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.

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

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Neal K. Katyal: What Trump Is Hiding From the Impeachment Hearings

The president’s efforts to prevent the House from doing its job are just as worrisome as the Ukraine scandal.

The public impeachment hearings this week will be at least as important for what is not said as for what is. Congress will no doubt focus a lot on President Trump’s dealings with Ukraine and his secret plan to get that government to announce a public investigation of the man he considered his chief political rival, Joe Biden.

But think about what the president is trying to hide in the hearings. He has been blocking government officials from testifying before Congress, invoking specious claims of constitutional privilege. And while the Ukraine allegations have rightly captured the attention of Congress and much of the public, Mr. Trump’s effort to hinder the House investigation of him is at least as great a threat to the rule of law. It strikes at the heart of American democracy — and it is itself the essence of an impeachable offense. [..]

Mr. Trump’s stonewalling is a grave problem because it means there is no way to police executive branch wrongdoing. The attorney general, William Barr, has said a sitting president cannot be indicted. The president’s lawyers have gone so far as to say, in light of that principle, that he cannot even be criminally investigated. But every serious scholar who adheres to the view that a sitting president cannot be indicted combines that view with the belief that the impeachment process is the way to deal with a lawless president. Indeed, the very Justice Department opinions that Mr. Barr relied on to “clear” the president say exactly that. Otherwise a president could engage in extreme wrongdoing, and the American people would have no remedy.

Jamelle Bouie: Who’s Afraid of Elizabeth Warren?

Quite a few people, and they have something in common. It’s not poverty.

President Trump has been good for America’s billionaires. He slashed corporate taxes, cut the top income tax rate and raised the total exemption for the estate tax, directly benefiting several hundred billionaires and their heirs. He’s placed wealthy supporters in key positions of government like the Commerce Department, rolled back Obama-era financial regulations and privileged the interests of favored industries — like resource extraction and fossil fuel production — above all else.

There are billionaires who oppose Trump, of course. But for the most part they aren’t class traitors. They still want the government to work in their favor. They still want to keep their taxes low, just without the dysfunction — and gratuitous cruelty — of the current administration. And they want Democrats to choose a conventional nominee: a moderate standard-bearer who doesn’t want to make fundamental changes to the economy, from greatly increased taxes to greater worker control.

Plenty of Democratic voters agree. But just as many have rallied behind candidates who want a more equal, more democratic economy. Two of the three leading candidates — Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren — want new taxes on the wealthiest Americans and their assets. Sanders has the steeper tax but Warren is not far behind former vice president Joe Biden in national polling and leads the field in both Iowa and New Hampshire. With Biden struggling to break away from the pack, it looks like Warren actually could be the nominee, and anti-Trump billionaires are worried.

Michael Fuchs: The question is not whether Trump did it – it’s whether he’ll get away with it

Donald Trump withheld US military assistance to Ukraine until it agreed to help Trump’s re-election campaign. That is an abuse of power of the highest order – a corruption of American democracy that undermines national security – and requires that Trump be removed from office.

As Congress begins public hearings to determine whether Trump’s actions merit impeachment by the House and conviction by the Senate, it’s vital that the process focuses on these simple facts of Trump’s corruption. Over recent weeks the House has conducted depositions of current and former officials, all of which have corroborated Trump’s abuse of power. But since the deposition transcripts from those officials are thousands of pages long, the details can get lost in the endless spin by politicians and the media. Don’t expect much new information from the public hearings because the facts are already clear and conclusive. Rather, this is an opportunity for the public to hear directly from participants in this saga and for the American people to understand just how dangerous Trump’s actions are.

So, what should the American people watch for in the hearings and the process that could lead to impeachment?

Harry Litman: Why this lawsuit against Trump is a road to nowhere

If you’re having trouble making sense of the screwy lawsuit in federal court brought by Charles Kupperman, formerly the president’s deputy national security adviser, you’re not alone: The case is hard to follow, let alone analyze.

he already bizarre set of circumstances took a further strange turn Monday as Mick Mulvaney, President Trump’s acting chief of staff, tried to horn his way into the case — which entails his actually suing Trump — and Kupperman and the House of Representatives asked the court to reject Mulvaney’s stratagem. By the end of the day Mulvaney had pulled back the request. Meanwhile, John Bolton, who shares a lawyer with Kupperman, lurks in the background, insisting that he will not testify without a subpoena yet not promising that he will comply if he is subpoenaed.

The key to understanding the different players and their various maneuvers is a different case before a different district court judge — the one involving former White House counsel Donald McGahn.

In the end, I don’t expect Kupperman’s case to go anywhere, meaning the complex maneuvers will all come to naught. But what a tangled tale.

Paul Waldman: Hearing’s first blockbuster shows why Trump is headed for impeachment

Given that the facts of the Ukraine scandal are relatively straightforward, and that transcripts of private depositions from key witnesses have already been released, some have wondered how much we’ll really learn from the public impeachment hearings.

But Ambassador William B. Taylor Jr. already dropped a new bombshell, about a conversation that occurred on July 26, the day after President Trump’s fateful phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

It concerns Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, a ringleader of the scheme organized by Trump lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani to pressure Ukraine into announcing a sham investigation that would smear Joe Biden.[..]

Since Taylor was not personally at this dinner, Sondland will certainly have to be asked about it when he testifies next week. But what we see here is Trump not as a disconnected figure, not as someone unaware of what is being done on his behalf, but as someone so intimately involved that he’s taking phone calls from Sondland to discuss the nuts and bolts of the whole plot.

This is important, because one defense of Trump that Republicans have floated is to essentially blame Giuliani, Sondland and maybe some others for the whole scandal, painting Trump as remote and therefore blameless.

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.

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: Bursting the Billionaire Bubble

No, America isn’t waiting for a tycoon savior.

Immense wealth isn’t good for your reality sense.

Billionaires aren’t necessarily bad people, and most of them probably aren’t. However, some are, and my unscientific sense is that billionaires are more likely than the rest of us to exhibit bad judgment warped by runaway egos, especially in the political sphere.

It’s not hard to see why: Great wealth attracts people eager to tell an extremely rich man (or woman, but political egotism is mainly a male thing) what he wants to hear. In the political arena this means telling billionaires both that their lavish financial rewards are a mere fraction of the vast contribution they have made to society, and that the public is clamoring for them to take their rightful role as leaders.

Put it this way: These days, many political factions are accused, with varying degrees of justice, of living in some kind of bubble, out of touch with American reality. But few live as thoroughly in a bubble as the billionaire class and its hangers-on.

And now the billionaires in the bubble find themselves in an environment in which concerns about soaring inequality, about the extraordinary concentration of wealth in the hands of the few, finally seem to be getting political traction. And they’re not handling it well.

Michael Tomasky: Bill Gates, I Implore You to Connect Some Dots

Bloomberg, Dimon and Gates call liberal tax ideas unfair. But excessive wealth is the real threat.

The billionaire class has begun unloading on Elizabeth Warren. A few days ago, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase — at just $1.6 billion in net worth, a comparative piker — said Senator Warren “vilifies successful people.” Then Bill Gates ($107 billion), in an onstage interview with The Times’s Andrew Ross Sorkin, mused about what his tax bill might be in a Warren presidency and left the door open to voting for Donald Trump should Democrats nominate Ms. Warren. And then Michael Bloomberg ($52 billion), who had previously criticized Ms. Warren as anti-corporate, signaled his intention to jump into the race, obviously out of concern at her rise.

I’m not expert enough to judge the wisdom of Senator Warren’s proposed wealth tax. I know that there are questions about its constitutionality and that several European nations tried a similar approach and found it unworkable (though four countries still have it). I don’t get why the candidates aren’t simply proposing to increase marginal income tax rates on dollars earned above some very high figure. That seems a lot more straightforward to me.

So this column is not a brief for Ms. Warren’s wealth tax or for her candidacy — I don’t have a preferred candidate. Instead, I want to make a simple plea to the country’s billionaires: Multibillion-dollar fortunes are often called excessive and decadent. But here’s something they’re rarely called but ought to be: anti-democratic. These fortunes will destroy our democracy.

Michelle Goldberg: To Exonerate Trump, Republicans Embrace Russian Disinformation

In this week’s impeachment hearings, expect a lot of G.O.P. conspiracy theorizing.

On Friday, House investigators released the transcript of the former National Security Council official Fiona Hill’s testimony from last month. It showed a Republican staff member trying and failing to get Hill to concede that there might be some validity to the conspiracy theories underlying Donald Trump’s demands of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. [..]

A few of Trump’s more responsible aides have reportedly tried to disabuse him of Ukraine conspiracy theories, to no avail. Instead it appears that House Republicans, out of slavish fealty to the president, are going to use high-profile hearings to amplify them.

In her testimony, Hill seemed to warn Republicans off their current path. She mentioned the report issued last month by the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee about how Russia used online propaganda to boost Trump in 2016. “If we have people running around chasing rabbit holes because Rudy Giuliani or others have been feeding information to The Hill, Politico, we are not going to be prepared as a country to push back on this again,” she said. “The Russians thrive on misinformation and disinformation.” Unfortunately, so do Trump’s defenders.

 
Eugene Robinson: Rank partisan solidarity is all Trump’s defenders have left

If President Trump is impeached by the House without the vote of a single Republican, you know what? He’ll still be impeached, and for good reason.

The same will be true if every Republican senator votes to acquit him. Partisan GOP solidarity might keep Trump in office — for another year — but it neither changes the facts as we know them nor absolves Congress of its constitutional responsibility. A decision by Republicans to put party loyalty ahead of the national interest cannot be allowed to derail this necessary process.

Would a “partisan” impeachment divide the country? If you haven’t noticed, the nation is pretty divided already. It’s understandable to worry about the reaction of the nearly 45 percent of Americans who, according to the FiveThirtyEight average of polls, oppose impeachment and removal. But what about the 48 percent who support it?

I put the word partisan in quotes because the House, in constitutional terms, is acting not as “House Democrats” but as the House itself. The fact that the Democratic Party holds the majority does not absolve Speaker Nancy Pelosi or any other House member of the duty to hold Trump accountable for “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” If Trump grossly abused his power and committed bribery in his dealings with Ukraine, as evidence strongly indicates, the House has no choice.

Tribalistic party identity is basically all the president’s defenders have left.

Catherine Rampell: We thought Trump was the biggest con man. We were all wrong.

Many of President Trump’s critics (myself included) have portrayed him as a fantastically successful con artist, a man who has swindled customers, vendors and voters alike.

We were all wrong. Trump isn’t history’s biggest scam artist; he’s history’s biggest dupe.

At least, that’s the narrative Trump and his defenders are spinning as they portray the president as the victim of an elaborate, long-running political sting, perpetrated by his own devious underlings.

Trump claimed once upon a time that he was recruiting the “best people” to the White House and senior ranks of the executive branch. He now claims he got conned into hiring a cabal of covert Never Trumpers.

The list of people who allegedly hustled the master hustler is long, an “Ocean’s Eleven”-like dream team carefully cultivated to undermine their guileless boss. But rather than ninjas, pickpockets or pyromaniacs, this political heist has been perpetrated by diplomats, donors, lawyers, economists and generals who earned and then abused the trust of their mark. [..]

These connivers have been astoundingly effective. Somehow they’ve tricked Trump into saying and doing racist and corrupt things, in public and on camera. They hoodwinked him into passing economic policies that punish his working-class base while rewarding wealthy donors. And, worst of all — in the case of Ukraine — these schemers suckered Trump into subordinating U.S. national security to his own selfish political interests.

Either that or they cleverly framed him.

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.

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

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Charles M. Blow: You Must Never Vote for Bloomberg

His expansion of the notoriously racist stop-and-frisk program is a complete and nonnegotiable deal breaker.

With his filing of paperwork on Friday to put his name on the ballot for the Democratic primary in Alabama, the billionaire businessman and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg inched closer to declaring a run for the Democratic nomination for president.

According to The New York Times, his advisers say he hasn’t made up his mind yet. But I have.

Let me plant the stake now: No black person — or Hispanic person or ally of people of color — should ever even consider voting for Michael Bloomberg in the primary. His expansion of the notoriously racist stop-and-frisk program in New York, which swept up millions of innocent New Yorkers, primarily young black and Hispanic men, is a complete and nonnegotiable deal killer.

Stop-and-frisk, pushed as a way to get guns and other contraband off the streets, became nothing short of a massive, enduring, city-sanctioned system of racial terror.

This system of terror exploded under Bloomberg, with his full advocacy and support.

Michelle Goldberg: The Cure for Democrats’ 2020 Terror

Voters who fear a Trump re-election can start rebuilding the blue wall now.

Pundits sometimes address Democratic primary voters as if they were complacent about the chances of another Trump term and need a harsh dose of reality. The primary campaign, New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait wrote recently, “has proceeded in blissful unawareness of the extremely high chance that Trump will win again.” But if there are Democrats out there who think beating Trump is going to be easy, I’ve yet to meet them. I’m deeply scared, and so are most progressives I speak to.

According to the polls we’re not alone; in one recent survey, 67 percent of Democrats said they feel anxious about the election. Reports from Iowa suggest that Democratic primary voters, desperate to find a silver bullet against Trump, are wracked with indecision. “Nobody knows what to do,” one member of a county Democratic committee told The Associated Press. “They’re all afraid.” [..]

Those shaken by the possibility of a second Trump term, however, can take concrete steps to make that prospect less likely, even if they don’t live in swing states. Doing so isn’t only useful — it’s therapeutic. “The best answer to despair is recognizing that you’re not helpless,” said Ezra Levin, co-founder of the progressive group Indivisible and co-author of the new book “We Are Indivisible: A Blueprint for Democracy After Trump.”

Robert Reich: Billionaires fear Warren and Sanders – but they should fear us all

Wealth tax plans make sense but proper regulation could also cut Bezos, Dimon, Cohen and Neumann down to size

Billionaires are wailing that wealth tax proposals by Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are attacks on free-market capitalism.

Warren “vilifies successful people”, says Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase.

Rubbish. There are basically only five ways to accumulate a billion dollars, and none of them has to do with being successful in a genuinely free market. [..]

Capitalism doesn’t work well with monopolies, insider-trading, political payoffs, fraud and large amounts of inherited wealth. Billionaires who don’t like Sanders and Warren’s wealth tax plans should at least support reforms that end these anti-capitalist advantages.

Greg Sargent: An epic ‘Meet the Press’ rant unmasks the real goal of Trump’s lies

The public phase of the impeachment inquiry is set to begin this week, and it will shock you to learn that House Republicans are pushing for it to include testimony from numerous people who are not in a position to shed any light whatsoever on President Trump’s conduct.

Republicans want to question Joe Biden’s son Hunter and other figures at the center of a nexus of conspiracy theories and lies that Trump and his propagandists have long employed to misdirect Americans away from Trump’s own bottomless corruption.

A remarkable and important series of exchanges on “Meet the Press” — including an epic rant from a Democrat about our media’s both-sidesing tendencies — demonstrates the true nature of the game plan we’re about to see from Trump and Republicans.

Karen Tumulty: Bloomberg has a narrow path to winning. But he’ll sure get under Trump’s skin.

Is it possible for news to seem both startling and inevitable at the same time?

For years, former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg has been playing with the idea of running for president. But he always backed off after crunching the data and deciding he didn’t have a realistic chance of winning.

It appeared Bloomberg had finally shut the door on that possibility last March. “I believe I would defeat Donald Trump in a general election,” he wrote. “But I am clear-eyed about the difficulty of winning the Democratic nomination in such a crowded field.”

Now comes this: Bloomberg is running after all. Almost certainly. Probably making it official within days.

But who looks at this race and thinks that what it needs is yet another septuagenarian in the mix? Or for that matter, another billionaire? Is the right standard-bearer for an increasingly liberal party a man whose most brilliant business idea was marketing computer terminals to Wall Street traders so that they could make rich people even richer? [..]

In an election season that has already seen more than its share of surprises, Bloomberg’s probable late entry into a crowded Democratic primary has delivered what is perhaps the biggest one yet.

On Friday, Trump said that Bloomberg “doesn’t have the magic to do well.” But that comment was surely wishful thinking, coming as it did from someone who measures everyone else by their wealth and success. But Bloomberg starts the campaign in a position that is enviable in at least one sense. He is the candidate most likely to get under Trump’s paper-thin skin.