Sen. Elizabeth Warren in April, 2015. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Primaries wrap up –> California, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Dakota and South Dakota hold primaries tomorrow, the last six states to do so. But the contests may not end the race: Sanders says he will take his campaign all the way to the July convention. At The New Yorker, John Cassidy assesses the state of play in California. It’s the big prize tomorrow, and Sanders and Clinton are polling neck-and-neck. The Los Angeles Times reports that “California’s voter rolls grew by almost 650,000 in the final six weeks of registration.”
Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton won in Puerto Rico over the weekend. Voters, especially Sanders supporters, complained that in some cases people waited hours to vote; this year, the number of polling places in Puerto Rico was cut from 1,510 to 455. Rebecca Savransky reports for The Hill.
If Warren is veep, what happens to the Senate? –> In a year when Democrats hope to flip the Senate back to their column, Minority Leader Harry Reid is trying to figure out the answer to that question. Matt Viser at The Boston Globe writes that Reid has been “actively reviewing Massachusetts rules for filling a US Senate vacancy, another indication of the seriousness with which Democrats are gaming out the possibility of Elizabeth Warren joining likely presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s ticket. The upshot of Reid’s review is that Senate Democrats may have found an avenue to block or at least narrow GOP Gov. Charlie Baker’s ability to name a temporary replacement and prevent the Senate from flipping to a Democratic majority if Warren were to leave the chamber. That suggests the issue is not as significant an obstacle as Reid previously feared.”
Another critic falls into line for Trump –> Former Romney strategist and proponent of the “Stop Trump” movement Alex Castellanos will work with the pro-Trump super PAC, Rebuilding America Now. Maggie Haberman and Ashley Parker at The New York Times: “Mr. Castellanos was blunt about what had changed for him. ‘My choice is now binary. Either I support her, or I support him,’ he said. ‘And the certainty of more of the same in Hillary Clinton is much more dangerous to this country than the uncertainty and disruptive change of Donald Trump.'”
Gunfire “a terrifying norm” –> The New York Times chronicled death over the Memorial Day weekend in Chicago, a city of 2.7 million with a murder rate greater than the far larger cities of Los Angeles and New York. Sixty-four people were shot over the holiday, six fatally, and Times reporters examined the background of each incident.
Step ahead –> Jess Staufenberg for the UK’s Independent: “Norway will ban the sale of all fossil fuel-based cars in the next decade, continuing its trend toward becoming one of the most ecologically progressive countries on the planet, according to reports. Politicians from both sides of the political spectrum have reportedly reached some concrete conclusions about 100 percent of Norwegian cars running on green energy by 2025.”
RIP –> The mighty Muhammad Ali died Friday at the age of 74. At The New York Times, Robert Lipsyte described him as “the most charismatic and controversial sports figure of the 20th century” and wrote, “If there was a supertitle to Ali’s operatic life, it was this: ‘I don’t have to be who you want me to be; I’m free to be who I want.’ He made that statement the morning after he won his first heavyweight title. It informed every aspect of his life, including the way he boxed.”
And: In a 2013 Moyers & Company interview, Dave Zirin, sports editor at The Nation, talked with Bill Moyers about Ali not only as an amazing athelete but also as a committed activist, saying, “You had these two titanic social movements in the 1960s, the struggle against the war in Vietnam and the African-American freedom struggle. And then here you have the most famous athlete on earth with one foot in both.”
“The more we learn, the less we know” –> We’ve known for a while that the universe is expanding. But Rachel Feltman at The Washington Post reports it’s doing so even faster than astrophysicists thought and no one quite understands why: “It’s a reminder of just how mysterious most of the universe is to us: Scientists estimate that some 95 percent of the cosmos is made up of substances like dark energy, dark matter and dark radiation — things we know only by the forces they exert on our galaxies.”
Morning Reads was written by John Light and edited by Michael Winship. See a story that you think should be included in Morning Reads? Tell us in the comments!
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