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Hi, I’m in for Drew Goins today with the Today’s Opinions newsletter. Sign up to get it in your inbox.
In today’s edition:
WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight- The vanishing model of Sandra Day O’Connor
- Bitter memories of Kissinger from Latin America
- Belarusian democracy needs our support
- No immunity for Trump
In praise of judicious justices
“As Donald Trump’s advisers set out during the transition to name a replacement for the late Justice Antonin Scalia, incoming White House counsel Donald McGahn issued stern instructions to the vetting team: ‘There can never be another Sandra Day O’Connor,’” writes Ruth Marcus in an appreciation of the first woman on the Supreme Court, who died on Friday at 93.
In other words, as Ruth describes it, never again should the president pick someone as stubbornly reasonable — someone so judicious, if you will — as O’Connor.
For the 24 years from her nomination by Ronald Reagan until she stepped down in 2006, O’Connor “elevated common sense and moderation over reflexive adherence to ideology,” Ruth writes. “O’Connor certainly had convictions — about the importance of federalism, for instance, or the separation of church and state — but her method was the antithesis of the wooden application of approaches such as the originalism that so dominates the current conservative majority.”
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Trump heeded McGahn’s warning, and the result is a court where no one is sure whether, for instance, a case it’s hearing this week will end with dismantling large parts of the tax code! What exciting times. Ruth, meanwhile, says we should be aiming for just the opposite: “More O’Connors, please, not fewer.”
Welcome to Kissinger Refugee High
Regarding another long-lived fixture of Washington who died last week, columnist Eduardo Porter weighs in from a singular perspective — that of a former Mexico City high school student who kept getting new classmates as their parents fled Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia and other countries destabilized with help from Henry Kissinger. “The grandson of Chilean President Salvador Allende, deposed in a U.S.-backed coup in 1973, was just a couple of years behind me,” Eduardo writes. “It is not difficult for me to write that Kissinger was an abomination.”
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For citizens of Central and South America, and the Global South in general, Eduardo says, Kissinger represented a worldview that cared little for their struggles: “It was a world in which human rights, democracy and justice were of little relevance; they were subordinate to the overarching goal of bolstering Washington and its allies in a balance of power with the other great coalition, led by Moscow.”
Today, that legacy hangs uneasily in the balance. Eduardo talks to some others whose lives were shaped by Kissinger’s decisions decades ago, and reflects on the uncertainty in the West about whether support for countries such as Ukraine or Israel is rooted in convictions of global power, humanitarian impulse or both. Kissinger is gone, but his actions and his ethos have a long wake.
Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, whose husband was imprisoned after challenging former Soviet bureaucrat Alexander Lukashenko for the presidency of Belarus in 2020, and who is widely believed to have then won the election herself, writes for us from Lithuania, where she and her children fled. This week, she says, the U.S. State Department will hold conversations with Belarus’s democratically elected government in exile — and our country’s help will be vital if Belarus is to return to democratic rule.
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“We must eliminate the possibility that Belarus will be given as a consolation prize to Putin when any peace talks about Ukraine take place,” Tikhanovskaya writes. “We should not allow Belarus to remain anywhere within the Russian sphere of influence. ‘Nothing about us, without us’ is our imperative.”
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More politics
If the recent Robert Kagan scarefest on the coming Trump dictatorship had you losing sleep — that thing is still in the top 10 on our site four days after publication! — you may find comfort along with Never Trumper Jen Rubin today. Jen locates cause for optimism in a district court judge’s dismissal of Trump’s immunity claim in the federal criminal case over his attempts to overturn the 2020 election. The ruling “might turn out to be the most consequential legal defeat yet for Trump and quite possibly a decisive turning point in the 2024 presidential election,” she writes.
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She quotes constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe, who is moved to near-fanfic levels of judicial admiration: “Judge [Tanya S.] Chutkan’s ruling is, quite simply, as solid as a rock and as piercing as tempered steel.” Oh my. That alluring image aside, Jen’s logic is that this development makes it more likely Trump gets convicted, which she thinks could help swing the election away from Trump.
Or will it make him even stronger? Time will tell!
Smartest, fastest
- Karen Attiah took a disturbing look at how the Israeli attacks on Gaza are wiping out not only thousands of civilians but also centuries of cultural heritage.
- Perry Bacon describes the risks of MSNBC deprioritizing left-wing voices like Mehdi Hasan’s to become more of an automatic booster of the Democratic Party.
- Megan McArdle gets real on the causes of the national debt: yes, tax cuts, but also expensive stuff including the Great Recession, the pandemic and, oh yeah, Social Security and Medicare.
It’s a goodbye. It’s a haiku. It’s … The Bye-Ku.
Throw power around
But in death, know we all have
No immunity
***
Have your own newsy haiku? Email it to me, along with any questions/comments/compliments/complaints. Drew will see you tomorrow!
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Hi, I’m in for Drew Goins today with the Today’s Opinions newsletter. Sign up to get it in your inbox.
In today’s edition:
“As Donald Trump’s advisers set out during the transition to name a replacement for the late Justice Antonin Scalia, incoming White House counsel Donald McGahn issued stern instructions to the vetting team: ‘There can never be another Sandra Day O’Connor,’” writes Ruth Marcus in an appreciation of the first woman on the Supreme Court, who died on Friday at 93.
In other words, as Ruth describes it, never again should the president pick someone as stubbornly reasonable — someone so judicious, if you will — as O’Connor.
For the 24 years from her nomination by Ronald Reagan until she stepped down in 2006, O’Connor “elevated common sense and moderation over reflexive adherence to ideology,” Ruth writes. “O’Connor certainly had convictions — about the importance of federalism, for instance, or the separation of church and state — but her method was the antithesis of the wooden application of approaches such as the originalism that so dominates the current conservative majority.”
Trump heeded McGahn’s warning, and the result is a court where no one is sure whether, for instance, a case it’s hearing this week will end with dismantling large parts of the tax code! What exciting times. Ruth, meanwhile, says we should be aiming for just the opposite: “More O’Connors, please, not fewer.”
Regarding another long-lived fixture of Washington who died last week, columnist Eduardo Porter weighs in from a singular perspective — that of a former Mexico City high school student who kept getting new classmates as their parents fled Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia and other countries destabilized with help from Henry Kissinger. “The grandson of Chilean President Salvador Allende, deposed in a U.S.-backed coup in 1973, was just a couple of years behind me,” Eduardo writes. “It is not difficult for me to write that Kissinger was an abomination.”
For citizens of Central and South America, and the Global South in general, Eduardo says, Kissinger represented a worldview that cared little for their struggles: “It was a world in which human rights, democracy and justice were of little relevance; they were subordinate to the overarching goal of bolstering Washington and its allies in a balance of power with the other great coalition, led by Moscow.”
Today, that legacy hangs uneasily in the balance. Eduardo talks to some others whose lives were shaped by Kissinger’s decisions decades ago, and reflects on the uncertainty in the West about whether support for countries such as Ukraine or Israel is rooted in convictions of global power, humanitarian impulse or both. Kissinger is gone, but his actions and his ethos have a long wake.
Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, whose husband was imprisoned after challenging former Soviet bureaucrat Alexander Lukashenko for the presidency of Belarus in 2020, and who is widely believed to have then won the election herself, writes for us from Lithuania, where she and her children fled. This week, she says, the U.S. State Department will hold conversations with Belarus’s democratically elected government in exile — and our country’s help will be vital if Belarus is to return to democratic rule.
“We must eliminate the possibility that Belarus will be given as a consolation prize to Putin when any peace talks about Ukraine take place,” Tikhanovskaya writes. “We should not allow Belarus to remain anywhere within the Russian sphere of influence. ‘Nothing about us, without us’ is our imperative.”
If the recent Robert Kagan scarefest on the coming Trump dictatorship had you losing sleep — that thing is still in the top 10 on our site four days after publication! — you may find comfort along with Never Trumper Jen Rubin today. Jen locates cause for optimism in a district court judge’s dismissal of Trump’s immunity claim in the federal criminal case over his attempts to overturn the 2020 election. The ruling “might turn out to be the most consequential legal defeat yet for Trump and quite possibly a decisive turning point in the 2024 presidential election,” she writes.
She quotes constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe, who is moved to near-fanfic levels of judicial admiration: “Judge [Tanya S.] Chutkan’s ruling is, quite simply, as solid as a rock and as piercing as tempered steel.” Oh my. That alluring image aside, Jen’s logic is that this development makes it more likely Trump gets convicted, which she thinks could help swing the election away from Trump.
Or will it make him even stronger? Time will tell!
It’s a goodbye. It’s a haiku. It’s … The Bye-Ku.
Throw power around
But in death, know we all have
No immunity
***
Have your own newsy haiku? Email it to me, along with any questions/comments/compliments/complaints. Drew will see you tomorrow!
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