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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Bryce Covert: Workers Must Get Radical to Fight Back Against Janus
The Supreme Court’s decision in Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which ruled that public sector unions may no longer require all the workers they represent to pay “agency fees,” is a wound to the labor movement that will bleed resources at a time when it’s already weak. Working Americans must now get radical to get heard. Even the lawyer representing the unions warned during oral arguments that when unions are denied agency fees, “they tend to become more militant, more confrontational.” The moment now necessitates it.
The Janus decision comes just weeks after the Supreme Court issued a decision in Epic Systems v. Lewis that curtailed employees’ ability to band together in class-action lawsuits, forcing workers to go it alone if they experience discrimination or abuse. [..]
Workers will have to reconstruct this countervailing power and find new ways to build solidarity. We’re going to have to get bold again.
We’ve seen a version of what this could look like in this year’s teachers strikes. As the momentum of those strikes has shown, when workers are boxed into a corner there’s appetite for going outside the normal lines of acceptable action. In West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona and Kentucky, where teachers are not legally allowed to strike, they nevertheless walked out of classrooms and won raises for themselves and other state employees.
The teachers won widespread public support by fighting not just for themselves, but for all government employees. There lies a lesson: We’re going to have to stand shoulder to shoulder or else we’ll all fall.
Michelangelo Signorile: F#ck Civility
This week, in a 5-4 ruling of the conservative majority, the Supreme Court dealt a stinging, bigoted blow to justice and equality, ruling for President Donald Trump’s travel ban ― a ban that lower courts ruled unconstitutional by virtue of Trump’s repeated hateful and discriminatory statements against Muslims. A 5-4 anti-abortion ruling came the same day, one day after a ruling allowing racial gerrymandering of congressional districts. And then came Wednesday’s stunning attack on public sector labor unions, another 5-4 ruling.
As if all that isn’t horrifying enough, Justice Anthony Kennedy ― the swing vote on so many issues, including marriage equality and LGBTQ rights ― announced he is retiring, handing Trump the opportunity to put another hard-right justice on the court.
If you care about America and its future, your blood should be boiling. [..]
Seeing how things are going, it’s not an exaggeration to say our democracy may go down in flames. But just like when many gay men in the ’80s believed we all might die from a then-fatal and devastating disease for which there were few treatments, we can’t just sit by. So, it’s time to raise hell. It’s time to scream out loud. It’s time to wake up everyone we can, before it’s too late.
Let it not be said that we stayed silent and “let the Trump team eat in peace” while it rather rapidly turned America into a fascist state.
Dana Milbank: Ocasio-Cortez just did Democrats a big favor
In her shocking primary upset of Nancy Pelosi’s heir apparent, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez just did Democrats a big favor.
I mean no disrespect to Rep. Joseph Crowley, the New York Democrat she beat. The head of the House Democratic caucus is by all accounts a nice guy, and he might have made a competent speaker of the House.
But now he won’t be speaker. And this, in a very concrete way, clears the way for a new generation to take the reins of the opposition — leaders who appeal to the emerging electoral majority that already dominates the party and will soon dominate the country: progressive, young, female and nonwhite. It is no accident that Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old Latina, is all four. [..]
The ouster of Crowley, who, fairly or not, had the aura of an old-time party boss and a conventional pol, gives the Democrats a vital chance to own the emerging electorate of young, female, nonwhite and progressive voters. This coalition can beat Trump in 2020 — and thwart Trumpism for years to come.
Charles M. Blow: Trump Remakes America
Donald Trump, a lying, bullying, womanizing autocrat-idolizer, is fundamentally transforming America in very real and lasting ways, in ways that have left decent people slack-jawed, enraged and exasperated.
He has overtaken and destroyed the structure of the Republican Party, unleashing its ugliest elements to chant his praise and stroke his ego like drunken apostates dancing around a golden calf.
He has attacked American institutions that seek truth and justice, like the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the press, because he wants to weaken America’s faith in truth and facts themselves.
He has shunned and denigrated America’s traditional allies and cozied up to America’s traditional enemies, in one of the most bewildering presidential postures the country may ever have seen.
And now, with the retirement of the Supreme Court moderate Anthony Kennedy, Trump will be able to solidify the court’s conservative majority for a generation.
Moustafa Bayoumi: The Muslim ban ruling legitimates Trump’s bigotry
The US supreme court has upheld the Trump administration’s Muslim ban. By doing so, the court has genuflected before a deeply bigoted president and has sacrificed constitutional freedoms in the process. It’s almost impossible to describe the mixture of rage and vulnerability that I feel knowing that the ban, a dagger in the heart of the first amendment principle of religious neutrality, is now law.
At the center of the court’s 5-4 decision is a degree of deference to the executive branch that is tantamount to nearly blind obedience. Trump’s many bigoted statements and actions denigrating Muslims are well known. And yet the supreme court decided that none of that matters when considering the constitutionality of this ban. This conclusion legitimates Trump’s bigotry by ripping up the Establishment Clause, one of the constitutional protections of religious freedom, into a thousand little pieces. [..]
This administration revels in novel ways of transforming cruelty into locked-and-loaded patriotism. And now they’ve got the supreme court’s approval behind them. Make no mistake. This decision expands presidential authority significantly and the results could be ominous. The future of this country is far too important for us to let them succeed.
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