Terrible news,

1. Michael Brendan Dougherty said it best when he wrote that it says something horrible about our country that we can imagine the nation’s legal transformation as the result of the death of one man.

2. Scalia’s death probably lends urgency to Rubio’s argument that Obama wants to transform America, etc.

3. Trump’s and (to a lesser extent) Cruz’s candidacies are about sending a message to an obdurate Republican governing class. My sense is that Scalia’s death will shift some fraction of Republican primary voters from prioritizing sending a message to Republican office holders to defeating the Democrats at all costs. I have no doubt that the mass of Republican office holders, consultants, and lobbyists are planning to use this argument in order to maintain business as usual. It doesn’t mean they are wrong.

4. This dynamic should benefit Rubio, but Rubio’s argument from electability only works if he starts winning elections very soon.

5. The cycle has already revealed severe fraying of the policy consensus within the center-right political coalition. If a Democrat is elected in November, and we get an aggressively liberal Supreme Court, the recriminations within the right (broadly defined) are going to be epic. They might also be productive – but it would not be worth the price.