“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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Paul Krugman: How America Was Lost
Once upon a time, the death of a Supreme Court justice wouldn’t have brought America to the edge of constitutional crisis. But that was a different country, with a very different Republican Party. In today’s America, with today’s G.O.P., the passing of Antonin Scalia has opened the doors to chaos.
In principle, losing a justice should cause at most a mild disturbance in the national scene. After all, the court is supposed to be above politics. So when a vacancy appears, the president should simply nominate, and the Senate approve, someone highly qualified and respected by all.
Nor were the consequences of a court vacancy as troubling in the past as they are now. As everyone is pointing out, without Mr. Scalia the justices are evenly divided between Republican and Democratic appointees — which probably means a hung court on many issues.
And there’s no telling how long that situation may last. If a Democrat wins the White House but the G.O.P. holds the Senate, when if ever do you think Republicans would be willing to confirm anyone the new president nominates?
How did we get into this mess?
Dean Baker: Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and the Money
Bernie Sanders has made the corrupting role of money in politics a centerpiece of his campaign. He has argued that because campaign contributions by the rich pay for political campaigns, they are able to control the political process. This gives us a political system that is very effective at serving Wall Street and the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. It is much less effective at serving the needs of ordinary people.
This has created an interesting dynamic in the race for the Democratic nomination. Secretary Clinton has flipped Sanders’ claim around and challenged him to show where she has reversed a position to serve the moneyed interests. This might be a useful campaign tactic, but it misrepresents the way in which money affects campaigns.
Undoubtedly there are cases where an individual or industry group promises a large campaign contribution in exchange for a politician’s support on a particular issue, but this is almost certainly rare. More typically the support of politicians for moneyed interests is part of a much longer process. It’s not just that the politician wants to act to curry the favor of the rich and powerful, more typically they identify with the interests of the rich and powerful so that they don’t even see themselves as compromising a principle.
Daphne Eviatar: Military Commissions Drag on at Guantanamo While Obama Keeps Promising to Close It
On Tuesday, the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay are scheduled to start up again, this time hearing yet more procedural arguments in the case against the five alleged plotters of the 9/11 attacks.
More than 14 years after the attacks, not only haven’t the men been tried yet, but lawyers are still arguing over a host of questions that are totally irrelevant to whether the men are guilty. These include:
1) Can female military guards at Guantanamo escort the defendants from their cells without violating their religion?
2) When will the Defense Department provide the detainees’ lawyers with a translator with the necessary security clearances who wasn’t previously working for the CIA and implicated in their clients’ torture?
and
3) Are the defendants getting proper medical treatment for the conditions that apparently resulted from the CIA abuse?
None of this seems to be getting us any closer to a trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his four alleged al Qaeda compatriots. Although the case was filed in this latest version of the commissions four years ago, no trial date has yet been set.
Aaron G. Fountain, Jr.: Do inner-city youth lives matter?
The lead-contaminated water crisis in Flint, Michigan, has captured national attention. But Flint is hardly the only town with dirty and poisonous drinking water. A 2014 report by the Pennsylvania Department of Health revealed that 18 cities in the state had higher rates of children who tested positive for lead poison.
Allentown, Pennsylvania’s third-most-populous city, had 23 percent. But unlike Flint, where the disaster occurred after city officials switched to a cheaper water source, lead poisoning in Allentown came from homes built before 1978. Pennsylvania ranks third in the nation in homes built before 1950. That little has been done to solve this problem underscores the depraved indifference to issues plaguing inner-city youths in the United States.
Environmental racism goes beyond black and white. Allentown is more than 40 percent Latino, most of them low-income Puerto Ricans and Dominicans who migrated to there from New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia since the 1980s. Real estate agents steered minorities into the most hazardous section of the city.
Allentown is a city I once called home. When I visited the city in 2015, I noticed positive and disturbing developments. Local government officials proposed more than $1 billion for a downtown revitalization project, but the poverty rate had increased to almost 39 percent as of 2013. There were more boarded-up and abandoned homes and police cameras at major intersections.
John Upton: What Scalia’s Death Means For Climate Change
Just days after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling clouded the future of a new United Nations climate pact, the passing of one of its justices has boosted the pact’s chances of succeeding.
Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia died at a resort in Texas on Saturday. Scalia, 79, was the court’s conservative leader and his death means it is now more likely that key EPA rules that aim to curb climate pollution from the power industry will be upheld.
Here’s how the sudden shakeup of the court could affect global efforts to combat climate change. [..]
It won’t be clear for many years yet what effect the Paris Agreement will have on global warming.
But Scalia’s passing means the pact seems safer now than was the case just several days ago.
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