“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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Charles M. Blow: Birth of the Biggest Lie
A few things are clear after the congressional testimony of James Comey, the F.B.I. director, this week:
First, Donald Trump owes Barack Obama and the American people an apology for his vituperative lie that Obama committed a felony by wiretapping Trump Tower. It was specious, libelous and reckless, regardless of the weak revelations of “incidental collection” that the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and Trump transition team member Devin Nunes outrageously made public, briefing the president without first briefing his fellow committee members. Nunes’s announcement was a bombshell with no bomb, just enough mud in the water to obscure the blood in the water for those too willfully blind to discern the difference.
Second, Donald Trump will never apologize. Trump’s strategy for dealing with being caught in a lie is often to tell a bigger lie. He seems constitutionally incapable of registering what others would: shame, embarrassment, contrition. Something is broken in the man — definitely morally and possibly psychologically.
Third, and to me this is the biggest, Comey confirmed that the investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to the Russians who tampered with our election is not “fake news” manufactured by Democrats stewing over a bitter loss but a legitimate investigation that has been underway for months and has no end in sight.
Individuals who were associated with the president of the United States’ winning campaign are under criminal investigation. That is an extraordinary sentence and one that no American can allow to be swallowed up by other news or dismissed by ideologues.
E. J. Dionne Jr.: Gorsuch’s big fat lie
With a shrewdly calculated innocence, Judge Neil Gorsuch told a big fat lie at his confirmation hearing on Tuesday. Because it was a lie everyone expected, nobody called it that.
“There’s no such thing as a Republican judge or a Democratic judge,” Gorsuch said.
Gorsuch, the amiable veteran of many Republican campaigns, is well-placed to know how serious a fib that was. As Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) noted, President Trump’s nominee for Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court seat actually received a citation for helping win confirmation for Republican-appointed judges.
We now have an ideological judiciary. To pretend otherwise is naive and also recklessly irresponsible because it tries to wish away the real stakes in confirmation battles.
Paul Waldman: Democrats are going to filibuster Gorsuch. It’s the right thing to do.
After days spent in fruitless attempts to get concrete answers out of Neil Gorsuch on just about anything, some Democrats in the Senate have decided they’ve had enough:
As the Senate Judiciary Committee was hearing from witnesses for and against Judge Neil Gorsuch, his Supreme Court nomination was delivered a critical blow: Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said he would join with other Democrats in filibustering Gorsuch — a move that would require at least 60 senators to vote to end debate on the nomination.
Republicans have vowed to change Senate procedures if Democrats do so to quickly confirm Gorsuch — but Schumer suggested they should focus instead on Trump’s nominee.
“If this nominee cannot earn 60 votes — a bar met by each of President Obama’s nominees, and George Bush’s last two nominees — the answer isn’t to change the rules. It’s to change the nominee,” he said.
That last part is questionable, because this really isn’t about Gorsuch in particular, even though Democrats can make a strong case that he would be an extremist on the court (some analyses suggest he’d be even farther to the right than Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas). It’s not even about their sincere frustration with Gorsuch’s unwillingness to give satisfying answers to their questions during the hearings, because that’s exactly what they and everyone else expected.
But filibustering Gorsuch is still the right thing to do.
Amanda Marcotte: Conservatives suddenly love big government — when it comes to punishing blue cities for passing progressive local laws
For decades now, exaltation of small government has been a conservative talking point. Conservatives would strenuously claim that it’s not that they objected to federal efforts to protect civil rights or create a nationwide social safety net. It’s just that state and local leaders are so much better equipped to understand the needs of their constituents — and the bigger and further away the government entity, the more out of touch it will be.
Smaller and more local government is better, conservatives insisted, and having bigger government entities usurp local decision-making power is a violation of our country’s founding principles.
Well, that’s how the argument used to go, anyway. It was employed by conservatives to justify everything from racial discrimination to teaching creationism in schools, while waving the local-is-better flag.
But recently, that’s changed — a lot. Conservatives are starting to sour on the concept of local control, so much so that Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, a leading figure on the Republican far right, recently gave a speech to the Texas Conservative Coalition Research Institute in which he suggested that Texas should pass “a broad-based law” that would “pre-empt local regulations.”
Wait, what? Conservatives are supposed to be the small government guys. Suddenly you’ve got one of the most right-wing Republican governors in the country denouncing local control and arguing that Big Brother should pass broad legislation stripping basic powers from local leaders to do things like pass smoking ordinances or regulate a city’s minimum wage.
Michael McFaul: The winner of the House Intelligence Committee hearing on Russia? Vladimir Putin.
After the vote results came in last November, many Russians close to the Kremlin celebrated. “Our Trump” — or #TrumpNash, as they tweeted — had been elected president of the United States. Few in Moscow expected Donald Trump to win, but many Russians wanted him to win, including Vladimir Putin. The Russian president so passionately supported the Republican candidate and despised Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton that he brazenly tried to influence our presidential election. As FBI Director James B. Comey described on Monday, the Russians “were unusually loud in their intervention,” violating our sovereignty by meddling in one of our most sacred acts as a democracy and not seeming to care if they were exposed. The Russian theft and then publication of private data from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta produced a significant impact on our electoral process. The DNC chair was forced to resign and Democratic supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) became more enraged at Clinton, causing many of them to stay home on Election Day. Clinton’s image was damaged continuously by daily media coverage of these stolen emails. Of course, many factors combined to produce Trump’s victory, but Putin’s intervention most certainly played a contributing role.
For its efforts, the Kremlin hoped to be rewarded. All it wanted was for President Trump to continue to praise Putin as a great leader, lift sanctions on Russia, stop talking about democracy and human rights, challenge the utility of NATO and look into recognizing Crimea as part of the Russian Federation. Some Russian supporters of Trump dreamed of a Yalta 2.0 at which Putin and Trump would sit down and carve out new spheres of influence between our two countries. Some Russian nationalists went even further, hoping for a new Christian, white alliance between our two powerful nations against Islam and China.
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