Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Speaker Mike Johnson's dilemma

[Brexiter]

We begin today with Victor Feldman of Roll Call, and his report about bipartisan frustration with Speaker Mike “Moses” Johnson’s use of the “suspension of the rules” House procedure to pass major legislation.

The frustration centers on the speaker’s heavy use of a House procedure known as “suspension of the rules,” which is designed to expedite the passage of legislation by barring amendments, limiting debate and avoiding a separate vote on a rule to set the terms of that debate. Placing a bill on what is unofficially known as the “suspension calendar” allows it to skip over the House Rules Committee, the powerful body that, under normal circumstances, gets to control the flow of legislation to the floor.

The catch: Any measure considered under suspension of the rules requires a two-thirds vote to pass, which means GOP leadership must count on Democrats to help.

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In recent months, Johnson, R-La., has used the suspension process to push through major legislation, including a sweeping $79 billion bipartisan tax bill and an $886 billion national defense policy bill, along with two stopgap spending bills to keep the government funded.

While they disagree on why it matters, a growing number of lawmakers in both parties are taking Johnson to task for what they see as an overreliance on suspending the rules to pass consequential and controversial items. The loudest protests are coming from members of the House Freedom Caucus, who say Johnson is ramming things through the suspension process to avoid negotiating with their membership on policy disputes.

Susan J. Demas of Michigan Advance writes about the fear of a Black female vice president.

While Republicans have never been big fans of the nation’s first female, Black and Asian-American VP, she also has a fair share of other detractors, from pundits who thought she lacked the experience to be Biden’s running mate to progressives who wanted him to tap someone in the orbit of U.S. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

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My world is far smaller and less significant than Harris’ is. But as a columnist and the first female political editor and publisher in the state, I’ve been subject to rape threats, creepy comments about my looks and repeated questions if my daddy really owned Inside Michigan Politics. I was even recently told that as a married woman, I’m responsible for what my husband says. And yes, some of those remarks came from so-called progressives.

In reality, Harris has been a strong partner to Biden on the world stage, delivering a powerful speech last week at the Munich Security Conference slamming Russian President Vladimir Putin for his “brutality” after opposition leader Alexei Nevalny’s death and decrying Trump’s nihilistic vision of authoritarianism and isolationism. She also gave a joint news conference with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Perhaps most significantly, Harris is the face of the administration’s reproductive rights policies, which was one of the top issues in the 2022 midterms where Dems defied conventional wisdom and thwarted the red wave. And with the Alabama Supreme Court ruling last week that frozen embryos are “children” — shutting down IVF at several clinics — it’s clear that reproductive rights will dominate the 2024 election, as well.

Welcome back to Nicolle Wallace, host of MSNBC’s Deadline: White House!

In this clip, Wallace asks New York University history professor Ruth Ben-Ghait why the possibility of authoritarianism is not much talked about.

An Authoritarianism is a system where a government is arranged so that the leader has total control and commit crimes and not pay any consequences and that is what (Trump) is saying he wants for the United States” @ruthbenghiat w/ @NicolleDWallace pic.twitter.com/WUjqydZetW

— Deadline White House (@DeadlineWH) February 26, 2024

Chris Geidner notes on his “Law Dork” Substack that a majority of U.S. Supreme Court justices appear disinclined to rule in favor of Texas and Florida mandating changes to social media content moderation policies.

On Monday, over nearly four hours of oral arguments, the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court debated whether Florida and Texas can — with slightly different laws — mandate that social media companies change their content moderation policies because conservative leaders in both states have decided that some of the largest platforms mistreat conservatives on their platforms.

At the end of the arguments, a majority of the justices appeared to agree that, at a minimum, the laws could not be applied to the social media companies’ expressive activities, specifically, when they are taking actions that amount to editorial discretion. However, it was also clear, particularly as to the Florida law, that the resolution of the cases could be more complicated than that.

Four justices — Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Brett Kavanaugh — most strongly pushed back against the laws, with Roberts explicitly questioning whether the states weren’t on the wrong side of the First Amendment with their claims and Kavanaugh repeatedly pressing back on anyone, including other justices, who tried to argue that private entities making private business decisions about content are ever engaged in “censorship.”

At one point, Sotomayor told Texas Solicitor General Aaron Nielson, “I have a problem with laws like this that are so broad that they stifle speech just on their face.”

In this clip from yesterday’s Deadline: White House, former president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund Sherrilyn Ifill talks about all the mini-Trumps running all over the country.

“If we were just talking about Donald Trump, that would be concerning enough but we are not, we are talking about a population that has been very quickly educated…we have a population now…that is willing to blow past norms.” @SIfill_ w/ @NicolleDWallace pic.twitter.com/zubchRpuz7

— Deadline White House (@DeadlineWH) February 26, 2024

Nicholas Fandos of The New York Times reports that the New York state Assembly and Senate have rejected the maps of the redistricting commission and will draft their own maps.

On a day of high drama inside the State Capitol in Albany, party leaders argued that the Senate and Assembly had no choice but to reject the commission map in lopsided votes because it improperly split counties, broke up naturally occurring communities and favored incumbents.

But in private conversations, they made little effort to hide their true objective. With the battle for control of the House likely to run through New York this fall, Democrats here and in Washington are determined to use their supermajority in the State Legislature to tilt the playing field against Republicans from Long Island to Syracuse.

The exact contours of the replacement districts remained to be seen late Monday. State lawmakers were expected to quickly release a draft of the replacement map in preparation for approval later this week, but discussions stretched into the night.

Eduardo Cuevas of The Palm Beach Post reports on the spread of measles in Florida and Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo’s utter defiance of CDC regulations.

In a letter Tuesday, Feb. 19 Ladapo said Manatee Bay parents and guardians could decide whether to send their children back to school, a statement that conflicted with federal and medical professional recommendations that children from the school should remain at home to prevent the spread of measles. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that unvaccinated children exposed to measles be isolated for three weeks. Ladapo appeared to agree with this assessment before he concluded that children’s attendance was up to parents or guardians because of the “high immunity rate” and the burden of healthy children missing school, but he said the state's recommendation could change.

Health experts are concerned by his lax attitude.

“This is a state surgeon general saying that he is not going to enforce any of the tenets of public health in the name of freedom,” said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, which has worked to contain a recent measles outbreak among children in the Pennsylvania city. “He wants freedom at the expense of putting children in harm’s way.”

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“This is a vaccine-preventable disease,” Dr. Thresia Gambon, president of the Florida chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, told USA TODAY. “There are very strict guidelines as to what to do in an outbreak in order to contain it quickly.”

Finally today, Saher Selod of USA Today has some possibly surprising results about support for a Gaza cease-fire based on religious affiliation.

The Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU) recently released a poll that examined how religious groups view a cease-fire. This poll differs from prior ones because it focused on religious groups rather than solely political affiliation.
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Broken down by religious groups in the United States, ISPU data highlights that the majority of Muslims (75%), not surprisingly, want a cease-fire. What was interesting is that half of Jews also support this cease-fire. When broken down by political party and religion, the number increases for both Jewish Democrats (57%) and Muslim Democrats (78%).
The fact that Jewish and Muslim Americans share similar views on this issue might seem shocking, given how the news media has portrayed them as in opposition to each other. The constant pitting of Jewish and Muslim interests, particularly in this moment, ignores a strengthening interfaith relationship.
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Favorable Jewish and Muslim opinions of one another have been increasing over time, according to the 2019 American Muslim Poll by ISPU, which oversampled Jewish and Muslim respondents.
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The relationship between Muslim and Jewish Americans can be tied to their shared experiences with discrimination. After the 2016 presidential election, Muslim (38%) and Jewish (27%) Americans experienced the highest level of fear of violence from white supremacist groups.

Look at the Muslim numbers according to age, though.

Everyone try to have the best possible day!