“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: The Supreme Court Keeps the Fair Housing Law Effective
Housing discrimination doesn’t have to be intentional to be illegal. That is the point of the Supreme Court’s ruling on Thursday interpreting the Fair Housing Act of 1968 in accord with clear congressional intent, and preserving a well-established and critical tool in the long-running battle to ensure a more integrated society.
By a vote of 5-4, Justice Anthony Kennedy, joined by the four more liberal justices, ruled that the law allows plaintiffs to challenge government or private policies that have a discriminatory effect, without having to show evidence of intentional discrimination.
Explicit, legally sanctioned racial segregation in housing may be over, Justice Kennedy wrote, but “its vestiges remain today, intertwined with the country’s economic and social life.” From discriminatory lending practices to zoning laws that favor higher-income home buyers, persistent patterns work to hurt minorities and other vulnerable groups the law was written to protect.
Scott Lemieux: John Roberts saved Obamacare again – and used Antonin Scalia’s words to do it
For all the time and money that fanatical opponents of providing health care to the uninsured poor and middle class have poured into their legal struggle against President Barack Obama’s signature domestic policy achievement, the Affordable Care Act (aka “Obamacare”),they’ve now failed twice to achieve their ultimate objective. Thursday, in a 6-3 vote, the US supreme court refused the opponents’ invitation to willfully misread the law to take health care away from millions of people.
Showing a legal craftsmanship that has too often been absent from his major opinions, Chief Justice John Roberts calmly obliterated the latest challenge to the ACA, providing a model of how to properly read a statute. (Hint: if your method of statutory interpretation shows that Spain was invaded by the “Moops”, you’re doing it wrong.)
Roberts’ opinion simply stated what should have been obvious: Congress anticipated that at least some states would not establish their own health insurance exchanges, authorized the federal government to establish exchanges on their behalf, and did not intend for this federal backstop to fail. “Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets” concluded the chief justice, “not to destroy them.”
Dr. Jill Stein has some great ideas about how to create “deep system change, moving from the greed and exploitation of corporate capitalism to a human-centered economy that puts people, planet and peace over profit.”
If the 2012 Green Party presidential nominee and contender for the party’s 2016 nod gets a hearing, those ideas will expand and improve the national debate. They could also strike a chord with the millions of Americans who are ready for a plan to “end unemployment and poverty; avert climate catastrophe; build a sustainable, just economy; and recognize the dignity and human rights of everyone in our society and our world.” [..]
The question is whether Stein, who this week formally launched her second presidential bid, will gain the hearing that is necessary to realize that potential. That is far from guaranteed, because the status quo polices presidential campaigns in order to maintain itself. That policing begins with ballot-access demands that make it hard for millions of American voters to have the multi-party choices that are available to voters in Germany, Japan, France, Britain, Canada, and every other credible democracy.
Even if Stein and the Greens secure every available ballot line-and they have a smart, ambitious plan for busting through the barriers-that still does not guarantee that she will be heard.
Faiza Patel: When will surveillance reform stop being just ‘cool’?
The USA Freedom Act marks the beginning, not the end, of the fight to protect our privacy
Last week, former National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden declared that he was “cool” with the recently enacted USA Freedom Act, which reined in government bulk collection of Americans’ phone records. His characterization of that program as “little” is no doubt accurate. Information from the archive of documents released by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has revealed many other programs that pose equal or greater risks to Americans’ privacy.
But Hayden is too quick to assume that the phone records program will be the only reform. The passage of the USA Freedom Act is the first curtailment of intelligence authorities since the 9/11 attacks and should mark the beginning – not the end – of reform.
Peter van Buren: Five Things That Won’t Work in Iraq
When at First You Don’t Succeed, Fail, Fail Again
In one form or another, the U.S. has been at war with Iraq since 1990, including a sort-of invasion in 1991 and a full-scale one in 2003. During that quarter-century, Washington imposed several changes of government, spent trillions of dollars, and was involved in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. None of those efforts were a success by any conceivable definition of the term Washington has been capable of offering.
Nonetheless, it’s the American Way to believe with all our hearts that every problem is ours to solve and every problem must have a solution, which simply must be found. As a result, the indispensable nation faces a new round of calls for ideas on what “we” should do next in Iraq.
With that in mind, here are five possible “strategies” for that country on which only one thing is guaranteed: none of them will work.
George Zornick: What’s Next for the GOP After the Obamacare Ruling?
The case of King v. Burwell may have been the last legitimate chance to disable the Affordable Care Act. So the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in favor of the administration, with only the conservative rump of the Court dissenting in amusingly strident terms, should leave conservatives despondent. [..]
And as always, this split will continue to trouble the GOP. The hard-core members still have ample opportunity to use real leverage to disable or hurt the Affordable Care Act. At some point this year, Congress will have to pass government spending bills-and there is considerable conservative activism around using the process, which only requires 50 Senate votes, to defund significant parts of the law.
Some more moderate senators are already urging caution, and openly saying the GOP is better served by waiting until 2016 to take on Obamacare. But if the hard-core members, and the base they represent, not to mention ambitious renegades like Ted Cruz, force the GOP’s hand, that dog might start nibbling at the bumper again within a matter of months.
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