Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Decisions, decisions ...

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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup is a long-running series published every morning that collects essential political discussion and analysis around the internet.

We begin today with Catie Edmondson of The New York Times, reporting that House Speaker Mike Johnson may be prepared to make a deal to pass aid for Ukraine, come what may.

While the speaker has remained noncommittal about any one option, he has repeatedly expressed a personal desire to send aid to Ukraine — something he has voted against repeatedly in the past — and now appears to be in search of the least politically damaging way to do it.

The challenge for Mr. Johnson is that any combination of aid measures he puts to a vote will likely infuriate the growing isolationist wing of his party, which considers the issue toxic. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, who has repeatedly said she would call a snap vote to unseat the speaker if he allowed a vote for Ukraine aid before imposing restrictive immigration measures, filed a resolution on Friday calling for his removal, saying she wanted to send him “a warning.”

Even if Ms. Greene follows through on the threat, Mr. Johnson could still hold onto his job. Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the minority leader, has said he believed “a reasonable number” of Democrats would vote to save the speaker were he to face a Republican mutiny for acting on the Senate-passed aid package, though on Friday Mr. Jeffries said that had been “an observation, not a declaration.”

Amy Davidson Sorkin of The New Yorker lays out the high stakes for the U.S. Supreme Court, where oral arguments in FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine are happening Tuesday.

Entire stretches of the country are now undergoing rapid desertification, in terms of reproductive health. A study released last week by the Guttmacher Institute shows how the terrain is shifting—and how people are trying to find their way through the land of Dobbs. Fourteen states, including Texas, Missouri, and Indiana, have banned almost all abortions; Guttmacher found that in states that bordered those fourteen the number of abortions in the formal medical system had increased by thirty-seven per cent since 2020. (Nationally, the increase was ten per cent.) That number suggests that Dobbs has levied a travel tax: Guttmacher estimates that a hundred and sixty thousand people crossed state lines to obtain an abortion last year.

The Guttmacher report demonstrates how essential mifepristone is. Between 2020 and 2023, the proportion of medical abortions rose from fifty-three per cent to sixty-three. (In 2014, the number was thirty-one per cent.) Guttmacher cited a study finding that online-only providers now account for eight per cent of abortions. Telemedicine is not a panacea; pharmacies cannot mail the pills to or even within every state, and some people would prefer to be cared for in person. And ten weeks is still a relatively narrow window. But more access helps.

[...]

The mifepristone case emerged from the Fifth Circuit, which, as Vox put it, has become the nation’s “Trumpiest court.” Still, it is shocking that the case has come this far. To bring a suit, parties are supposed to show “standing”—meaning that they have been harmed in some direct way that a court can remedy. The A.H.M.’s contention is that some of its members are doctors who theoretically might encounter patients in an emergency room who needed care after taking mifepristone and be forced to treat them in some manner that could violate those doctors’ consciences. It’s not clear that this has ever happened. The A.H.M. also argues that treating these patients would divert “time and resources” from those its members do approve of.

Paul Krugman of The New York Times reminds us that the future of Obamacare is on the ballot in November.

When he was in office, Trump was putty in the hands of right-wing economic ideologues, who actually know how to write legislation that serves their objectives; practically his only major budgetary initiatives were a tax cut for the wealthy and corporations, which passed, and the attempted gutting of Obamacare, which fell just short.

And what we know is that even though Trump likes to portray himself as a populist, right-wing economic ideology still rules among congressional Republicans, who are as eager as ever to effectively destroy Obamacare. Last week, the Republican Study Committee, which includes a majority of G.O.P. members of the House of Representatives, released a budget proposal that teed up many of the 2017 “reforms” that would have caused millions of Americans to lose health coverage. (It also called for down-the-road cuts in Social Security and Medicare.)

What I found striking about the budget proposal was how its authors deal with the fact that none of the dire predictions right-wingers made about Obamacare have come true. The answer is that they simply pretend that the bad things they predicted, which didn’t happen, did. I was struck, for example, by the assertion that Obamacare “dramatically escalated the unsustainable rise in American health care spending.” Indeed, in 2010, total U.S. health care spending was 17.2 percent of G.D.P. By 2022 that number had risen to … 17.3 percent of G.D.P.

So the reality of Obamacare’s success won’t deter Republicans who want to destroy it. If anything, the law’s success only increases their determination to kill it, because it shows that, contrary to their ideology, government actually can make Americans’ lives better.

Renée Graham of The Boston Globe takes note of the annual “World Happiness Report” survey, which shows that the United States is considerably less “happy” than in 2023, with increasing economic and social inequalities being a driving force behind the trend.

For the first time since the World Happiness Report released its inaugural findings in 2012, the United States has dropped out of the top 20, landing at 23. That’s eight spots lower than last year. Are you happier today than you were four years ago? A decade ago? If you live in America, the answer is probably no — especially for people under the age of 30.

While a happiness report seems like fodder for late-night comedians, there’s a very serious undercurrent here. For the first time, this year’s report, compiled by various organizations including the United Nations, Columbia University, and Gallup, emphasizes a focus on “the happiness of people at different stages of life.” The report reveals an alarming divide between Baby Boomers over 60 and those who’ve not yet turned 30 — Gen Z and millennials born in the late 1990s.

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And what’s driving the downturn in overall happiness among young Americans is what researchers call “the inequality of well-being.”

”Inequality in the distribution of happiness reflects inequalities of access to any of the direct and indirect supports for well-being, including income, education, health care, social acceptance, trust, and the presence of supportive social environments at the family, community, and national levels,” they wrote. “People are happier living in countries where the equality of happiness is greater.”

Jon Allsop of the Columbia Journalism Review notes some positives coming out of the disastrous hire of former RNC Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel by NBC News.​

Todd’s on-air broadside against his own bosses was surprising. It was also, as I see it, spot on (even if saying that McDaniel has “credibility issues” might be the understatement of the year). The appropriateness of the revolving door between politics and paid punditry—and who gets to pass through it—is a legitimately thorny question that I won’t get into here. (If you’re interested, I wrote about this and related questions here, here, here, and here.) McDaniel’s specific case, though, is an easy one: the glaring problem with her hiring is not that she was (or is) a partisan hack or anything to do with her policy positions, but her deep complicity in Trump’s election denialism. As I’ve written before, the only appropriate media standard for this, given its corrosive effect on the democracy journalists rely on to do their jobs, is zero tolerance. It certainly shouldn’t be rewarded with a gilded contributor contract. I’m sure there are people even less deserving of one of those than McDaniel, but I’m struggling to name one right now.

Perhaps ironically, this desperate episode has given rise to what I see as a very hopeful one: the performances on air yesterday of Todd and, especially, Welker. In the past, I’ve criticized Meet the Press (and the Sunday show format as a whole) for letting lying politicians off the hook, but Welker’s interview with McDaniel yesterday was one of the best I’ve seen on any such show in years: it was tenacious, devastatingly so, without being performatively confrontational or rude. It’s hard to know to what extent this was a consequence of the awkward situation Welker was put in, but the interview was more pointed than her November sit-down with McDaniel. Either way, the awkward situation resulted in exactly the type of rigorous interview that I and other media critics have wanted to see more of for years—on the grounds that they serve viewers better than debate segments that seek civility and compromise for those things’ own sake, or insidery roundtables that serve, however superficially, as a shop window for competing views.​

Robert Mendick and Gareth Corfield of The Telegraph report on a major speech being given by BBC director-general Tim Davie Tuesday, where he will identify the “global media landscape” as a threat to British broadcasters.​

Mr Davie, who has run the corporation for the past four years, will warn of the dangers facing the BBC and other UK broadcasters while stressing the need for it to thrive to maintain a “healthy democracy” in the UK.

The threat to British broadcasters comes from a “new wave of technological change” which is “reshaping our media landscape”, Mr Davie will say in the speech delivered to the Royal Television Society on Tuesday.

In a year when both the UK and US will hold general elections, the head of the BBC will say that the BBC plays a vital role in tackling misinformation and fake news.

[...]

“British storytelling is at growing risk of being squeezed out in an extraordinarily competitive global media landscape,” Mr Davie is expected to say, adding: “We are in danger of allowing the UK’s world-class creative industries to be undermined and diminishing our unique cultural identity and its remarkable influence worldwide.”

Mr Davie will also blame global social media platforms for fuelling “polarisation and social division… with US and Chinese algorithms the potential taste-makers of the future”. He will say: “Shared moments and unifying cultural experiences are increasingly rare.”​

The independent Russian media outlet Meduza delves into the reason why Islamic State-Khorasan has such a deep enmity for Russia.​

Radical Islamists have long accused Russia of being a state that “oppresses Muslims” both at home and abroad. ISIS propaganda regularly mentions Russia’s past military campaigns in Afghanistan and Chechnya, and Moscow’s intervention in support of Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria put an even bigger target on its back.

ISIS-K leadership has seen the initial success of ISIS leadership, which capitalized politically on the global struggle against “infidel empires” such as the United States, China, Iran, and Russia. Prioritizing “external operations” could yield far greater political and financial benefits (in the form of donations) than working with local resources.

There are also deeper reasons for the particular hostility towards Russia. In recent years, ISIS-K has been trying to expand the movement’s ethnic base — both in Afghanistan and beyond. In the northern regions of Afghanistan, where many ethnic Uzbeks and Tajiks live, its numbers are growing. ISIS-K regularly threatens Central Asian authorities, calling them “puppets of the Russian empire.” In this sense, the struggle against Russia is a fight for resources: primarily for radically minded supporters in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and neighboring countries.​

Ynetnews’s Ben Dror-Yemini gives further reasons for ISIS-K’s enmity toward Russia from an analysis of Russia’s foreign entanglements, especially in Africa.

Finally today, former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzel writes for Haaretz that Israel’s postponement of sending a delegation to Washington, D.C. to hold high-level talks about Israel’s impending military operation in Rafah makes no sense.​

In his statement announcing the decision, the prime minister called the U.S. decision to abstain a "retreat" from previous U.S. positions. First, it is unseemly and insulting for any foreign leader to characterize American policy this way. The United States makes its own policy, taking into account the views of friends and allies. The constancy of U.S. support for Israel at the United Nations Security Council should have given the prime minister pause before attacking the American abstention on this particular resolution.

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The postponement, perhaps cancellation, of the visit of the high-level Israeli delegation makes no sense at all. The administration has made crystal clear its strong opposition to a full-scale assault on Rafah without a plan for the safety of the million-plus Palestinians who are huddled there. The administration has also made clear that it does not oppose in principle a plan to move against Hamas fighters in Rafah, provided a plan for the civilians is in place. This was the rationale for the visit that has now been shelved. So, why does the prime minister not want to talk with the Americans at this critical moment?

It defies reason to believe that Israel will proceed with a full-scale onslaught against Rafah without first consulting with Washington. First, the timing could not be more challenging. The administration is weighing whether Israel is in compliance with National Security Memorandum-20 which, inter alia, requires recipients of U.S. arms to provide assurances that U.S. arms will be used in accordance with international law and that they will not impede or restrict the delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance. Should those assurances be considered inadequate, the president will consider such measures as suspending additional arms transfers. Given Vice President Kamala Harris' warning that an onslaught against Rafah would have "consequences," Israel should not test the United States at this time on this issue.​

Everyone try to have the best possible day!​