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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Where are the evangelicals? [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-07-09

Peter Wehner/The Atlantic:

Why Evangelicals Turned Their Back on PEPFAR A religious movement that has so often taken public stands has been unusually quiet since Trump gutted the program to combat AIDS in Africa. The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, first authorized by Bush in 2003, was the largest commitment made by any nation to address a single disease. It was, the president said, “a work of mercy beyond all current international efforts to help the people of Africa.” PEPFAR, which received strong bipartisan support, is credited with saving 26 million lives and enabling almost 8 million babies to be born without HIV. It transformed the landscape of the HIV epidemic and helped stabilize the African continent. Not only is PEPFAR the single most successful policy to date in U.S.-Africa relations; it is “also one of the most successful foreign policy programs in U.S. history,” as Belinda Archibong, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote last year. … Then came Donald Trump.

The Texas Hill Country floods are a tragedy, but not the only tragedy. So much more has been and could be done all over the world and at home to save lives. Where are the evangelicals clamoring to do so and speaking out? The above is an eye opening read.

x It’s not a political statement for me as a Harvard-degreed atmospheric scientist to say that elected representative Marjorie Taylor Green doesn’t know what the hell she’s talking about.



She’d be equally qualified to fly a Boeing-737, practice nuclear medicine or train zebras. https://t.co/FQrj6FvXKE — Matthew Cappucci (@MatthewCappucci) July 5, 2025

Jack Jenkins and Bob Smietana/RNS:

Churches can endorse politicians, IRS says in court filing The IRS hopes to settle a lawsuit brought by a pair of Texas churches and a group of religious broadcasters over rules that bar houses of worship and other nonprofits from getting involved in political campaigns. Americans — including religious Americans — generally take a dim view of political endorsements in the pulpit. According to an analysis of 2023 polling provided to RNS by the Public Religion Research Institute, majorities of all major religious groups oppose or strongly oppose allowing churches and places of worship to endorse political candidates while retaining their tax-exempt status. That includes white evangelicals (62%) as well as Black Protestants (59%), white mainline or nonevangelical Protestants (77%), white Catholics (79%), Hispanic Catholics (78%), Hispanic Protestants (72%) and Jewish Americans (77%). Researchers noted opposition to the idea among white evangelicals remains virtually unchanged since 2017, when they last polled on the topic. There was one outlier, however: People labeled by PRRI as “adherents” to Christian nationalism — people who agree with statements such as “the U.S. government should declare America a Christian nation” — were statistically more likely (45%) to support endorsements from the pulpit, with only a narrow majority (51%) opposed.

See also the first story… pastors and religious leaders are mostly wary of splitting their congregations and tend to shy away from blatant politics, which also means shying away from denouncing Republicans (even when they want to).

x Four high-ranking ex-NYPD chiefs are suing Mayor Adams, claiming they were forced to retire from the department after complaining his “unqualified” friends were being placed in prestigious posts, sometimes after allegedly bribing their way into the jobs. https://t.co/Tvi2tlfsZf — Chris Sommerfeldt (@C_Sommerfeldt) July 8, 2025

Sarah Binder/Good Authority:

Three big takeaways from that “One Big Beautiful Bill” Republican tactics seem likely to weaken the Senate – and make fiscal crisis more likely. The GOP-led Senate detonated a nuclear device on their chamber. The GOP move attracted far less attention than past “nuclear episodes” such as when Democrats banned filibusters of nominations in 2013 and Republicans abolished them for Supreme Court nominees in 2017. But the institutional change is no less important: By undermining the authority of the chamber’s neutral, non-partisan parliamentarian, the move made it far easier for the current Senate, as well as future majorities, to avoid compliance with the “Byrd Rule.” That’s the tool that empowers a minority to block the majority from cramming every legislative priority into a filibuster-proof reconciliation bill – including long-term deficits caused by tax cuts or increased spending. To understand what just happened, put yourself on the Senate floor. Typically, when a senator raises a “point of order,” the parliamentarian provides guidance (based largely on chamber precedents) to the presiding officer (aka “the chair”) on how to rule on the senator’s procedural objection. Following advice from the parliamentarian is par for the course in most legislative bodies. Doing so reduces uncertainty about which procedural strategies to follow in the future, dampens the risk that the chair will rule based on his or her political interests (rather than the Senate’s), and fortifies the parliamentarian’s reputation as a straight shooter. Senate Republicans took a different path when GOP leader John Thune (R-S.D.) raised a key point of order during Senate consideration of the bill. Thune basically asked whether making the Trump tax cuts permanent (without paying for them) violated the Byrd Rule ban on increasing the deficit beyond the ten-year lifespan of the bill. In crafting the bill, Senate Republicans had adopted an accounting rule (known as the “current policy baseline“) that essentially zeroed out the cost of renewing the tax cuts, even after the ten-year mark.

Technical, but important read from a parliamentary expert, above.

x New: Mayor Adams is expected to tap Eugene Noh, a longtime New York political consultant with a history of inflammatory rhetoric, as his reelection campaign manager, the Daily News has learned. https://t.co/H5m11h2rz6 — Chris Sommerfeldt (@C_Sommerfeldt) July 8, 2025

The husband works for Adams. The anti-Adams wife endorsed Mamdani. Shades of Carville-Matalin (ifkyk).

Gothamist:

Numbers are in and NYC congestion pricing is a big 'success,’ Hochul says Gov. Kathy Hochul and the MTA on Saturday touted congestion pricing as a “huge success,” saying 67,000 fewer vehicles are entering Lower Manhattan each day, while mass transit ridership is up across the board. The program is also on track to reap the forecasted $500 million in revenue in 2025, allowing the MTA to move forward with $15 billion in improvements to subways, buses, and the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North Railroad systems, officials said. The program, launched Jan. 5, charges motorists in passenger vehicles who enter the Congestion Relief Zone below 60th street a $9 toll during peak periods. “Six months in, it’s clear: congestion pricing has been a huge success, making life in New York better,” Hochul said in a statement.

x My daughters, who practice medicine and social work in rural New Hampshire made me realize that a focus on macroeconomics, while valid, misses the human brutality that I now see as the most problematic aspect of the OBBB legislation. This round of budget cuts in Medicaid far… — Lawrence H. Summers (@LHSummers) July 8, 2025

Whatever it takes to make you realize. Hey, also, I accept Trump voters who will never vote GOP again. Here’s the Summers link.

Philip Bump/Washington Post:

The useful political lesson from Zohran Mamdani’s college application America’s understanding of race and ethnicity is still woefully simplistic. There are a lot of questions worth asking about the New York Times’s report on Thursday about New York City Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani. The most obvious is how Mamdani’s racial self-identification in his 2009 application to Columbia University — the university where his father was a tenured professor — has any bearing on his current candidacy. Another is whether the Times should have granted anonymity to the source of the story, a man described by the Guardian as a “proponent of eugenics.” Yet another is whether the news value of the story outweighed its provenance: a hack of personal information from the university by a politically motivated hacker. But there is nonetheless value to the story: It offers an excellent distillation of the narrow and archaic way Americans evaluate race — both personally and institutionally.

There is a lot about Mamdani’s election that’s worth covering and watching, including this. And also that the young, talented candidate didn’t kiss butt and wait his turn to get where he is. That’s upset a large chunk of the sclerotic NYC Dem establishment.

See/hear the classic “The Bum Won” from Broadway’s Fiorello:

Like the Little Flower, this guy has talent.

x Shooting our videos is a little bit different now. pic.twitter.com/6F1ufZ8alX — Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@ZohranKMamdani) July 8, 2025

Chelsea News:

Mamdani Tops First Poll in Five-Person Sprint to November Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani officially won the Democratic primary as of July 1 after the third round of ranked-choice voting, pulling 56 percent of the votes to runner-up Andrew Cuomo’s 44-percent tally. Now the race shifts to the big prize in November. And days after the primary results were tallied, the first post-primary poll showed Mamdani with a comfortable lead over the major candidates in the race. “I am humbled by the support of more than 545,000 New Yorkers in last week’s primary,” Mamdani wrote in a statement after the ranked-choice votes were tallied July 1. “This is just the beginning of our expanding coalition to make New York City affordable. And we will do it together.” The first post-primary poll, released by American Pulse days after the July 1 tally, shows Mamdani as the front-runner with support from 35 percent of expected general election voters to 29 percent for former Governor Andrew Cuomo; 16 percent for Republican Curtis Sliwa, founder of the Guardian Angels; 14 percent for Mayor Eric Adams, who skipped the Dem primary to run on two independent lines; and 1 percent for businessman Jim Walden. The poll also showed that cost of living was the No. 1 issue for 31 percent of voters, while 21 percent listed public safety as the top issue.

I expect another poll later today.

Greg Sargent/TNR (podcast here):

Transcript: Trump Blurts Out Awkward Truth About ICE as MAGA Seethes As Trump angers MAGA personalities by vowing to suspend deportations of farmworkers, a journalist who covers ICE explains how Trump accidentally revealed the deep unpopularity and unworkability of his own agenda. President Trump has done it again. At a rally, he declared that his administration is now looking at suspending deportations for farmworkers and other migrant workers. Trump openly admitted this will anger the “radical right,” by which he likely meant Stephen Miller, who suffers severe night terrors about the very possibility that he might fail to humiliatingly frog-march every undocumented immigrant in this country and many others onto deportation planes. We think this should be understood as an admission of weakness by Trump, both substantively and politically. At a minimum, Trump wants the public to think that he’s considering relaxing his mass deportation regime at exactly the moment when Congress has given him tens of billions of additional dollars for it. And MAGA personalities don’t like this at all. Today we’re discussing all this with journalist and historian Garrett Graff, who has a new piece up on his Substack, Doomsday Scenario, about the coming ICE crackdown and the horrors we should expect from it. Garrett, thanks for coming on.

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