Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news media 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.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Robert E. Rubin: H.R. 1 and H.R. 4 would reform our democracy. They’d also help our economy.

Robert E. Rubin, co-chairman emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, was treasury secretary from 1995 to 1999.

H.R. 1, the For the People Act, and H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, are commonly framed as bills to reform our democracy. But they’re also key to our economic future.

For our country to succeed economically, our market-based system must function alongside strong, effective government. Strong, effective government, in turn, requires a functioning democratic process. By repairing our democracy, H.R. 1 and H.R. 4 could pave the way for policies that achieve the interdependent objectives of strong growth, widespread economic well-being and reduced inequality.

These bills are so important that if they can garner majority support, Senate rules should be changed so that they can be passed even without 60 votes.

Faith in democracy and faith in markets go hand in hand. People support pro-growth policies when they believe they will share in the benefits of growth. For these benefits to be widely shared, we need an inclusive growth policy agenda. This can be achieved only if elected officials feel accountable to the broader public. And there is broad accountability only if voting is widespread.

Heather Digby Parton: McConnell’s filibuster threats are already backfiring: Biden signals support for major Senate reform

Mitch McConnell has finally managed to get the Democrats to understand they have nothing to lose

Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., had been making a mockery of Senate norms for years as Majority Leader and he had made it quite clear those old-fashioned notions were no longer operative. There was a time when elected officials would express their support for a new president of the opposite party, wishing them success for the good of the country. McConnell broke that norm during Barack Obama’s first term when he openly admitted that he considered it his top priority to deny Obama a second term. He didn’t believe it was in his interest to accommodate or negotiate in good faith and instead began a campaign of total obstruction so that the president and his administration would fail and the Republicans would take back the White House. [..]

Needless to say, the Democrats are no longer under any illusion that McConnell and the Republicans operate in good faith, as they have demonstrated over and over again that they don’t. They pretend to negotiate in order to delay and then when they get Democrats to compromise they refuse to vote for the bill anyway. It’s no longer worth it for Democrats to waste time playing their game. So, they are now seriously discussing reforming the filibuster in order to pass some of their important priorities. If they don’t, the entire legislative agenda is dead in the water and they know it.

Even the recalcitrant centrists Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema have signaled that they are open to changing the rules to require a “talking filibuster” which would have several elements that make it very difficult for the minority to efficiently obstruct. (The Intercept’s Ryan Grim explains the various possible rule changes in his newsletter this week.) In an important shift, President Biden said on Tuesday that he too is open to the idea:

Amanda Marcotte: Trump can’t save vaccine hesitant Republicans: Fox News has turned the GOP into a death cult

It’s not just that Fox News wants the virus to defeat Biden — they really are turning viewers into a death cult

Tucker Carlson really wants his audience to die. The notorious Fox News host and primary mainstreamer of white nationalist views was at it again on Monday night, presenting the coronavirus vaccine as some kind of evil conspiracy and discouraging his audience from getting it.

“How effective is this coronavirus vaccine?” How necessary is it to take the vaccine?” Carlson asked, with his usual feigned expression of skepticism. [..]

The worst part about it is that Carlson is doing this while pretending to promote critical thinking. His infatuation with the idea of cults isn’t exactly subtle. He frequently does segments apologizing for or covering up for QAnon, even going so far as to encourage viewers to get involved. He’s clearly inspired by and learning from QAnon’s recruitment strategies, which involve instructing people to “do their research” and tricking them into believing that they’re engaging in critical thinking, when they are actually getting indoctrinated into a cult.

This is why the Biden administration is wise not to waste energy trying to get Donald Trump to do more to promote the vaccination. Not only is it useless to try to convince a sociopathic narcissist to do something to help others, but it would probably backfire anyway. As Luntz’s research shows, vaccine-hesitant Republicans would probably just assume Trump is being manipulated by the “deep state” and reject his advice anyway, especially if Fox News encouraged this view. That’s the beauty of mistaking paranoia for critical thinking — even the most beloved figureheads on the right can be easily reimagined as mere parrots for the all-powerful liberal elite.

Not all is hopeless, however.

Paul Waldman: State Republicans have found their first fight to pick with Biden

The covid relief bill says they can’t use state aid to cut taxes. They want to do it anyway.

When Barack Obama was president, Republican state attorneys general would brag about how often they sued him, which for many became a steppingstone to positions of greater glory. Now that another Democrat is in the White House, Republican-run states are already launching the first salvo in what will surely become a years-long war in which they regularly shout that their sovereignty has been assaulted by the tyrannical federal government.

The first legislative achievement of Joe Biden’s presidency — the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill — has now been greeted with the threat of a lawsuit by 21 attorneys general from Republican states.

In this case, though, they might actually have a point.

Their objection concerns the $350 billion the bill offers in aid to states, counties and cities to help rescue their budgets. In giving that money, the bill says states and localities can’t use that money to offset a tax cut, “either directly or indirectly.” While they can spend it on almost anything — schools, clinics, roads, libraries — they can’t use it to cut taxes.

Greg Sargent: What Republicans really mean when they blast the ‘border crisis’

Republicans have a very different view of what “success” at the border would really entail.

At a House hearing on Wednesday, Republicans repeatedly tried to bait Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas into admitting the border is in “crisis.”

Mayorkas wouldn’t take the bait. But one fraught exchange crystallized something essential about the debate over the influx of young migrants currently overwhelming our facilities.

It’s this: Republicans and Democrats have starkly different visions of what would count as successful management of what’s happening at the border.

For Republicans, success constitutes doing whatever it takes to vastly minimize the number of migrants who apply for asylum — and qualify, ending up living in the United States — even if those measures result in a humanitarian catastrophe outside our borders for the migrants themselves.

For Democrats, measures that result in such a catastrophe are unacceptable even if they would reduce migrant flows. So success cannot constitute reducing migrant flows that way. Instead, success constitutes reforming the system so that people can apply for asylum — and qualify where appropriate — in an orderly way, without the border itself turning into a humanitarian crisis.

Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news media 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.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Paul Krugman: The Pandemic and the Future City

Lessons from Alexander Hamilton and the book trade.

In 1957 Isaac Asimov published “The Naked Sun,” a science-fiction novel about a society in which people live on isolated estates, their needs provided by robots and they interact only by video. The plot hinges on the way this lack of face-to-face contact stunts and warps their personalities.

After a year in which those of us who could worked from home — albeit served by less fortunate humans rather than robots — that sounds about right. But how will we live once the pandemic subsides?

Of course, nobody really knows. But maybe our speculation can be informed by some historical parallels and models.

First, it seems safe to predict that we won’t fully return to the way we used to live and work.

A year of isolation has, in effect, provided remote work with a classic case of infant industry protection, a concept usually associated with international trade policy that was first systematically laid out by none other than Alexander Hamilton.

Eugene Robinson: Ron Johnson’s racism is breathtaking

Once, the party moved away from abhorrent views. Today’s GOP is going backward.

It has become perfectly acceptable in the Republican Party to just go ahead and say the racism out loud — and to do so with apparent pride, and with no fear of consequences.

The most recent proof came from Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who said last week that he “never felt threatened” by the overwhelmingly White crowd of insurrectionists that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, chanting, among other things, “Hang Mike Pence.” But, depending on who the protesters were, Johnson said, well, it might have been a different matter.

Johnson made the comments on conservative talk-radio host Joe Pagliarulo’s nationally syndicated show. “Now, had the tables been turned — Joe, this will get me in trouble — had the tables been turned and President Trump won the election and those were tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and antifa protesters, I might have been a little concerned.”

But Johnson described the White mob this way: “I knew those are people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break the law, so I wasn’t concerned.”

As anyone whose brain is not addled by white supremacy recalls, the rioters showed how much they “respect law enforcement,” with their actions leading to the death of one police officer who was defending the Capitol and the injury of some 140 others. One policeman was beaten with a pole bearing the American flag, which is a strange way for his attackers to demonstrate love of country.

Karen Tumulty: Cuomo deserves due process. He should quit trying to interfere with it.

If the governor and his allies have faith that an investigation will exonerate him, they can show it by backing off and letting the process play out.

Although it is hard to see anything positive as claims of sexual misconduct have mounted against New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D), the controversy seemed, at least for a while, to offer a test of whether the #MeToo movement has evolved to the point where due process is possible for those accused of wrongdoing.

Given the volume of allegations against Cuomo involving sexual harassment, and separate questions about whether his administration attempted to conceal the number of covid-19 deaths in New York nursing homes, whatever investigators turn up is not likely to be flattering. But the fact that a fact-finding inquiry is underway over the harassment claims itself breaks new ground. [..]

Cuomo’s best protection at the moment is the fact that an independent investigation is underway, overseen by New York Attorney General Letitia James and conducted by two lawyers that she chose. Separately, he is facing federal and state inquiries into what may have been efforts to cover up the number of covid-19 deaths that occurred in New York nursing homes.

Whether all of this amounts to grounds for removing him from office remains to be seen.

Michelle Goldberg: How the Left Made Cuomo Vulnerable

The governor tried to ruin the Working Families Party. It helped ruin him instead.

The Working Families Party doesn’t act as a spoiler, like the Green Party. It tries to push the Democratic Party leftward by backing progressives in Democratic primaries, while supporting Democrats in general election contests against Republicans. Because New York has what’s called fusion voting, progressives can vote for Democratic candidates on the Working Families ballot line, allowing the party to show its strength and maintain the threshold of votes required to stay on the ballot from year to year.

Cuomo has tried all sorts of things to kill the W.F.P. In 2014, he created the shell Women’s Equality Party to siphon votes from Working Families. Unions allied with Cuomo have left the W.F.P., threatening its funding; W.F.P. leaders believe Cuomo twisted their arms. The governor reportedly pressured Letitia James, New York’s attorney general and a longtime W.F.P. stalwart, to reject the party as a price of his support in her 2018 race. He maneuvered to end fusion voting — while denying that that was what he was doing — and used the state budget to triple the number of votes third parties need to keep their ballot lines. According to Politico, the governor has told people he wants to destroy the party.

Even allowing for his reputation as a vindictive control freak, I never fully understood the amount of energy Cuomo seemed to put into this vendetta. But it turns out he wasn’t being paranoid in seeing the W.F.P. as a threat. The 2018 victories of W.F.P.-backed state legislature candidates, part of that year’s blue wave, set the stage for Cuomo’s current crises.