(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Election night blues for the red team as Cory Booker sets a record [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-04-02
Christian Paz/Vox:
Why has Cory Booker been talking for more than 24 hours (and counting)? The New Jersey senator is doing something many Democrats wish their party would do more of. Into his second day of a marathon address on the Senate floor, Booker is engaging in almost, but not quite, a filibuster — an old congressional tradition. Filibusters are marathon addresses used as a procedural tool. They take advantage of the Senate’s rules that allow for unlimited debate or speaking by a senator unless there have been special limits put in place. Senators recognized by the presiding officer can speak indefinitely, “usually cannot be forced to cede the floor, or even be interrupted”…but “must remain standing and must speak more or less continuously,” according to the Congressional Research Service. But Booker’s address isn’t a filibuster — there’s no legislation that he’s trying to hold up. Instead, it’s a form of political theater and protest against the Trump administration. And it comes at a time when overwhelming shares of his party’s membership think their elected leaders aren’t putting up a tough enough fight to resist Donald Trump’s agenda. About two-thirds of Democratic voters would prefer their leaders “stick to their positions even if this means not getting things done in Washington” a March NBC News poll found.
The title comes from two over-performing Democratic losses in Florida (as good as it gets these days) coupled with a big Democratic court election win in WI.
x D+22 overperformance in FL01 tells you why Stefanik's nomination was withdrawn lol
Dems also had a good candidate in that race, whereas I don't think either of the FL campaigns contributed to their margins
https://t.co/wnBV045dFf — Dj (@DjsokeSpeaking) April 2, 2025
Jason Furman/New York Times:
Trump Is About to Bet the Economy on a Theory That Makes No Sense My local bookstore has been taking advantage of me for years. I have run a trade deficit, giving it money with nothing but books in return. At the same time I have been taking advantage of my employer, running a trade surplus with it as it gives me a salary with nothing but educational services in exchange. Thinking that way about the kinds of exchanges we all engage in is obviously absurd. But that’s precisely the reasoning behind the “reciprocal tariffs” President Trump is expected to announce this week. The details have not yet come into view, but if he does follow through, it’s clear the plan would add to what are already the nation’s highest tariffs since the 1940s. Their effect will be lower economic growth, higher inflation, higher unemployment, the destruction of wealth and a tax increase on American families. It will deal a blow to the rules underlying the global trading system and further empower China.
Washington Post:
Trump voters in the federal government are torn over his job cuts A majority of these voters said they agree in concept with the cuts. But many in interviews said they are overwhelmed by the breakneck pace of changes and concerned about their impact on government services. An employee with the Treasury Department who lives in Idaho said he voted for Trump in the fall because he liked his business background and felt the economy under President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris was not good enough. Inflation surged to a 40-year high during Biden’s presidency, a spike experts attribute largely to the pandemic. But the employee started to grow nervous about his choice on Trump’s first day back in office, when the president blasted out too many executive orders for him to track. ... The employee said he would not vote for Trump again but does not wish he had voted for Harris because “it would have been more of the same of what Biden was doing at that time, and it was not working, so it needed to be changed.”
That part about not voting for Harris because of ‘no different than Biden’ was key to the election. She couldn’t abandon him and/but couldn’t embrace him.
We saw it with Humphrey and Johnson in the 60’s. It’s a strong dynamic with precedent.
Jon Allsop/Columbia Journalism Review:
Is Le Pen Mightier Than the Sword? The media dynamics behind a consequential conviction. Yesterday, a court in France handed down a bombshell verdict with huge ramifications for the country’s politics, finding Marine Le Pen, the figurehead of the far-right Rassemblement National party and two-time presidential runner-up, guilty of embezzlement. The charges stemmed from a system that the party was accused of putting in place to divert staffing budgets for its members of the European Parliament, the legislative arm of the European Union, to pay people to work for the party itself; alongside Le Pen, nearly two dozen other officials and staffers were convicted, as was the party itself. (“Jesus Christ also was found guilty, and he was innocent,” one of the other defendants said of the verdict.) Le Pen was handed a hefty fine, a four-year prison sentence (though she likely won’t see jail)—and, crucially, a ban on running for public office for five years, effectively ruling her out of the next presidential contest, in 2027, for which she was considered the front-runner. The ban is effective immediately; Le Pen can appeal, but that process is likely to be slow.
x When historians look back on this period the thing that will puzzle them most might be how little American law firms, universities, media, etc, really cared about defending free expression when presented with the most obvious opportunities to do so. — Phillips P. OBrien (@PhillipsPOBrien) April 1, 2025
Steve Vladek/One First:
The Trump Reckoning Reaches the Court How the justices navigate the six pending emergency applications from the Trump administration will tell us a lot about how much (or how little) the Court will be a bulwark against the President. I wanted to put up a post today (Friday), rather than wait for Monday’s “regular” newsletter, because of the unprecedented flurry of activity we’ve seen from the Trump administration at the Supreme Court—including the filing of three separate emergency applications in the last four days, each of which seeks to put back into effect controversial policies that were blocked by federal district courts, rulings that three different federal courts of appeals kept in place. If we add in the three pending emergency applications in the birthright citizenship cases, that brings the total to six pending applications from the federal government—with a seventh potentially on the way.
Steve Vladek/One First:
Setting the Record Straight on the Anti-Trump Injunctions President Trump and his supporters are mounting increasingly noisy attacks on lower-court judges. But their claims combine shameless hypocrisy with shameful distortions of the facts. I already posted last Friday about the biggest Supreme Court-related news of the week (the six pending emergency applications from the Trump administration). Thus, I thought I’d use today’s issue for something different—taking a more holistic look at the public discourse surrounding the role of the federal courts vis-a-vis the current administration. With Speaker of the House Mike Johnson now suggesting that Congress should pursue legislation to simply “eliminate” those district courts that have ruled against the executive branch, and with both the House and Senate Judiciary Committees set to hold hearings this week on nationwide injunctions (at the latter of which I’ll be one of the witnesses), it seemed worth providing some actual data with which to analyze some of the claims out there about how many rulings against the Trump administration we’re seeing; in which courts these cases are being brought; and which judges are being assigned to hear them / are ruling against the executive branch.
x Sen. Bill Cassidy: "Is there some way that we cut Medicare so that it's-- excuse me, reform Medicare." pic.twitter.com/odTNHPYIyd — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 1, 2025
New York Times:
Johnson Fails to Kill Bipartisan Measure to Allow Proxy Voting for New Parents The speaker tried to use an unprecedented parliamentary maneuver to deny a bipartisan majority the chance to hold a vote on their proposal to allow new parents to vote remotely in the House. Speaker Mike Johnson on Tuesday tried and failed to kill a bipartisan effort to change House rules so that lawmakers would temporarily be allowed to vote remotely after the birth of a child, suffering an embarrassing defeat that paralyzed the chamber and signaled that the proposal could soon be adopted. Using strong-arm tactics in a bid to block the measure, Mr. Johnson tried an extraordinary use of the speaker’s power to prevent the House from even considering a measure backed by half its members. But nine Republicans refused to go along, instead dealing him a public rebuke that left him without a strategy for moving ahead. After the vote, Mr. Johnson abruptly canceled votes for the rest of the week, sending members home and leaving legislative business unsettled. Under House rules, Republican leaders are required to bring the proxy voting resolution to a vote within two legislative days. But they appeared to be refusing to do anything else until the holdouts in their party cave, which they have shown no sign of doing. As Republicans left Washington for the week having passed no bills, it was not clear how or when the issue would be resolved.
David Schuster on Trump’s bad no good horrible week:
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/4/2/2313959/-Abbreviated-Pundit-Roundup-Election-night-blues-for-the-red-team-as-Cory-Booker-sets-a-record?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
