The Abbreviated Pundit Round-up is a regular feature of Daily Kos.
Harold Meyerson at The American Prospect writes—Which Are the Real Mismanaged States?
Republicans seem bent on finding a way to punish the blue states in the next tranche of emergency legislation coming from the Congress. Rick Scott, the former governor and current senator from Florida, has contrasted his state’s low budgets with those of blue New York and California (all of which were in balance before the pandemic struck), while President Trump has claimed that “Republican states are in strong shape.” Trump has also chastised states with Democratic governors for their presumed tardiness in lifting shelter-in-place orders. “There just seems to be no effort on certain blue states to get back into gear,” he has lamented.
The real difference between blue states and red, if I may borrow a term from the anti-choice movement, is that the blue states are pro-life while the red states are largely indifferent to same.
That’s certainly clear from the divide we’re seeing on the readiness to open states up at a time when the rate at which COVID-19 is spreading is still increasing in most parts of the country. It’s also true when it comes to matters budgetary. Allegedly well-managed Florida has had perhaps the most inefficient unemployment insurance system in the country. As of mid-April, more than 850,000 Floridians had filed for unemployment, while a bare 34,000 had actually received checks. The number of applicants has now grown to 1.9 million, of whom just 28 percent have received their UI from the state. Had Scott and his Republican successor as governor, Ron DeSantis, invested a sufficient level of public funds to create a more well-run system, Floridians wouldn’t now be subjected to this breakdown in necessary state services.
The vice president made a commitment last month to protecting workers at JBS by sending more PPE and tests. The community in Greeley has yet to receive these supplies.
— Michael Bennet (@SenatorBennet) May 14, 2020
Emily Bazelon and Eric Posner at The New York Times writes—There Used to Be Justice. Now We Have Bill Barr:
It’s easy to grow numb to the abuses of the Trump era. But Mr. Barr’s intervention in the Flynn and Stone cases is a deviation even from the standards at the outset of Mr. Trump’s presidency. The corrosion at the Justice Department from the beginning to the homestretch of Mr. Trump’s first term illustrates a long-term problem of maintaining the independence of a department with unrivaled powers of investigation and prosecution. [...]
The attorney general, whom the president hires and can fire, is supposed to advise the president and advance his or her policies. But he is also obligated to enforce the law impartially and not to use it to shield the president’s allies or punish his enemies.
Nancy LeTourneau at The Washington Monthly writes—Why Aren’t More Newspapers Calling on Trump to Resign?
Much of the country seems to have grown complacent about the massive failures, criminal violations, and ubiquitous lies coming from Donald Trump. It would be an overwhelming task to chronicle all of them, but Joe Lockhart made an attempt to highlight the most egregious.
After three years of political and actual carnage under Trump, including Robert Mueller’s description of acts that amounted to, he told Congress, obstruction of justice; Trump’s “fine people on both sides” reaction to a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville where a counter-protester was killed; his rampant conflicts of interest and credible accusations of his violations of the emoluments clause of the Constitution; his close to 17,000 false statements; a travel ban that primarily targets mostly Muslim-majority countries;impeachment for alleged extortion of a foreign government (he was acquitted in the Republican Senate), and the gross mishandling of a deadly pandemic, you’d think somebody on an editorial board might say it’s time for the President to leave.
That was part of a column by Lockhart in which he attempted to answer the question of why more newspaper editorial boards haven’t called for Trump’s resignation. For some historical precedent, he notes the following.
By the height of the Watergate scandal in 1974, virtually every major newspaper in America had called for President Richard Nixon’s resignation. During the investigation and impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998, more than 100 newspapers called for him to resign.
Given that both Woodward and Bernstein have said that Trump’s Ukraine scandal alone was worse than Watergate, it is an important question to ask.
Wearing a mask doesn't really protect you. It protects other people. Protecting other people isn't weakness.
— [[[ âÂ�³âÂ�²Ã�Â�âÂ�¦âÂ�® âÂ�¦Ã�Â�âÂ�¦ ]]] (@TheAgentNDN) May 14, 2020
Leanna S. Wen at The Washington Post writes—We’re retreating to a new strategy on COVID-19. Let’s call it what it is:
The administration has yet to use these words, but it appears that we’re adopting a strategy that I recognize from other aspects of public health: harm reduction.
Harm reduction was initially developed as a public health approach to reduce the negative consequences of drug use. It recognizes that while stopping drug use is the desired outcome, many people won’t be able to do that. For those individuals, needle-exchange programs can reduce their risk of acquiring HIV and hepatitis and transmitting these infections to others. Such programs do not promote or condone drug use, as some critics contend. Rather, they face the reality that if a behavior with harmful consequences is going to happen regardless, steps should be taken to reduce the risk for both individuals and others around them. Think, too, of safe-sex campaigns, or motorcycle helmet laws.
And this seems to me where we are with covid-19: We’re no longer trying to eliminate the virus. Instead, we are accepting that Americans will have to live with it.
Mindy Isser at Jacobin writes—The Post Office Is a National Treasure. We Can’t Let the Privatizers Destroy It:
On May 6, President Trump appointed longtime GOP donor Louis DeJoy, a North Carolina businessman, as the new postmaster general. Curiously absent from DeJoy’s résumé is any experience working in the USPS — the first time in nearly two decades the postmaster general has not been selected from the postal service’s ranks. In a statement on DeJoy’s appointment, the American Postal Workers Union (APWU) — one of four unions that represent postal employees — said that if DeJoy pursues an agenda of privatization, he “will be met with stiff resistance from postal workers and the people of this country.”
There’s plenty of reason to suspect DeJoy will do so, falling in line with the man who selected him. [...]
The USPS is the second largest employer in the country — topped only by the federal government — with over 600,000 workers. A little more than one-third of postal employees are women; 18 percent are veterans. A source of well-paying, union jobs, the USPS is also an engine for racial justice. Nearly a quarter of all postal workers are black, and the postal service has long been a means for black Americans to access decent pay and stable working conditions. As early as 1861, federal employment in the postal service was open to African Americans, and since the end of the Civil War it has provided a home for black workers throughout the country. As William Burrus, the first black president of the American Postal Workers Union, has warned, a successful assault on the postal service would “put an end to the relationship between people of color and their opportunity to climb up the ladder of success in our country … The post office has permitted millions of African-Americans to better themselves.”
40 years ago today, people pushed the state to reopen areas around Mt. St. Helens citing tourism & the economy against advice of scientists. Five days later, the volcano erupted. #msh40 https://t.co/ok5Vmjwug8
— WA Emergency Management (@waEMD) May 14, 2020
Amanda Marcotte at Salon writes—Trump flunkies try to scapegoat Anthony Fauci — but we all know who's really to blame:
Just a month ago, I predicted that Donald Trump and his lickspittles in Congress and right-wing media were setting up Dr. Anthony Fauci as their scapegoat for Trump's massive failures. (That admittedly wasn't difficult, since the far right has been attacking Fauci all along.) Now here we are, with the death toll from the novel coronavirus soaring past 83,000 and the unemployment rate at 15% (and likely closer to 20%) and, sure enough, some of the worst Trump flunkies are looking to blame the sober-minded infectious disease expert who's been working tirelessly on the coronavirus problem, despite having the worst possible boss imaginable.
Some on the right, in their ludicrous efforts to depict Trump as blameless (and almost hapless), are painting Fauci as an all-powerful mastermind who is somehow controlling the government against the president's will — and even suggesting he's faking the scientific understanding of how contagious the coronavirus is. [...]
This is the paradox of Trumpian authoritarianism. On one hand, Trump ran on the promise that "I alone can fix it", but from the second he set foot in the Oval Office, he and his supporters have depicted him as a helpless child being controlled by a nefarious "deep state" that is working against him. Now the narrative forming against Fauci holds that he somehow manipulated Trump or controlled his decisions on handling the coronavirus.
Kim Kelly at The Baffler writes—Barely Necessities:
ONE OF THE DEFINING PORTRAITS of the coronavirus crisis has been that of the heroic, self-sacrificing “essential worker”—the doctor, nurse, janitor, transit operator, grocery store worker, farmworker, or meatpacking plant worker—who valiantly reports to their job each day, often swathed in public accolades instead of PPE, and gives their all to keep society running smoothly. Many of them are paid minimum wage and lack health insurance and other benefits. In New York City, the current epicenter of the pandemic, they’re even greeted with a nightly round of applause and pot clanging.
Many writers—and workers themselves—have pointed out the cognitive dissonance that comes with treating essential workers with the forehead-scraping reverence usually reserved for battered troops returning from one of our imperialist forever wars. It’s even more awkward for those who are still putting in hours at businesses that have been deemed “essential” but are really anything but, from print shops to pet grooming salons. These reluctant heroes are yet another example of how the United States values capital over labor, and how bosses can (and will) exploit any legal loophole they find, even amid a global public health crisis, in their pursuit of the almighty dollar.
William Rivers Pitt at TruthOut writes—The HEROES Act Is a Vital Step Toward Ending COVID, So of Course It Is Doomed:
On Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) unveiled the beginnings of an answer to this crisis. The $3 trillion Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions Act, or HEROES Act, would be the largest relief package ever passed in the U.S. if it actually sees the light of day. It is incomplete in a number of vital areas, but it is a stupendous improvement over Trump’s whistle-past-the-overflowing-graveyard plan of pretending none of this is actually happening. [...]
The centerpiece of the bill is another $1,200 direct payment to individuals — up to $6,000 per household. As with the previous relief package, this would also be a one-time payment, and that has led to some appropriately vigorous argument from the progressive wing of the Democratic party.
Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), Ilhan Omar (D-Minneapolis) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts) co-signed a letter to Speaker Pelosi urging the HEROES Act be modified to make such payments a recurring monthly phenomenon. There was talk of doing just that in the early stages of the bill’s drafting — Senators Bernie Sanders (D-Vermont), Kamala Harris (D-California) and Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) proposed legislation guaranteeing a $2,000 monthly payment to citizens for the duration of the pandemic — but those ideas did not survive the final draft.
Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg writes—Republican Deficit Hawking Is About to Backfire:
Republicans, then, are not guilty of hypocritically caring about the deficit only when they are out of office. They never care about the actual budget deficit, while always caring about their specific positions on spending and revenue. It’s true that they deploy the rhetoric of deficit reduction when they believe it will help them politically (which, of course, is the way political parties always use words).
But while the emphasis sometimes changes, the policy usually doesn’t. They favor lower taxes, especially for the wealthy, lower spending on many social programs and higher spending on programs for the military, among a few other things, more or less all the time. What’s striking about the mainstream Republican position is consistency, not hypocrisy. Even during the pandemic, they resisted Democratic efforts to spend money on hospitals and expanded coronavirus testing. Yes, they supported funding to support failing businesses, but again: Republicans don’t consider all government spending to pump up the deficit — just spending on things they don’t like.
Now Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other congressional Republicans are reluctant to agree to any new pandemic relief and stimulus money. Because, they say, of the deficit. I don’t think this means they expect to lose power in November, as at least one political scientist has speculated, or that they’re bluffing; it just needs translation. When they say they care about deficits, it just means that they oppose this particular kind of spending — in this case, aid to state and local governments, extended unemployment benefits, money for health care and the post office, and more.
Michael H. Fuchs at The Guardian writes—Trump is making America an obstacle in the global fight against Covid-19:
President Donald Trump’s incompetent handling of the Covid-19 pandemic is not only exacerbating the death and destruction caused by the virus in the US. It is also crippling the global response to the crisis, and the costs could be even deadlier.
When global crises hit, American leadership is essential. Whether it was launching the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar) or marshaling efforts to respond to the 2014 Ebola outbreak, the US has played a central role in tackling many of the world’s deadliest health crises. American leadership is far from perfect, but it is necessary to tackle threats of a global magnitude.
This pandemic is one of the greatest challenges the world has faced since the second world war. [...]
A successful global effort to defeat the pandemic will require a robust American response. Instead, Trump is making it harder for the world to address the crisis.
Trump wants to accuse Obama of crimes. Is he suggesting that a sitting President can commit a crime?
— RESIST 45* (@schwanderer) May 14, 2020
Mark Hertsgaard at Covering Climate Now writes—The COVID-19 Stimulus Debate Is a Pivotal Climate Story:
Of course, it’s neither desirable nor feasible to keep economies on permanent lockdown in the name of climate stability. Which may explain why variations of a Green New Deal, an idea first pressed by climate activists, are garnering support from more and more pillars of the establishment. The European Union, the International Monetary Fund, the mayors of 33 of the world’s biggest cities, the leaders of Europe’s two biggest economies, Germany and France, a coalition of investors who manage more than $32 trillion worth of assets—these are just some of the voices arguing that the government stimulus programs being devised to revive pandemic-stricken economies must be green.
Covid-19 recovery programs “should not be a return to ‘business as usual’—because that is a world on track for more than 3 degrees C of overheating,” warned a statement by the mayors of New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, São Paulo, Seoul, and 27 other cities with a combined population of 750 million people. Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England, has argued that instead of ploughing trillions of dollars into fossil fuel energy sources and infrastructure, countries “should try to leapfrog ahead” by investing in solar and wind power and emulating the UK government’s plan to phase out gasoline and diesel engine cars by 2035.
A study led by Nicholas Stern, former chief economist at The World Bank, and Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University found that green stimulus programs outperform their opposites. The economists’ examination of more than 700 stimulus programs launched after the 2008 global financial crisis found that investing in energy efficiency—for example, by retrofitting buildings—and renewable energy yielded more jobs and higher monetary returns than traditional stimulus programs.
Nick Martin at The New Republic writes—Is the Supreme Court Scared of Tribal Sovereignty?
In 2003, writing a concurrent opinion in United States v. Lara, a case that determined an individual can be charged with the same crime in tribal and federal court, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas described the contradictory nature of federal case law as it relates to Indigenous policy: “In my view, the tribes either are or are not separate sovereigns. And our federal Indian law cases untenably hold both positions simultaneously.” This week, nearly 20 years removed from Thomas’s assessment, the high court’s institutional inability to grasp the basics of tribal sovereignty was once again on full display.
On Monday morning, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in McGirt v. Oklahoma, a case concerning whether the Muscogee (Creek) Nation’s 1866 treaty reservation boundaries are still legally in place. The MCN reservation was never officially dissolved by Congress, meaning that a large swath of what is now Oklahoma, formerly Indian Territory, is still technically under MCN jurisdiction, even if it is effectively governed by the state. The appealing party, Jimmy McGirt, is currently serving a life sentence for sex crimes he committed against a child. The case is not concerned with his guilt, which was well established, but rather the jurisdictional issues that arise from the fact that McGirt’s crimes were committed on what is still technically MCN land, but he was tried in state court. (Typically, federal courts have jurisdiction over major crimes committed on sovereign Native soil.)
The issue was initially argued in Murphy v. Carpenter last spring, but because Justice Neil Gorsuch, a Trump appointee, had heard the case when he was sitting on the Tenth Circuit, he had to recuse himself, leading to a 4–4 split. Seeking to bring in Gorsuch to answer the question definitively, the court took on McGirt, which quickly became one of the most intriguing tests of the United States Indian Country legal framework in recent memory. Listening to the arguments, as the public is now able to do because of the pandemic, it was clear that most of the justices had a staggering but sadly unsurprising lack of knowledge on the basic tenets of sovereignty and Indian Country.
Trump doesn�t care about the 80,000+ people who�ve died from #Coronavirus! He only wants to open up the economy so he can go back to having his white power pep rallies! The death & economic devastation we are facing is b/c Trump failed to act early & called #COVID19 a HOAX!
— Maxine Waters (@RepMaxineWaters) May 14, 2020
Jonathan Chait at New York magazine writes—Obamagate’ Is Trump’s Name for the Crimes He’s Trying to Commit Himself:
President Trump likes to accuse his political antagonists of crimes, almost always imaginary, and his favorite target is President Obama. Trump claims Obama illegally persecuted him, though the details of the accusation have changed. Three years ago, he claimed the crime was a “tapp” of his phones (“How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process.”) The charge evolved to claiming Obama’s national security adviser, Susan Rice, committed a crime by “unmasking” Trump officials surveilled in talks with foreign leaders.
Trump seems to return to the charge in times of stress. He has renewed the charge, calling it “OBAMAGATE!” When asked by a reporter what crime he was claiming Obama had committed this time, Trump replied, “You know what the crime is. The crime is very obvious to everybody.” [...]
For Trump, “Obamagate” is a wish-fulfillment fantasy. He believes every president does, and should, use the Department of Justice as a weapon to protect his friends and harass his rivals. The greatest ire he has reserved for any of his underlings is the yearslong grudge he’s held against Jeff Sessions for the sin of following the black-letter law requiring his recusal from the Russia investigation, and refusing Trump’s entreaties to violate the law by un-recusing himself.