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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: When pointing a finger... [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-04-22
We begin today with Allison Morrow of CNN and the riskiness of the tacky shoe salesman’s personal attacks on Fed Chairman Jerome Powell.
To be sure, these attacks on Powell could prove empty threats. Trump may be blowing off steam or teeing up Powell as a scapegoat for a future tariff-driven recession, said Krishna Guha, vice chairman of Evercore ISI, in a note. “But this is self-defeating,” he writes. By publicly undermining Powell, Trump “risks putting upward pressure on inflation expectations, making it harder for the Fed to cut rates.” Putting aside the very real legal question of whether Trump can actually oust a sitting Fed chair (tl;dr: it’s debatable), here’s why Trump’s renewed fixation on Powell, whom Trump himself appointed in 2017, is so concerning: The Fed, an independent body that sets US monetary policy, is the ultimate economic safety net. It has the power to absorb big shocks — like a pandemic, say, or a recession triggered by the upending of global trade — through interest rate policy-setting and the use of its virtually unlimited balance sheet. [...] Take away that independence, and you take away the Fed’s ability to keep prices in check.
Heather Digby Parton of Salon details the many many many problems with the unqualified Defense Secretary Pete “DUI” Hegseth.
First of all, he appears to be obsessed with his Fox News culture war issues, particularly DEI, and spends an awful lot of time worrying about things like physical fitness rather than the big picture. His first act as defense secretary was to fire the top women and Black leaders in the chain of command, including the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, whose record of accomplishment was stellar. His directives to purge the military of transgender people and every reference to race, sex or ethnicity have resulted in some extremely embarrassing misfires such as removal of baseball great Jackie Robinson's and the Navajo code-talker's web pages. In fairness, as odious as Hegseth's eagerness to go about it might be, that agenda is Donald Trump's as much as his own. The problem is that he's so ridiculously underqualified for the real job of running the Pentagon that the whole place is starting to come apart — and it's happening at the hands of Hegseth's own closest allies who are apparently at each others' throats. [...] You might also say that Pete Hegseth can't manage his way out of a garbage bag. This turmoil is caused by his closest staff who are all at each others' throats. The buck should stop with Pete, don't you think? Meanwhile, another of his close pals, a true blue MAGA follower named John Ullyot who formerly worked as the Pentagon spokesman, wrote an op-ed in Politico on Sunday night saying the Pentagon has been in total chaos for the last month and that it's hard to see how Hegseth survives. He claims more bombshells are on the way.
Alice Speri of the Guardian is reporting that over 100 colleges and universities have signed on to a statement condemning Trump’s overreaching and relentless attacks on the nation’s colleges and universities.
More than 100 presidents of US colleges and universities have signed a statement denouncing the Trump administration’s “unprecedented government overreach and political interference” with higher education – the strongest sign yet that US educational institutions are forming a unified front against the government’s extraordinary attack on their independence. The statement, published early on Tuesday by the American Association of Colleges and Universities, comes weeks into the administration’s mounting campaign against higher education, and hours after Harvard University became the first school to sue the government over threats to its funding. Harvard is one of several institutions hit in recent weeks with huge funding cuts and demands they relinquish significant institutional autonomy. [...] Harvard’s lawsuit comes after the administration announced it would freeze $2.3bn in federal funds, and Donald Trump threatened to revoke its tax-exempt status, over claims the university failed to protect Jewish students from pro-Palestinian protests. The suit and the statement, taken together, mark an increasingly muscular response from universities following what initially appeared to be a tepid approach.
Hamilton Nolan writes for his “How Things Work” Substack that Trump’s attacks on Labor and labor unions is simply a continuation of pattern started by Ronald Reagan.
It’s dumb to sit around waiting for bad things to happen before we start deciding how to deal with them. Let’s look forward a bit, shall we? And let’s begin by looking backwards, to what happened after Reagan fired the 11,000 striking air traffic controllers. As jarring as that action was, its impact was felt not just by thousands of workers in one union in 1981, but by millions of workers, in every union, for decades. Because PATCO was also a big, flashing sign to corporate America that the federal government was definitively on their side in the battle between capital and labor. The legacy of the firings was not just a more anti-union public sector, but a private sector that felt unleashed to be ruthless with striking workers. This unshackling of union busting by America’s employers (along with Reagan’s entire economic and legislative agendas) helped to accelerate the collapse of the labor movement’s strike power. In 1974, there were 424 major strikes in America. In 1981, the year of PATCO, there were 145. By 1988, when Reagan left office, there were 40. Companies felt empowered to crush strikes as they wished; unions felt more intimidated, and became less likely to strike; the bargaining power of workers decreased; union density fell; economic inequality rose. All of these trends have continued to this day. When Reagan took over in 1981, more than 22% of workers were union members. Today, that figure has fallen below ten percent. And in 2024, there were only 31 major strikes in the country, a figure significantly lower than the lowest point of the Reagan era. In his first months in office, Trump has already exceeded Reagan’s attacks on public sector workers by an order of magnitude. First he unilaterally tossed out the union contract covering more than 50,000 TSA workers, and then (after there was no powerful labor action in response, natch) followed that up by tossing out union contracts covering close to a million more workers across the federal government. You can bet that red state governors will do their best to copy Trump’s actions with public sector workers in their own states. If organized labor, dazed and confused, does not figure out an effective response quickly, you can bet that public sector unionism will be decimated nationally before Trump leaves office.
Chris Geidner of LawDork reports that the U.S. Supreme Court will probably turn down a challenge to the preventative care requirements of the Affordable Care Act...a move that may give HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. more authority over coverage protections.
Under the ACA, among other preventative care requirements, insurance providers must include cost-free coverage for services that get certain positive recommendations from the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force. Employers who don’t want to provide insurance that covers care they oppose on religious grounds sued and argued at the Supreme Court that the task force members are unconstitutionally appointed because they weren’t nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate — an argument accepted by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. That argument, that task force members are “principal” officers under the Appointments Clause, would not only toss out coverage protections for the care the employers oppose — PrEP coverage (an HIV-prevention drug regimen) and certain contraceptive coverage — but all of the recommendations of the task force, including certain cancer and mental health screenings. [...] Given that...the concerns that prompted initial opposition to the lawsuit due to its attacks on PrEP coverage and certain contraceptive care coverage are not likely to go away altogether. Instead, advocates who fought this lawsuit very well could need to focus on a new front should Kennedy back political efforts to change the task force’s membership and recommendations — and, with it, coverage protections.
Finally today, Anthea Butler writes for MSNBC on the surprise that Jorge Mario Bergoglio (a.k.a Pope Francis) ascended to the papacy in the first place and why we may not see a pope quite like Francis any time soon.
Taking the name of Francis after St. Francis of Assisi, one of the pontiff’s first controversial acts, and a clue to how he’d conduct his papacy, was his moving into Casa Santa Marta immediately after his election, eschewing the traditional papal apartments. His desire to be among people, rather than in the opulent apartments set aside for the church’s leader, was a continuation of how he’d lived as a priest and then as an archbishop in his native Argentina. His first official visit was to the migrant island of Lampedusa, located off the coast of Italy, to bring a message to 50 African migrants. [...] The papacy of Francis was a surprise. No one, including Francis himself, ever expected a Jesuit to become pope. St. Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuit order, did not want members of the order to become bishops for fear it would take them away from the mission field and their work in education and reforming individuals. Taking on ecclesiastical roles at the time the order was founded in 1540, during the Protestant Reformation, would have mired the order in the intrigues and scandals that were plaguing the Catholic Church. Francis’ papacy, then, was a singular event, likely not to be repeated in our lifetimes. It was a rare feat, given the history of the Jesuits, for him to be elected to pope. After all, the superior general of the Jesuit order is referred to colloquially as the black pope, who wears all black, in contrast to the white vestments of the pope. Even today, Jesuits are looked upon with suspicion by some within and many outside of the church.
Yes...I remember reading Richard Hofstadter’s book of essays The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays and reading about a number of anti-Jesuit conspiracy theories dating back to the 19th century.
I attended a Jesuit junior high school and graduated from a Jesuit university so this non-Catholic might be a little biased.
Pope Francis was far from perfect.
But in my opinion, Francis was a better pope than we could have hoped for, especially after Pope Benedict XVI.
May Pope Francis rest in eternal peace.
Try to have the best possible day everyone!
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