Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Republicans trashing our institutions

[Brexiter]

We begin today with John T. Bennett of Roll Call reporting on the GOP-lead House approving of an impeachment inquiry of President Biden.

The measure was approved 221-212, with every Republican supporting it and every Democrat opposed. One Democrat did not vote.

The impeachment resolution spells out the authorities of three involved committees, and an accompanying measure describes the GOP-run panels’ subpoena powers. GOP leaders, including Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., who teed up the resolution, contend the move would place the inquiry on firmer legal ground, should the Biden camp challenge any subpoenas in court. [...]

House Judiciary Committee ranking member Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., on Wednesday called the inquiry “political hackery,” adding: “This is not serious work.” And Oversight and Accountability ranking Democrat Jamie Raskin of Maryland said moments earlier that “this stupid, blundering investigation is keeping us from getting any real work done for the people of America.”

President Biden and White House aides have vigorously denied any wrongdoing. Asked last week about House GOP claims that he had interacted with his son’s foreign business associates, Biden told White House reporters, “I did not. And it’s just a bunch of lies.”

Kimberly Atkins Stohr of The Boston Globe says that the U.S. Supreme Court threatens to dismantle the criminal prosecution of Donald Trump by taking up the appeal of a case from a Jan. 6 Capitol rioter.

By taking up an appeal by accused Jan. 6 Capitol rioter Joseph W. Fischer, the court could undo the most serious federal criminal charge Trump is facing for his attempt to subvert democracy.

Fischer’s appeal stems from a charge that he, Trump, and hundreds of others involved in the events of Jan. 6 are facing: corruptly obstructing, influencing, or impeding an official proceeding. The charge comes under a federal law passed in the wake of the Enron collapse and was aimed at toughening penalties for actions including destroying, altering, or fabricating financial records. The penalties are stiff indeed: Trump and the other defendants face as many as 20 years in prison as well as steep fines if found guilty.

The language of the statute is not limited to shredding documents and the like. It contains the broad catchall that prohibits any action that “otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so.” And it has been deemed by courts to include interfering with congressional proceedings.

Adam Serwer of The Atlantic writes about the complete absurdity of the “Great Replacement” theory at a time Republicans can field Vivek Ramaswamy for the Republican presidential nomination.

Right-wing apologism for January 6 is no longer shocking, not even from Republican presidential candidates. Trumpists often vacillate between denying it happened, justifying and valorizing those who attempted to overthrow the government to keep Donald Trump in power, or insisting that they were somehow tricked into it by undercover agents provocateurs. But the basic facts remain: January 6 was a farcical but genuine attempt to overthrow the constitutional government, which many Trump supporters think is defensible because only conservatives should be allowed to hold power. [...]

Since Trump’s election, in 2016, the Great Replacement has gone from the far-right fringe to the conservative mainstream. After a white supremacist in Texas targeted Hispanics, killing 23 people in 2019, many conservatives offered condemnations of both the act and the ideology that motivated it. But over the past several years, a concerted campaign by conservative elites in the right-wing media has made the theory more respectable. By 2022, after another white supremacist murdered 10 Black people at a supermarket in Buffalo, some prominent voices on the right were willing to claim that there was some validity to the argument that white people are being “replaced.” [...]

Arab American voters, both Christian and Muslim, are withdrawing support from Joe Biden over his thus-far unconditional support for Israel’s conduct in its war with Hamas. This shift, along with a drift to the right that had already begun among more conservative segments of the Muslim community over LGBTQ rights—is an obvious example of how religious and ethnic minority groups can realign politically in unanticipated ways. Muslim voters were a largely pro-Bush constituency in 2000, prior to the GOP embrace of anti-Muslim bigotry after 9/11. So were Hispanic voters in 2000 and 2004, and Trump showed similar strength with such voters in 2020, as well as making gains with Black voters. Many immigrants who fled left-wing or Communist regimes in Asia and Latin America—Vietnamese, Venezuelans, Cubans—lean right, much as the influx of Jewish refugees from the Soviet Union in the 1990s did. Immigrants from West Africa are often highly religious and socially conservative. And even within particular groups, there are tremendous regional, cultural, class, and educational differences—Puerto Rican voters in Chicago will not necessarily have the same priorities and values as Tejano voters living in Laredo. The far right and its admirers are too busy railing against diversity to understand that diversity is precisely why “the Great Replacement” is nonsense.

Charles Blow of The New York Times looks at some of the reasons that too many Americans are thirsty for authoritarianism.

Confidence in many of our major institutions — including schools, big business, the news media — is at or near its lowest point in the past half-century, in part because of the Donald Trump-led right-wing project to depress it. Indeed, according to a July Gallup report, Republicans’ confidence in 10 of the 16 institutions measured was lower than Democrats’. Three institutions in which Republicans’ confidence exceeded Democrats’ were the Supreme Court, organized religion and the police.

And as people lose faith in these institutions — many being central to maintaining the social contract that democracies offer — they can lose faith in democracy itself. People then lose their fear of a candidate like Trump — who tried to overturn the previous presidential election and recently said that if he’s elected next time, he won’t be a dictator, “except for Day 1” — when they believe democracy is already broken.

In fact, some welcome the prospect of breaking it completely and starting anew with something different, possibly a version of our political system from a time when it was less democratic — before we expanded the pool of participants.[...]

And while these authoritarian inklings may be more visible on the political right, they can also sneak in on the left.

The former chair of the board of trustees at the University of Pennsylvania, Scott L. Bok, writes about the negative influence of donors on university decisions for The Philadelphia Inquirer.

I advocate for free expression and the right to demonstrate, but I am deeply troubled by the hurtful rhetoric sometimes used at demonstrations.

I despair at the ability of social media to mislead, distort, and amplify such rhetoric.

But there are limits to what universities can do to address such matters. Physical safety concerns must come first, so at Penn, we dramatically stepped up our police presence — that campus has never been more closely watched. And if you walked across campus as I did numerous times this semester, most often you would have been struck by how normal life seemed. [...]

Penn has repeatedly condemned hateful speech and appropriately investigated all acts of antisemitism, pursuing every remedy within its power. In particular, it has acted aggressively in response to any vandalism, theft, violence, or threats of violence on the campus.

The challenge all universities face — and always have faced — is how to balance the desire to allow free speech with the desire to maintain order and allow all students to flourish free from bias or harassment. Chaos and violence are bad, but so are McCarthyism and martial law.

Jeannie Suk Gersen of The New Yorker asks an interesting hypothetical question: should American colleges and universities have affirmative action for men?

Despite efforts to dampen their success in admissions, women have, since the nineteen-eighties, been a majority of undergraduate student bodies. Today, they constitute nearly sixty per cent of students enrolled in college nationwide, at private and public institutions. The freshman classes of nearly all Ivy League schools are majority female. Female applicants consistently have higher high-school grades than male applicants, have completed more credits and more challenging courses, and have done more extracurricular activities. Male applicants reportedly have more trouble getting their application materials submitted (which has led Baylor to launch a “males and moms communication campaign” to help keep male applicants on track). Women also perform better than men in college, being more likely to graduate and to do so with honors. Women outnumber men in college applications by more than a third, and there are more qualified women than men in the applicant pool. [...]

At oral arguments in the S.F.F.A. [Students for Fair Admission] case, more than a year ago, Justice Elena Kagan stated aloud the open secret that, if selective colleges were to admit applicants without considering gender, the student bodies would be majority female. Justice Kagan asked the lawyer for S.F.F.A., who argued against using race in admissions, whether he thought it was lawful for schools to use gender in admissions and “put a thumb on the scales” for men in order to serve the health of university life and of society. He replied that the use of gender in admissions may be lawful even though the use of race is unlawful, because the Court does not subject gender to the same level of scrutiny that it subjects race to. Kagan observed that it “would be peculiar” if “white men get the thumb on the scale, but people who have been kicked in the teeth by our society for centuries do not.”

In equal-protection analyses under the Fourteenth Amendment, the Court has indeed allowed more leeway for using gender, but, in order to be constitutional, the use of gender must be substantially related to an important interest. The question, then, would be whether colleges’ interest in having a gender-balanced student body is so important that it justifies holding women to higher admissions standards than men. If a plaintiff brought an equal-protection challenge to the use of sex in admissions, colleges would surely have to do better than to invoke students’ desire to be on a gender-balanced campus, which may reflect their assessment of dating or marriage prospects. (Susan Dominus reported this fall in the Times that at Tulane, where last year’s freshman class was nearly two-thirds women, female students felt that “the gender ratio left them with fewer options, in sheer numbers and in the kinds of relationships available to them.”) Alexandra Brodsky, a civil-rights lawyer at Public Justice and the author of “Sexual Justice,” told me, “I’d be curious, in an equal-protection suit, what reasons a school would give for wanting a sex-balanced class. Relying on the desires of customers is not usually a justification for discrimination.” It’s also doubtful that the Court, which doesn’t consider racial diversity a compelling interest for schools to pursue, would conclude that gender diversity is an important one.

Marianne Lavelle of Inside Climate News says that, with the help of U.S. Special Climate Envoy John Kerry and his team, COP28 wasn't the total disaster that it might have been.

The United States may not have entirely won over its critics when COP28 ended Tuesday with the first statement on fossil fuels in the history of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. But the summit’s cautious final compromise text—which the United States clearly had a key role in helping to craft, say those familiar with Kerry’s team—was enough to ensure that the gathering did not blow up and end without a deal. And that, in itself, was a victory both for the United States and the much-maligned U.N. process, say a number of close observers of climate talks.

To the extent that the U.S. contributed to keeping the process alive, it was able to ensure continued progress would come out of its intensive pre-summit diplomacy with China. The world’s two largest greenhouse gas polluters worked together at Dubai to include in the summit’s final statement a number of items from the agreement they reached in November in Sunnylands, California, including language on addressing potent greenhouse gases other than carbon dioxide, especially methane.

Univision news anchor Enrique Acevedo pens an essay for The Washington Post defending his Univision interview with Number 45.

Joaquin Blaya, a former president of Univision who left the network 32 years ago, told The Post, “This was Mexican-style news coverage,” casting a shadow of corruption over my interviewing style and overlooking how journalists in Mexico, where I’m based, are killed more than anywhere else in the world for doing their jobs. Some Latino celebrities employed the same nativist rhetoric they decry from the far right to say “the Mexicans” were importing unscrupulous practices to meddle in U.S. elections. Never mind, I’m American, and have been working more than 20 years for some of the most prestigious news outlets in the world, my record speaks for itself.

Outdated prejudice about Mexico and its news media poses significant dangers, validating decades-old perceptions that fail to reflect the modern, vibrant and open society that defines the country today. Moreover, it underscores a striking absence of humility in the face of our own democratic challenges. Given this broader context, the irony of such false claims is glaring and concerning.


Amid intense partisanship with clearly delineated camps, my interview with Trump wasn’t crafted to convince Democrats or my colleagues in the press that Trump is an unsuitable choice. Instead, its purpose was to afford conservative Latinos the opportunity to hear directly from him without confrontation or hostility.

I didn’t even consider watching Mr. Acevedo’s interview with Number 45 until last night, which basically consisted of Acevedo asking a question and then allowing Number 45 to gish gallop his answers. That’s my problem with the interview as opposed to Mr. Acevedo or Univision wanting to create a “safe space” for conservative Latinos that admire Trump.


Finally today, Fred Kaplan of Slate reports on the possible consequences of Republicans holding Ukraine aid hostage.

The Ukrainian president had flown 5,000 miles to patch up his fraying relationship with Washington legislators. On his previous two trips, they’d practically hoisted him on their shoulders, cheering him as democracy’s great brave hope. But this time, in a series of meetings on Tuesday, the Republican lawmakers brushed him off, shrugged that the romance was over, then tacked on that hoariest of evasions: It’s not you, it’s us.

It was among the most shameful episodes of a sordid political season—and it could have dangerous consequences worldwide.

Taken by itself, the cause of Ukrainian independence—which requires arming Ukrainian troops to fight off Russia’s invading army—enjoys broad, bipartisan support. But the cause has hit a dire moment. The troops are running out of ammunition. President Biden has asked Congress for $60 billion in emergency supplemental funding to keep them going. But Senate Republicans are telling him: We won’t give you the money—we’ll block the 60-vote majority needed to pass the supplemental funding—unless you let us pass a radical immigration bill that all but locks down America’s southern border and makes it nearly impossible for migrants to apply for asylum.

Biden says he’s willing to meet the Republican demand for border tightening halfway. But the Republicans want no compromise; they demand a Senate version of a bill that the House passed earlier this year—a bill so extreme that it garnered not a single Democratic vote. And they are willing to do this even if it means the collapse of Ukraine’s defenses against Russia.

I didn’t even need to read that story, just the look on Zelensky’s face in the photo…

Everyone try to have the best possible day!