Punting the Pundits

“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.

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

Bob Herbert: Get Ready for a G.O.P. Rerun

You just can’t close the door on this crowd. The party that brought us the worst economy since the Great Depression, that led us into Iraq and the worst foreign policy disaster in American history, that would like to take a hammer to Social Security and a chisel to Medicare, is back in control of the House of Representatives with the expressed mission of undermining all things Obama.

Once we had Dick Cheney telling us that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and belligerently asserting that deficits don’t matter. We had Phil Gramm, Enron’s favorite senator and John McCain’s economic guru, blithely assuring us in 2008 that we were suffering from a “mental recession.”

Robert Muggah: The world’s broken promises to Haiti

A year on from the earthquake, more than a million are still living in tents and less than a tenth of aid cash has been delivered

Despite breathless promises to “build back better”, the international community has made only incremental progress in Haiti over the past 12 months. Our failures are especially stark when measured against the genuine displays of global solidarity with Haiti in the wake of the the January earthquake and financial pledges to reconstruction three months later, in March.

Even if some allowance is made for the extraordinary devastation wrought by the disasters, few disagree that the Haitian government’s handling of the situation has been spectacularly poor. Likewise, with few exceptions, the international aid sector’s record has been dismal. Notwithstanding efforts to signal political commitment to supporting Haiti’s transition – including UN secretary general Ban Ki Moon’s appointment of Bill Clinton as special envoy – few tangible outcomes have yet to be materialise. Haitians themselves are growing disillusioned and impatient, and signs of violence are apparent in the streets of wrecked Port-au-Prince.

And while 2010 was grim, there are few guarantees that 2011 will be any better.

Eugene Robinson: Health Care Melodrama

If the incoming Republican leadership in the House of Representatives is serious about trying to repeal health care reform, there’s only one appropriate Democratic response: “Make my day.”

Just to be clear, there’s no earthly chance that a bill repealing the landmark health care overhaul could actually make it through Congress and be signed into law. Even if Republicans managed to hold together their new majority in the House, they would face the inconvenient fact that Democrats still control the Senate. And even if a repeal measure somehow sneaked through the Senate, President Obama would veto the thing faster than you can say “pre-existing conditions.”

So this exercise in tilting at windmills can’t even be described as quixotic, since that would imply some expectation of success, however delusional. The whole thing is purely theatrical-and woefully ill-advised.

Dahlia Lithwick: Read It and Weep

How the Tea Party’s fetish for the Constitution as written may get it in trouble.

Members of the Tea Party are really into the Constitution. We know this because on Thursday, House Republicans propose to read the document from start to finish on the House floor, and they also propose to pass a rule requiring that every piece of new legislation identify the source of its constitutional authority. Even Roger Pilon of the Cato Institute-its popular pocket version of the Constitution is only $4.95!-agrees that these are largely symbolic measures, noting in the Wall Street Journal that as a legal matter, “at least since Marbury v. Madison in 1803, the Supreme Court has had the last word on what the Constitution authorizes Congress to do.” Nobody has suggested that legislators don’t have an independent duty to uphold the Constitution as they understand it. But that doesn’t change the fact that the courts, not Tea Party Republicans-even those with the benefit of extra-credit classes from Justice Antonin Scalia-get to make the final call.

This newfound attention to the relationship between Congress and the Constitution is thrilling and long overdue. Progressives, as Greg Sargent points out, are wrong to scoff at it. This is an opportunity to engage in a reasoned discussion of what the Constitution does and does not do. It’s an opportunity to point out that no matter how many times you read the document on the House floor, cite it in your bill, or how many copies you can stuff into your breast pocket without looking fat, the Constitution is always going to raise more questions than it answers and confound more readers than it comforts. And that isn’t because any one American is too stupid to understand the Constitution. It’s because the Constitution wasn’t written to reflect the views of any one American.

Juan Cole: Wrong Again, Sen. Graham

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., repeated on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday his hope that the United States can maintain at least two permanent air bases in Afghanistan. He was pushing back against Vice President Joe Biden’s pledge that the U.S. would be out of Afghanistan by 2014 “come hell or high water.” Graham has been wrong about almost everything in the Middle East for a decade and a half, so this harebrained proposal is hardly surprising. But it signals the harder line likely to be pursued by Republicans now that they have taken back the House of Representatives and have much strengthened their position in the Senate.

While pundit Bill Kristol has been tagged as perpetually wrong about everything for his various incorrect pronouncements about Iraq, Graham has largely gotten a pass for saying all the same things, from a greater position of power. Graham was among the earliest to be fooled by the ideologues around George W. Bush into thinking that the ramshackle Saddam Hussein regime posed a threat to the United States. Just after the “Axis of Evil” State of the Union address in 2002, Graham told Chris Matthews of Bush, “I think he was very direct about what the nation faces, about Iraq being a possible target sooner, rather than later.” He virtually salivated at the prospect of a war: “I think the danger to this country from Saddam Hussein is great. The president was amazingly direct about people who procure weapons of mass destruction.”

Amy Goodman: Darrell Issa: Step Away From the Corporations

Remember “freedom fries”? That’s what the House Republicans, when they were last in the majority, renamed french fries, after France refused to support the invasion of Iraq. It seems like renaming fries might be just about the extent of food regulation that some in Congress are willing to support.

The new Republican majority threatens a barrage of investigations. California Republican Darrell Issa is the new chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Issa has been tweeting about the subjects he intends to investigate: “CONTINUED INITIAL OVERSIGHT INVESTIGATIONS LINEUP: WikiLeaks, the safety of American food/medicine and effectiveness of @FDArecalls …”

The timing of his tweet on food safety was impeccable, coming just one day before President Barack Obama was scheduled to sign into law the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act, one of the last bills passed by the House before Congress recessed in late December. The new law will give the Food and Drug Administration authority to order a food recall, among other tools intended to protect people in the U.S. from foodborne illnesses. Believe it or not, before now, the FDA could only recommend a recall, not order one.

Ray McGovern: Obama Should Read WikiLeaks on Afghanistan

Perhaps President Barack Obama should give himself a waiver on the ban prohibiting U.S. government employees from downloading classified cables released by WikiLeaks, so he can better understand the futility of his Afghan War strategy.

For instance, if Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has hidden from him Ambassador Karl Eikenberry’s cables from Kabul, he might wish to search out KABUL 001892 of July 13, 2009, in which Eikenberry reports that Afghan President Hamid Karzai is “unable to grasp the most rudimentary principles of state building.”

And, while he’s at it, he should dig out the September 2009 cable from the U.S. Ambassador in Pakistan, Anne Patterson, in which she warns: “There is no chance that Pakistan will view enhanced assistance … as sufficient compensation for abandoning support to these [Taliban and similar] groups in Pakistan.”

The same conclusion is contained in the recent National Intelligence Estimates on Afghanistan and Pakistan. My advice to Obama would be: Don’t let anyone gist them for you; read at least the Key Judgments.

John Nichols: The Filibuster FAQ: Fact, Fiction, and Why We Need Reform

Cato the Younger, who inspired the eighteenth-century proponents of a free society who in turn inspired the libertarian Cato Institute, employed the filibuster to slow Julius Caesar’s consolidation of authority over the Rome Senate. Caesar jailed Cato at one point and then thought better of it; the consul released Cato, learned a few legislative tricks of his own and succeeded in circumventing the delaying tactic.

So let’s accept that the filibuster has a history.

Let’s also accept that the history is one of constant evolution that has always erred on the side of constraining rather than empowering the outliers who would use it to impose the will of the minority on the majority.

As Senate Democrats maneuver this week to implement a relatively minor reform of the current filibuster rule-beginning a process that could take weeks, even months-what should we know about Cato’s tool?

Ari Melber; New Congress Begins with Charades and Debt Threats

What are we to make of the fact that two of the top priorities for the 112th Congress, convening for the first time today, involve an irrelevant charade and an irresponsible threat?

Repealing health care, a pure symbolic activity, is one of the first votes scheduled for next week. House Republicans know their bill will not pass the Senate or clear a presidential veto. Maybe they want to get their irrelevant votes out of the way early.  But it gets worse.

The bigger story is the truly bizarre threat to freeze the debt ceiling, which could theoretically place the U.S. in default and spark a larger recession or economic crisis.  Alarmingly, the idea is picking up traction among conservative Republicans. And on cue, political reporters have begun speculating that Obama must grant concessions to the fiscal bully wing of the G.O.P.