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

Jill Filipovic: Amy Coney Barrett’s day one hearing was rank hypocrisy from start to finish

Republicans can’t pass a pandemic relief bill that Americans desperate need, but they can jam through a rightwing judge just days before the election

The first day of the Senate hearings to confirm Amy Coney Barrett to the supreme court was a disgrace and a sexist spectacle.

First was the simple fact that the hearings are being held at all. A pandemic continues to ravage the United States, having killed more than 210,000 people and devastating the American economy. Millions of Americans are out of work, struggling to pay the rent or the mortgage, worried about how they’re going to afford groceries. Republicans in the Senate can’t get it together to pass a pandemic relief bill that Americans desperately need, but they can demand that the judiciary committee convene, in person, to jam through a hardline right-wing judge just days before the presidential election concludes – and is presumably contested by a president who has already refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power. [..]

Republicans have said over and over that Barrett’s personal life, including her faith, should be off-limits. And yet they repeatedly raised her personal life, including her faith, as an asset. They seem to want to use what they claim is Barrett’s private life as both a sword and a shield: an argument in her favor, but one that cannot be refuted on its own terms or even questioned, because to do so would be to criticize her private convictions and impose a “religious test”.

It was rank hypocrisy from start to finish. It was also a deep show of disrespect to American women, who would like to be professionally evaluated on our qualifications – not our family size.

Amanda Marcotte: Why are Republicans obsessed with Amy Coney Barrett’s kids? To troll feminists

Anti-choicers argue women don’t “need” birth control or abortion — Barrett’s brood is meant as an illustration

Hey, folks, did you know that Amy Coney Barrett, Donald Trump’s nominee to fill Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat on the Supreme Court, has a lot of kids? [..]

Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, proving he’s not “pro-life” by going mask-free despite his COVID-19 diagnosis, raved about how Barrett was “the oldest of seven children” before having seven kids of her own, offering the opinion that maternal “responsibilities have undoubtedly helped you throughout life.”

Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa falsely declared that Democrats are “attacking you as a mom and a woman of faith.” (This is repeatedly claimed by Republicans, but I remain unaware of any Democrat who has attacked Barrett on either count.)

“I bet there’s many young women, like my own two daughters, who marvel at the balance that you’ve achieved between your personal and professional life,” said Sen. John Cornyn of Texas. That distinguished gentleman — now facing an unexpectedly tight re-election battle against Democrat MJ Hegar — failed to note that Barrett has a net worth of $2.6 million, a $200,000 salary as a professor at Notre Dame and a husband who is a partner at a prestigious law firm. So the answer would seem to be that Barrett’s family can afford to hire lots of child care while she pursues her professional goals.

And so on and so forth. Republicans were way more interested in Barrett’s accomplishments as a producer and adopter of children than in her legal résumé. Part of that is because Republicans would rather talk about anything other than Barrett’s legal record, since they don’t want the public to know about her opposition to the Affordable Care Act, her desire to end legal abortion and strip women of contraception access or her association with anti-LGBTQ groups.

Brice Covert: School Is (Whisper It) a Form of Child Care

And child care, at its best, fosters children’s development. So how did we come to treat them so differently?

This summer, as debate raged among lawmakers, school districts and parents about whether it was safe to send kids back to school, something strange happened in Howard County, Md.

The Howard County school system decided to remain remote for at least the first semester. But to help parents deal with the lack of in-person care for their children, the county offered elementary school students a spot in parks and recreation programs, which provide “support for virtual learning assignments” along with “work sessions” and “crafts, physical activities, and games” — activities not totally unlike, say, school.

Little mention was made of the adults who will supervise the children during this child care. There was no hand-wringing about classroom configurations or safety guidelines. The catch? Unlike regular public school, which is guaranteed and free, the spots were limited — and cost $219 each week for a full day. [..]

What is going on? Why would we endlessly debate the safety of putting children in classrooms, but put them in day care settings without anyone batting an eye — and certainly with no national debate?

In reality, there is no magical distinction that leaves children and adults immune to the coronavirus in a child care setting but not in a school. And yet throughout the pandemic we’ve operated as if there is.

Jamelle Bouie: Oh, Now You Believe in Norms

The G.O.P. blocked Obama and quick-pitched Amy Coney Barrett. Democrats must fight fire with fire.

Neither Joe Biden nor Kamala Harris has made a clear statement in favor of expanding the Supreme Court beyond its current size. But that hasn’t stopped conservatives and Republicans from denouncing — perhaps with a hint of fear — their as-yet unarticulated plan to do so.

Amazingly, this particular argument against expanding the Supreme Court hinges on preserving the norms of American democracy. Having torched those norms in pursuit of a conservative judiciary, Republicans want their opponents to play by the old rules, as if the game is theirs alone to shape. [..]

Of course, what’s good for the goose is also good for the gander. Once you reject the constraints imposed by norms in favor of an instrumentalism bound only by the text of the Constitution — an “originalist” politics, perhaps — you cannot then turn to those norms to protest an escalatory response or reprisal. Or rather you can, but no one has to take you seriously when you do.

The same Constitution that says Republicans can confirm Barrett weeks before the election, that allows them to retroactively impose a new and novel partisan requirement (same-party control of the Senate) on judicial confirmations, also says Congress can add as many seats to the Supreme Court as it wishes. It says Congress can strip the Supreme Court of its jurisdiction to hear certain kinds of cases. It says the judiciary is as subject to “checks and balances” as any other institution in American government and that the people through their elected officials have the right to discipline a court that works against their will.

Jennifer Finney Poyland: It’s Not Easy Being an Optimist in Maine

We have late-spring storms and high-stakes Senate races. But we also have lobster and Patty Griffin.

The optimist, according to an old joke, believes that this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears that the optimist is right.

Mainers are accustomed to second-guessing good news. Which is what you’d do, too, if you’d experienced enough late-season ice storms. This year, over 200,000 of us lost power in the wake of a furious blizzard. In April.

Maybe this is what gives so many Mainers a dark turn of mind. There’s a story about the time Mark Twain gave a reading at a bookstore near Bangor, to a crowd that mostly sat there in stony silence. Afterward, Twain heard a couple talking. The wife said, “I think he might have been the funniest person I’ve heard in my life.”

The husband replied, “I’ll tell ya, he was so funny, it was all I could to do keep from laughing.”

Maine voters aren’t laughing this fall. Everything feels too high-stakes. Our Senate race — Senator Susan Collins versus the Maine House speaker, Sara Gideon — might well decide whether the Democrats take back that chamber.

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: Mitch McConnell’s Mission of Misery

Why Senate Republicans won’t help Americans in need.

I keep seeing news reports saying that the Trump administration is “pivoting” on economic stimulus. But Donald Trump has been reversing positions so frequently that it looks less like a series of pivots than like a tailspin.

Over the course of just a week he went from demanding big stimulus, to calling off negotiations, to demanding big stimulus again, to calling for a small-scale deal using already allocated funds.

It would be funny if the human consequences weren’t so terrible. At this point the best guess is that for the next three-plus months — that is, until President Joe Biden takes office (highly likely, though not certain) with a Democratic Senate (more likely than not, but definitely not a sure thing) — there will be little or no aid for the millions of families, thousands of businesses and many state and local governments on the brink of disaster.

But why isn’t America getting the pandemic relief it so obviously needs? [..]

But even if Trump had any idea what he was doing, he would be paralyzed by the opposition of many, probably most Senate Republicans to any serious deal. They’re willing to cover for Trump’s unprecedented corruption; they’re apparently unbothered by his fondness for foreign dictators. But spending money to help Americans in distress? That’s where they draw the line.

Michelle Goldberg: Republicans’ Galling Bad Faith About the Supreme Court

It’s way too late for the right to pretend to care about civic norms.

Four years ago, when many Republicans believed that Hillary Clinton was about to be elected president, conservatives plotted to stop her from reshaping the Supreme Court.

“The Senate should decline to confirm any nominee, regardless of who is elected,” Michael Stokes Paulsen wrote in National Review. “More than that, it is time to shrink the size of the Supreme Court.” Paulsen proposed that Congress reduce the court to six justices, its original size. “It is entirely proper for Congress to adjust the size of the court either to check judicial power or to check executive appointments,” he wrote.

This was not, at the time, an outré position on the right. In October 2016, Senator Ted Cruz suggested that the Senate, which had refused to even consider Barack Obama’s nominee to fill Antonin Scalia’s seat, wouldn’t move on a Clinton nominee either, essentially reducing the court to eight judges. “There is certainly long historical precedent for a Supreme Court with fewer justices,” he said. Senator John McCain, now remembered as an icon of bipartisan institutionalism, said that if Republicans held the Senate, they might not let Hillary Clinton fill any Supreme Court seats, though he later tempered his stance.

Now, facing another presidential election that they expect to lose, Republicans are caterwauling about Democratic calls to expand the court. As they prepare to jam through Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, Republicans are shocked — shocked! — that Democrats would contemplate playing constitutional hardball just as Republicans do. If Democrats jettison the Senate filibuster and add judges to the Supreme Court, Senator Ben Sasse said on “Fox News Sunday,” they’d be “suicide bombing” American institutions.

Eugene Robinson: Republicans are trying to make court expansion a mortal sin. Don’t let them.

Biden and Harris shouldn’t have to answer a hypothetical question — or give up their options.

As Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation hearings begin and the 2020 presidential election enters its final stretches, Republicans are accusing Democrats of wanting to manipulate the size of the Supreme Court to achieve political ends. Let’s be clear about one thing, though: It is Republicans who have tried to warp the court’s dimensions in recent years. And they’re doing it again right now.

Whether Democrats would consider returning the favor at some point in the future is entirely hypothetical and depends on a host of unknowable variables. Joe Biden and Kamala D. Harris are right not to be baited into answering a question — “Will you or won’t you?” — that presently has no meaning.

Ask them again if and when Biden is president and Democrats control both houses of Congress. Then, and only then, will Biden’s view on expanding the number of Supreme Court justices be meaningful — because then, and only then, will court-packing be an actual possibility. [..]

The Constitution, which does not specify the number of seats on the court, allows all of the above. Republicans have tried to paint “court-packing” as an unthinkable horror, an unprecedented departure from norms and traditions. Having transformed itself from the Party of Lincoln into the Party of Trump, however, the GOP has no standing to lecture anyone about norms and traditions. And the fact is that a decision by Democrats to expand the court would be nothing more than a variation on the “court-warping” that Republicans would achieve with Barrett’s confirmation.

Paul Waldman: Republicans have seen the enemy: Democracy

The Supreme Court is the last bulwark of their minority rule, and they’re determined to keep it.

Brace yourself while I paint a picture of a nightmarish future. It’s one in which every American gets to vote without impediment or inconvenience. Where the presidential candidate who gets the most votes actually moves into the Oval Office. Where bills in Congress are debated and then voted on, the side with more votes prevails, then those laws take effect and the public can judge the results.

This is the terrifying political hellscape the Republican Party is determined to prevent. For a party with a dwindling base and a broadly unpopular agenda, there is no more profound threat than democracy.

In the first day of questioning in Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court, she gave no indication that she will be anything but an enthusiastic participant in their effort to hold it back.

Greg Sargent: Trump admits it: The intervention he desperately needs isn’t going to come

At his Florida rally, the president makes an inadvertent concession.

President Trump has been reliving the glory days of 2016 a lot lately.

At a rally in Florida on Monday night, Trump waxed nostalgic: “Did we win Florida last time? Was that beautiful?” He railed about “globalists” bleeding the country dry, robotically mimicking his last campaign’s closing argument as if playacting his way through 2016’s final surge. And he reminisced about the wrongness of the polls, predicting another major upset.

But there’s a crucial difference this time around, which is taking shape in a variety of ways: The sort of 11th-hour intervention that drove that glorious 2016 upset — something like those newly discovered Hillary Clinton emails — does not seem to be materializing.

And Trump appears to know it.

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

Scott Lemeiux: Republicans aren’t being honest about why Amy Coney Barrett has their support. They can’t be.

The rulings they hope — and fully expect — Trump’s Supreme Court nominee to make are so unpopular they have to pretend they don’t know she’ll make them.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has repeatedly suggested that the Senate will forgo passing an economic stimulus package in order to focus on the confirmation of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. Superficially, this makes little political sense: The public — Democrats, independents and some Republicans alike — would overwhelmingly prefer that the Senate focus on improving the economy and their response to Covid-19 rather than ramming through another arch-conservative judge.

So given the clear importance that McConnell and Trump have placed on confirming Barrett before the election over all other political priorities, one might then expect Republicans to shout to the rooftops the conservative constitutional positions Barrett is being put onto the court to advance. Instead, the GOP is largely denying that she holds or will advance Republican views on constitutional issues at all.

This reflects an obvious truth: Barrett’s views on many major issues are enormously unpopular and Republicans know it.

Robert Reich: Trump said he could kill and win – Covid and cheating may prove it

He said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose votes. Now 210,000 are dead and he’s scheming to keep power

“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters,” Donald Trump boasted in 2016. He thought his almost unlimited bravado, bombast and dominance of any situation allowed him to get away with figurative murder.

Since then, the president’s Fifth Avenue principle has been repeatedly tested – most notably by the Access Hollywood tape, Robert Mueller’s findings that Trump obstructed justice and his campaign aides cooperated with Russia, overt racism, quid pro quo to the president of Ukraine, and impeachment – yet some 40% of American voters have stuck by him notwithstanding.

That’s all he’s needed. And for reasons I’ll explain in a moment, he’s counting on them to preserve his presidency after 3 November. [..]

Trump’s Fifth Avenue principle has kept him in power for almost four years of death and mayhem that would have doomed the presidencies of anyone else. But as a former New Yorker he should know that Fifth Avenue ends at the Harlem River, at 142nd Street. The end is near.

Sydney Blumenthal: Lindsey Graham, reverse ferret: how John McCain’s spaniel became Trump’s poodle

On Monday, the senator who praised Hillary and helped get the Steele dossier to the FBI will preside over a hearing for Amy Coney Barrett, a nominee to tilt the supreme court right for years to come. His is a quintessential Washington tale

That Lindsey Graham would become Donald Trump’s poodle was not a tale (or tail) foretold. But it has landed him in the dogfight of his life for re-election to his Senate seat in South Carolina, challenged by a relentless and capable Democratic candidate, Jaime Harrison, who methodically chased Graham around the ring in their debate, repeatedly jabbing him as a hypocrite, until he struck him with a haymaker, ending the verbal fisticuffs with a TKO: “Be a man.”

Bruised and battered, Graham retreated to his corner, Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News, to beg: “I’m getting overwhelmed … help me, they’re killing me money-wise. Help me.”

Graham has climbed the greasy pole within the Senate, to a position that historically has been rewarded by his state with a lifetime tenure. He succeeded to the seat that Strom Thurmond held for 48 years before he died at 100. From Graham’s chairmanship of the Senate judiciary committee he has taken up the defense of Trump, to unmask the dastardly conspiracy of “Obamagate” and to handle the confirmation of a justice on the supreme court, to pack it with a conservative majority for a generation to come. But just at this consummate moment of his career, events have conspired to dissolve his facade and expose his flagrant hypocrisy. His presumed strength has turned into his vulnerability. Worse, in Washington, where the press has treated him for more than 20 years like the genial star of the comedy club, he has become an object of ridicule.

Arwa Mahdawi: Enough with militias. Let’s call them what they really are: domestic terrorists

This week the FBI announced charges in a plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer. Much of the coverage referred to them as a militia – and the governor wasn’t having it

The vocabulary of violence

Terrorists (noun): evil brown people.

Thugs (noun): violent black people.

Militia (noun): misunderstood white men. Groups of heavily armed individuals whose actions, while not exactly ideal, deserve compassion and should be looked at within a wider socioeconomic context. Instead of rushing to judgment or making generalisations, one must consider the complex causes (economic anxiety, video games, mental health issues) that have triggered these poor guys into committing mass murder, conspiring to violently overthrow the state or plotting to kidnap government officials. [..]

Much of the media coverage of Whitmer’s would-be kidnappers referred to them as members of a Michigan militia group called Wolverine Watchmen. The wolverine, by the way, isn’t just a Marvel character – it’s an animal that looks like a small bear but is actually part of the weasel family. This seems appropriate because “militia” is very much a weasel word. It’s a way to avoid putting white extremists in the same bucket as brown people. It lends them legitimacy. It obfuscates what these people really are.

Governor Whitmer, to her immense credit, was having none of it. “They’re not ‘militias’,” she tweeted on Friday morning. “They’re domestic terrorists endangering and intimidating their fellow Americans. Words matter.”

Sheldon Whitehouse: Trump is in debt. We can’t ignore the national security risks that come with that.

Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat, represents Rhode Island in the U.S. Senate.

They aren’t even trying to hide it: President Trump and Senate Republicans are desperately rushing to confirm Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court in time to rule on bogus election-administration disputes they have in the pipeline: Bush v. Gore 2.0.

Barrett has an obligation to recuse herself from those disputes, and she should promise to do just that.

Trump has made clear he wants Barrett in place to help him win the election. “I think this will end up in the Supreme Court,” he said. “We need nine justices.” Senate Republicans parrot the president. A Supreme Court with just eight justices, claimed Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.), “lacks the constitutional authority to decide anything.” That’s simply wrong.

The court holds the constitutional authority to decide cases with eight justices; it actually needs only six for a quorum. If the court happens to split 4 to 4, the lower court ruling would stand. Somehow, that prospect didn’t bother Republicans four years ago. They made sure we had only eight justices during the 2016 election when they stonewalled Merrick Garland’s nomination.

What has changed? Trump is watching voters turn out in droves, which is never a good thing for Republicans. So Republicans are out to suppress the vote at all costs — a strategy, the president believes, that will throw the election to a Supreme Court fixed to rule for him.

Republicans want to rush Barrett through in time to deliver what could be the key vote on behalf of the president who chose her.