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.

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

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Irvin B. Nathan: Congress can force answers from Trump officials. Why doesn’t it?

Officials in the Trump administration don’t seem to have much respect for congressional oversight. Some officials — including Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats and National Security Agency Director Michael S. Rogers — have refused to answer questions about presidential communications, either because they asserted it was “inappropriate” to do so or because they claimed they wanted to preserve the president’s option to assert executive privilege.

The administration has no right to stonewall like this. It’s time for members of Congress to start using their legal powers to compel answers. [..]

Congress and the public will not get the answers they deserve until lawmakers issue subpoenas and pursue contempt charges against officials who deem questions “inappropriate” to answer. If congressional committees are serious about getting to the bottom of their investigations, they will have to be much more aggressive and use the tools provided by the Constitution and the courts.

Amanda Marcotte: The face of Republican evil: It’s not Donald Trump

In the hellish months since Donald Trump’s inauguration, a dark parlor game of sorts has cropped up in liberal circles that I like to call “Would an Impeachment Even Be Worth It?” With the full acknowledgment that it’s unlikely to happen as long as Republicans are in charge, participants still sip cocktails and ponder out loud the question of whether booting out Trump on his butt would be enough to save our democracy, considering the fact that the Republican slimeball taking his place would invariably sign a bunch of retrograde legislation setting back this country decades.

These discussions break down into two camps: those who think Trump presents a unique threat to our democracy and replacing him with someone in the succession line, like Vice President Mike Pence or House Speaker Paul Ryan, would at least preserve our democratic norms; and those who think the corruption started long before Trump and has spread throughout the Republican Party, rotting it from the inside out.

Consider me in the latter camp, which makes me kind of unpopular in these discussions. Unfortunately, my view that the Republican Party as a whole is irredeemably antidemocratic has been borne out, yet again, in the process that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has put into motion to destroy the Affordable Health Act, a process that will likely take out the U.S. health care system as we know it.

Jason Kander: President Trump Is Relinquishing The Title Of Commander In Chief

As an Afghanistan veteran, I’m concerned by the news that President Donald Trump is removing himself from the process of deciding whether or not we send more American troops to that country, because I believe he is putting political safety ahead of national security. As he’s already shown, he wants to be able to take credit when military operations go well and blame others when they don’t.

If military leaders determine an increased troop level is necessary, the president will say it was their decision, not his, in an effort to shield himself from public opinion. If, God forbid, Americans are killed in a new surge of troops, President Trump is positioning himself to blame generals – just like when he said “they lost Ryan,” referring to Navy SEAL Ryan Owens, who was killed during a Trump-approved raid in Yemen.

Later, when President Trump was asked whether he had authorized the dropping of the largest non-nuclear bomb in the U.S. arsenal, he replied, “Uhh, everybody knows exactly what happened.” What likely happened is that Donald Trump didn’t know the outcome of the mission, or what popular opinion was going to be, so he had yet to decide whether to take credit for it.

This is not what a leader does, and it follows a previous Trump decision to remove himself from the responsibility of setting troop levels in Iraq and Syria. Despite what President Trump has claimed, this is not about saving time for the military; it’s about saving face for a president with a notoriously fragile ego and a habit of skipping intelligence briefings.

Heather Dogby Parton: Never mind Trump and Russia: GOP still longs to investigate Obama, Hillary Clinton and Loretta Lynch

Was President Donald Trump an unwitting agent of the Russian government? That’s not the sort of question we would have ever thought would be asked in a Senate hearing, and not just because until quite recently the idea that there would ever be a President Donald Trump would have been an absurd joke. This question is not something we could never have imagined would be asked at a Senate hearing no matter who the president is. Yesterday it was.

The Senate Intelligence Committee heard testimony from Bill Priestap, assistant director of the FBI’s counterintelligence division, who said unequivocally that the Russians had interfered in the election. He noted that they had tried to do this many times in the past with cruder methods but that the internet has given them new and very effective tools to accomplish their goals. When asked what those goals were, he replied:

I think the primary goal, in my mind, was to sow discord, and to try to delegitimize our free and fair election process. I also think another of their goals, which the entire United States intelligence community stands behind, was to denigrate Secretary Clinton and to try to help then — current President Trump.

Following up on that comment, Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico asked Priestap if he thought Trump was an unwitting agent of the Kremlin. He sat there for several beats, saying nothing. Then the leading FBI counterintelligence official answered, “I can’t really comment on that.”

Heinrich said he didn’t blame him and the room erupted in relieved laughter. It was a very weird moment. A top FBI official said that the Russian government had interfered in the election on behalf of the current president and that he couldn’t comment on whether or not our president was an unwitting Russian agent. My God.

Michael Winship: Former Commish Michael Copps: ‘Maybe the Worst FCC I’ve Ever Seen’

In just a few short months, the Trump wrecking ball has pounded away at rules and regulations in virtually every government agency. The men and women the president has appointed to the Cabinet and to head those agencies are so far in sycophantic lockstep, engaged in dismantling years of protections in order to make real what White House strategist Steve Bannon infamously described as “the deconstruction of the administrative state.”

The Federal Communications Commission is not immune. Its new chair, Republican Ajit Pai, embraces the Trump doctrine of regulatory devastation. “It’s basic economics,” he declared in an April 26 speech at Washington’s Newseum. “The more heavily you regulate something, the less of it you’re likely to get.”

His goal is to stem the tide of media reform that in recent years has made significant progress for American citizens. Even as we rely more than ever on digital media for information, education and entertainment, Pai and his GOP colleagues at the FCC seek to turn back the clock and increase even more the corporate control of cyberspace.