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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Laurence H. Tribe: Repealing the Second Amendment is a dangerous idea
Sometimes the young are wiser than their elders. Days after the survivors of the Stoneman Douglas slaughter stunned the world with the 800-city #MarchForOurLives and their brilliantly effective call for laws to stem the tide of gun violence, retired Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens handed the gun lobby a rhetorical howitzer.
For years, that lobby’s most effective way to shoot down proposed firearms regulations has been to insist, falsely, that any new prohibition would lead to the eventual ban of all firearms. It is easy for those who revile our lax gun laws to lose sight of how many Americans cherish the right of law-abiding citizens to keep guns at home for self-defense or hunting.
The NRA’s strongest rallying cry has been: “They’re coming for our beloved Second Amendment.” Enter Stevens, stage left, boldly calling for the amendment’s demise, thereby giving aid and comfort to the gun lobby’s favorite argument. [..]
Repealing the Second Amendment would eliminate that source of reassurance — without even achieving the Parkland, Fla., students’ aims. It would not take the most lethal, military-grade weapons out of dangerous hands. Indeed, it wouldn’t eliminate a single gun or enact a single gun regulation. It would instead make the passage of each proposed regulation more difficult. Worse, a repeal campaign would infuse the Second Amendment with an absolute anti-regulation meaning that only the gun lobby has given it.
Dean Baker: High CEO Pay: It’s What Friends Are For
The explosion in the pay of corporate CEOs is well documented. While the heads of major corporations were always well paid, we saw their pay go from 20- to 30-times the pay of ordinary workers in the 1960s and 1970s to 200- or 300-times the pay of ordinary workers in recent years. Paychecks of more than $20 million a year are now standard, and it’s not uncommon to see a top executive haul in more than $40 or $50 million in a single year.
Soaring CEO pay is an important part of the story of the rise in inequality over the last four decades. These people are all in the top 0.01 percent or even 0.001 percent of the income distribution.
The high pay of CEOs lifts the pay for other top executives. If the CEO is getting $25 million a year, it is likely that people directly under her are making salaries of $3 to $5 million, and quite possibly considerably more. If CEOs were earning $2 million, most likely the next tier of workers would be earning in the neighborhood of $1 million. And, it’s just straight logic that higher pay at the top means less for everyone else.
E. J. Dionne Jr.: Two big cheating scandals plague our politics
Cheating isn’t winning. We try to teach this to our children, but politics provides the opposite lesson.
Political cheating allows those who engage in it to amass far more power than they have a right to in a constitutional democracy. Its most sophisticated form isn’t ballot-box stuffing but the use of indirect means by those in authority to perpetuate themselves in office.
Within 48 hours, Americans were offered two fast courses in the politics of cheating.
Late Monday, the Trump administration — acting against the advice of six previous Census Bureau directors, Republicans and Democrats alike — moved to add to the 2020 Census a query about a respondent’s citizenship status.
And on Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard a case that turns on whether Maryland’s gerrymandered district boundaries deprive Republicans of fair representation in Congress.
In both instances, the courts should act to defend our republican democracy. On the census controversy, Congress could also provide a remedy. But most Republicans are likely to be quite happy with the distortions the citizenship question could introduce into our decennial head count.
Walter Shapiro: John Bolton is a hawk itching for war – and few are there to stop him
The good news first: Jared Kushner will not be replacing HR McMaster as Donald Trump’s third national security adviser. Nor will the clueless education secretary, Betsy DeVos. But that is about the only ray of sunshine surrounding Trump’s anointing former UN ambassador John Bolton and his Neville Chamberlain moustache.
The explosive Bolton – who is the kind of uber-hawk who will always choose conflict over conciliation – now steps into the most important national security job in government that does not require Senate confirmation. [..]
It is time to pity the permanent staff of the White House, who constantly have to shuffle offices like desk clerks at a hot sheet motel. But maybe it no longer matters who is advising Trump. Caught up in his own fantasy world of unappreciated greatness, the 45th president is prepared to serve as his own chief of staff, national security adviser, press secretary, political director and White House counsel.
Anything left over is for Jared and Ivanka.
As for Bolton, he was the wild man in George W Bush’s tragically misguided, but sane, administration. Under Trump, though, he may end up as the sanest man in the Land of the Crazy.
Jill Abramson: Lawyers, lawyers everywhere. And none to represent Trump
It matters that Donald Trump can’t find a great lawyer to represent him. Just ask Richard Nixon.
In disgrace following his 1974 White House resignation, Nixon paced and pondered the “what ifs” from exile in San Clemente, California. He placed a call to Washington, DC to the one man he thought could have made a difference and saved him from his ignominious fate and place in American history as the only president to resign from the job.
“I wish you were my lawyer,” he told Edward Bennett Williams, who, at the time, was the most famous litigator since Clarence Darrow. But it was way too late for such regrets. It may be too late for Donald Trump, too.
Lawyers, including John Dowd, have been ousted. Lawyers, most notably Michael Cohen, have been exposed as thugs allegedly paying hush money to a porn star. Lawyers, well-placed Republicans like Ted Olsen, have said no. More recently, other lawyers, like Chicago’s Dan Webb, also declined to come aboard. Lawyers found conflicts to prevent them from representing Trump, like Joe DeGenova and his wife, Victoria Toensing.
Lawyers, lawyers everywhere but none who jump for Trump.
He will, of course, eventually find someone willing to serve as lead counsel alongside his existing, threadbare team. Unsurprisingly, he seems in utter denial that there is any problem with his legal representation.
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