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: Trump Is Abusing His Tariff Power, Too

More contempt for the rule of law.So here’s the story: Donald Trump has abused the powers of his office to threaten a U.S. ally. His threat is probably illegal; his refusal to produce documents about his decision process is definitely illegal. And his claims about the motivation for his actions don’t pass the laugh test.

You probably think that I’m talking about Trump’s attempt to pressure Ukraine into producing political dirt on Joe Biden by withholding aid, and the subsequent cover-up — you know, the stuff for which he has been impeached (and that half the country believes should lead to his removal from office). But there’s another, somewhat similar story: his repeated threats to impose prohibitive tariffs on imports of automobiles from Europe.

Granted, the auto tariff story isn’t as vile as the Ukraine story, and it poses less of a direct threat to a fair election. But it’s recognizably part of the same syndrome: abuse of presidential power, contempt for the rule of law, and dishonesty about motivations.

Petra Costa: Bolsonaro’s War on Truth

Brazil is mired in an endless drama, while its government is bringing democracy to the brink.

SÃO PAULO, Brasil — On Jan. 13, a documentary film I directed, “The Edge of Democracy,” was nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary feature. In the film, I intertwine the rise and fall of the Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff presidencies and the election of Jair Bolsonaro with my own family story. I am the same age as Brazil’s democracy, and much of the country’s deep polarization mirrors my family divisions.

Following the nomination, my team was flooded with messages on social media congratulating us. But our government responded differently. [..]

There is no visible light at the end of the tunnel in this culture war that seeks to censor liberal and progressive values and the destruction of the truth to impose a tropical fascism. As I point out in “The Edge of Democracy,” the elite got tired of playing democracy. As the history of Nazism reminds us, the elites who were silent in the face of the advance of authoritarianism ultimately ended up swallowed by it. Extinction is the price of omission.

Ezra Klein: Why Democrats Still Have to Appeal to the Center, but Republicans Don’t

Polarization has changed the two parties — just not in the same way.

American politics has been dominated by the Democratic and Republican Parties since the Civil War. That gives us the illusion of stability — that today’s political divisions cut roughly the same lines as yesteryear.

But in recent decades, the two parties have been changing, and fast. Those changes are ideological — the Democratic Party has moved left, and the Republican Party has moved right. But more fundamentally, those changes are compositional: Democrats have become more diverse, urban, young and secular, and the Republican Party has turned itself into a vehicle for whiter, older, more Christian and more rural voters.

This is the root cause of intensifying polarization: our differences, both ideological and demographic, map onto our party divisions today in ways they didn’t in the past. But the changes have not affected the parties symmetrically.

Put simply, Democrats can’t win running the kinds of campaigns and deploying the kinds of tactics that succeed for Republicans. They can move to the left — and they are — but they can’t abandon the center or, given the geography of American politics, the center-right, and still hold power. Democrats are modestly, but importantly, restrained by diversity and democracy. Republicans are not.

Catherine Rampell: Trump’s Treasury secretary just admitted the tariff rationale is hogwash

Perhaps distracted by the beauty and billionaires of Davos, Switzerland, this week Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin let slip an embarrassing admission: President Trump’s justification for his trade wars is hogwash.

For two years, the administration has offered increasingly ludicrous explanations for its tariffs. Sometimes tariffs are designed to shield pet U.S. industries from unfair competition. (Those industries are still shuttering plants despite the tariffs, but no matter.) Sometimes, tariffs are instead intended to raise revenue from abroad. (That additional tax revenue is being paid by Americans, not foreigners, but whatever.)

Perhaps the most farcical rationale, however, has been that massive tariffs are necessary to safeguard America’s “national security.”

It’s true that Congress, in the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, authorized the president to impose tariffs when national security is at stake. Historically, presidents have invoked this authority regarding sensitive commodities, such as uranium and oil. The law’s language is pretty broad, though. That makes it ripe for mishandling by a president inclined to abuse it.

And this one certainly is.

Amanda Marcotte: How the anti-choice movement’s lies laid the foundation for Donald Trump’s big cover-up

It was anti-abortion fanatics who taught Republicans how to lie so shamelessly — and Donald Trump is grateful

In the midst of Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, as Democrats continue to lay out a flawless case demonstrating the president’s guilt, Trump is turning to the anti-sex lady-hater brigade to bolster him. That’s right: On Friday, Trump will become the first president to show up in person at the annual March for Life. Other Republican presidents have just phoned in their remarks from a distance, since while they need the votes of anti-abortion fanatics, they have clearly found such people as pleasant to be around as the rest of us do.

But Trump is desperate to shore himself up with his almighty base, and that means maximum pandering to the people who have a fetish for forced childbirth. So he’s got to show up and talk directly to the fundamentalists and the squads of high school virgins they bus in, using them to fill out the ranks of marchers before those teens start having sex and drifting away from the anti-choice movement.

That Trump is turning to these people as a comfort blanket and a shield against the political damage of impeachment might seem strange at first: What does punishing women for having sex have to do with blackmailing Ukraine? But in truth, the whole situation makes a lot of sense if we unpack it a little.

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

Trevor Timm: Brazil’s charges against Glenn Greenwald reek of authoritarianism

The move to retaliate against Greenwald, who has reported critically on Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, is a threat to the press everywhere

In a shocking attack on press freedom, the Brazil’s rightwing government announced on Tuesday it was charging the journalist Glenn Greenwald with “cybercrimes” in relation to his reporting on the Bolsonaro administration and corruption within its ranks.

Thankfully, as of now, Greenwald remains free; a federal judge must affirm the charges before he is officially indicted. But make no mistake: this move by the Brazilian government is an outrageous attempt to retaliate against a journalist who has reported critically on Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro; its justice minister, Sergio Moro; and their allies – and it reeks of authoritarianism.

Journalists everywhere should be disturbed by what this means for press freedom in the world’s fifth-largest country.

Noah Bookbinder: The American People Are Being Scammed by Mitch McConnell

Senators have a duty to conduct a fair and full trial. The Republican leader is trying to make sure they can’t.

The removal of a sitting president is the last line of defense provided by the framers of the Constitution against the abuse of power by the leader of our country. When senators take an oath to uphold the Constitution, they assume the grave responsibility to conduct a thorough and fair trial on behalf of the American people.

Dismissing this process set out in the Constitution, President Trump has called the impeachment process a “scam.” That’s his opinion, of course — but this week Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is doing everything he can to ensure that the Senate trial actually is a scam.

An impeachment trial is only meaningful if the American people can have confidence in the fairness of the process; only then will the trial’s verdict be worthy of respect. Mr. McConnell is advocating trial procedures that would undercut any possibility of that.

Jamelle Bouie: The Iconic Man With a Gun Is a White Man

Protesters in Virginia were re-enacting — and re-embracing — an exclusionary vision of American history.

RICHMOND, Va. — Around 22,000 people came here on Monday to protest potential new restrictions on guns under consideration by the new Democratic majority in the General Assembly. Most of the protesters were outside the grounds of the State Capitol, and most appeared to be carrying weapons: handguns, shotguns, carbines and semiautomatic rifles. There were armed men in camouflage and military-style equipment threatening insurrection if the state’s elected representatives acted contrary to their wishes. [..]

As I watched the rally, it was impossible not to think through counterfactuals. What if these were left-wing protesters instead? Twenty-two thousand members of the Democratic Socialists of America, armed and threatening insurrection if the Commonwealth of Virginia didn’t establish a system for single-payer health care. How would the state authorities react? Would they give them a wide berth or would they assume hostile intent?

What if this were 22,000 black nationalists, similarly armed, similarly enraged at the prospect of gun control? Would the police have had the same light touch, watching and listening but allowing events to unfold? Or would they have gone into overdrive with riot gear and armored vehicles, aggressive tactics and a presumption of criminality?

We know the answer. In Virginia and many of the 30 other states that allow open carry, Americans have a right to mass, armed protest. But that right, and the right to bear arms in general, is informed by the settler history of the American nation and structured by hierarchies of race and gender, despite our collective pretense to universalism. Or put another way, every American has a right to gun ownership, but the paradigmatic gun owner is still a white man.

 
Paul Waldman: From torture to Trump, Republicans no longer even pretend they have principles

President Trump is on trial in the Senate, but so is the entire Republican Party. And 1,300 miles away in Guantanamo there’s another trial taking place, one that implicates the GOP just as much.

In these two trials we can see the complete moral wreckage of their party, and how they’ve carried the country down with them.

What does the trial of a group of alleged terrorists have to do with impeachment? When seen from the perspective not of one president but of what Republicans ask all of us to accept and how they frame their own moral culpability, they are waypoints on the same devolutionary road.[..]

The story of the Republican embrace of torture reminds us that Trump didn’t create the moral vacuum that lies within the GOP. He exploited it to get elected and counts on it to survive, but it was there before. And their pathetic sycophancy toward him shows that there are absolutely no actions they will not defend, even those done for the worst possible reasons.

Remember that when every Republican in the Senate votes to acquit Trump of the charges against him.

Andrew Gawthorpe: Republicans have turned the impeachment trial into a dangerous sham

The trial in the Republican-controlled US Senate is only going to tear up restraints on the would-be authoritarian White House

It is overly generous to refer to what is unfolding in the US Senate this week as a “trial”. There are not many trials in which it is clear at the outset that the defendant is guilty but that he will nevertheless be cleared of all charges. And while we might be tempted to say that it is not Donald Trump but America’s system of checks and balances that is on trial in the Senate this week, that isn’t true either. That trial was likewise already over before the action in the Senate even began, the result just as horrific. [..]

With the complicity of the Republican Senate majority, Trump is hence claiming the right to violate even this most basic requirement of his office, and to vastly expand what constitutes acceptable presidential conduct. While previous presidents tended to seek incremental increases in presidential power in service of what they believed, rightly or wrongly, to be the common good, Trump does the exact opposite. He seeks not just one particular new power but complete freedom from scrutiny for his conduct, and he does so in service not of any plausible national interest but rather purely to shield himself from the consequences of his abuses of power.

Trump appears to give little thought to his actions, but McConnell does. Just as he decided that refusing to consider the nomination of Merrick Garland was worth imperiling the legitimacy of the supreme court, now he has decided that the political survival of Donald Trump is worth creating the precedent that future presidents do not have to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed”. The only remedy is to channel public anger into a Democratic seizure of the Senate, and remake a broken institution as an instrument of the public good rather than a rubber-stamp legislature for the would-be authoritarian in the White House. If you want to see the consequences of failing to do so, just tune into the “trial”.