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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: The Tom and Daisy presidency [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-03-21
Steve Vladeck/New York Times:
The Courts Alone Can’t Save Us The courts can do only so much when the goal of imposing a policy isn’t to win so much as it is to break things and, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in “The Great Gatsby,” to “let other people clean up the mess they had made.” For all of the judicial interventions we’ve seen in the first eight weeks of the new Trump administration, alarmingly little has changed on the ground. Much of the unlawfully frozen federal money is still frozen; many of the unlawfully fired federal workers are still out of work. Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia graduate and green card holder arrested March 8 in New York on exceptionally tenuous legal grounds, remains in an immigration detention facility in Louisiana.
The original title, the Tom and Daisy Presidency, was better. Good piece.
x In a just world, Tom Homan and Stephen Miller would be indicted for this.
https://t.co/Jr521h1dfl — Tim Miller (@Timodc) March 20, 2025
Philadelphia Inquirer:
More than 425 popular campsites across Pa. are closed indefinitely due to DOGE cuts Reservations made at impacted sites on Raystown Lake, Seven Points, Susquehannock, Nancy’s Boat-to-Shore Campgrounds, Tompkins Campground on Tioga-Hammond and Cowanesque Lakes will be refunded. Raystown Lake, in Huntingdon County, is the largest lake entirely within Pennsylvania. The 8,300-acre lake is managed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and, according to a news release from the agency’s Baltimore office, staffing shortages will require staff to focus on “dam operations for flood protection and emergency response readiness” ahead of the 2025 season. According to the Army Corps, the lake’s Seven Points, Susquehannock, and Nancy’s Boat-to-Shore Campgrounds all will be closed until further notice. All told, more than 300 campsites will be closed as a result of the announcement, including boat-in-only sites. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has targeted cutbacks at a slew of government agencies, including the Army Corps.
x SURVEY SAYS! pic.twitter.com/WRgVZs1OA9 — Go to Bluesky to save your brain -- L O L G O P (@LOLGOP) March 20, 2025
A very interesting essay from conservative farmer Pete Jacobs/Denver Gazette:
How easily we forget previous struggles How easily we forget the struggles we endured. During that time, corn and soybean elevators were at full capacity, and farmers were forced to dump grain in huge piles on the ground, with nowhere for it to go. And ranchers taking their calves to the sale barn is not only a monetary venture but also a social one. The grandstands surrounding the sale ring area are typically filled like a Friday night football game with buyers and sellers. Amid the auctioneer’s rapid-fire call to secure the highest bids for sellers, the air buzzes with chatter as old friends reconnect, sharing stories about the last time they met, bragging about their children and grandchildren, celebrating wins at county fairs and catching up on the latest gossip. However, shortly after the tariffs were enacted, the grandstands no longer were full; it became a scene dominated only by buyers. The sale ring, once bustling with calves, now featured cows and bulls—the seed stock painstakingly developed over generations, being sold off due to farm and ranch foreclosures. Sellers no longer could bear to watch their livestock being auctioned at prices not seen since the 1990s; instead, they would drop them off and drive home with tear-filled eyes.
x The Hegseth-led targeting of "DEI" in the military is perhaps the dumbest, sloppiest element of Trumpian politics and we should mock it relentlessly. Gift link: wapo.st/4kUWWmH — Philip Bump (@pbump.com) 2025-03-20T14:02:33.727Z
G Elliott Morris/Strength in Numbers::
The Trump Vibe Shift Public opinion, especially on the economy, is turning against the president Take for example the public's support for entitlement spending. A poll conducted by AP-NORC in February found 62%-67% of adults thought the U.S. government should be spending more on entitlements, education, and assistance to the poor. And the General Social Survey finds that support for the federal spending on health care, child care, Social Security, and, well, pretty much everything, to be at or near all-time highs. Then there's President Trump's job approval rating. In my average (a successor methodology to the one published at 538) of recent polls, Trump's approval rating stands at just 48.0% today, with a disapproval of 48.7%. That is hardly a number to cheer about, and would not be enough to rescue the party from next year’s likely midterm losses. This all sets the background for discussing two new polls released this week. They help fill in the picture of public opinion toward Trump, the president — distinct from Trump, the man or Trump, the 2024 candidate.
Wisconson Supreme court race:
x Madison has another big day and is at 167% of 2023’s IPAV.
https://t.co/pTLquy1ASS — Toby MG (@TobyMGData) March 21, 2025
POLITICO:
The Data Is Clear: Democrats Face Their Own Tea Party Revolt Polls show the Democratic grassroots is on the verge of mutiny. As Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer knows better than anyone, the Democratic base is pissed off. And not just a little The intensity of the anger roiling the party is at a historic level, suggesting a breach between congressional Democrats and the party grassroots so severe that it could reshape the 2026 primary election season. Congressional Democrats have typically enjoyed higher popularity with their voting base than their Republican counterparts. But the trauma of the 2024 presidential election defeat appears to have ruptured that relationship. A review of Quinnipiac University’s annual first-quarter congressional polling reveals that, for the first time in the poll’s history, congressional Democrats are now underwater with their own voters in approval ratings.
Fox News:
Most think the national debt is a crisis or major problem, and nearly 6 in 10 feel a great deal or almost all of government spending is "wasteful and inefficient," according to a new Fox News national survey. Yet a slim 51% majority opposes substantially shrinking the number of government employees, some 56% disapprove of the job the Trump administration is doing identifying and reducing wasteful spending, and another 65% worry that not enough thought and planning has gone into the cuts.
I want lower taxes and more services. Why can’t I get what I want?
x Dem voters' rage at their own leaders has been building for months—and is breaking out at town halls following Schumer's shutdown fold.
Unclear if this is Dems' "Tea Party moment."
But while fury drove that movement, fear is animating this one.
https://t.co/A5A1JW1MsY — Cameron Joseph (@cam_joseph) March 20, 2025
Jerusalem Demsas/The Atlantic:
Liberals Can’t Blame Trump for California Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein on their new book, Abundance In their telling, what stands between humanity and this future are not just the usual culprits—conservatives and Big Business—but also liberals. The self-described champions of clean energy, transit, and affordable housing have allowed those goals to fall by the wayside while they prioritize onerous regulations, processes, and a myriad of competing interest groups. On today’s episode of Good on Paper, Thompson and Klein join the show to talk about why states like California and New York struggle to achieve the priorities they claim to have. Why is high-speed rail nothing but a dream? Why does Texas build more utility-scale solar than California? Why is New York, a state run by Democrats, unable to tackle its affordable-housing crisis?
x Fox News (Beacon/Shaw) poll
“Please tell me if you favor each of the following”
•US taking over Panama Canal (57/39 oppose)
•Renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America (67/31 oppose)
•Have the US take over Greenland (70/26 oppose)
3/14-3/17 RV
https://t.co/gILulk77ll — Politics & Poll Tracker 📡 (@PollTracker2024) March 20, 2025
Steven M Teles/National Affairs:
Minoritarianism Is Everywhere Terms like "minoritarianism," "democratic backsliding," and "authoritarian populism" have provided the lingua franca for a broad movement of democracy-oriented organizations and programs at major philanthropies. This framework has also filtered down to the messaging and prioritization of the Democratic Party, which returned to it like a moth to a flame during the most recent campaign. They did so despite the fact that major figures within the party warned that it was distracting from what most voters actually cared about. Governor Jared Polis of Colorado, to take just one example, argued back in February 2024, "Democrats can't just be the party of protecting liberal democracy....That's not the top voting issue for most Americans." Last November's election results should raise questions not only about minoritarianism discourse's political potency, but about whether it is true. Republicans won an electoral majority and a popular plurality for the first time in two decades, and they did so without much, if any, violence or election suppression of consequence. Despite Donald Trump's persistent falsehoods about the 2020 election and indications he would not accept another loss, it turns out the GOP was able to win the ordinary way. Attacking the failures of Democratic governance, drawing on a global trend of anti-incumbency, and targeting a promising demographic — namely non-college-educated men (including a significantly increased share of Hispanic and black men) — turned out to be a viable alternative to minoritarianism. Just as striking, Nicholas Stephanopoulos, Christopher Warshaw, and Eric McGhee have shown that Republicans won control of the House of Representatives in 2024 without any systematic partisan bias due to legislative gerrymandering.
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