Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from> around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
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Roger Cohen: The Strange Persistent Troubling Russian Hang-Up of Donald Trump
So President Trump’s main concern at the border with Mexico is the supposed discovery of “prayer rugs.” Trump came into office as an anti-Muslim bigot; he is still an anti-Muslim bigot. In fact, he remains himself in every aspect, his miserable pettiness impervious to any glimmer of uplift through his office.
I will ignore the hermetic sealing of Trump’s personality against decency, and resist the temptation to riff on Abraham Lincoln’s brooding portrait in the White House dining room above the buffoon in chief with his burgers, to ask a simple question: If President Donald Trump is a Russian asset, what would he be working to achieve?
The central thrust of Russian foreign policy under President Vladimir Putin is the dismantlement of NATO. Putin seeks this in order to sever the trans-Atlantic bond between European powers and the United States that secured Western Europe against the Soviet Red Army, and still embodies the shared defense of democracy and freedom.
Tick that Russian box. Trump holds NATO in contempt, has discussed a United States withdrawal from it, and works to undermine it.
Bhaskar Sundkara: Martin Luther King was no prophet of unity. He was a radical
Martin Luther King Jr is useful to just about everyone nowadays. For President Donald Trump, celebrating King is a chance to tell everyone that he shares “his dream of equality, freedom, justice, and peace”. For Ram trucks, it’s a chance to, well, sell trucks.
This wasn’t always the case. In 1983, 15 years after King’s death, 22 senators voted against an official holiday honoring him on the third Monday in January. The North Carolina senator Jesse Helms undertook a 16-day filibuster of the bill, claiming that King’s “action-oriented Marxism” was “not compatible with the concepts of this country”. He was joined in his opposition by Senators John McCain, Orrin Hatch, and Chuck Grassley, among others.
Reagan reluctantly signed the legislation, all the while grumbling that he would have preferred “a day similar to Lincoln’s birthday, which is not technically a national holiday”.
And guess what? He had a reason to be hesitant. The real Martin Luther King Jr stood for a radical vision of equality, justice, and anti-militarism that rebelled against Reagan’s entire agenda. Today more than ever, we need to rediscover that champion of working people.
Robert Reich: The shutdown has exposed the disaster that is Trumponomics
One of the least talked-about consequences of the partial shutdown of the US government – courtesy of Donald “I’m proud to shut down the government” Trump – is its negative effect on the US economy.
Federal spending accounts for just over 20% of the total economy. When that spigot is turned halfway off, as it is now, demand for goods and services necessarily drops. The result is less investment and slower growth.
Right now some 800,000 government employees aren’t collecting paychecks. Nor are hundreds of thousands of government contractors being paid. None of them can buy as much as before.
It’s just another aspect of Trumponomics, which stands for the highly dubious proposition that prosperity comes from cutting taxes on corporations and the wealthy, while squeezing American workers – the people who do most of the buying.
Michael J. Glennon: If Trump is impeachable, so is Pence
Assume, hypothetically, that the upcoming report by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, together with other evidence, were to establish conclusively that candidate Donald Trump engaged in electoral fraud or corruption by unlawfully coordinating his activities with the Russian government. Assume also that Trump derived a decisive electoral benefit from that coordination. And assume that no probative evidence exists that Vice President Pence was aware of the coordination. Trump would be impeachable. But what about Pence, who himself would have committed no impeachable offense?
The question can be argued either way, but the better view is that Pence, too, would be impeachable. The reason is that, had Trump not engaged in electoral fraud and corruption, Pence, like Trump, would not have been elected. That Pence would still be first in the line of succession to replace Trump is the result of an unintended consequence of the 12th Amendment, which was ratified in 1804. The fate of the Republic ought not turn on a constitutional oversight.
Jennifer Rubin: Kamala Harris is in. She’ll be a formidable challenger.
Nearly five decades after Shirley Chisholm announced her run as the first African American woman to seek the Democratic nomination for president, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) declared her run for president with an appearance on ABC’s “Good Morning America” and a slick video: [..]
The Democratic presidential field is already crowded with two female senators (Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts), former San Antonio mayor Julián Castro and two lesser-known congressional representatives (John Delaney of Maryland and Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii) — and we’ve yet to hear from former vice president Joe Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Beto O’Rourke. The challenge for Harris and the others is to define themselves in a way that differentiates them from the others and simultaneously electrifies the base and presents a viable challenger to President Trump.