Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news media 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.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Charles M. Blow: ‘Awful but Lawful’

Our legal system allows for extrajudicial killings by the police without real consequence.

Along with many others, I have long argued that the reason so few police officers are ever charged in their killings of unarmed Black people (and few of those charged are ever convicted) is that our legal system has effectively rendered those killings legal. This is the case regardless of how horrendous the killings are or how much evidence, including video, makes clear what took place.

The defense in the trial of Derek Chauvin in the death of George Floyd raised this very concept Wednesday when questioning Sgt. Jody Stiger, a Los Angeles Police Department use-of-force expert who was a witness for the prosecution.

Eric Nelson, an attorney for Chauvin, asked if Sergeant Stiger had ever had anything to do with a training called “awful but lawful, or lawful but awful.” He said that he had. Nelson continued his questioning: “The general concept is that sometimes the use of force, it looks really bad, right, and sometimes it may be so, it may be caught on video, right, and it looks bad, right?”

Sergeant Stiger responds, “yes.”

Nelson then says, “But, it is still lawful.”

The officer concludes, “Yes, based on that department’s policies or based on that state’s law.”

This concept seems, on its face, morally depraved: The bar for actions, and in this case use of lethal force, isn’t propriety or decency, but the likelihood of legal exposure and jeopardy.

But the very existence of “awful but lawful” training reminds us that this concept isn’t new.

Paul Waldman: We’re all Joe Manchin’s prisoners

If you want to know what will happen, figure out what the West Virginia senator wants.

Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) is happy to drive you crazy. And he’s going to make sure that at least through 2022 and perhaps beyond, he’ll be the one to decide not only the substance of what legislation gets passed, but the procedures by which the Senate runs.

So what does he want?

It’s not always clear; Manchin can be cagey, sometimes almost self-contradictory. He has signaled that he might be open to some reform of the filibuster. But now Manchin has written an op-ed for The Post declaring: “There is no circumstance in which I will vote to eliminate or weaken the filibuster.”

Instead, Manchin says, “The time has come to end these political games, and to usher a new era of bipartisanship where we find common ground on the major policy debates facing our nation.”

Which is kind of like me saying, “The time has come to make me the starting point guard for the Washington Wizards, where I’ll average 35 points and 15 assists per game.” I might like that to happen, but there are some pretty good reasons it won’t. [..]

There are a couple of ways to look at what Manchin says about the filibuster. One is that he can’t grasp what’s right in front of his face, and he’s so absurdly nostalgic for a long-gone era of comity and cooperation that he has blinded himself to the reality of modern partisan politics and the past 20 years of history.

Amanda Marcotte: Republicans are waging war against US children: Anti-trans bills part of longstanding GOP campaign

The attack on trans kids is the latest front in the multi-decade Republican war on children

Republicans, having lost their decade-long fight to prevent same-sex couples from getting married, are now targeting an even more vulnerable population for the next round of culture war hysterics: Trans children.

The GOP is clearly convinced that the way to win the 2022 elections is by stirring people up with lurid, false tales of predatory trans people. They’ve recently passed a slew of state-level bills attacking trans rights, especially in public schools. The victims are some of the people least able to protect themselves: Minor children, many who are already struggling with difficulties stemming from being trans, queer, or otherwise gender nonconforming — a category so broad that it could capture most kids, depending on the interpretation. [..]

The primary targets of this onslaught of legislation are trans kids, of course, who are in serious danger of being denied medical care and being bullied by institutions in ways that can be severely detrimental to their mental health. Trans kids are at alarmingly high risk for suicide, but medical treatment and accepting environments can do a lot to save their lives. By trying to deny kids these things, Republicans are sending a strong message that they would rather these kids die than live as their true selves.

The broad language in the North Carolina bill also points to a secondary purpose behind these bills: It’s part of the long-standing GOP war on children’s rights.

Robert Reich: Don’t Be Fooled, Corporate America Is Crushing the Working Class

Today’s largest employers are Amazon and Walmart, each paying far less per hour and routinely exploiting their workers, who have little recourse.

The most dramatic change in the system over the last half-century has been the emergence of corporate giants like Amazon and the shrinkage of labor unions.

The resulting power imbalance has spawned near-record inequalities of income and wealth, corruption of democracy by big money, and the abandonment of the working class.

Fifty years ago, General Motors was the largest employer in America. The typical GM worker earned $35 an hour in today’s dollars and had a major say over working conditions.

Today’s largest employers are Amazon and Walmart, each paying far less per hour and routinely exploiting their workers, who have little recourse.

The typical GM worker wasn’t “worth” so much more than today’s Amazon or Walmart worker and didn’t have more valuable insights about working conditions.

The difference is those GM workers had a strong union. They were backed by the collective bargaining power of more than a third of the entire American workforce.

Today, most workers are on their own. Only 6.4% of America’s private-sector workers are unionized, providing little collective pressure on Amazon, Walmart, or other major employers to treat their workers any better.

Fifty years ago, the labor movement had enough political clout to ensure labor laws were enforced and that the government pushed giant firms like GM to sustain the middle class.

Today, organized labor’s political clout is minuscule by comparison.

Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news media 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.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Paul Krugman: Embracing the Softer Side of Infrastructure

Investments in the future don’t always involve concrete.

Republicans have been having a hard time explaining why they oppose President Biden’s American Jobs Plan.

Their real motives aren’t a mystery. They want Biden to fail, just as they wanted President Barack Obama to fail, and will once again offer scorched-earth opposition to anything a Democratic president proposes. And they’re especially opposed to public programs that might prove popular, and thereby help legitimize activist government in voters’ minds.

But laying out those true motives wouldn’t play well with the electorate, so they’ve been looking for alternative attack lines. And in the past few days many Republicans seem to have settled on the claim that most of the proposed spending isn’t really infrastructure.

Being who they are, they can’t help going to ludicrous extremes, and their claims that only a few percent of the proposal is “real” infrastructure are easily debunked. The only way to get anywhere close to their numbers is to declare, bizarrely, that only pouring concrete for transportation counts, which means excluding spending on such essentials for a modern economy as clean water, reliable electricity, access to broadband and more.

Michelle Goldberg: The Authoritarian Plan for a National Abortion Ban

Some on the right want the Supreme Court to go beyond ending Roe.

The anti-abortion movement was never going to stop with overturning Roe v. Wade.

For years, Republicans have argued that their goal was to return the issue of abortion to the states. At no point was this believable; since 1984, the Republican Party platform has called for a constitutional amendment banning abortion. Having spent decades denouncing abortion as a singular moral evil, the anti-abortion movement will not be content to return to a pre-Roe status quo, where abortion was legal in some places but not others.

So it’s not that surprising that, with the possible end of Roe in sight, some opponents of abortion are thinking about how to ban it nationally. Last week my colleague Ross Douthat wrote about a debate within the anti-abortion movement sparked by a highly abstruse article by the Notre Dame professor John Finnis in the Catholic journal First Things. Finnis argues that fetuses are persons under the 14th Amendment, and that the Supreme Court should thus rule abortion unconstitutional. The political implication, wrote Douthat, is that just jettisoning Roe is “woefully insufficient.”

Jamelle Bouie: If It’s Not Jim Crow, What Is It?

Georgia’s new voting law has to be understood in its own peculiar historical context.

The laws that disenfranchised Black Americans in the South and established Jim Crow did not actually say they were disenfranchising Black Americans and creating a one-party racist state.

I raise this because of a debate among politicians and partisans on whether Georgia’s new election law — rushed through last month by the state’s Republican legislature and signed by Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican — is a throwback to the Jim Crow restrictions of the 20th century.

Democrats say yes. “This is Jim Crow in the 21st century. It must end,” President Biden said in a statement. Republicans and conservative media personalities say no. “You know what voter suppression is?” Ben Shapiro said on his very popular podcast. “Voter suppression is when you don’t get to vote.”

The problem with the “no” argument here is that it mistakes both the nature and the operation of Jim Crow voting laws. There was no statute that said, “Black people cannot vote.” Instead, Southern lawmakers spun a web of restrictions and regulations meant to catch most Blacks (as well as many whites) and keep them out of the electorate. It is true that the “yes” argument of President Biden and other Democrats overstates similarities and greatly understates key differences — chief among them the violence that undergirded the Jim Crow racial order. But the “no” argument of conservatives and Republicans asks us to ignore context and extend good faith to lawmakers who overhauled their state’s election laws because their party lost an election.

Catherine Rampell: The GOP, America’s most selfless political party

Republicans are on the verge of surrendering to Democrats solo credit for yet another incredibly popular issue: upgrading the nation’s crumbling infrastructure

Republican politicians have proven themselves an admirably selfless bunch. Time and again, they’ve handed over credit to Democrats — and Democrats alone — for all sorts of popular policy initiatives.

A year ago, Washington Republicans abdicated leadership on any coherent federal response to the pandemic, praising a Republican president who proudly didn’t “take responsibility at all” on the issue. (That president left office with a 38 percent approval rating for his handling of the outbreak; President Biden’s marks are now roughly double that, at 73 percent.) Then last month, Republicans effectively conceded political credit for the strengthening economic recovery by refusing to award a single vote to Biden’s popular $1.9 trillion fiscal relief bill. (The bill was favored by most Americans, in some polls by a supermajority.)

Now, astonishingly, Republicans are on the verge of surrendering to Democrats solo credit on yet another popular issue: upgrading the nation’s crumbling infrastructure. [..]

So, Republican pols continue scrambling for other excuses to oppose the infrastructure proposal. Maybe it’s the plan’s pay-fors, those evil tax hikes on corporations! Alas, raising taxes on corporations is super popular too.

Because GOP officials can’t articulate a coherent or consistent case for their objections, and they’re surely in favor of political unity, the only possible explanation left is that they’re just extremely generous souls — eager to bestow as many political brownie points upon their opponents as possible.

Chuck Rosenberg: Does the FBI have the right culture to fight domestic terrorism?

Chuck Rosenberg is a former U.S. attorney, senior FBI official and head of the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Three months ago, rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol seeking violently to overturn the results of a valid presidential election. Not all of the rioters were domestic terrorists, but domestic terrorists were among the rioters. Vile extremists have raised their fists and torches elsewhere, including in Charlottesville in 2017. Domestic terrorism is a grave threat to the national security of the United States.

Because the FBI and the Justice Department are responsible for protecting us from that threat, we need to ask whether officials there are using all of the lawful tools at their disposal, whether the FBI is properly aligned to the threat, and whether the FBI’s culture helps or hinders that effort. One historical example is illuminating.

Before 9/11, FBI intelligence officials, especially in counterterrorism cases, did not fully share information gleaned in their investigations with FBI criminal investigative colleagues because of a “wall” between their operations. The origins of the wall are murky, but it inhibited full information sharing within the FBI and between the intelligence community and the Justice Department. The wall was rooted in policy and law, though it was more than that. It was reinforced by bureaucratic habit, trepidation and confusion within the Justice Department, and it made the FBI less effective. It also highlighted a stubborn inability to mend a faulty structure. That wall is gone. Do other barriers still exist?