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 Paul Kane of The Washington Post writing about the probability of a first in the Congressional elections this coming November.
In the 110-year history since the direct election of senators, the American electorate has never flipped majorities in both chambers going in opposite directions. Now, as lawmakers and campaign advisers look to the looming November elections, that norm could easily be turned upside down.
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This type of scenario was unimaginable for more than a century, but Walter, the editor in chief of the Cook Report, views this crosscurrent trend as part of the drift into a political system where campaigns get predetermined by the relative rural-urban breakdown in a particular state or district.
“In a country that is more calcified in its blue/red divide, it makes a lot of sense that House and Senate majorities can go in different directions in the same year. The Tip O’Neill ‘all politics is local’ adage is now ‘all politics is national AND regional’,” she wrote in an email.
Nick Niedzwiadek of POLITICO reports on a Biden Administration plan designed to better protect the federal workforce.
Under a final rule issued by the Office of Personnel Management, employees whose jobs include civil service protections would not lose them if their position is converted to an exempt category. However, they could choose to waive that security or voluntarily move to a role that serves at the will of the president — typically highly coveted positions toward the top of an agency’s org chart.
The regulations also establish several procedural hurdles for an administration to clear if it wants to shift jobs between categories. Federal workers who believe they are being stripped of their protections could challenge the move with the independent Merit Systems Protection Board.
By issuing formal regulations on the personnel protections, the administration made it more time-consuming for a future president to reverse them.
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The change is widely viewed as a pointed response to a fall 2020 executive order from Trump that created a new designation — known as Schedule F — for employees in policymaking roles that effectively made those workers easier to hire, fire or otherwise shuffle around.
Liuba Grechen Shirley and Shana M. Broussard of Roll Call report about a new Federal Election Commission (FEC) rule that may enable a broader swath of people to campaign for and hold public office.
Recently, the FEC approved final rules to make it easier for federal candidates to draw salaries from their privately raised campaign funds and pay themselves a livable wage. This will change the political landscape.
Candidates can now pay themselves a salary throughout the entirety of their campaign. That means instead of barely scraping by until they make the ballot, candidates can start paying themselves a salary as soon as they declare their candidacy. Previous regulations only considered the candidate’s earned income in the calendar year preceding their candidacy, a rule that disadvantaged stay-at-home caregivers, full-time students, and people who were unemployed. New regulations consider a candidate’s average earned income over the most recent five years, creating a more equitable system that does not exclude candidates who were out of the workforce right before running for office. The new regulation also expands the eligibility period and allows candidates to continue drawing compensation for 20 days after their campaign ends. During the interval between the general election and being officially sworn into Congress and receiving their first paycheck, candidates can use their campaign funds to stay financially afloat.
The FEC is making it easier for everyday people to run for office and have a fighting chance to represent their communities in Congress, but a problem still persists. Many candidates still express feeling shame when faced with the financial realities of campaigning, and many are also hesitant to use these financial resources for fear of being politically attacked. While all campaign expenditures can and should be evaluated by voters, we hope that voters see that significant work goes into campaigning and that all too often, running for federal office is reserved only for wealthy Americans.
Shannon Pettypiece of NBC News reports about major slowdowns at the U.S. Postal Service.
Across the country, residents and businesses have been reporting widespread slowdowns in mail and package delivery by the U.S. Postal Service. The delays have become so persistent that members of Congress have gotten involved, urging the Postal Service to drastically correct course and raising concern about what impact the disruptions could have on mail-in ballots in the upcoming election.
The delays appear to largely stem from a new system the Postal Service began rolling out last fall that will eventually funnel all the nation’s letters and packages through a consolidated network of 60 regional distribution centers — similar to the airlines’ hub-and-spoke model. The change is part of a wider $40 billion, 10-year overhaul of the network that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has said will reduce costs, improve reliability and make the Postal Service more competitive. But in some instances, the plan has done the opposite, according to the Office of the Inspector General for the Postal Service, members of Congress and Postal Service advocacy groups.[…]Nationwide, 87% of first class, two-day mail arrived on time during the last three months of 2023, a 2.5 percentage-point decrease from the same period a year earlier, according to data published by the Postal Service inspector general. For mail intended to take three to five days, just 70% arrived on time, a decrease of 11 percentage points, the data showed.
And why does Louis Dejoy still hold the Postmaster’s job?
With this March Madness weekend being one of the biggest sports betting weekends on the calendar, Sheldon H. Jacobson writes for The Hill that the 2018 Supreme Court ruling that struck down a federal law prohibiting sports betting is creating a nation of gambling addicts.
The amount of money being gambled on sports has been on the rise since the 2018 Supreme Court ruling. The American Gaming Association estimated that $2.7 billion would be legally wagered during March Madness 2024 and bets for this year’s Super Bowl alone were estimated at over $23 billion from 68 million Americans.
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Sportsbooks are quick to provide warnings associated with the risk of sports gambling, imploring people to only gamble what they can afford to lose. For example, DraftKings provides a link to encourage “responsible gambling,” including telephone numbers for gamblers to seek help. However, this link is in the upper right hand corner of their web page, in a font that is smaller than most of the page’s other fonts.
The problem with such information is that gambling addicts lack the self-restraint to know when to stop. The ease at which sports bets can be placed on smartphones, in real-time, likely amplifies the addictive rush. In fact, without gambling addicts, it would be impossible for sportsbooks to generate the revenue that they are amassing. Indeed, advising problem gamblers to not gamble is akin to advising alcoholics to not drink or smokers to not smoke — they are words that cannot be heard nor advice that can be followed.
Patrick Wintour of the Guardian looks at disruption to the international order caused by the war in Gaza.
Wars are supposed to be the father of all things, according to Heraclitus, and many still predict that this war will define everything in the future and prove a turning point to their advantage. Iran believes the US is closer to being forced out of Iraq than at any point in the last two decades and its president, Ebrahim Raisi, has said the war in Gaza will lead to a “transformation in the unjust order that rules the world”. Iran’s ally, the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, whose group has traded fire with Israel across the Lebanese border, has claimed “the onset of a new historical phase” for the entire Middle East and that Israel will be unable to withstand the “al-Aqsa flood”.
By contrast, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, vowed on 9 October, two days after the Hamas massacre in Israel that triggered the war, that the region would be changed to Israel’s benefit. “What we will do to our enemies in the coming days will reverberate with them for generations,” he said.
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Among emerging powers, the lesson of Gaza has been that it is time for new voices to join the top table. “This war is hideous but speaks to a bigger problem: the lack of reform of global governance institutions, including and primarily the UN security council,” said Filipe Nasser, a senior adviser at the Brazilian foreign ministry. “This is the point of convergence across the global south. They feel the international order is profoundly asymmetric and detrimental to their interests. The three US vetoes show how the rules are bent”
Finally today, Comfort Ero of Foreign Affairs looks at the contentious relationship between “the West” and the “global South.”
Policymakers in the West risk losing sight of the diversity the term encompasses. When they regard the global South as a more or less cohesive coalition, they can end up simplifying or ignoring countries’ individual concerns. Western officials who want to cultivate better ties with their non-Western counterparts may become tempted to focus on winning over a few supposedly leading global South states, such as Brazil and India. Their assumption is clear: bolster ties with Brasilia or New Delhi and the rest will follow. The Biden administration and its allies invested so heavily in making last year’s G-20 summit in India a success at least in part for this reason. […]
Recent global events have made schisms between these countries and the West more pronounced. When many non-Western governments refused to take sides after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, some Western leaders acknowledged the need to address allegations of a double standard—specifically, the perception that they only took principled stands when a European nation was attacked. Only with the support of a large bloc of states that are usually considered part of the global South, after all, could the UN General Assembly deliver a strong show of solidarity with Ukraine. But Western governments did not seek to apply this lesson beyond the Russia-Ukraine war. If the war in Gaza posed the next test of whether Western leaders truly grasped the importance of facing accusations of hypocrisy, those leaders appear to have failed. Across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, officials and citizens believe that the United States and some of its allies in Europe have greenlighted Israel’s wholesale destruction of Gaza. The perception of double standards is stronger than ever.
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While many purport to speak for the global South—at the UN or otherwise—no single country can claim the mantle. Over the last year, Brazil, China, and India have tussled to present themselves as the group’s most effective leaders. All three countries are founding members of the BRICS, whose core members also include Russia and South Africa. During India’s 2023 G-20 presidency, Modi promised to represent “our fellow travelers from the global South” and helped the African Union gain a permanent seat. China, meanwhile, concentrated on expanding the BRICS, leading a successful push to extend invitations to Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates to join. (Argentina declined its invitation.) Brazil plans to use its role as president of the G-20 this year and host of the COP30 climate summit in 2025 to advance what President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (known as Lula) has presented as a vision of a “multipolar, fair, and inclusive order” in which countries of the global South would have greater influence than they do today.
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