“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.
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New York Times Editorial Board: A Step to Majority Rule in the Senate
After years of growing Republican obstruction – legislation blocked, judicial candidates forced to withdraw, presidential nominations left to languish, government agencies rendered powerless by denying them leaders – Senate Democrats say they are finally ready to take action. Barring a last-minute deal, Harry Reid, the majority leader, said he would move to change the Senate rules on Tuesday to ban the filibuster for executive appointments.
This is a relatively modest step toward returning basic governance to the chamber. It does not change the 60-vote requirement that Republicans have made routine for virtually all legislation, perverting the majoritarian vision of the Constitution. It does not ban the filibuster for judicial nominees, though we wish it did because Republicans are still holding up too many federal court candidates.
William K. Black: What If Bernanke Had the Character to Be Candid?
David Wessel has just published a fantasy piece in the Wall Street Journal that asks the question, “What if Bernanke could be blunt” in his Congressional testimony later this week? Here are the first two things that Wessel envisions a blunt Bernanke as telling Congress:
One. [T]he U.S. is doing a heck of a lot better than the rest of the developed world.
and
Two. You in Congress are hurting the economy now by allowing the sequester to stick and hurting the economy in the future by refusing to deal with long-term deficits. The Fed is trying to offset this, but there’s only so much we can do.
Wessel’s column has prompted me to ask a more important question: What would Bernanke tell Congress if he had the character to be candid? Many witnesses have been blunt with Congress. The problem is that one can be a blunt and dead wrong. It takes character for a Fed Chairman to tell Congress that the economy is screwed up because the Fed screwed up on his watch. That candor is what the nation needs and the character that produces such candor has been sadly lacking among Fed chairmen.
While Washington sleeps, America crumbles. Why? How have we allowed that to happen?
The short version is this: The American people have been subjected to a bait-and-switch routine on a massive scale. The national debate should have centered solely on how much to borrow, where to invest, and how to divide the investment among the plethora of worthy projects dotting the American landscape.
Instead we were treating to the bread-and-circuses spectacle of “Deficit Commissions,” debt hysteria, and a cult of economic austerity that demanded spending cuts across the globe despite the utter absence of real-world evidence for its harsh and untested prescriptions. When the evidence finally did come in, it showed that austerity’s effects were as devastating as the Keynesian economists had predicted.
Austerity prevailed anyway.
Dean Baker; The Return of Larry Summers?
According to accounts in the business press, there is a campaign among Washington insiders to get Larry Summers appointed as Ben Bernanke’s replacement as Federal Reserve Board chair. This could end up being the scariest horror movie of the summer.
It is bizarre that Summers would be seriously considered as the next Fed chair if for no other reason that there is an obvious replacement for Bernanke already sitting at the Fed. Janet Yellen, the vice-chair, has in the past served as the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, a member of the Board of Governors in the 1990s and head of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers. She also has an impressive academic background, having been a professor at both Berkeley and Harvard. [..]
But even if President Obama were to decide for some reason not to promote Yellen to Bernanke’s position, it is difficult to see why Summers would be the alternative. Memories tend to be short in Washington, but those of us removed from elite circles know that Summers’ policies played a central role in setting up the economy for the crash that got us where we are today.
Eugene Robinson: Denied the Right to Be Young
Justice failed Trayvon Martin the night he was killed. We should be appalled and outraged, but perhaps not surprised, that it failed him again Saturday night with a verdict setting his killer free.
Our society considers young black men to be dangerous, interchangeable, expendable, guilty until proven innocent. This is the conversation about race that we desperately need to have-but probably, as in the past, will try our best to avoid. [..]
The conversation we need to have is about how black men, even black boys, are denied the right to be young, to be vulnerable, to make mistakes. We need to talk about why, for example, black men are no more likely than white men to smoke marijuana but nearly four times as likely to be arrested for it-and condemned to a dead-end cycle of incarceration and unemployment. I call this racism. What do you call it?
Trayvon Martin was fighting more than George Zimmerman that night. He was up against prejudices as old as American history, and he never had a chance.
Robert Kuttner: A Revolutionary Solution to Student Debt
On July 1, the Oregon legislature unanimously passed a plan to allow students to attend public colleges and universities tuition free and without incurring college loans.
The plan is revolutionary, and long overdue. It could change the politics of student debt nationally. The program permits an Oregon resident to attend an Oregon public university or community college, and pay back the state a percentage of income over a 24-year period, 3 percent of income for a four-year university, 1.5 percent for a community college. This system, called Pay It Forward, will be tried on a pilot basis, and then if the legislature reaffirms it, will be available to any Oregonian.
Congressman John Mica, Republican from the Florida 7th district and member (former chair) of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, has been on the attack against Amtrak again. During the testimony to the committee by John Robert Smith, head of
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