Pondering the Pundits

“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.

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Eugene Robinson: Trump could learn a lot from his mistakes. He won’t.

Last week’s health-care fiasco could end up being a positive experience for President Trump if he learns a few obvious lessons. Spoiler alert: He won’t.

The first thing that should dawn on Trump is that the warring Republican factions in Congress have multiple agendas, none of which remotely resembles his own. This is why the bill that House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) was forced to withdraw on Friday — the abominable American Health Care Act — made such a cruel mockery of Trump’s expansive campaign promises.

A “populist” president who promised health insurance “for everybody” ended up supporting legislation that would have taken away coverage from 24 million people. Many, if not most, of the victims would have been working-class voters — the “forgotten Americans” Trump claimed to champion. Now that he has time, maybe he will actually read the bill (or have someone summarize it for him) and realize how truly awful it was.

You don’t have to be a policy wonk to recognize that replacing income-based subsidies with less generous across-the-board tax credits would mean a net transfer of resources from poorer people to wealthier people. That’s just fine with Ryan and the “mainstream” House Republicans who hung in there with legislation that Ronald Reagan or even Barry Goldwater would have considered extreme.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Russia is not the reason to block Gorsuch

Even by the lofty standards of the Trump era, the past week in Washington has been chaotic. Just a few days after FBI Director James B. Comey stepped back into the political spotlight by publicly confirming the bureau’s investigation into possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives, the president’s bid to rush his health-care bill through the House failed in spectacular fashion. As a result, the Senate confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch received much less attention than they would have under ordinary circumstances.

In light of Comey’s revelation, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) called for delaying a vote on Gorsuch until the investigation is resolved. Some progressives went a step further. For example, MoveOn started a petition demanding a halt to all “legislation and appointments . . . until the American people learn the full truth about Trump and Russia,” a position that Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) echoed on Twitter.

The impulse to hype the FBI investigation is natural. But it’s worth remembering that, even before Comey’s announcement, there were plenty of reasons for Democrats to do everything in their power to stop Gorsuch’s nomination from coming to the floor — starting with the fact that he was nominated to fill a stolen seat. After Senate Republicans refused to even hold a hearing on President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland for about 300 days, an unprecedented level of obstruction, there is no reason for Democrats to acquiesce to an up-or-down vote on Gorsuch now. They are right to fight back.

David Leonhardt: Republicans for Single-Payer Health Care

Without a viable health care agenda of their own, Republicans now face a choice between two options: Obamacare and a gradual shift toward a single-payer system. The early signs suggest they will choose single payer.

That would be the height of political irony, of course. Donald Trump, Paul Ryan and Tom Price may succeed where left-wing dreamers have long failed and move the country toward socialized medicine. And they would do it unwittingly, by undermining the most conservative health care system that Americans are willing to accept.

You’ve no doubt heard of that conservative system. It’s called Obamacare.

Let me take a step back to explain how we got here and how the politics of health care will most likely play out after last week’s Republican crackup.

Jill Filipovic: The All-Male Photo Op Isn’t a Gaffe. It’s a Strategy.

During the great Republican health care debacle, President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence met with the far-right congressional Freedom Caucus to discuss, among other things, stripping out requirements for insurance companies to cover maternity, newborn and pregnancy care. After the meeting, Mr. Pence tweeted a photo of two dozen men sitting around a table. Kellyanne Conway was reportedly in the room, but in the picture the vice president circulated, there was not a woman in sight.

For liberals, the photo seemed like an inadvertent insight into the current Republican psyche: Powerful men plotting to leave vulnerable women up a creek, so ensconced in their misogynistic world they don’t even notice the bad optics (not to mention the irony of the “pro-life” party making it harder for women to afford to have babies). Political analysts treated the photo as a gaffe, the kind of rookie mistake we’re used to seeing from the Trump White House.

I’m not so sure.

Amanda Marcotte: From health care to tax reform: Paul Ryan’s empty-suit act is about to get worse

For years now, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., has bamboozled huge numbers of political journalists and Beltway insiders into believing he’s some kind of policy genius, a reputation he parlayed into a running-mate role for Mitt Romney in 2012 and eventually into a position as speaker of the House. Ryan uses big words and writes white papers that he releases with great pomp and circumstance, in order to burnish his credentials, but the debacle of his failed attempt to pass a bill to replace the Affordable Care Act has finally started to ding his reputation. [..]

Harold Pollack at Politico writes that Ryan “produced one of the worst pieces of major legislation in memory — and his reputation as a policy professional and legislative tactician may never recover.”

Ryan’s fall from grace is looking even more likely in light of the widespread expectation that his next move will be to try to pass a tax reform bill. Like his health care reform bill, this legislative effort will almost certainly bring the phrase “dumpster fire” to mind.