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 Marianna Sotomayor of The Washington Post writing that the next two weeks will be critical for House speaker Mike Johnson.
The next two weeks are the most critical of Johnson’s nearly six-month tenure atop a very wobbly House with a majority that continues to narrow. His chief priority is passing a bill funding Ukraine that also sends aid to Israel and Indo-Pacific allies. Unlike a national security package that passed the Senate, House Republicans across the ideological spectrum insist that any foreign aid deal must also include measures that strengthen U.S. borders.
But the shape of that package will be fiercely debated, and a route to passage is unpredictable and murky. With just a two-vote majority, Republicans have been unable to achieve consensus on such divisive issues, angering a far-right desperate for ideological purity. Choosing a bipartisan route is also complicated: Getting lawmakers to agree on anything related to Ukraine and Israel, especially with outrage mounting about civilian casualties in Gaza, is an almost impossible task, given the partisanship and anger in today’s House.
[…]
Another speakership fight seven months before the elections would only further expose the chronic disarray in the House Republican Conference and the difficulty it has had in governing. Many House Republicans acknowledge their inability to agree on passing anything — whether narrow messaging bills that will not become law or more substantive legislation — may harm their quest to stay in and expand their majority.
Heather Digby Parton of Salon says that Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene is ready to hold a ‘cage match’ against Speaker Johnson.
Greene…is having a monumental temper tantrum, ostensibly because Johnson managed to avoid shutting down the government by making a deal with Democrats to keep it funded through next fall. The idea that Johnson would further fund U.S. aid to Ukraine has infuriated Greene so much so that she’s filed a motion to vacate the chair and seems ready to call for the vote with the GOP’s now minuscule majority and turn the body into chaos once again.
[…]
In an interview with Manu Raju of CNN on Wednesday, Greene let fly, claiming that Republican voters are “furious that our so-called Christian conservative, Republican Speaker of the House did this to them.” She went on to compare Johnson to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, saying “people are fed up with Republicans that say one thing and turn around and literally join the flock and just continue the same old crap everybody’s tired of.” She said Johnson has “literally turned into Mitch McConnell’s twin and worse. He’s a Democrat. There’s not even any daylight between him and Nancy Pelosi at this point.” I’m not sure she could have insulted the Republican leader any worse.
There are quite a few members of the MAGA caucus who are extremely hostile to Ukraine aid but Greene seems to be making it a red line issue for her — even though Trump himself has tried to ease away from his hardline position by offering up the loan idea. Greene told CNN that the idea is “the biggest bunch of heaping, steaming pile of BS.” She’s not wrong. It’s a meaningless, irrelevant policy that only someone as inept and out of his depth as Trump would have the nerve to propose. Graham knows this, too, but he wants to get aid to Ukraine, as does Johnson, and they see it as a way to appease Trump by giving him the ability to tell his followers that he’s the very stable genius running foreign policy. Apparently, many Democrats are willing to let him have that if it means getting this whole thing over with.
Lisa Lerer and Elizabeth Dias of The New York Times say Trump chose the path of political expediency in talking about about abortion yesterday.
Some of the most stalwart anti-abortion champions said that as much as Mr. Trump wanted to neutralize the politics of the issue, he could not outrun what his presidency had unleashed. States across the country are enmeshed in battles over the details of their restrictions on the procedure, as Democrats push ballot measures across the country to enshrine abortion rights in state constitutions. Stories about women being denied the procedure continue to dominate the news. And the Supreme Court is expected to rule in June on curtailing access to a prominent medication used in abortion procedures.
Even as Mr. Trump’s views on whether he would sign a national abortion ban remain opaque, his allies and supporters are moving ahead with plans to restrict abortion rights with proposals and executive actions that could go beyond a national ban in a potential second Trump administration.
“Saying the abortion issue belongs in the states will not make it disappear from national elections,” Leonard A. Leo, a longtime leader of the Federalist Society who played an influential role in Mr. Trump’s selections for the Supreme Court, said in an interview.
Tim Kelly and Trevor Hunnicutt of Reuters report an exclusive that one thing that President Joe Biden may talk about during his meeting with Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida on Wednesday is a deal involving Japanese high=speed trains that might connect Dallas to Houston in the future.
President Joe Biden is seeking to revive interest in a plan to build the first high-speed rail in the U. S. using Japanese bullet trains, with sources saying he is likely to discuss the project with Japan’s prime minister in Washington this week.The leaders may publicly voice support for the multi-billion-dollar Texas project after Wednesday’s talks, which have been partly overshadowed by U.S. opposition to another Japanese investment, Nippon Steel’s planned purchase of U.S. Steel.[…]The project linking Dallas and Houston will be on the agenda for the talks, said three sources familiar with summit preparations, who sought anonymity as they were not allowed to speak to the media.It is likely to be mentioned in joint statements following the talks, two of the sources said.
Paul Krugman of The New York Times looks at some of the reasons why that the “vibecession” persists.
More often than not, anyone who argues that we’re in a “vibecession,” in which public perceptions are at odds with economic reality, gets tagged as an elitist, out of touch with people’s real-life experience. And there’s a whole genre of commentary to the effect that if you squint at the data hard enough, it shows that the economy really is bad, after all.
But such commentary is an attempt to explain something that isn’t happening. Without question, there are Americans who are hurting financially — sadly, this is always true to some extent, especially given the weakness of America’s social safety net. But in general, Americans are relatively optimistic about their own finances. […]
Americans are upbeat not just about their own circumstances; they’re also upbeat about their local economies. A recent Wall Street Journal poll of swing state voters found that voters have negative views of the national economy but significantly more positive views about the economy in their state. This is consistent with the Federal Reserve’s report on economic well-being for 2022 (published in 2023), which shows a much higher percentage of Americans assessed their local economy as good or excellent than the percentage who said the same about the national economy.
Basically, Americans are saying, “I’m doing OK, people I know are doing OK, but bad things are happening somewhere out there.” As The Journal’s Greg Ip wrote, “When it comes to the economy, the vibes are at war with the facts.”
Finally today, Alex Hern and Tom Phillips of Guardian writes about the legal actions that Brazil’s Supreme Court have taken against X/Twitter CTO Elon Musk.
Justice Alexandre de Moraes had issued a court order forcing the site formerly known as Twitter to block several users as part of his investigation into the former president Jair Bolsonaro’s attempts to stay in power after his 2022 election defeat.
The order also barred the social network from publishing details of which accounts were blocked, and came with fines of about £16,000 a day for failure to comply. Now, Musk says, the company will reverse those blocks. The multibillionaire also called on Moraes to resign or be impeached.In response, the judge announced late on Sunday that he had opened an inquiry into what he called Musk’s obstruction of justice.
[…]
On Saturday, Musk responded, calling the action “aggressive censorship” and committing to lift all restrictions. “This judge has applied massive fines, threatened to arrest our employees and cut off access to X in Brazil,” he added.
As a result of refusing to comply, Musk predicted: “We will probably lose all revenue in Brazil and have to shut down our office there. But principles matter more than profit.”
Have the best possible day everyone!