We begin today's rondup with
Eugene Robinson's take on the stalled confirmation of Loretta Lynch:
In a sane world, the Republican-led Senate would have confirmed Loretta Lynch as attorney general months ago. But sanity hasn’t been seen around here in some time.
No one has raised the slightest question about Lynch’s qualifications. No one disputes that she has been a tough, effective U.S. attorney and a strong manager. No one doubts she is fully capable of serving as the nation’s top law enforcement official — or fails to appreciate the importance of the job [...]
I would prefer to believe that what’s at work here is neither racism nor sexism but a continuation of the self-destructive political gamesmanship that Republicans prefer over actual governance. McConnell keeps promising to bring Lynch’s name to the floor one of these days, and she needs only a handful of GOP votes to win confirmation. At present, she seems likely to get them — but there is little margin for error.
The thing is, many Republican senators actually like Lynch but won’t vote for her. Unless, perhaps, Obama denounces his own nominee.
The Miami Herald editors agree:
It’s self-defeating for Republicans to hold up the nomination because it means Attorney General Eric Holder — for whom they reserve a special disdain — will remain in place for the rest of President Obama’s term. How does his staying in place serve their aims?
It’s also self-defeating because Ms. Lynch is the first African-American woman picked for the post, and Republicans shouldn’t want to be seen as rejecting a historic nomination — especially as a presidential campaign goes into high gear. Even Jeb Bush has called on the Senate to act. He gets how bad this looks for his party.
Last week, Republicans reached the 100-day milestone of having Congress under their party’s control. They’re eager to shed the do-nothing, dysfunctional label. They’ve made some encouraging progress, but it only serves to highlight the embarrassing failure to act on the Lynch nomination.
For more on the day's top stories, head below the fold.
Al Sharpton adds his take:
As the 2016 Presidential campaign gets underway, candidates are declaring their intent to run and fundraising wherever and however they can. In the Republican field, we already see numerous contenders who are all vying for the vote of the American people. With continually changing demographics, they are often discussing ways to expand their Party and be more inclusive. Maybe it's time they realize that using Blacks and women as some sort of a dog whistle for the base of their Party is clearly not the way. They need to know that they cannot have it both ways; castigating us and our issues will not win us over.
Switching topics,
Dana Milbank takes apart the latest anti-equality argument:
As the Supreme Court prepares to take up same-sex marriage next week, conservative scholars have produced a last-ditch argument to keep the scourge of homosexual unions from spreading across the land: Gay marriage kills.
They’re saying that legalizing same-sex marriage will cause 900,000 abortions.
The logic is about as obvious as if they had alleged that raising the minimum wage would increase the frequency of hurricanes. If anything, you’d think that more same-sex marriages would mean more adoptions.
Marco Rubio gets his policy torn apart over at The Week by
Michael Brendan Dougherty:
Rubio concluded, "The reason Obama hasn't put in place a military strategy to defeat ISIS is because he doesn't want to upset Iran."
I don't know how to say this respectfully. But this is dumber than a brick in a tumble-dryer: a clanging, dangerous error. Iran is one of the principal enemies of ISIS. It didn't even need to be persuaded to join the fight. It sees ISIS as another manifestation of the kind of Sunni extremism that threatens Iran's regional allies: Bashar al-Assad in Syria and the Shia-friendly government in Baghdad. If we really wanted to stick it to Iran, we'd be arming Islamic State fighters and providing "devastating air support" to them. [...]
Rubio has a reputation for foreign policy expertise because he chooses to talk about foreign policy often, promises large budgets to the Pentagon, and mostly pronounces the words correctly. Rubio's foreign policy consists of babyish moralizing, a cultivated ignorance of history, and a deliberate blindness to consequences. This is the same "foreign policy expertise" that led to a misbegotten war in Iraq and empowered Sunni insurgencies across the Middle East.
On a final note,
Anthony Romero at The Los Angeles Times looks ahead at how millennials will shape policy on domestic surveillance and privacy:
Though surveillance reform may confront resistance in the near term, millennials have made it clear that they don't want government agencies tracking them online or collecting data about their phone calls. In the United States, millennials will surpass the baby boomer generation this year, and by 2020, they will represent 1 out of 3 adults. As they grow in influence, so too will the demand to rein in the surveillance state.
Conventional wisdom says that the young and idealistic grow up and shed their naive ideals as they confront the real world. By that logic, as millennials age, they will recognize the need for the surveillance state to keep us safe from terrorism. But given the lack of evidence that mass surveillance works — President Obama's own review group concluded that the National Security Agency's call-records program never played a pivotal role in any investigation — it is unlikely this generation of digital natives will shed a fundamental commitment to the free exchange of information.