I have tried to stay away from the Mark Sanford story as best I could over the past week, but with the South Carolina Governor continually stepping in it, it's getting increasingly hard. Looking through the latest news, it's difficult to see how Sanford isn't done.

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford has backed out of a promise to release personal financial records to the media proving he did not use state money for trips to see his mistress.

Charles wrote, "Governor Sanford should resign not because he is having an affair but because he misled his staff as to his whereabouts and breached his duties." I think that's about right, particularly on the last point.

When this story was just about moral turpitude, it looked like Sanford was going to be able to survive. Though such news probably foreclosed the possibility that he could run for President in 2012, it did not implicate the type of broader legal issues that had forced previous politicians to step down as a result of sex scandals.

However, once Sanford dangled out in front of the press a promise to prove that he did not misuse state funds -- only to rescind the offer -- he made this story significantly bigger. Now the scandal is about a potential abuse of office, even if also an affair. The press isn't going to let this story go until they find out whether or not Sanford properly paid for the trips to see his paramour, and apparently even the South Carolina GOP is beginning to get antsy. So I think he's just about done.

The headline from Gallup yesterday reads: "More Americans See Democratic Party as 'Too Liberal'." Indeed, the proportion of Americans saying this has gone up from 39 percent to 46 percent in the last year, at the same time as the proportion of those saying the Democratic Party's views are "about right" has declined from 50 percent to 42 percent. Bad news for the Democrats, right? Not necessarily.

Leaving aside for another time the debate over whether being viewed as liberal is necessarily a bad thing in American politics (or at least as bad as it once might have been), it's worth noting that the Republicans have been seeing a very similar trend in recent years. Currently 43 percent of respondents say that the GOP is too conservative -- not too different from the proportion calling the Democrats too liberal -- a number that has consistently risen for the past six years. The proportion calling the Republicans' views "about right" is actually significantly lower than that of the Democrats, with just 34 percent saying so (down from 51 percent in 2003).

Even more importantly, however, are the views of Independents -- a group that now theoretically should be more Republican-leaning than it once was given the high number of former GOPers who have left their party in recent years. Among Independents, Gallup finds 38 percent calling the Democrats' views "about right" and just 25 percent calling the Republicans' views about right. Again, considering that a significant portion of those now calling themselves Independent were not long ago Republicans, this margin separating the views of the Democrats and the Republicans is quite striking. And in the zero-sum game that is a two-party political system, when one party isn't viewed tremendously well but the other is viewed significantly worse, the former generally has an advantage over the latter.

Norm Coleman concedes following unanimous Minnesota Supreme Court ruling favoring Al Franken. Congratulations Senator Al Franken.

Watch it:

Conservatives, and the few remaining neoconservatives specifically, have not liked Barack Obama's response to the situation in Iran, beseeching the President to take a stronger role in trying to undermine the Iranian regime under the assumption that American involvement would help rather than hinder the opposition. (They might want to go back and read Stephen Kinzer's "All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror" to get a sense of the how Iranians perceptions of American involvement in their internal politics changed when the U.S. helped overthrow the Democratic leader of the country more than a half century ago.) But almost as amazing as the strained logic used by those on the right to hit President Obama is the fact that the American people just aren't buying it.

More than eight in ten questioned in the CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll, released Monday, think the election results released by the Iranian government were a fraud, with just one in ten believing the results were accurate. But only three in ten respondents say they are personally outraged by the results, with another 55 percent upset by not outraged.

Most Americans approve of how President Obama's handled the situation. And 74 percent think the U.S. government should not directly intervene in the post-election crisis, with one out of four feeling that Washington should openly support the demonstrators who are protesting the election results.

[...]

Even though nearly eight in ten consider Iran a serious or moderate threat, the poll suggests that a vast majority of Americans, 82 percent, don't think the government should take military action against Iran.

Following the coverage of the administration's response to the situation in Iran, one might come away with the sense that the public is evenly divided, or at least closely divided, on the topic. Not so much. Though it may not bear out in the news, neoconservatism simply is not an ideology in which Americans put faith anymore. Instead, wide majorities of the country stand firmly along with Barack Obama in the more realist camp -- a group that includes more than a 4-in-5 majority opposing military action against Iran.

I had been hoping to put up some thoughts yesterday on the Supreme Court's decision in Ricci v. DeStefano (.pdf), the New Haven firefighters case, but the time got away from me. Here goes a somewhat belated write up.

A great deal has been written about the 5-4 decision overturning an appellate decision, of which Judge Sonia Sotomayor was a part, will not likely harm the nominee's path to the Supreme Court. That seems right. With Sotomayor coming to a conclusion reached also by the four liberal members of the Court, including Justice David Souter, whom she was nominated to replace, her position falls squarely within the mainstream of judicial thought. The outcome could have been worse, no doubt, had the four liberal Justices voted to remand, making what inherently is a 5-4 split on the issues look more like a 9-0 rejection of Sotomayor's position. In the end, it's hard to see how today's ruling doesn't help, rather than hurt, Sotomayor's already strong chances of being confirmed by the Senate.

But more fundamentally, the Ricci decision indicates yet again that the conservative majority on the Supreme Court is willing to make sweeping changes to the law -- and make no mistake, yesterday's decision fundamentally altered the state of Title VII work discrimination law (with the concurring opinion by Antonin Scalia going so far as to question the validity of "disparate impact" claims in which no intentional discrimination is proved yet there still remains severe disparities in the impact on minority employees) -- by the narrowest of 5-4 majorities.

It seems to me that fundamentally altering the state of law in this country by narrow ideological majorities does not serve to enhance or even maintain faith in the judiciary. At a time which the Supreme Court has held a disapproval rating north of 25 percent, and as high as 48 percent, for an entire decade, it might actually behoove the Court to either stick with precedent or to find wider majorities that don't look purely ideologically determined  when overturning or drastically narrowing established case law. To its credit, the Court has seen some wider majorities in major cases recently, most notably in the NAMUDNO case in which the Court rejected calls to overturn a key portion of the Voting Rights Act. Still, in its most high profile case of the term, the Court split as it often does -- with the five conservatives lining up to narrow rights, with the four liberals trying to preserve rights -- and that isn't likely to help rebuild the credibility of the Court in the eyes of many.

Via Matthew Yglesias comes a data point from the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll that stands out: The American public is strongly opposed to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade:

The Supreme Court legalized abortion 36 years ago in the ruling known as Roe versus Wade. If that case came before the court again, would you want Sotomayor to vote to (uphold) Roe versus Wade, or vote to (overturn) it?

Uphold: 60 percent
Overturn: 34 percent

Given the tendency of the Supreme Court under John Roberts to whittle away at precedent rather than directly overturn previous decisions, I don't believe it is particularly likely that the core of Roe is in danger just yet -- even if a meaningful right to choose for women is in jeopardy as a result of the strategy of limiting the bounds of the earlier precedent.

That all said, these numbers aren't tremendously surprising. Even as this is a country that respects life, and thus many self-identify as pro-life (for reference, how many countries are anti-life?), this remains a country that believes that women should have say over their bodies and reproductive systems. Indeed, Americans had the chance to bring about a potential end to Roe, either in a piecemeal manner seemingly preferred by the Chief Justice or through a more direct manner, by electing in John McCain a President who could appoint a fifth -- and perhaps sixth or seventh -- vote to overturn the 1973 decision. They didn't, of course. And they still voice the strong opinion that Roe should not be overturned. So regardless of how the numbers are twisted, it is fairly apparent that this remains a country committed to the notion that women have the right to make reproductive choices -- including the right to have an abortion.

I am always surprised (though perhaps I shouldn't be) at the establishment media's willingness to allow the Republicans to cast themselves as martyrs in the larger judicial confirmation battles, pinning the blame for any and all acrimony in the process on the Democrats. In The New York Times today there is yet another story along these lines, the basic premise of which is that conservatives are itching for a fight over Sonia Sotomayor because the Democrats showed an improper lack of reverence for Robert Bork, among others.

While The Times does manage to slip in one paragraph -- the fifteenth! -- to provide context for the story by way of reminding readers that the GOP shut down the judicial nomination process during the final six years of the administration of Bill Clinton, effectively blocking most of the President's choices for the bench, the general thrust of the piece appears to be that it's all the Democrats' fault.

But I have said it before and I'll say it again: The Republicans began this fight with the unprecedented filibuster of Abe Fortas, the sitting Associate Justice of the Supreme Court nominated by Lyndon Johnson to serve as the Chief Justice of the panel. This isn't to say that the Democrats' hands are clean in the process, because both sides have played hardball on confirmations in recent decades. Yet to suggest, as Republicans do and The Times appears willing to pass on without much context, that it's all the Democrats' fault is simply preposterous, and editors should know better than to pass on this drivel.