance, however small, of preventing him from gathering enough delegates for the nomination.

With Mr. Gingrich stepping aside from the daily combat of the race, Mr. Santorum remains the last real roadblock to Mr. Romney’s becoming the nominee. Mr. Santorum is waging a tenacious battle in Wisconsin, bluntly reminding Republicans to send a message that the party needs a stronger conservative candidate than Mr. Romney.

Speaking at a gathering of hundreds of evangelical Christians outside Milwaukee on Saturday, Mr. Santorum defiantly referred to a recent comment from a Romney adviser that he could win the delegate fight only through an “act of God,” saying, “I don’t know about you, but I believe in acts of God.”

But as he, Mr. Romney, Representative Ron Paul of Texas and even Mr. Gingrich were campaigning in Wisconsin, aides to Mr. Santorum said they were just as focused on the action behind closed doors in North Dakota and Washington, where state and county gatherings were being held to select delegates for the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla., in August.

Michael Biundo, Mr. Santorum’s campaign manager, said their team had always been anticipating a much better climate in May, when several states similar to those Mr. Santorum has won this year will vote. While the campaign remains confident about must-win Pennsylvania, which Mr. Santorum represented in Congress and which will vote on April 24, it is also quietly picking up support from as-yet-uncommitted delegates who do not believe that Mr. Romney is sufficiently conservative, Mr. Biundo said.

“The Romney campaign would love to close this out and take the ball home with them, because they know May is going to be a great month for us,” he said in an interview. “What happens on the ground and what happens in the national media are sometimes two different things.”

But since Mr. Romney’s victory in Illinois on March 20, numerous prominent figures have endorsed him and called for an end to the primary process.

The latest, Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, chairman of the House Budget Committee, had not planned to pick sides in the race before the primary. But on Friday he endorsed Mr. Romney and warned Republicans that they did not have the luxury of waiting until the party’s convention to unify. He said he was not troubled by a series of missteps that critics have used to suggest Mr. Romney is out of touch with voters. In the latest example, Mr. Romney joked last week about the time his father, as the head of American Motors, “closed the factory” in Michigan and moved jobs to Wisconsin.

“Whether a candidate has a gaffe on Tuesday or Thursday is not going to decide the campaign,” Mr. Ryan said in an interview. “Voters are looking for someone who will show them a contrasting vision to the one that Obama has given us.”

Even though 29 states have held their primaries and caucuses, only this week is Mr. Romney expected to pass the halfway mark to 1,144 delegates. According to an estimate by The Associated Press, Mr. Romney has 568.

A series of wins in the April primaries in states including Wisconsin and New York could greatly add to his tally.

“I don’t think he’s presumptive just yet, but I do think we’re near a tipping point,” said Ed Gillespie, a former Republican Party chairman and White House counselor to President George W. Bush who supports Mr. Romney. “April is pretty happy hunting ground for him, and he’s got some potentially significant delegate accumulation ahead.”

All the same, the protracted Republican primary season has paid dividends for Mr. Romney. At fund-raisers last week in California and Texas, donors said, he raised more money than he had initially expected. A swing through Dallas, Houston and San Antonio netted more than $2 million.

“It’s made people very willing to give — just to get on with the next stage of the race,” said Ray Washburne, a Dallas businessman and top fund-raiser who had dinner last week with Mr. Romney. “A lot of people who had been holding back are like, ‘We’re ready to go.’ ”

Jeremy W. Peters contributed reporting from Waukesha, Wis.

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Weighing When Slim Hopes Become G.O.P. Problem

As President Obama’s campaign fired a shot against Mr. Romney with a new ad campaign attacking him as cozy with “Big Oil” — and Mr. Romney took formal steps to raise general election funds — Mr. Santorum kicked off an intense new drive to wrest the party mantle away from Mr. Romney before he secures the nomination for good.

It was replete with the political equivalent of the nuclear option: A television commercial that morphed the face of President Obama into that of Mr. Romney.

Throughout the day Mr. Santorum slammed “the establishment” members of his party for trying to end the contest before all the voters had spoken, and he mocked Mr. Romney as a moderate “Massachusetts governor” — “There’s a conservative you can stand by,” he deadpanned — whose positions on social issues have been “all over the map.”

“With all the establishment and all the media singing this song, ‘Well, it’s over it’s, over it’s over,’ less than half the delegates have spoken,” he told a small but enthusiastic crowd gathered at a highway-side banquet space here. “We’re not even at halftime.”

Mr. Santorum and his aides may now openly acknowledge that his odds for the capturing the nomination look high, and that a victory here would be a long shot (it is assumed by both sides he will lose in Maryland and the District of Columbia, which also vote Tuesday). But they are digging in for another month of hard campaigning at least, a reminder that for all of Mr. Romney’s progress, an ideological rift remains that Mr. Santorum will exploit as long as he sees a path to win, even if by forcing an open convention.

And as long as he remains a threat, Mr. Romney’s campaign will be forced to keep attention and money focused on beating him back as much as on the larger task of defeating Mr. Obama, even as Mr. Obama’s campaign increasingly attacks him. Mr. Romney’s aides are plenty aware that while the likelihood that Mr. Santorum can block him from acquiring the 1,144 delegates may be small, it is not quite zero.

So for all of the talk about the Republican primary season coming to a conclusion, Mr. Santorum, Mr. Romney and their supportive outside groups are campaigning hard here, spending at least $4 million on television ads — most of it from the Romney side — something that is likely to be repeated in the coming weeks.

Keeping the pressure on Mr. Santorum as much as possible, Mr. Romney’s campaign has dispatched a traveling aide to forward an anti-Santorum message at his events here. The aide was asked to leave a Santorum appearance on Sunday, and did, but he attended the rally here Monday without complaint.

That continuing dynamic is boiling down to a vital question for a party burning to replace Mr. Obama: When does Mr. Santorum’s slim hope become the party’s big problem?

It is a question Mr. Romney’s campaign will press with increasing intensity through the coming weeks as it seeks to upset Mr. Santorum in his former home state of Pennsylvania on April 24 — and to pressure him into dropping out before he gets into what is presumably more favorable ground in May, when Southern states including Texas and North Carolina vote.

“I just think we can get to the counterproductive stage of this primary,” Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin said after a campaign event in Howard, Wis., where he appeared with Mr. Romney. Worrying aloud that the prolonged primary season would set back the party’s need to match Mr. Obama’s fund-raising for the fall, he added, “It’s in our interest as a party to focus on the fall and the sooner we do that the better we’re going to be.”

As if he heard Mr. Ryan’s admonitions, Mr. Santorum told reporters in Appleton, Wis., “People say going to the convention would be dangerous — no.”

“I would argue even if it ends up in a convention, that’s a positive thing for the Republican Party,” he said. “That’s a positive thing for activating and energizing our folks heading into this fall election. I think in this primary, the longer it goes the better it is for the party.”

A brokered convention, which he hopes to force, “would be energizing.”

Mr. Romney’s campaign was clearly annoyed by the new advertisement from Mr. Santorum, which includes a debunked assertion about his position on carbon emissions and a disputed claim about his tax record. “Senator Santorum is at a point of desperation that he will say or do anything,” it said in a statement. “It is pretty clear that he is lashing out at everyone around him in order to prop up his sinking campaign.”

The spot opens with a picture of Mr. Obama as a female narrator works through a series of policies he has presumably carried out: higher taxes, “big government mandating health care” and his support for “Wall Street bailouts” before revealing that it was not Obama she was talking about, but Mr. Romney.

Hogan Gidley, a Santorum spokesman, said that the advertisement was running statewide in Wisconsin as the race there neared its end and that it was to be used in Pennsylvania, as well.

Voters supportive of Mr. Romney said they were getting nervous that the damage was piling up. “He should stop,” said Jim Knutson, 82, a retired insurance salesman who attended Mr. Romney’s town hall-style meeting in Howard. “He’s not helping the cause.”

But for now, at least, Mr. Santorum’s core voters do not seem to be losing their enthusiasm, with some saying it is Mr. Romney who should give up.

“I say he should hang it up,” a Santorum supporter in Green Bay, Wis., Joe Draves, 35, said of Mr. Romney. “Santorum is the candidate of conservatives.”

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Mitt Romney Wins Maryland, Tightening Grip on Nomination

Eric Thayer for The New York TimesMitt Romney attended a primary-night rally in Milwaukee, Wis.

MILWAUKEE — Mitt Romney tightened his grip on the Republican nomination on Tuesday with a sweep of the primaries in Wisconsin, Maryland and the District of Columbia, and found himself in his first direct engagement with President Obama, an unmistakable signal that the general election would not wait for internal Republican politics.

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Mitt Romney campaigned with Representative Paul D. Ryan on Tuesday at a sandwich shop in Waukesha, Wis.

Mr. Romney emerged from the evening with substantial gains in delegates and a growing perception that he was winning over previously reluctant elements of the party. In winning the main battleground of Wisconsin, Mr. Romney led among strong Tea Party supporters and ran closely with Rick Santorum among those who consider themselves to be very conservative and among evangelical Christians, according to exit polls.  

Mr. Santorum, who at one point led in polls here, said he would continue to compete for voters who “have yet to be heard” in the coming primaries, starting with his home state, Pennsylvania, on April 24.

But the day was in some respects the start of the general election. Mr. Obama for the first time singled Mr. Romney out by name, during a major address dedicated to the budget championed by Mr. Romney’s marquee endorser in Wisconsin — Representative Paul D. Ryan — which the president called “social Darwinism.”

“He said that he’s ‘very supportive’ of this new budget,” Mr. Obama said of Mr. Romney while speaking at a meeting of editors and reporters in Washington. Using a mocking tone, and referring obliquely to perceptions of his potential opponent’s elite pedigree, Mr. Obama added, “And he even called it ‘marvelous,’ which is a word you don’t often hear when it comes to describing a budget; it’s a word you don’t hear generally.”

Taking the stage to declare victory in downtown Milwaukee, Mr. Romney took his turn to strike general election themes. “President Obama thinks he’s doing a good job — I’m not kidding,” Mr. Romney said, speaking with a huge American flag behind him and an excited hall of supporters in front of him. “It’s enough to make you think that years of flying around on Air Force One, surrounded by an adoring staff of true believers telling you that you’re great and you’re doing a great job, it’s enough to make you think that you might  become a little out of touch.”

Even as he assailed Mr. Obama as presiding over a “government-centered society,” Mr. Romney spoke in upbeat, elevated and optimistic tones that were steeped in themes of patriotism fashioned for a general election.

“The dreamers can dream a little bigger, the help wanted signs can be dusted off, and we can start again,” Mr. Romney said. “And this time we’ll get it right.”

Mr. Obama’s new focus on Mr. Romney represents a sudden but much-thought-out shift.

The White House had been content until now to watch the Republican race unfold on its own, and let Mr. Santorum and Mr. Romney batter each other without its help.

But as Mr. Romney has started to solidify his delegate lead, unify his party and repair the damage to his favorability ratings from these past few months of hard campaigning, Mr. Obama’s aides decided to take their engagement to a new level on Tuesday.

The president will not directly confront Mr. Romney every day, aides said. That responsibility will largely be left to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the re-election campaign.

But the frequency of the television advertising is increasing, an intentional strategy of the Obama campaign to deny Mr. Romney a moment to rebuild from his long and bruising primary fight.

The Democrats have conducted extensive research on Mr. Romney, his positions and the early perceptions that voters may have of him. A key finding of polling and other surveys, advisers say, is that Mr. Romney remains undefined to a wide universe of people, a void that the Obama campaign is eager to fill while Mr. Romney is still trying to secure the nomination.

The president’s re-election team was initially planning to start directly confronting the likely Republican nominee in February — the week after Mr. Romney won the Florida primary — but the rapid rise of Mr. Santorum delayed the need for that effort.

Now, advisers to Mr. Obama say they are intent on keeping the arguments from the Republican race fresh in the minds of voters, including those who were not closely following the primary.

Mr. Obama, as he spoke about income disparity in America on Tuesday, outlined what his campaign hopes to make a central question of the presidential race: Should voters trust Mr. Romney, one of the wealthiest candidates in modern times, to be fair to them?

Ashley Parker contributed reporting from Milwaukee, and Mark Landler from Washington.

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In Wisconsin Polls, Hints at Leanings for November

In Tuesday’s Republican primary, voters chose the economy as more important than social issues and the ability to defeat President Obama as the top qualification in a candidate.

And as the Republican nominating process begins to wend its way into the general election race, about 8 in 10 Wisconsin voters said they thought Mr. Romney would be the party’s standard-bearer, according to preliminary exit poll results. Even Rick Santorum’s supporters do not see a bright future for their candidate — a little more than a fourth expected their candidate to win.

As to whether Mr. Romney can draw out the Republican base in the fall, the jury is still out. Most Wisconsin voters said they were just fine with Mr. Romney as the nominee, while nearly 6 in 10 Santorum supporters said they would be dissatisfied.

Though Wisconsin has long been proud of its progressive streaks, recent political upheavals — like the influence of the Tea Party movement that propelled Scott Walker, a Republican, into the governor’s seat two years ago — have shifted the landscape. The Republican primary vote was split on Tuesday, with nearly 60 percent saying they belonged to the party, about 30 percent identifying as independents and about 1 in 10 as Democrats (who largely voted for Mr. Santorum).

A little more than half said they supported the Tea Party, nearly the same number as other Midwestern states. Mr. Romney won among Tea Party supporters in Wisconsin, a group he has often lost to — or split with — Mr. Santorum.

Over all, the state provided friendlier demographic terrain for Mr. Romney than Southern states that have voted so far, with fewer very conservative voters and evangelical Christians. Maryland’s composition was similar among these groups, with Mr. Romney winning all segments except for dividing evangelical Christians, very conservative voters and younger voters with Mr. Santorum.

About 3 in 10 said they were “very conservative,” and about the same number identified as “somewhat conservative.” Nearly 4 in 10 said they were moderate or liberal. None of these have shifted appreciably since the 2008 primary. Mr. Romney won all these groups in Tuesday’s election, except for splitting the very conservative voters with Mr. Santorum, a group that was especially troublesome for Mr. Romney in the Southern states.

A little less than half of Wisconsin voters said Mr. Romney’s positions were not conservative enough, but more than a third were comfortable with his views. About 3 in 10 voters said Mr. Santorum’s positions were too conservative, while about 4 in 10 said they were about right.

In 2008, nearly 4 in 10 voters considered themselves born-again or evangelical Christians, and they overwhelmingly supported Mike Huckabee. This year, about the same number said they were evangelical, and they divided their vote between Mr. Romney and Mr. Santorum.

The Republican primary has largely been eclipsed by more local political matters in Wisconsin, with Mr. Walker becoming the state’s first governor to face a recall election, set for June. A recent NBC News/Marist poll found that a majority of likely Republican voters said that they were watching the recall election more closely than the presidential primary.

Since his election, Governor Walker has become a lightning rod for his attempts to fix the state’s budget through reducing state employee benefits and collective bargaining rights.

Tuesday’s exit poll in Wisconsin showed that Republican primary voters overwhelmingly — by about 8 in 10 — approve of Mr. Walker’s job as governor. The NBC/Marist poll found approval for Mr. Walker evenly split.

Between the recall election and the presidential race, both parties will be trying to divine whether Wisconsin’s electorate looks more like 2008 or 2010.

Though voters supported Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, Democratic candidates have won the state ever since. Al Gore and Senator John Kerry claimed extremely tight victories of less than 1 percentage point. In 2008, Barack Obama won by 14 points over John McCain. But in 2010, Mr. Walker won the governorship by 6 percentage points, largely carried by voters’ disapproval of the Obama administration and a wave of Tea Party enthusiasm.

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Tax Fantasy

Congressman Paul Ryan, the author of the House Republican budget, is not the first politician to go long on promises and short on details. But his budget, which passed the House last week with no Democratic votes, takes untruth in taxes to a new level.

Mr. Ryan claims that he can drastically cut income tax rates without adding to the deficit, but he hasn’t specified how he would make up the lost revenue, an estimated $4.6 trillion over 10 years. Instead, he has said he would end or reduce unnamed deductions, exemptions and loopholes and defended this dodge by saying that he first wants to build consensus for the concept of pairing lower rates with fewer write-offs. That’s already a mainstay of many tax reform plans.

The problem is that politicians’ most cherished constituencies are big recipients of the most cherished tax breaks — including the exclusion for employer-provided health insurance; deductions for mortgage interest, state and local taxes and charitable donations; tax deferral for retirement savings; and special low taxes on investment income. With some 70 percent of an annual $1.1 trillion in tax breaks flowing to the top 20 percent of taxpayers, and 20 percent going to the middle rung, politicians are loath to champion the end of specific tax breaks.

Another problem is that ending tax breaks would not end the need for government to help with many of the activities subsidized by the tax code, like employee health insurance and retirement savings. Tax subsidies may not be the most efficient or fairest way to support social and economic goals, but there is a need for public efforts to help achieve many of their aims.

The question is how much can reasonably be saved by ending or reducing tax breaks. A new analysis by the Congressional Research Service puts the savings at $100 billion to $150 billion a year. The aggressive deficit reduction plan by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington-based think tank, would generate $3.5 trillion in savings to 2020. A proposal by President Obama, scorned by Republicans, would raise $584 billion in 10 years by capping deductions for high-income taxpayers.

The upshot is that Mr. Ryan will never come up with a workable way to pay for his $4.6 trillion tax cut. And even if he found substantial offsets, it would be obscene to use the money to lower tax rates for rich taxpayers when the nation is starved for investment in jobs, education and infrastructure. What’s needed is a realistic approach, starting with letting the high-end Bush era tax cuts expire at the end of this year and closing blatant loopholes, including the unconscionably low tax rate for private equity partners. Raising taxes on the rich is not a cure-all, but there will never be consensus for broad reform without first ending the lavish tax breaks at the top. Realism also requires new tax sources, including a financial transactions tax. But being realistic is not Mr. Ryan’s style.

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Pink Slime Economics

But we should not allow events in the court to completely overshadow another, almost equally disturbing spectacle. For on Thursday Republicans in the House of Representatives passed what was surely the most fraudulent budget in American history.

And when I say fraudulent, I mean just that. The trouble with the budget devised by Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, isn’t just its almost inconceivably cruel priorities, the way it slashes taxes for corporations and the rich while drastically cutting food and medical aid to the needy. Even aside from all that, the Ryan budget purports to reduce the deficit — but the alleged deficit reduction depends on the completely unsupported assertion that trillions of dollars in revenue can be found by closing tax loopholes.

And we’re talking about a lot of loophole-closing. As Howard Gleckman of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center points out, to make his numbers work Mr. Ryan would, by 2022, have to close enough loopholes to yield an extra $700 billion in revenue every year. That’s a lot of money, even in an economy as big as ours. So which specific loopholes has Mr. Ryan, who issued a 98-page manifesto on behalf of his budget, said he would close?

None. Not one. He has, however, categorically ruled out any move to close the major loophole that benefits the rich, namely the ultra-low tax rates on income from capital. (That’s the loophole that lets Mitt Romney pay only 14 percent of his income in taxes, a lower tax rate than that faced by many middle-class families.)

So what are we to make of this proposal? Mr. Gleckman calls it a “mystery meat budget,” but he’s being unfair to mystery meat. The truth is that the filler modern food manufacturers add to their products may be disgusting — think pink slime — but it nonetheless has nutritional value. Mr. Ryan’s empty promises don’t. You should think of those promises, instead, as a kind of throwback to the 19th century, when unregulated corporations bulked out their bread with plaster of paris and flavored their beer with sulfuric acid.

Come to think of it, that’s precisely the policy era Mr. Ryan and his colleagues are trying to bring back.

So the Ryan budget is a fraud; Mr. Ryan talks loudly about the evils of debt and deficits, but his plan would actually make the deficit bigger even as it inflicted huge pain in the name of deficit reduction. But is his budget really the most fraudulent in American history? Yes, it is.

To be sure, we’ve had irresponsible and/or deceptive budgets in the past. Ronald Reagan’s budgets relied on voodoo, on the claim that cutting taxes on the rich would somehow lead to an explosion of economic growth. George W. Bush’s budget officials liked to play bait and switch, low-balling the cost of tax cuts by pretending that they were only temporary, then demanding that they be made permanent. But has any major political figure ever premised his entire fiscal platform not just on totally implausible spending projections but on claims that he has a secret plan to raise trillions of dollars in revenue, a plan that he refuses to share with the public?

What’s going on here? The answer, presumably, is that this is what happens when extremists gain complete control of a party’s discourse: all the rules get thrown out the window. Indeed, the hard right’s grip on the G.O.P. is now so strong that the party is sticking with Mr. Ryan even though it’s paying a significant political price for his assault on Medicare.

Now, the House Republican budget isn’t about to become law as long as President Obama is sitting in the White House. But it has been endorsed by Mr. Romney. And even if Mr. Obama is reelected, the fraudulence of this budget has important implications for future political negotiations.

Bear in mind that the Obama administration spent much of 2011 trying to negotiate a so-called Grand Bargain with Republicans, a bipartisan plan for deficit reduction over the long term. Those negotiations ended up breaking down, and a minor journalistic industry has emerged as reporters try to figure out how the breakdown occurred and who was responsible.

But what we learn from the latest Republican budget is that the whole pursuit of a Grand Bargain was a waste of time and political capital. For a lasting budget deal can only work if both parties can be counted on to be both responsible and honest — and House Republicans have just demonstrated, as clearly as anyone could wish, that they are neither.

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Men in Black

How dare President Obama brush back the Supreme Court like that?

Has this former constitutional law instructor no respect for our venerable system of checks and balances?

Nah. And why should he?

This court, cosseted behind white marble pillars, out of reach of TV, accountable to no one once they give the last word, is well on its way to becoming one of the most divisive in modern American history.

It has squandered even the semi-illusion that it is the unbiased, honest guardian of the Constitution. It is run by hacks dressed up in black robes.

All the fancy diplomas of the conservative majority cannot disguise the fact that its reasoning on the most important decisions affecting Americans seems shaped more by a political handbook than a legal brief.

President Obama never should have waded into the health care thicket back when the economy was teetering. He should have listened to David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel and not Michelle.

His failure from the start to sell his plan or even explain it is bizarre and self-destructive. And certainly he needs a more persuasive solicitor general.

Still, it was stunning to hear Antonin Scalia talking like a Senate whip during oral arguments last week on the constitutionality of the health care law. He mused on how hard it would be to get 60 votes to repeal parts of the act, explaining why the court may just throw out the whole thing. And, sounding like a campaign’s oppo-research guy, he batted around politically charged terms like “Cornhusker Kickback,” referring to a sweetheart deal that isn’t even in the law.

If he’s so brilliant, why is he drawing a risible parallel between buying health care and buying broccoli?

The justices want to be above it all, beyond reproach or criticism. But why should they be?

In 2000, the Republican majority put aside its professed disdain of judicial activism and helped to purloin the election for W., who went on to heedlessly invade Iraq and callously ignore Katrina.

As Anthony Lewis wrote in The Times back then, “Deciding a case of this magnitude with such disregard for reason invites people to treat the court’s aura of reason as an illusion.”

The 2010 House takeover by Republicans and the G.O.P. presidential primary have shown what a fiasco the Citizens United decision is, with self-interested sugar daddies and wealthy cronies overwhelming the democratic process.

On Monday, the court astoundingly ruled — 5 Republican appointees to 4 Democratic appointees — to give police carte blanche on strip-searches, even for minor offenses such as driving without a license or violating a leash law. Justice Stephen Breyer’s warning that wholesale strip-searches were “a serious affront to human dignity and to individual privacy” fell on deaf ears. So much for the conservatives’ obsession with “liberty.”

The Supreme Court mirrors the setup on Fox News: There are liberals who make arguments, but they are weak foils, relegated to the background and trying to get in a few words before the commercials.

Just as in the Senate’s shameful Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings, the liberals on the court focus on process and the conservatives focus on results. John Roberts Jr.’s benign beige facade is deceiving; he’s a crimson partisan, simply more cloaked than the ideologically rigid and often venomous Scalia.

Just as Scalia voted to bypass that little thing called democracy and crown W. president, so he expressed ennui at the idea that, even if parts of the health care law are struck down, some provisions could be saved: “You really want us to go through these 2,700 pages?” he asked, adding: “Is this not totally unrealistic?”

Inexplicably mute 20 years after he lied his way onto the court, Clarence Thomas didn’t ask a single question during oral arguments for one of the biggest cases in the court’s history.

When the Supreme Court building across from the Capitol opened in 1935, the architect, Cass Gilbert, played up the pomp, wanting to reflect the court’s role as the national ideal of justice.

With conservatives on that court trying to block F.D.R., and with Roosevelt prepared to pack the court, the New Yorker columnist Howard Brubaker noted that the new citadel had “fine big windows to throw the New Deal out of.”

Now conservative justices may throw Obama’s hard-won law out of those fine big windows. They’ve already been playing Twister, turning precedents into pretzels to achieve their political objective. In 2005, Scalia was endorsing a broad interpretation of the commerce clause and the necessary and proper clause, the clauses now coming under scrutiny from the majority, including the swing vote, Justice Anthony Kennedy. (Could the dream of expanded health care die at the hands of a Kennedy?)

Scalia, Roberts, Thomas and the insufferable Samuel Alito were nurtured in the conservative Federalist Society, which asserts that “it is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be.”

But it isn’t conservative to overturn a major law passed by Congress in the middle of an election. The majority’s political motives are as naked as a strip-search.

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