“Pondering 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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Zephey Teachout: There’s No Such Thing as a Free Rolex
THIS week, the Supreme Court heard McDonnell v. United States, the case of Bob McDonnell, the former governor of Virginia who is appealing his 2014 conviction for public corruption. Although the court’s ruling is not expected until June, in Wednesday’s hearing several justices seemed set on undermining a central, longstanding federal bribery principle: that officials should not accept cash or gifts in exchange for giving special treatment to a constituent.
Justice Stephen G. Breyer dismissed the idea that, in the absence of a strong limiting principle, federal law could criminalize a governor who accepted a private constituent’s payment in exchange for intervening with a constituent problem. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. expressed disbelief that an official requesting agency action on behalf of a big donor would be a problem. A majority seemed ready to defend pay-to-play as a fundamental feature of our constitutional system of government. [..]
[..] Their main worry appeared to be that Mr. McDonnell’s prosecution had criminalized what they perceived as normal, day-to-day political behavior — seemingly more concerned for the chilling effect of federal bribery law on an elected official who accepts a Rolex than for the citizens who are hurt by such self-serving behavior.
To overturn the McDonnells’ convictions, however, would also overturn more than 700 years of history, make bad law and leave citizens facing a crisis of political corruption with even fewer tools to fight it.
Trevor Timm: Donald Trump’s foreign policy speech shows: we have no anti-war candidates
Now that it’s increasingly likely that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton will be the two major candidates for president in the general election, voters are once again left without a true anti-war candidate, or even a decisive break from the last decade and a half of disastrous foreign policy.
We already know there’s barely ever been a military engagement that Clinton didn’t like. And Trump confirmed on Wednesday in his “big” foreign policy speech that he will be a chaotic and unpredictable aggressor whose opinion changes with the wind. When Bernie Sanders leaves the race, there will no longer be a credible voice saying that more bombing is not necessarily the answer to solving all the problems in the Middle East, many of which were caused by bombing in the first place.
Paul Krugman: Wrath of the Conned
Maybe we need a new cliché: It ain’t over until Carly Fiorina sings. Anyway, it really is over — definitively on the Democratic side, with high probability on the Republican side. And the results couldn’t be more different.
Think about where we were a year ago. At the time, Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush were widely seen as the front-runners for their parties’ nods. If there was any dissent from the commentariat, it came from those suggesting that Mr. Bush might be supplanted by a fresher, but still establishment, face, like Marco Rubio.
And now here we are. But why did Mrs. Clinton, despite the most negative media coverage of any candidate in this cycle — yes, worse than Donald Trump’s — go the distance, while the G.O.P. establishment went down to humiliating defeat?
Personalities surely played a role; say what you like (or dislike) about Mrs. Clinton, but she’s resilient under pressure, a character trait notably lacking on the other side. But basically it comes down to fundamental differences between the parties and how they serve their supporters.
Joseph A. Palermo: Republicans Invented the “Woman Card”
Donald Trump accuses Hillary Clinton of “playing the woman card” and says if she were a man “she’d only get 5 percent of the vote.”
Meanwhile, Ted Cruz announced with great fanfare Carly Fiorina as his “running mate” (whatever that means) whose greatest political asset is that she’s an anti-choice woman who can really tear into Hillary Clinton without being accused of sexism.
These latest lines of attack — Trump criticizing Hillary Clinton for belonging to the female gender and Cruz turning to Fiorina as the anti-Hillary — not only expose Trump’s misogyny and Cruz’s cynicism, but the underlying Republican attitude toward women in politics generally.
The Republicans know the “woman card” well since they’re the ones who invented it. They’ve been playing it since 1984 when the Democrats nominated Geraldine Ferraro for vice president, the first woman to make it onto the ticket of a major American political party.
Heather Digby Parton: Donald Trump’s new secret weapon: How the man who ran “The Torturer’s Lobby” is securing the billionaire’s nomination
Perhaps one of the most unnerving political developments over these last few days has been the beginning of the reluctant acceptance of Donald Trump among the Republican establishment. Watching the likes of Senator Bob Corker on television praising his “foreign policy” and seeing influential House members like Bill Schuster endorse him is more than a little bit unsettling. It stands to reason that this would happen now that Trump is looking more and more like the winner, but considering just how unpopular Trump is among the political establishment, it’s more likely due to the hard work of his recently hired senior adviser, Paul Manafort. [..]
Manafort was mentored by Bush family consiglieri James Baker and partnered with the notorious political operative Lee Atwater. He ran Republican campaigns and conventions for decades, including Reagan’s legendary “Morning in America” convention in 1984. Everyone assumed he was hired by Trump to perform the specialized task of suppressing a convention insurgency, which he performed on behalf of Gerald Ford in the 1976 convention. But this man is so much more than that.
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