“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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Trevor Timm: Congress cannot be taken seriously on cybersecurity
None of the members of the Senate’s Intelligence Committee have encrypted websites nor use secure emails. So how can we trust them with our privacy?
Members of Congress – most of whom can’t secure their own websites, and some of whom don’t even use email – are trying to force a dangerous “cybersecurity” bill down the public’s throat. Everyone’s privacy is in the hands of people who, by all indications, have no idea what they’re talking about.
Leaders are expected to bring its much-maligned series of “cybersecurity” bills to the floor sometime in the next couple weeks – bills that we know will do little to help cybersecurity but a lot to ]help intelligence agencies like the NSA vacuum up http://www.theguardian.com/com… even more of Americans’ personal information. The bills’ authors deny that privacy is even an issue, but why we’re trusting Congress at all on this legislation, given their lack of basic knowledge on the subject, is the question everyone should be asking.
New York Times Editorial Board: Rules to Make Retirement Investing Safer
In a giant step forward for investor protection, the Department of Labor proposed new rules this week to ensure that financial advisers act solely in their clients’ best interests when giving advice and selling products for retirement accounts. The new standard of fiduciary duty would bar stockbrokers, insurance agents and other financial professionals from increasing their pay by steering clients into high-cost products and strategies when comparable lower-cost ones are available.
For Labor Department officials, the challenge now is to see the proposal through the rest of the rule-making process. The United States Chamber of Commerce, which has opposed the fiduciary standard, has already said it plans to ask for an extension of the 75-day comment period. Other delay tactics are all but certain. [..]
Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez and his team deserve praise for a well-crafted proposal. Now they need to carefully vet the public comments and promptly issue a final rule that preserves the proposal’s strong protections for retirement savers.
Despite the protections delineated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, as well as the Twenty-Fourth Amendment to the Constitution (which in 1964 formally banned poll taxes), headlines remind us that the right to vote is “still threatened.” The US Supreme Court has mangled the Voting Rights Act, and the Congress has failed to repair the damage done. The Brennan Center for Justice has determined that at least 83 restrictive bills were introduced in 29 states where legislatures had floor activity in 2014, including proposals to require a photo ID, make voter registration more difficult, reduce early voting opportunities, and make it harder for students to vote.
“The stark and simple truth is this-the right to vote is threatened today-in a way that it has not been since the Voting Rights Act became law nearly five decades ago,” said President Obama.
The great American process of forming a more perfect union is far from complete. The events of 150 years ago were not the end of anything. They were a pivot point that took the United States in a better direction. But the was incomplete, and insufficient to establish justice. So the process continues.
That is why Congressmen Mark Pocan, D-Wisconsin, and Keith Ellison, D-Minnesota, have proposed to amend the Constitution to declare clearly and unequivocally that
Scott Paul: The Follies of Fast Track
Even before the ink was dry on the deal between committee leaders on fast-track trade-negotiating authority, Cabinet secretaries were already completely ignoring its milquetoast terms.
And that should tell you a lot about the direction this debate is headed.
There’s a passing reference to currency in the fast-track bill draft unveiled on Thursday, but there’s no requirement that it be deterred in any enforceable or meaningful way, inside or outside trade agreements such as the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
The TPP has already largely been negotiated, even though this current debate on trade-negotiating authority pretends to inform it. And it’s abundantly apparent from the comments of President Barack Obama, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, and Trade Ambassador Michael Froman that currency manipulation won’t be addressed in any enforceable way as part of the TPP.
For American workers, that’s bad news.
Mike Lux: Elizabeth Warren’s Comprehensive Wall Street Reform Agenda
Elizabeth Warren has given her fair share of great speeches, and has written some outstanding legislation on reforming Wall Street, but her speech on April 15 to the Hyman P. Minsky Conference was the best Wall Street policy speech I have ever heard her, or anyone, ever give. It was comprehensive without being a laundry list of in-the-weeds wonkiness. It laid out a strong philosophical rationale for why we need to do these reforms, and it was politically compelling as well. Her politically compelling argument laid out a strong philosophical rationale for why we need these reforms. Perhaps most importantly, she did all this while masterfully refuting the hackneyed attacks about her being anti-business, anti-growth, and anti-market forces.
Warren’s series of proposed reforms would be a major and much needed boost to an economy still held down by the Wall Street abuses that brought on the collapse of the massive housing bubble, the 2008 financial collapse, and the hardest hitting economic slowdown since the Great Depression.
Andrew Rosenthal: Ted Cruz’s Strange Gun Argument
Americans who believe the Second Amendment gives them an individual right to own guns (as opposed to a more general right to bear arms, as our editorial board argues) often make cogent arguments for their position. I believe that allowing people to own guns is not incompatible with imposing reasonable restrictions on their ownership, but I have heard sensible people strongly argue the opposite side.
But there are ridiculous arguments against gun control, perhaps the silliest of which is that the framers of the Constitution wanted to preserve the possibility, or even encourage the idea, of armed rebellion against the government. It’s a particularly absurd argument when it comes from a member of Congress who is running for president.
I hate 
On this day in 1775, British troops march out of Boston on a mission to confiscate the American arsenal at Concord and to capture Patriot leaders Samuel Adams and John Hancock, known to be hiding at Lexington. As the British departed,
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