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For the Record: We'll see you in court?

Brett McGinness   | Paste BN

No prior political experience? Significant unfavorability among voters? Significant legal woes? None of these things will disqualify you from the presidency anymore. Hooray for democracy! Just as primaries and caucuses are winding down, class-action lawsuits and FBI investigations are heating up. And we thought there wouldn't be anything to talk about for the next six months ...

Laying down the law

Before the year is out, there's a chance that both major party nominees will wind up providing sworn testimony in a legal setting — Donald Trump in a lawsuit against Trump University, and Hillary Clinton in an ongoing FBI investigation into her private email server. It's not a sure thing, though ... we're putting the odds of both candidates testifying as worse than "Clinton names Bernie Sanders as her running mate," but better than "Trump names Jeb Bush as his running mate."

The Trump campaign got some good news Friday as the judge overseeing the Trump U case said the trial wouldn't begin until a few weeks after the general election. The class-action suit was brought by former students who say Trump didn't actually hand-pick the instructors, few instructors had significant experience buying and selling real estate, and the dining hall always ran out of flour tortillas way too early on Taco Tuesdays.

Clinton's camp, on the other hand, says the candidate is still waiting to hear from the FBI on the need for testimony from the Democratic front-runner. Bernie Sanders declared early that he was sick and tired of her damn emails, and her detractors never found the pantsuits-for-nuclear-launch-codes "smoking gun" email in the releases of her emails, but the Feds still censored some of the emails on the server as "top secret," withholding them from the mass email releases.

Apropos of nothing, did you know that both parties have a contingency plan for replacing nominees? Per Rule 9 of the GOP'S 2012 rules, they can hold a convention do-over in case there's a vacancy on the ticket due to "death, declination, or otherwise." Section 8 of the 2009 DNC bylaws gives the power to the 200 or so members of the Democratic National Committee. And we should point out that both sets of rules can be scrapped altogether and rewritten at the party conventions in July. Should be fun to see if the rules committees for either party make any changes to the removal/replacement procedure.

Matchmaker, matchmaker ...

Both front-runners have another few weeks to lock down their running mates before the July conventions, but the rumor mill is swirling (thanks in part to the fact that there's not much else to talk about right now).

Hillary's options are 1) to pick someone to the right of her, and hope to snag the #NeverTrump Republican vote, or 2) to pick someone to the left, and spark the interest of Bernie Sanders supporters. One possibility on the left is Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who got into a Twitter war with Donald over the weekend. Another option to bring aboard the Bernie Bros: Bernie Sanders. “I think that that is a hypothetical that will not happen.” Perhaps his mouth said "no," but his body language said "I have a lingering headache and I'm late for the train."

Then there's Trump. Conventional wisdom says he should pick a counterbalance, someone with a steady hand and decades of political experience, so we definitely can rule out anyone who fits those credentials. Trumpwatchers note that he loves going with gut feel, and also selecting people out of nowhere and drastically elevating their position -- he once picked a guy to be his head of security after watching him toss people out of a tennis match. One journalist thinks Trump already knows who his pick is going to be. We're gonna put two and two together here and say that if Donald was in your restaurant in the past month and you recommended he try the bacon-wrapped shrimp, you have a decent shot at being on his ticket.

They said it: Sunday talk show roundup

"Who made up that list? They didn't put me on there." —Former Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, CNN's State of the Union

Well, there's at least one person already lobbying for a spot on the Trump ticket.

"I'm three million votes ahead of Senator Sanders, nearly 300 pledged delegates ahead of him. He has to make his own mind up." —Hillary Clinton, CBS' Face the Nation

Translation: "It's making me look bad when you beat me 52 to 48, especially when you need 84% of the remaining vote ... come on, dude."

"It's not called the Conservative Party. This is called the Republican Party." -Donald Trump, ABC's This Week

Trump says he doesn't need Paul Ryan or the establishment to come on board, and apparently this is his party now, dammit.

More from the campaign trail

Ted Cruz: More sanctimonious than the Church Lady

Dana Carvey's "Church Lady" returns to SNL to offer her views on the presidential matchup "between a godless liberal Democrat and Hillary Clinton." Bonus points to SNL for retaining the voice of the late, great Phil Hartman for the lead-in.

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