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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: The politics of school board races, writ large [1]

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Date: 2023-04-19  

x I genuinely can't remember what exactly it was that made DeSantis decide to try to destroy the top tourist attraction and one of the biggest employers in the state he was elected to govern, but this is a bizarre crusade. https://t.co/ZNNjsvd4Aj — Tom Bonier (@tbonier) April 17, 2023

Jennifer Rubin/The Washington Post:

Aftershocks from Tennessee Republicans’ fiasco may resonate for years Though Democrats quickly reappointed the ousted lawmakers, the Tennessee travesty is a reminder that a largely White Republican Party increasingly resorts to antidemocratic means to squelch Black voting power and maintain policies (on guns, abortion, LGBTQ rights) that most voters reject. As Democracy Docket’s Caroline Sullivan and Madeleine Greenberg point out, the expulsion was not an isolated event in Tennessee, but rather part of a widespread attack on democracy that includes 470,000 people affected by felony disenfranchisement, egregious gerrymandering and barriers to mail-in voting… In Wisconsin, a Republican former governor, Scott Walker, viewing the results of Democrats’ recent win in the state Supreme Court election, declared on Twitter, “Younger voters are the issue.” Although he bizarrely blamed “radical indoctrination,” Walker’s conclusion was sound: “We have to counter it or conservatives will never win battleground states again.” In a similar vein, GOP pollster and strategist Kellyanne Conway said on Fox News that Republicans have “got work to do on the young people who think differently on abortion, perhaps, or guns or climate change.” She’s worried that Democrats can create a “turnout machine with young people.”

A reminder from POLITICO, published mid-February:

Why California was over Feinstein’s retirement before it happened Adam Schiff and Katie Porter were already running. Nancy Pelosi already endorsed. The California senator was the last one to her own party. Senate retirements typically prompt tectonic shifts and scrambles within a senator’s state. Dianne Feinstein’s has sparked little more than a shrug. The 89-year-old California senator’s decision to retire at the end of her term in 2024 mostly confirmed assumptions both nationally and back home. In fact, the main question on the minds of candidates and politicos alike was whether she would make it to the end before stepping aside. She insists she will.

Maybe. But the outcome may well be to wait.

x Update ⬇️



One thing I forgot to mention: they hit this record *after* Feinstein last voted! https://t.co/NgZP06pEZK pic.twitter.com/eleYSg2wSA — ringwiss (@ringwiss) April 18, 2023

Victoria Bekiempis/Rolling Stone:

Jim Jordan Tried to Pull Some D.C. Bullshit on New Yorkers

It went over exactly as well as you'd expect As the hearing began, members of the public who were denied access shouted at cops and sundry congressional staffers outside the meeting room, demanding admittance. “Let the public in! Let the public in!” the crowd shouted, moving away from their orderly line along the wall and filling the hall passageway upon learning they couldn’t get inside. “Let us in! Let us in!” As they continued to chant, photographers and reporters came out of the hearing room to chronicle the swarming commotion. Various police entered the fray, shuttling slow-moving protesters away from the area. Jordan may have been expecting the hearing to play out a bit more like they typically do in the halls of the Capitol, where most attendees stay quiet like their jobs depend on it — in large part because they do. But the people in New York City were not political professionals on the clock, and they weren’t constrained by the D.C. decorum that endeavors to keep politics as tame as possible, no matter the life-or-death stakes of what’s being discussed.

x STORY: Fulton DA Fani Willis is seeking to remove a lawyer from representing 10 Georgia Republicans who served as fake 2020 electors for Donald Trump after several of them allegedly accused a fellow elector of breaking state law last week. #gapolhttps://t.co/WwzQPUfTh5 — stephen fowler (@stphnfwlr) April 18, 2023

Charles P. Pierce/Esquire:

Jim Jordan Brought His Cabaret Act to New York City At a ridiculous field hearing on crime in New York, the one thing the visitors didn't want to talk about was this country's insane attraction to its firearms. Jordan brought his cabaret act to New York for the purpose of dinging up District Attorney Alvin Bragg so as to discredit Bragg before Bragg puts Jordan's favorite former president* on trial. To that end, Jordan and his merry band of congressional misfits came to New York to talk about crime in Manhattan. You see, instead of trying to run a crooked former president* to ground, Jordan was attempting to express his great, lifelong concern for the people and property of New York City, who are the primary victims of a crime wave that exists only in the heads of Jordan and his fellow Republicans, and when is Bragg going to do something about that? Of course, short of laying in a lifetime supply of Thorazine, Bragg couldn't do much about a crime wave that exists largely in the imaginations of the nation's conservatives. Jordan started right in with the ol' boogedy-boogedy: Their stories are emblematic of a city that's lost its way when it comes to fighting a crime and upholding the law. As we all know, fairness under the law is a bedrock principle of American democracy in this country. Justice is supposed to be blind, regardless of race, religion, or creed. However, here in Manhattan, the scales of justice are weighed down by politics. For the District Attorney, justice isn't blind. It's about looking for opportunities to advance a political agenda, a radical political agenda rather than enforcing the law. The DA is using his office to do the bidding of left wing campaign funders. The Democrats, particularly Jerrold Nadler of New York and David Cicilline of Rhode Island, listened politely as some victims of crime told their stories and the Republicans pretended they gave a flying fck about them.

This is why Jim Jordan was in New York City:

x KEY FINDING: By a 24-point margin, nearly 3 in 5 Americans believe Donald Trump has committed a crime (58%), including a majority of independents (57%) & even 1 in 4 Republicans (26%). pic.twitter.com/wjiftOq8p9 — Navigator Research (@NavigatorSurvey) April 18, 2023

Sarah Longwell/The Bulwark:

You Have to Think of Trump’s Election as Year Zero Because Republican voters say they don’t want any part of a Republican party that looks anything like it did before 2016. This period has existed outside of nearly all established norms, yet many Americans seem to believe that it is an interregnum. An aberration. An accident of history that will undo itself—soon—as norms and the old equilibrium return. I think this view misunderstands the true nature of what has happened to the Republican party because it does not see what has happened to Republican voters. I’ve sat through hundreds of focus groups with GOP voters over the last four years and one thing is perfectly clear: The Republican party has been irretrievably altered and, as one GOP voter put it succinctly, “We’re never going back.”

x [Captain Obvious puts on his pundit hat]



Fox settled the Dominion case because it was very very obvious they were going to lose a great deal of money and earn bad headlines for months to boot. — Sonny Bunch (@SonnyBunch) April 18, 2023

Tom Hurwitz/The New York Times:

Adolf Eichmann Was Ready for His Close-Up. My Father Gave It to Him. My father, Leo Hurwitz, directed the television coverage of the Eichmann trial, which was held in Jerusalem and broadcast all over the world in 1961. My dad was chosen for the position after the producer convinced both Capital Cities Broadcasting, then a small network that organized the pool coverage, and David Ben-Gurion, the prime minister of Israel, that the trial needed to be seen live. In the 1930s, my father had been one of the pioneers of the American social documentary film. In later years, he had directed two films on the Holocaust and had helped to invent many of the techniques of live television while director of production in the early days of the CBS network. Also, as a socialist, he had been blacklisted from all work in television for the previous decade, so he came cheap… Though he did not know it at the time, these institutions showed no interest in the sources of fascism because the trial was not a trial of fascism. Instead, it was an opportunity for Ben-Gurion and the Jewish Agency to rebrand the Zionist movement. While the early days of Zionism extolled muscular, self-sufficient pioneers in a new, empty and promised land, that image had not aged well in the postwar world. In addition, many Israeli Jews looked down on the Jews of “old Europe,” whom they saw as trembling in their shtetls and walking helplessly to their deaths. Of course, they grieved the Holocaust, and their diplomats used its memory to convince the United Nations to recognize the State of Israel. Still, the ring of shame had settled around the survivors, many of whom had been traumatized to the point of dysfunction.

x Time to revise any historical opinion that Ford was right to give Nixon a quick "full, free and absolute pardon." This act, however well-intentioned, opened the door to later Presidents like Trump presuming that they too could break rules without suffering serious consequences. — Michael Beschloss (@BeschlossDC) April 16, 2023

The Washington Post:

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