“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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Richard (RJ) Eskow: Trump’s Supreme Court Pageant: A Silly Show To Fill A Stolen Seat
The 45th President of the United States just handled one of his gravest responsibilities, the selection of a Supreme Court justice, with typically vulgar and vaudevillian vapidity. Only eleven days into his presidency, Donald Trump’s shtick has become as boring as it is dangerous. If a president’s only duty were to entertain his audience, Trump would already be facing impeachment.
Despite his best efforts, there was no suspense in Trump’s announcement. As predicted, he nominated someone for the Supreme Court whose right-wing notions of “originalism” would suspend our living Constitution in ancient prejudices of race, ethnicity, religion, class and gender.
But cheap tricks like Trump’s live, prime-time Supreme Court announcement do serve a purpose: they distract the public from everything else he’s doing. It’s government by three-card monte, and in this case it draws attention away from the most important fact of all about this Supreme Court seat: It’s not rightfully Trump’s to fill.
Lawrence Douglas: Steve Bannon is calling the shots in the White House. That’s terrifying
That didn’t take long. From no-drama Obama to all-trauma Trump: the shift has been seismic, leaving millions in this country and abroad frightened and struggling to make sense of America’s new political landscape. [..]
As we now know, the drafting and rollout of the travel ban was largely the work of Steve Bannon, the president’s chief political strategist. It was Bannon who reportedly overruled the proposal to exempt green card holders from the ban. And it was Bannon who pushed the order through without consulting experts at the Department of Homeland Security or at the state department.
The Nacht und Nebel quality of the ban’s announcement makes clear that the president’s chief strategist wanted to send tremors through the world. Here was bold proof that the portentous accents of Trump’s inaugural address, also Bannon’s work, was not mere rhetoric.
Now the world would know what “America First” means – not first in democracy or human rights; not first in recognizing an obligation to victims of humanitarian crisis (some of which we have helped create). No, this was America first in pugilism, parochialism and misplaced protectionism.
Lucia Graves: Why Democrats should hold the line and filibuster against Neil Gorsuch
In nominating Neil Gorsuch to the supreme court, Donald Trump just gave Senate Republicans exactly what they’ve long hoped for in filling Antonin Scalia’s vacant seat – and Democrats should do everything in their power to stop it.
It’s not that Gorsuch’s record is significantly more problematic than that of anyone else on Trump’s shortlist (he is, in many ways, merely Scalia’s ideological twin). It’s that Scalia’s successor should have rightfully been Obama’s to choose, and Democrats should return the favor by pushing Republicans to the legal limit, including making Republicans eliminate the filibuster on supreme court nominations.
Senate Republicans shamelessly played out the clock on the president’s dwindling tenure. After vowing to filibuster anyone Obama picked, they lived up to their word in refusing to hold a single confirmation hearing even for his eventual highly moderate selection of Merrick Garland. It was the perfect cherry atop an administration marked by Republican intransigence and opposition to practically every policy proposal put forward by the president.
David Cay Johnston: Donald Trump Eyes Nukes to Eradicate Terror
Let’s step back and take a calm look at President Donald Trump’s executive order banning travel to America by residents of seven predominantly Muslim countries and giving preference to religious minorities in those countries, specifically Christians.
As the libertarian Cato Institute has pointed out, since 1975 the number of Americans slain here in terrorist attacks by people from those seven countries is zero.
The questions to focus on are:
1) What are Trump and his nationalist advisors trying to achieve, and
2) How does the ban advance their stated goals?
The purpose of the order was not to protect Americans from radical jihadists hell-bent on murder, as the order states. Trump’s subsequent conduct confirms this, as we shall see.
The order justifies itself by declaring that increased vetting of immigrants, refugees, and visitors after the 9/11 attacks “did not stop attacks by foreign nationals who were admitted to the United States.”Yet it does not apply to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, or Lebanon, the countries where the 9/11 attackers came from, nor to Pakistan or Afghanistan. It does not apply to any of the predominantly Muslim countries where Trump is known to have significant business dealings, with profits hidden in his still-unreleased tax returns here and through his crony state connections there.
Heather Digby Parton: Payback to the Christian right? Donald Trump owes a huge debt — and Neil Gorsuch is the first installment
Many theories floating around the internet attempt to explain the appallingly inept rollout of the flurry of executive orders issued during Donald Trump’s first few days in office. One is that Trump strategist Steve Bannon believes the most important first step is to thoroughly secure the Trump base’s undying loyalty by addressing every campaign promise as quickly as possible. In my opinion, this is as unlikely as the theory that he’s implementing a cunning Machiavellian plan to use each new order as a shiny distraction from the last disastrous one. The Trump people are bold, but they’re not that organized.
But the fact that the Trump team moved the announcement of the new Supreme Court nominee earlier to Tuesday night from its previously scheduled time on Thursday may lend some credence to both theories. The base was starting to get restless after watching the pandemonium of the first few days and needed calming. There’s nothing like a young, far-right Supreme Court justice in waiting to bring together the GOP coalition.
Trump staged the announcement with a corny and manipulative “suspense” plot by calling the two reported finalists to Washington so no one would know who “won” the job until he announced it before the nation at a prime-time ceremony in the White House. Trump obviously plans to run his administration like a cheap reality-TV show, so we’d better get used to this sort of thing.
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