“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: If Trump’s not a white supremacist, he does a good impression
President Trump’s race-baiting attack on African American athletes is nothing new. During the civil rights movement, blacks in the South who dared to stand up for justice were often punished by being fired from their jobs. Trump is demanding that National Football League team owners act like the white segregationists of old.
It was gratifying to see the overwhelming rejection of Trump’s hideous rabble-rousing by NFL players, owners and fans. But let’s be clear: There is no reason, at this point, to give Trump the benefit of any doubt. We should assume Trump’s words and actions reflect what he truly believes. [..]
Trump’s intent, I assume, was to create a wedge issue, with patriots on one side — his side — and non-patriots on the other. He did not realize that so many people who might dispute Kaepernick’s position on police violence would nevertheless defend the players’ right to take a stand, or a knee. We have a president who does not understand our fundamental freedoms.
We also have a president who, if he’s not a white supremacist, does a convincing impression of one.
Catherine Rampell: ‘Reasonable’ Republicans are betraying us, too
President Trump clearly has no clue what’s happening on health care, taxes or really any other major policy front. He has also made abundantly clear that he has no interest in getting up to speed.
Unfortunately, Trump’s unseriousness has become so grotesque, so all-consuming, that it has distracted us from dozens of other dilettantes and demagogues in Washington — far too many of them other members of Trump’s own political party.
Trump may be a toddler, we keep telling ourselves, but at least some (comparative) grown-ups on Capitol Hill are thinking things through. Maybe we don’t agree with them all the time; maybe they have a different vision for the role of government than many of us do. Still, at least a few thoughtful, moderate, principled, solutions-oriented people in the legislature are working to offset the White House’s abdication of policy leadership.
The flaming turd that is Cassidy-Graham should disabuse us all of that notion.
What’s been threatening the health-care coverage of tens of millions of Americans isn’t Trump. It’s the entire Republican Party.
Michelle Goldberg: Tyranny of the Minority
Since Donald Trump’s cataclysmic election, the unthinkable has become ordinary. We’ve grown used to naked profiteering off the presidency, an administration that calls for the firing of private citizens for political dissent and nuclear diplomacy conducted via Twitter taunts. Here, in my debut as a New York Times columnist, I want to discuss a structural problem that both underlies and transcends our current political nightmare: We have entered a period of minority rule.
I don’t just mean the fact that Trump became president despite his decisive loss in the popular vote, though that shouldn’t be forgotten. Worse, the majority of voters who disapprove of Trump have little power to force Congress to curb him.
A combination of gerrymandering and the tight clustering of Democrats in urban areas means that even if Democrats get significantly more overall votes than Republicans in the midterms — which polls show is probable — they may not take back the House of Representatives. [..]
Our Constitution has always had a small-state bias, but the effects have become more pronounced as the population discrepancy between the smallest states and the largest states has grown. “Given contemporary demography, a little bit less than 50 percent of the country lives in 40 of the 50 states,” Sanford Levinson, a constitutional law scholar at the University of Texas, told me. “Roughly half the country gets 80 percent of the votes in the Senate, and the other half of the country gets 20 percent.”
David Leonhardt: Trumpcare Is Dead. Long Live the Trumpcare Opposition.
It’s over. And it’s not over.
The effort to take away health insurance from millions of people — known by the name it deserves, Trumpcare — seems to have failed again. The latest version, the Graham-Cassidy bill, looks doomed, with three Republican senators joining all 48 Democrats and independents in opposition. Three plus 48 equals 51, and 51 no votes equal defeat.
Thank goodness. More specifically, thank goodness for the citizens who have rallied against the bill — the disabled activists who protested on Capitol Hill yet again on Monday, the callers who flooded the Senate switchboard, the experts who dispassionately explained the bill’s brutal effects, and many others.
This outpouring has left Republican leaders without the votes to pass a bill by Saturday, the end of the federal fiscal year. If they don’t meet that Sept. 30 deadline, Senate rules force them to start the process all over again. Which is why many observers are declaring Obamacare repeal to be dead.
But it is not dead. By now, everyone should have learned that President Trump and Mitch McConnell are not going to give up until absolutely forced to.
Jared Berstein: Do Republicans Really Care About the Deficit?
Though America really doesn’t need a tax cut — demographic pressures alone suggest the need for more, not less, future revenues — President Trump and the Republican majority want one. But they don’t want to pay for it, which means the budget deficit is going to rise. Based on what we’ve seen so far, the increase in the deficit could be at least $1.5 trillion over 10 years.
Perhaps this surprises you, as you’ve long heard Republicans cry about deficits and debt. But any such tears are of the crocodile variety. When it comes to increasing the budget deficit, the impact of this tax plan is no different from any of their others.
Back in 2015, I testified at a hearing on these issues before the House Budget Committee. One after another, Republican members on the committee denounced rising debt levels. Why then, I asked, do you want to cut taxes? Their answer: It’s spending, not tax cuts, that increases the deficit.
That, of course, is crazy. I don’t mean it’s bad economics, or lousy fiscal policy. I mean it’s disconnected from reality, or more precisely, from arithmetic. You can, and they do, make arguments about how growth effects will make up the difference, despite the complete lack of empirical evidence to support such claims. Indeed, rumor is that Mr. Trump has his economics team ginning up a “dynamic growth model” that will spit out phony growth effects offsetting much of the cost of their tax cut.
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