“Punting 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.
From the Editorial Board of the New York Times: Marriage Is a Constitutional Right
Until Wednesday, the thousands of same-sex couples who have married did so because a state judge or Legislature allowed them to. The nation’s most fundamental guarantees of freedom, set out in the Constitution, were not part of the equation. That has changed with the historic decision by a federal judge in California, Vaughn Walker, that said his state’s ban on same-sex marriage violated the 14th Amendment’s rights to equal protection and due process of law.
The decision, though an instant landmark in American legal history, is more than that. It also is a stirring and eloquently reasoned denunciation of all forms of irrational discrimination, the latest link in a chain of pathbreaking decisions that permitted interracial marriages and decriminalized gay sex between consenting adults.
As the case heads toward appeals at the circuit level and probably the Supreme Court, Judge Walker’s opinion will provide a firm legal foundation that will be difficult for appellate judges to assail.
E.J. Dionne Jr.: Is the GOP shedding a birthright?
Rather than shout, I’ll just ask the question in a civil way: Dear Republicans, do you really want to endanger your party’s greatest political legacy by turning the 14th Amendment to our Constitution into an excuse for election-year ugliness?
Honestly, I thought that our politics could not get worse, and suddenly there appears this attack on birthright citizenship and the introduction into popular use of the hideous term “anchor babies”: children whom illegal immigrants have for the alleged purpose of “anchoring” themselves to American rights and the welfare state.
John Gapper of the Financial Times: Keep the spies from our computers
The shift over the past two decades towards the use of e-mail, the internet and other technology – by both companies and individuals – has provided a potential trove of data for security services and governments. Were it not for barriers such as privacy laws, data encryption and companies’ scruples, the world would a far easier place for police and spies.
That is why the battle in the Gulf between the governments of the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, and Research in Motion, the maker of the BlackBerry smartphone, is vital. If companies that store and transmit vast amounts of personal data do not provide protection against routine snooping, we can all wave goodbye to a large slice of our privacy.
snip
Due process has also been under pressure in the west since the terrorist attacks of September 2001. The US Patriot Act made it easier for agencies to make cable and telecoms companies provide customer data, and Yahoo is currently fighting an effort by US prosecutors to obtain e-mails without warrants.
There is, however, a big difference between inquiries into individuals approved by judges and routine scanning of data by agencies and the police. The rule of law is the best hope for innocent users of the internet and mobile phones to keep their civil liberties.
(emphasis mine)
David S. Broder The Senate, running on empty
Earlier this week, as the Senate went through the motions of debating Elena Kagan’s nomination to a Supreme Court seat that almost certainly will be hers, readers of the New Yorker could review journalist George Packer’s masterful article “The Empty Chamber“, tracing the decline and fall of that same Senate.
Packer shares with thousands of citizens across the country what every reporter who covers the Capitol knows: that the public disdain for Congress, measured in record-low approval scores in polls, is mirrored by the frustration of the members of both parties who have to serve and bear the scorn.
I heard that frustration over lunch one day last week from a conservative Republican senator with three years of seniority. He was bitterly disappointed that he did not find the collegial, challenging body that his predecessor had described to him — or the cross-party friendship that Vice President Biden had told him he once enjoyed in his travels with a Republican counterpart from the senator’s own state.
David Ignatius: Obama offers Iran an opening on engagement
President Obama put the issue of negotiating with Iran firmly back on the table Wednesday in an unusual White House session with journalists. His message was that even as U.N. sanctions squeeze Tehran, he is leaving open a “pathway” for a peaceful settlement of the nuclear issue.
“It is very important to put before the Iranians a clear set of steps that we would consider sufficient to show that they are not pursuing nuclear weapons,” Obama said, adding: “They should know what they can say ‘yes’ to.” As in the past, he left open the possibility that the United States would accept a deal that allows Iran to maintain its civilian nuclear program, so long as Iran provides “confidence-building measures” to verify that it is not building a bomb.
Matt Miller: Lower the voting age to 10
What this country needs is a movement to lower the voting age to 10. Hear me out.
Wherever you look, from debt to schools to climate to pensions, the distinctive feature of American public life today is a shocking disregard for the future. Yes, politicians blather on about “our children and grandchildren” all the time — but when it comes to what they actually do, the future doesn’t have a vote. If you want to change people’s behavior, you need to change their incentives. It’s time to give politicians a reason not simply to praise children, but also to pander to them.
About 125 million Americans voted in the 2008 presidential election. There are about 35 million Americans ages 10 to 17. Giving them the vote would transform our political conversation. It would introduce the voice we’re sorely missing — a call to stewardship, of governing for the long run, via the kind of simple, “childlike” questions that never get asked today.
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