“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 Says Again: Juveniles Are Different
The Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly over the last decade that it is morally and constitutionally wrong to equate offenses committed by emotionally undeveloped adolescents with crimes carried out by adults. It made this point again on Monday when it ruled that people who were sentenced to mandatory life in prison without the possibility of parole as juveniles have the right to seek parole.
The decision has its roots in the 2005 case of Roper v. Simmons, in which the court held that children under 18 were ineligible for the death penalty. It found that children were less culpable than adults and more likely to be rehabilitated, and that extinguishing their lives violated the Eighth Amendment prohibition against “cruel and unusual punishment.”
Dean Baker Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and Wall Street
As the Democratic presidential primary heats up, one of the major issues has been which candidate has the better approach towards regulating Wall Street. While financial regulation can get into many complex areas, there are some basic points that people should know.
First, financial regulation always leaves enormous room for discretion. Some regulatory agencies, like the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, are notoriously lax, not because they lack the authority to control the banks and other financial institutions, but because their leadership is content to let the banks do what they want. [..]
This is a crucial point, since the effectiveness of any regulation will always depend on the political will to enforce it. Even with the deregulatory steps of the 1990s, the Federal Reserve Board still had all the power it needed to rein in the housing bubble. The Fed had authority to regulate mortgage issuance. It chose to ignore this authority during the run-up of the bubble. [..]
This point about discretion is important, because whatever words we have on paper, we have to ask whether the people responsible for enforcement will actually carry through. Do we think that Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders will appoint people who
break up large banks that pose a risk to the economy? Do we think that they will throw their top executives in jail if they break the law?
Robert Reich: The Volcanic Core Fueling the 2016 Election
Not a day passes that I don’t get a call from the media asking me to compare Bernie Sanders’s and Hillary Clinton’s tax plans, or bank plans, or health-care plans.
I don’t mind. I’ve been teaching public policy for much of the last thirty-five years. I’m a policy wonk.
But detailed policy proposals are as relevant to the election of 2016 as is that gaseous planet beyond Pluto. They don’t have a chance of making it, as things are now.
The other day Bill Clinton attacked Bernie Sanders’s proposal for a single-payer health plan as unfeasible and a “recipe for gridlock.”
Yet these days, nothing of any significance is feasible and every bold idea is a recipe for gridlock.
This election is about changing the parameters of what’s feasible and ending the choke hold of big money on our political system.
Jason Nichols: Environmental racism harms Americans in Flint – and beyond
Environmental racism is often an afterthought, even for those who want to fix our race-based ills and protect black and brown lives. Now, the water crisis gripping Flint, Michigan, is shining a bright light on how structural racism is found in our environmental resources and is costing people their lives across the nation.
Flint is experiencing a well-documented crisis as a result of a contaminated water supply. A study dating back to 2011, showed the Flint River water supply needed to be treated with an anti-corrosive agent in order to be fit for human consumption, as required by federal law. This study and law was ignored when officials decided to use the river as the primary water source for the city.
Potentially large numbers of children in Flint will have to cope with the neurological damage caused by lead poisoning for the remainder of their lives as a result.
Zoë Carpenter: Should Anti-Abortion Activists Be Allowed to Harass Preschoolers?
David Daleiden, the antiabortion activist behind the recent sting-video campaign intended to take down Planned Parenthood, arrived at a construction site in Northeast DC on Thursday morning dressed in black, his hair gelled into a modest faux-hawk, a layer of makeup smoothed over his face. He thanked the few dozen people standing around him for coming out in the bitter weather to protest the Planned Parenthood “mega clinic” that stood, incomplete, behind him. “I think that the building itself…is a little symbolic,” Daleiden mused. “This construction right now, as we stand here, is stopped in its tracks. And that’s the situation with Planned Parenthood and the rest of the abortion industry right now: They’re stopped in their tracks.”
In fact, construction was underway; workers were moving loads of rubble and the clang of metal and the beep of machinery kept interrupting. What antiabortion protesters had managed to shut down was the school next door—a charter school called Two Rivers, which has been unwittingly drawn into the national debate over abortion. Over the past several months activists opposed to the clinic’s construction have been “purposely and aggressively menacing” school children as young as 3 years old with graphic images and language, causing “severe emotional stress,” according to a lawsuit filed in DC Superior Court by the school in December. Teachers have had to keep students inside at recess, and the school implemented a telephone system to alert parents on days when protesters are present. On Thursday, with a larger crowd and a number of prominent antiabortion figures expected on account of the annual March for Life, administrators decided to cancel school altogether.
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