The metric used to measure how effectively law enforcement is solving crimes is a statistic known as the clearance rate. The clearance rate is a fraction, of which the denominator is the number of a particular crime committed over a given period of time, say a calendar year, and the numerator is the number of cases “cleared.”
A case is typically cleared by the arrest of the person whom law enforcement believes has committed the crime. There are a few other ways a case can be cleared. For example, the law enforcement agency can determine that the report was false and no crime was actually committed.
There has been some criticism of the use of the clearance rate as a metric, primarily because there are some timing issues that can affect the rate. However, it is the best metric we currently have to judge how well a law enforcement agency is “solving” the crimes reported to it.
The FBI publishes the clearance rates for various crimes as part of its annual report on crime. The FBI’s latest report is from 2019. Here is what it reports as the national average for clearing various categories of crimes.
I suspect that if you are seeing these numbers for the first time, you are shocked at just how low the rates are. I find it particularly infuriating that we only solve a third of rapes. Knowing how difficult it is for a rape victim to come forward in the first place, it is a travesty that we do such a poor job of delivering justice for the crime committed against them. And to make matters worse, most law enforcement agencies saw their clearance rates decline since 2019, with the spike in crime that occurred across the country.
Law enforcement predictably responds to criticism of their embarrassingly low clearance rates by complaining that it needs more resources and personnel. There is undoubtedly some validity to their complaint, but Americans are already spending vast sums on law enforcement. Estimates vary, but the consensus is something in the $200-300 billion range annually. That is nearly $400-600 per person. And funding has continued to grow with little or no improvement in clearance rates.
So, while raising the clearance rate may require more resources, it is going to take more than just throwing more money at law enforcement or just adding more “boots on the ground.” We will have to be much smarter about how we approach solving crimes.
First, we must devote more resources to forensics. While there have been some high-profile scandals about DNA tests being abused, the reality is that we have more forensic tools to solve crimes today than at any time in history. There have been many media accounts about backlogs at crime labs across the county. In Houston, our backlog for rape kits is 173 days, and the backlog for firearm examination is a jaw-dropping 307 days.
Second, we should consider prioritizing investigation over patrol. Seeing a patrol car rolling through your neighborhood may make you feel safer, but taking dangerous criminals off the street will actually make you safer. This is especially true when you consider that criminals rarely commit just one crime. Of course, this strategy only works if prosecutors and judges actually keep habitual criminals off the street once they are caught.
Also, when I look through police department budgets, it always appears that many officers are assigned to duties that are not really law enforcement functions. It is not unusual to see that up to a third of its force is assigned support functions – administrative, airport security, mounted patrol, and other miscellaneous areas. I think every department should take a hard look at what support and administrative services could be outsourced or handled by civilian employees to increase the number of investigators. And there are some areas that should probably be shut down completely. I am not sure a large city still needs a mounted patrol.
Another idea I heard from one retired officer is to bring retired detectives back to work on cases on a contractual basis. I am sure a detailed review of the department’s operations would discover other ways to increase our investigative efforts. A better use of technology is likely one of those ways.
Police departments are para-military organizations, and like the military, they are frequently slow to adapt and generally are resistant to change. We need to think outside the current paradigm of law enforcement. For example, one thing that should be on the table is a complete overhaul of how we deal with substance abuse. The “war on drugs” has been a complete failure, and more police corruption comes from narcotics enforcement than any other area.
But the bottom line is that if we want to solve more crimes, it must be made a priority. The clearance statistics should be reported to the public on a monthly basis. When I was running companies, one of my mantras was, “If you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it.” We need to start paying attention to the clearance rates. The media needs to start paying attention to the clearance rates. When was the last time you heard a story about how awful the clearance rates are? I suspect never. But most of all, mayors, city councils, county supervisors, and all of those to whom law enforcement ultimately reports, need to start paying attention to clearance rates and demanding answers as to why the rates are so low.
Until we as communities and as a country demand better performance from all of our law enforcement agencies at solving crimes, the vast majority of victims will continue to be denied justice for the crime committed against them. That should be on all of our consciences.
Bill King is a businessman and lawyer, and is a former opinion columnist and editorial board member at the Houston Chronicle. He has served in a number of appointed and elected positions, including mayor of his hometown. He writes on a wide range of public policy and political issues. Bill is the author of “Unapologetically Moderate.”
With a population of approximately 9.3 million including around two million Arab citizens, the nation-state of the Jewish people is the only rights-protecting democracy in a region – the Middle East and North Africa – of more than 500 million Muslims. Despite its diminutive size, youth, and the security threats to which it has been constantly subject from the instant that David Ben Gurion read aloud the country’s Declaration of Independence in Tel Aviv on May 14, 1948, Israel has built the region’s most advanced high-tech economy, most formidable and sophisticated military, and most robust civil society. And Israel has fostered an extraordinary diversity of Jews: of European, Middle Eastern, and North African descent; secular, traditional, and religious; farmers and entrepreneurs, scholars and chefs, warriors and winemakers, lawyers and doctors and business executives, social justice activists and hit TV-show makers, small business owners and, yes – nations and peoples being what they are – thugs and criminal families.
Five months after some 3,000 Hamas jihadists invaded southern Israel to perpetrate mass atrocities against the nation’s civilian population, new contrasts sear the Israeli psyche. In the face of the terrible national trauma inflicted by Hamas on Oct. 7, Israelis have shown remarkable resiliency. War has brought them together, but it has not dissipated the grievances, resentments, and enmities that fueled and were fueled by the preceding nine months of controversy over the government’s proposed judicial overhaul. Not least, many with whom we spoke stressed the discrepancy between the people’s heroic response to the jihadists’ bloodthirsty assault and the governing class’s multiple failures to protect the nation.
TPIF prepares fellows to explore such complex political realities. Under the leadership of Executive Director Garrett Exner, Deputy Director Serena Frechter, and Director of Operations Nani Beraha, the program brings annually approximately 10 talented young men and women to the nation’s capital for two-year stints to do work – in journalism, with political consulting firms and public-policy think thanks, at not-for-profit initiatives, and in Congress – that advances the nation’s interest in individual liberty, limited government, free markets, vigorous civil society, and a strong America abroad. As the program’s director of studies, I conduct bi-monthly seminars on the modern tradition of freedom; host monthly dinners with distinguished figures from politics, national security, law, and journalism; and convene seasonal weekend retreats that allow fellows to delve into enduring ideas and contemporary issues. Every other year, TPIF fellows and staff travel to Israel to improve our understanding of America’s best friend and partner in the region.
On this trip, TPIF’s fifth to Israel, the war forced adjustments to our itinerary. We spent several days in Tel Aviv and in Jerusalem, traveled through parts of Judea and Samaria, visited Rahat, a Bedouin city in the Negev, and picked garlic and worked in onion fields near Gaza. Security considerations compelled us to forgo our usual stops in Ramallah to meet with Palestinian Authority representatives, in the Golan Heights to observe the border with Syria, and in the upper Galilee within eyesight of Lebanon.
As on TPIF’s previous Israel trips, we met a variety of speakers. We talked to journalists, former politicians and government officials, and active-duty military officers. We heard from men and women of the left, center, and right. We spoke with a distinguished Arab Israeli journalist and an eminent ultra-Orthodox rabbi. We listened to a traditionally garbed Bedouin woman – a mother of six and an entrepreneur who had launched a line of cosmetics – and to a 29-year-old woman who survived the Nova music festival massacre where Hamas gunned down more than 400 people and kidnapped more than 40. We convened discussions with Israelis who wished to expand Israel’s presence in and control over Judea and Samaria – home to between 2.5 and 3 million non-citizen West Bank Palestinians – and with Israelis who oppose such expansion and seek separation from the West Bank, as well as Gazan Palestinians. We held conversations with prominent defenders of the Netanyahu government’s judicial reform efforts and its conduct of the Gaza war and diplomacy and with prominent opponents of every aspect of the Netanyahu government.
We also participated in difficult but essential conversations with members of communities that Hamas had devastated. On Oct. 7, the terrorists abducted Thomas Hand’s then-8-year-old daughter Emily from Kibbutz Be’eri. She was released as part of the November cease-fire. Pausing occasionally to collect himself, Emily’s father told us with tears of wonderment that his daughter had already recovered to 95% of her old self.
Chen Kotler hosted us at Kfar Aza, another kibbutz on the Gaza border that Hamas invaded on Oct. 7. While we were sitting on her porch, our guide – just returned from nearly five months of reserve duty in the north – determined that the explosions in the distance were outgoing Israeli artillery fire.
Chen showed us where the jihadists burst through the kibbutz’s back fence, about a mile from Gaza, rampaged through the young adults’ quarters and, with advance knowledge of the kibbutz layout, clambered atop her roof, which overlooked the kibbutz armory, to ambush members rushing to arm themselves. On that awful day, Hamas slaughtered 62 kibbutzniks and abducted 19, five of whom the terrorists still hold hostage.
The war was the fixed point around which our conversations revolved. Israelis are a legendarily contentious people – try to agree and as often as not you will be informed with a wry smile that you don’t – but those we encountered unanimously affirmed that the war marks a turning point in the nation’s short history.
Here, too, we encountered a stunning contrast. Many Israelis share Amir Tibon’s assessment. A journalist who, with his family, survived the jihadists’ invasion of Kibbutz Nahal Oz, Tibon told us that the response to the Oct. 7 attacks has been Israeli society’s finest hour while exposing a dysfunctional governing class and public sector.
The intelligence community did not effectively warn of the murder and mayhem. The security barrier, designed to stop individuals and small groups of terrorists, was swiftly overwhelmed by thousands of jihadists who disabled its cameras and censors and cut through it or knocked it down, flew over it, or bypassed it by sea. In addition, the military was caught unprepared: Too few troops were stationed on the border and, of those, too few stood ready to repel an attack. Most consequentially, the government’s strategy for containing and deterring Hamas failed. Several years ago, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu authorized the delivery of tens of millions of dollars in cash a month to Hamas, courtesy of the Qatari government. Netanyahu aimed to divide West Bank Palestinians ruled by the Palestinian Authority from Gaza Palestinians controlled by Hamas, while turning Hamas toward economic development. Instead, the government’s policy funded Hamas’ massive tunnel infrastructure, enormous weapons stockpiles, and monstrous plans to destroy Israel.
At the same time, Israelis have shown breathtaking valor and unity. Some 350,000 reservists reported for duty within five days of the Oct. 7 attacks. The Israel Defense Forces have made substantial progress toward destroying Hamas as a governing power and military while defying all expectations in minimizing casualties among comrades and among noncombatant Palestinians. In the war’s early weeks, restaurant owners made available their kitchens for others who set aside their regular jobs to prepare meals for the soldiers. Israelis from all walks of life travel to the north and south to work in the fields. Many Israelis have raised money to purchase essential equipment from abroad for frontline soldiers: helmets, protective vests, high-tech goggles, and more. And civil society has rallied to provide mental health care and education for the tens of thousands of internally displaced citizens.
At Kfar Aza, Chen Kotler sent TPIF on its way with her own contrast, at once heartbreaking and fortifying, somber and hopeful. She stood in front of the kibbutz gate through which the jihadists stormed on that awful early autumn morning. Behind her lay Kfar Aza’s green fields – sand and stone until the kibbutz, forgive the cliché, made the desert bloom. Just beyond the spring crops, we could see Gaza – an easy walk and only a few minutes by motorcycle, pickup truck, or paraglider.
As Chen spoke, her quietly resolute voice occasionally faltered. We barely breathed.
Her features taut and her tone grim, Chen told us that the war with Hamas is not just the kibbutz’s war. It’s not just Israel’s war. It’s not just the Jewish people’s war. The war against Hamas is civilization’s war, she said. And we must win it.
Then, with a soft smile tinged with indelible sorrow, she told us that she believes in shalom – peace – which in Hebrew signifies, beyond the absence of fighting, the achievement of harmony in a broken world. We Israelis seek shalom, she concluded, because we love life.
We thanked Chen for her courage and told her that we would remember her words and share them with others.
Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. From 2019 to 2021, he served as director of the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. State Department. His writings are posted at PeterBerkowitz.com and he can be followed on Twitter @BerkowitzPeter.
But Wilkins said that his experience only underscores the need for term limits in Washington, which is the focus of his new book. This interview is with Carl M. Cannon, RealClearPolitics Washington bureau chief.
Q: Gerrick, what do you see as the benefits of having fresh faces on Capitol Hill?
A: The regular influx of new representatives would bring diverse ideas and backgrounds into the political arena, fostering a government that is more responsive to its constituents. Term limits disrupt the cycle of career politicians, who become disconnected from the everyday experiences and needs of the people they represent. This disconnection often leads to a sense of disenfranchisement among citizens. Limiting the length of time an individual can serve in Congress also reduces the risk of corruption and undue influence from special interests.
Q: How do you respond to people who say that institutional memory is beneficial in any organization, even government?
A: When people bring up the importance of institutional memory in government, I like to point to a different angle, one I explore in my book. Careerism, or the tendency to have career politicians, often leads to a kind of groupthink, which tends to hold back innovation. Think about it: Back before 1900, over half of Congress was made up of freshmen, bringing new ideas and perspectives. We’re facing longstanding issues like the border crisis and our national debt – these aren’t new problems, and they need fresh minds to find solutions. Keeping the same people in for too long, in my view, can actually prevent us from effectively addressing these challenges.
Q: One way to effect term limits would be if the people just “voted the bums” out, to use an old expression. Why is legislation needed?
A: Well, as my own experience shows, it’s a rigged system. As James Madison wrote, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” Although I already favored term limits before running for Congress, I have firsthand knowledge of how necessary it is.
The early polling suggested a promising opportunity to unseat the incumbent. However, as the race progressed, the formidable nature of incumbency became apparent. He started with a large war chest and secured donations from major political action committees, outspending my campaign five to one. This disparity highlighted a vital aspect of the incumbency advantage: the overwhelming support from special interest groups. These PACs rarely, if ever, support a challenger over an incumbent. By contrast, my campaign was primarily fueled by individual donations, self-funding, and on-the-ground grassroots efforts.
A: Do you believe term limits will resonate with voters in the 2024 presidential election?
A: I hope so. It won’t be lost on the voters that if congressional term limits had been enacted in the 1990s, the candidate landscape in 2024 would likely have been notably different. Joe Biden is 81 years old. He was first elected to the Senate when he was 30. Think of that. His path to the Oval Office would have been much less likely without such an extended period in Congress.
And Donald Trump has repeatedly emphasized his commitment to passing a term limits amendment for Congress. I believe this stance resonates with a significant portion of the electorate who are frustrated with career politicians and Washington’s continued dysfunction.
Other prominent Republicans, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, have also highlighted term limits as a vital issue. As more candidates address this issue, term limits are likely to become a pivotal point of debate and differentiation in the 2024 election, influencing not only the candidates’ platforms but perhaps even voter turnout and preferences. This shift in focus toward term limits signals a growing demand for a more dynamic and responsive legislative branch, fundamentally altering the landscape of American politics.
Q: The idea of term limits isn’t new. What does “Unshackling Democracy” add to the conversation? Why did this book need to be written now?
A: I’d like to think that it reinvigorates the national conversation at a time when we need it most. The book emerges in a context where past efforts to institute term limits, notably during the 1990’s “Contract with America,” fell short, primarily due to the unwillingness of career politicians to give up their power. Although several states attempted to implement congressional term limits without the federal government, these efforts were ultimately struck down by the Supreme Court, highlighting the necessity of a constitutional amendment to effectuate this change.
In my book, I build on the foundation laid in previous debates, infusing it with fresh perspectives shaped by contemporary challenges. The metaphor I used on the campaign trail succinctly describes the need: “If someone drives your truck into the ditch, to get it out, you need a change of direction, a change of trajectory, and often a change of drivers.” This analogy aptly describes the current political landscape, where career politicians have driven our country into a ditch, and we need citizen legislators to get it out.
Q: Are additional political reforms needed?
A: Certainly, but term limits would be a terrific start – and have far-reaching implications. My book goes beyond just advocating for term limits; it delves into how their implementation could significantly curb corruption and diminish the overpowering influence of special interests in Washington, D.C.
My book presents term limits as not just a policy change but as a pivotal step toward revitalizing our Republic. It brings this old idea into a new light, offering both a historical perspective and a relatable narrative for the average American. Our nation is more ready than ever to embrace changes that restore power to “We the People.” I like to think that “Unshackling Democracy” is more than a book; it’s a call to action to unshackle our democracy and revive the true spirit of our Constitutional Republic.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics and executive editor of RealClearMedia Group. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.
In “Julius Caesar,” William Shakespeare opens the second scene of the play as a crowd is paying homage to Caesar. Except for one member of that crowd, identified only as a “soothsayer,” who calls out “Caesar!”
“Who is it in the press that calls on me?,” says Caesar, who describes the voice as “a tongue, shriller than all the music.”
“Beware the Ides of March,” says the soothsayer.
“What man is that?” asks the ruler.
Brutus, who will betray Caesar, repeats the phrase. Caesar beckons the soothsayer, who repeats the ominous expression again, the third time it’s uttered in this play: Beware the Ides of March.
It’s a fraught moment because the soothsayer appears to threaten the ruler. But Caesar doesn’t kill the messenger, to use a metaphor that dates to an even more ancient time. “He is a dreamer,” Caesar says, “let us leave him pass.”
I’ll explain the relevance of all this in a moment. First, though, I’d direct you to RCP’s front page, which contains the latest poll averages, political news and video, and aggregated opinion pieces ranging across the ideological spectrum. We also offer the usual complement of original material from our stable of columnists and contributors. Recent highlights include the following:
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“Did Not Exonerate”: Robert Hur Faces Heated Congress. Phil Wegmann reports on the contentious examination of the WH special counsel and his conclusions on Biden’s handling of classified documents.
Is DoD Tracking Reports of Misused Aid in Ukraine? Phil also follows the recent allegations of mismanaged equipment and materiel sent to help Ukraine’s military.
RCP on SiriusXM. On Thursday evening’s edition, Tom Bevan, Andrew Walworth, and I review the latest presidential polls from swing states and discuss the variables that third party candidates introduce into poll numbers. I also talk with Mollie Hemingway about the Nancy Mace–George Stephanopoulos dust-up earlier this week, and Andrew picks the brain of Tom Shanker regarding the intel community’s 2024 Annual Threat Assessment.
Ten Senate Seats Most Likely To Flip. Sean Trende previews the races taking shape in the shadow of the 2024 presidential rematch.
Why I File Title VI Complaints Against Universities. Zachary Marschall makes the case for his fight against campus antisemitism.
We Shouldn’t Be This Invested in a Presidential Election. At RealClearPolicy, Richard Lim notes that the chief executive was never supposed to be the center of national life -- for good reason.
Real-World Dangers of Politicized De-Banking. At RealClearMarkets, Kristen Waggoner sounds the alarm on the perils of canceling financial access on the grounds of political and religious disagreements.
Could Singapore Math Be a Fix for U.S. Education? American students continue to lag behind other countries in math scores. Walter Myers at RealClearEducation proposes concentrating less on “equity” and more on systems proven to raise proficiency.
Climate Bureaucrats Give China a Free Pass. At RealClearEnergy, Oliver McPherson-Smith asks why experts should look the other way as the world’s second-largest economy emits greenhouse gases at an unparalleled level.
Duplication and Obsolescence: U.S. Marine Corps’ Missile Dilemma. At RealClearDefense, James Conway and Jerry McAbee argue that this arm of the U.S. military has made egregious errors in its most recent reorganization.
Activists Are Fearmongering About Mercury in Seafood Again. Americans eat about a billion pounds of canned tuna every year. At RealClearScience, David Zaruk writes that environmentalists continue to sound alarms that have little connection to reality.
For Health’s Sake Target Tobacco Not Vapes. At RealClearHealth, Jerry Rogers asserts that anti-smoking activists and government regulators are fighting technologies and products that could potentially save millions of lives.
Don’t Penalize Scientific Curiosity and Investigation. Also at RealClearHealth, Kirsten Axelsen urges the California Supreme Court to fix a bad appellate decision that would create penalties for inventors.
You Deserve To Control Your Healthcare Data. More from Health: Jason Barr examines the advantages and dangers of the proliferation of medical information on each one of us and asks, who owns it?
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The Ides of March in 2024 falls on Friday, the day of the week when I reprise a quotation meant to be enlightening or informative. I usually cite American sources, but I chose Shakespeare this morning for a couple of reasons.
Let’s start with that word “press” in the scene about Caesar and the soothsayer. Its meaning differs from modern English in that press doesn’t mean “media,” so much as it evokes a crowd of people pressed together. Yet, I would suggest that the two definitions -- the old one and the new one -- have become conflated in an era of citizen journalists when everyone who posts content on social media considers themselves political pundits.
Julius Caesar is unconcerned about the warning. Is he Joe Biden, wrongfully assuring the press (the actual press) that he’s leading in most of the polls? Or is Caesar’s hubris more akin to Donald Trump, conceitedly assuring his loyalists that he will win back the presidency and that Nov. 5, 2024, will be, improbably, “the most important” date in U.S. history?
Widening the lens, in truth we mainly ascribe power to omens after the fact. Those of us in journalism actually know that the future is not set in stone and that conventional wisdom should be questioned, not repeated as gospel. Kamala Harris is a drag on the Democratic ticket. A No Labels “unity ticket” will only hurt President Biden. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. helps former President Trump. The Senate will likely go Republican. Perhaps all these things are true. But maybe none of them are.
“Men at some time are masters of their fates,” Julius Caesar tells Brutus. “The fault,” he adds, “is not in our stars, but in ourselves …”
And that is our quote of the week.
Carl M. Cannon
Washington Bureau chief, RealClearPolitics
@CarlCannon (Twitter)
ccannon@realclearpolitics.com
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics and executive editor of RealClearMedia Group. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.
“If you never look, you will never find it,” a source familiar with how the report was compiled said of the worst-case possibility that aid was being misappropriated.
The report comes as President Biden struggles to keep the supply lines open to Ukraine. Although a majority of Congress supports sending further aid to help hold back the Russian onslaught, and the Senate passed a bipartisan aid package late last month, House Republicans have yet to approve the latest round of now-stalled military assistance.
The United States remains the leading supplier of munitions and other aid to Ukraine, providing more than $42 billion in assistance since Russia’s invasion. Much of it has come through the Presidential Drawdown Authority, which allows the president to transfer equipment from American stores directly to allies. The annual amount was limited by law to $100 million a year until Congress lifted the cap to $14.5 billion.
The sheer tonnage of supplies and the speed of its shipment, according to the GAO report, has left the Pentagon without “quality data” to assess its delivery. Ensuring munitions and materiel arrive in the right hands has led to unprecedented challenges on top of the existing chaos of war. Most officials were evacuated from Ukraine long ago, for instance, and those who remain are restricted from leaving Kyiv to ensure delivery of shipments before it is used or destroyed on the battlefield.
Department of Defense officials, however, maintain that they and their Ukrainian allies are up to the challenge. “We think the Ukrainians are using properly what they’ve been given,” Colin Kahl, formerly the Pentagon’s top policy official, told Congress over a year ago, assuring lawmakers that the DoD conducts regular audits and “we are laser-focused on this issue.”
Though a nascent democracy, Ukraine has a history of corruption. Mismanagement or graft could threaten future aid, a message that has been relayed from the White House to President Volodymyr Zelensky directly.
“Still no indication that there’s been any kind of widespread corruption or inappropriate use of U.S. capabilities,” John Kirby, a national security communications adviser to President Biden, told RealClearPolitics last October. As America reprises its role as an arsenal of democracy, the spokesman described a “hand-to-mouth” scenario where munitions are used as soon as they arrive.
“It’s a matter of days before some stuff gets there,” Kirby continued, “and then a matter of days more before it is being used on the battlefield.”
That kind of haste could very well make waste, or what the GAO report described as “end-use violations involving defense articles provided to the country.” It is precisely because so much has been provided so quickly that the nonpartisan government watchdog sees risk.
According to the report, the Pentagon “is generally not tracking” the status of vehicles and armaments that make up the majority of supplies. More sensitive items, such as night vision capabilities and certain advanced missiles, are being monitored through updated procedures to account for their delivery into hostile environments. DoD officials often cooperate with their Ukrainian counterparts, the report found, via video calls, email, and text messages to ensure the receipt and status of those supplies.
Complicating matters further, there is no shared definition of “delivered” among the branches of the U.S. military. Army officials told GAO they considered materiel delivered once they left an “Army point of origin,” though they could be days or weeks in transit before arriving in the hands of Ukrainians. The Marine Corps, by contrast, only marked items delivered once they received email confirmation from DoD officials or their Ukrainian counterparts.
“The U.S. has provided a large volume of equipment in a very short period of time, and it is unclear whether DOD guidance and processes have been adjusted to accurately account for all of these items,” warned Chelsa Kenney, the director of international affairs at GAO.
More than just shipping delays and a logistical nightmare, the greater risk is the worst-case scenario: American hardware falling into the hands of an adversary.
The Pentagon tracked one allegation that U.S. supplies had been transferred to Russian forces, a story which, according to the report, DoD officials on the ground in nearby Poland deemed not credible and “consistent with Russian disinformation.”
And yet, the GAO found that the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, the DoD office responsible for such shipments, had “not consistently tracked” allegations of that possibility.
“While DOD officials said there had been no credible evidence of diversion of U.S.-provided advanced conventional weapons from Ukraine,” the report states, “it is unclear whether all allegations are being tracked.” The report also warned that without tracking those allegations, “DOD may face an increased risk of real or perceived defense article losses that can undermine Ukraine’s war efforts.”
For its part, per the GAO report, the DSCA stated the agency was “only responsible for tracking the allegations that it receives and is not required to proactively identify allegations. Further, officials from the Office of the Secretary of Defense said DSCA was not responsible for tracking unverifiable claims meant to discredit Ukraine’s weapons accountability efforts.”
The GAO included in their report eight separate recommended reforms, which the DoD consented to partly or entirely. In a letter from Laura Cooper, deputy assistant secretary of defense, that was included in the report, the DoD declined a recommendation to require which allegations of misuse should be recorded and tracked. According to Cooper, the DoD already has sufficient regulations in place.
This will do little to pacify Republicans eager to rein in the war funding.
“The Biden administration has spent two years deceiving the American people, claiming they’ve closely tracked the military material we’ve sent to Ukraine. The GAO’s report not only proves them wrong, it references allegations that U.S. military equipment ended up in the hands of Russian military forces,” Sen. JD Vance, an Ohio Republican and former U.S. Marine, told RCP.
“This is a major problem. I plan to immediately introduce legislation to hold the Biden administration accountable for these errors,” Vance added.
Philip Wegmann is White House correspondent for RealClearPolitics.
For the many Americans who are neither Trump enthusiasts nor card-carrying Democratic partisans, this choice at the ballot box may be less than fully enticing. But for those patriots who still love this country, warts and all and in spite of our ruinous current trajectory and decadence, it is imperative that Trump secures a second presidential term. It really is that simple.
You may admire Trump's willingness to challenge conventional orthodoxies and his instinctual nationalism; or maybe you think he is an unprincipled politician and an obnoxious boor, to boot. Perhaps you believe Trump is now being persecuted by a weaponized prosecutorial apparatus; or you might have deep qualms about voting for someone found guilty of a crime by a jury of his peers.
But whatever it is you think about the polarizing 45th president of the United States, it doesn't really matter. The reality is the Democratic Party in its fetid current form is wholly unfit to govern the local assisted living facility -- to say nothing of the greatest country in the world. And whoever once said American elections don't present a binary choice is a moron; that is precisely what they do.
Patriots of all stripes must therefore band together to get Trump across the finish line this November. Trump can certainly make that task easier (or harder) based on how he runs his campaign this year. Here is what he should do.
Since Trump is the first former president to run for a non-consecutive additional term since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, his campaign is somewhat anomalous. Most challengers to an incumbent president seeking reelection can only talk about what they will do once they are in office and how that agenda differs from the incumbent's record. But Trump already served a full term; he has a record. What's more, that term was just a few years ago; most voters remember it well.
The key to Trump's reelection this fall, then, is to make the straightforward case that his term was demonstrably better for the median American citizen than Biden's term has been.
On the economy, Biden has presided over the worst inflation in four decades, declining real wages, a formal recession and a historic supply chain crisis. Trump, by contrast, oversaw a generally flourishing pre-COVID economy: The stock market soared, inflation was generally subdued, America became a net exporter of oil and natural gas for the first time ever, and the Black unemployment rate even reached the lowest it has been since that statistic was first measured.
On the border, Biden has presided over the worst crisis in American history: Endless streams of unknown illegal aliens have flooded over, leading to a massive strain on municipalities' resources, skyrocketing violent crime, depressed wages for working-class Americans and the mass importation of terrorism-implicating "special interest aliens." Trump, by contrast, may not have finished construction of the border wall, but illegal immigration was orders of magnitude lower than it is today due in no small part to the prudent measures he implemented, such as Remain in Mexico.
On the world stage, Vladimir Putin did not march into Ukraine under Trump (indeed, it is curious that Putin invaded Crimea during the Obama presidency in 2014 and then waited patiently until the next Democratic president to invade again), and under Trump, Hamas did not infiltrate Israel and kill the most Jews in a single day since the defeat of Nazi Germany. Iran was on the brink of economic catastrophe by the end of Trump's term due to his administration's "maximum pressure" campaign; under Biden, the Islamic Republic has been "maximally emboldened" to sow the seeds of jihad all over the Middle East. For all the talk of Trump's "chaos," there was not a single major war abroad during his presidency.
The 2024 presidential campaign is going to get ugly. Democrats have barely commenced the advertising onslaught that is to come, wherein they will depict Trump as a Mafia-like thug and shamelessly compare Jan. 6, 2021, to 9/11. Trump's best chance this fall is to ignore the noise and prove, contrary to the smear campaigns, that he is the superior candidate in terms of competence, stability and sanity. He has the record to prove it.
COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM
When called out in his recent State of the Union address, President Joe Biden referenced the deceased Riley. But Biden misidentified her as "Lincoln Riley" --the USC football coach!
Biden only accurately noted that she "was killed by an 'illegal.'"
True -- but almost immediately the left was infuriated over Biden's accurate use of the supposedly insensitive "illegal" for the murderer Ibarra.
Biden soon apologized for correctly identifying her killer as an illegal alien -- but not for misidentifying the victim.
He left the callous impression that he was more upset about offending his open-borders base than about the savage beating of a young 22-year-old American nursing student.
Biden's woke open-borders agenda supersedes any worry over the subsequent mounting number of Americans who have fallen victim to foreign gangs and criminals. He seems oblivious to the nearly 100,000 Americans who die from fentanyl imported across open borders.
The same idea of abstract humanity juxtaposed with concrete callousness towards humans characterizes much of the current leftist agenda.
The Biden administration envisions mandating the use of electric vehicles and banning natural gas appliances. These measures will supposedly help "save" the planet -- even as they make life far more expensive and dangerous for the middle class and poor in the here and now.
We are told that biologically born males who transition to females have a civil right to compete in female sports.
Such transgender activism may sound compassionate in the abstract. Yet in the concrete, thousands of women are put in danger by competing against the much larger musculoskeletal frames and natural strength of transitioning males.
Moreover, tens of thousands of young female athletes are losing opportunities to excel and set records -- thus destroying over a half-century of women's efforts to reach parity with men's sports.
In 2021, United Airlines president Scott Kirby bragged that his company was now devoted to ensuring that 50 percent of all trained pilots would be either people of color or women.
The Federal Aviation Administration had similar diversity, equity, and inclusion mandates for hiring air traffic controllers.
In 2023, Boeing bragged that it was using "inclusion" as a criterion for executive compensation. Pay from now on would be calibrated in large part on the success of hiring new employees on the basis of their race, gender, and sexual orientation.
In the abstract, ensuring that air travel "looks like America" is no doubt a noble goal.
But if such subordination of meritocracy is canonized without proper attention to the only criterion that really matters -- the safety of the nearly 3 million American airline passengers who take 45,000 flights per day -- lives will be needlessly lost.
Some data and recent anecdotal evidence suggest that something has now gone dangerously wrong with the entire airline industry.
In January 2023, thousands of domestic flights were canceled or delayed because of a series of Federal Aviation Administration computer failures. Over the last 10 years, near-crashes and collisions of commercial places have more than doubled.
Even scarier, in the last two weeks alone, United Airlines suffered numerous near-catastrophic events that may have involved crew lapses, air traffic controller errors, or problems with Boeing jet construction or maintenance -- or all three. Specific details have mysteriously been kept from the public.
A United flight from San Francisco to Mexico had to make an emergency landing due to failing hydraulics. Another United flight bound for San Francisco from Sydney, Australia, had to return around due to a "maintenance issue." Yet another flight out of Chicago O'Hare International Airport likewise suffered undisclosed "maintenance issues" and returned home.
At Houston's George Bush Intercontinental Airport, a United plane simply taxied off the runway and got stuck in the grass. Another United flight from San Francisco lost a wheel while taking off!
Yet another United flight from Houston to Florida was forced to make an emergency landing after one of its engines caught fire. At about the same time, a United flight bound for San Francisco from Hawaii experienced an engine failure in mid-flight.
Dozens were injured on a Boeing jet during a Chilean airline flight from Australia to New Zealand due to what officials called "a technical event during the flight which caused a strong movement."
Anytime ideology and dogma trump merit, logic, and safety, the result is predictably scary and dangerous.
America needs to recalibrate its priorities to protect the lives and aspirations of all its citizens, regardless of their race and gender.
If our elites do not stop playing god and mandating their visions of heaven on earth, then they will surely ensure hell for us all.
(C)2024 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of "The Case for Trump." You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.
Polls give us clues. Trump continues to have the small but persistent lead in public polls he has maintained since November 2023 -- in contrast to the 2016 and 2020 cycles, in which he often trailed in national and target state polls.
But polls are only one indicator. Actual votes are another. And we've had one contest this year that provides important clues to the November vote: the California primary.
Primary voters in California, like those in Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, North Carolina and Texas, have voted not just for president but also for members of Congress and (in North Carolina) governor and statewide officials. Those contests may draw turnout from voters with little motivation to participate in seemingly already decided presidential primaries.
And California, unlike those states but like Louisiana and Washington, has, except at the presidential level, all-party primaries, in which the top two candidates, regardless of party, advance to the general election.
The results of all-party primaries in many but not all cases turn out to be good forecasts of the general election. For example, Washington state's 1994 results presaged the defeat of then-House Speaker Tom Foley and the first Republican majority in the U.S. House in 40 years.
It's true that this year's California primary came eight months before the November election, and in eight months, events can surprise and opinions can change. But today's polls are subject to the same caveat.
The big news from California is that, with 85% of the votes counted (high-tech California counts slowly), Democratic support is sagging a bit. With no viable opposition in the state to Biden or Trump, Democrats cast 59% of presidential votes and Republicans 39%. That's down from the state's 63%-34% margin for Biden over Trump in 2020.
Similarly, in the all-party primary for the U.S. Senate, Democrats got 59% of the votes and Republicans 39%. That's down from Sen. Alex Padilla's (D-Calif.) 61%-39% margin in 2022 and then-Sen. Dianne Feinstein's 63%-37% in the last Democratic-Republican runoff in 2012. It's nearly the same as Gov. Gavin Newsom's 59%-41% reelection in 2022 but weaker than his 62%-38% victory in 2018.
Those numbers don't mean difficulty for Biden in carrying California's 52 electoral votes or for Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Congress's chief propagator of the Russia collusion hoax, in replacing Feinstein in the Senate.
But it does suggest gains for Republicans in congressional and state legislative districts, and it does lend credence to polling data, reviewed last month in this space, showing Trump and Republican gains among Hispanic and Asian voters.
This year, Republicans won majorities in 13 districts to Democrats' 39, a vast improvement on the 46-7 Democratic margin in 2018 when, in reaction against Trump, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) won back the House majority and the speaker's chair.
Republican incumbents in three heavily Hispanic and Asian seats who were elected with 51% in 2022 got between 55% and 56% of primary votes this year. And Republicans won between 43% and 49% of primary votes in nine other districts, seven of them heavily Hispanic. Most of those seats aren't seriously contested this year, but most may be in years to come.
As Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini argues in his book "Party of the People," non-college-educated Hispanic people, Asian people, and Black people with conservative views are voting increasingly Republican, like non-college-educated white people.
California has seen something like this before. Over the last three generations, the state has been populated by two brief but enormous surges of migration of (to oversimplify) Midwesterners from 1946 to 1973 and Mexicans from 1982 to 2007. The Midwesterners provided majorities first for Pat Brown liberals and, after riots in Berkeley and Watts, for Ronald Reagan conservatives. Midwestern migrants enabled Republicans to hold the governorship in six of eight elections from 1966 to 1994.
Mexican voters entered the voting ranks more slowly. But in this century, they, together with liberal white college graduates in the San Francisco Bay Area and Westside of Los Angeles, have made once-marginal California solidly Democratic. Just as settled-in Midwesterners soured on liberals' 1960s policies, so settled-in Mexicans seem to be souring on this generation's liberal excesses.
Gentry liberals' high turnout will probably keep California Democratic, but Republican trending in lower-turnout Mexican areas will reduce their ranks in Congress well below Pelosi highs.
Meanwhile, California has been losing population, down 538,000 between 2020 and 2023, even as it lost one U.S. House seat in the reapportionment following the 2020 census. Migration from Mexico halted during the 2007-2008 housing crunch, and today's illegal immigrants are surging toward Texas, not California.
California bitterly clings to much of the high-tech and entertainment industries, but it seems to be losing its hold, in the days of Reagan, on the imaginations of most immigrants and Americans alike.
COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM
Michael Barone is senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.
Beyond the president's class warfare rhetoric, the lure of putting his hands on more revenue is one of the factors behind the proposal. Biden likes to pretend he is some sort of deficit cutter, but his administration is the mother of all big spenders. He's seeking $7.3 trillion for next year without acknowledging the insolvency of Social Security coming our way or addressing what happens when Congress makes the Republican tax cut permanent in 2025 for people earning less than $400,000 a year.
Unfortunately, no fiscally irresponsible budget is complete without soothing individual taxpayers by promising to tax corporations. Never mind that the burden of corporate income tax hikes isn't shouldered by corporations. Yes, corporations do write the checks to the Internal Revenue Service, but the economic weight will be partially or fully shifted to others, such as workers through lower wages, consumers through higher prices, or shareholders through lower returns on investment. That means that many taxpayers making less than that $400k will be shouldering the cost of the corporate tax hike.
It is worth expanding on the fact that much of a corporate tax increase will be shouldered specifically by workers. A recent Tax Foundation article, for instance, explained that "a study of corporate taxes in Germany found that workers bear about half of the tax burden in the form of lower wages, with low-skilled, young, and female employees disproportionately harmed."
Biden's planned tax hike would raise revenue for sure. Kyle Pomerleau at the American Enterprise Institute told me that it would raise roughly $1 trillion over a decade. However, it will do it in the most damaging way possible.
Indeed, it is well-established by the economic literature that increasing corporate taxes is the most economically destructive method due to its impact on incentives to invest. Investments that were previously feasible at the lowest rate of capital are now out of reach. Firms forgo machinery, factories and other equipment, reducing their capital stock. That in turn reduces productivity, output and overtime wages.
The good news is that the reverse is also true. That's what the Republicans did in 2017 when they cut the federal corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% while broadening the tax base. Chris Edwards at the Cato Institute recently noted that the move increased investments and wages as one would hope -- and it also managed to boost federal corporate tax collections from $297 billion in 2017 to a projected $569 billion in 2024.
While this spike was attributed to temporary factors -- the revenue is anticipated to decrease to $494 billion in 2025 -- it also reduced tax avoidance from firms who repatriated much of the revenue they used to keep abroad. Instead of avoiding higher tax rates, they invested more in America and boosted wages along the way.
In addition, for all the concerns about fairness expressed by the administration to justify its tax hike, the corporate tax is quite unfair. Profits are already subject to taxation at the individual level when distributed as dividends or realized as capital gains. Increasing the corporate tax rate will exacerbate the issue of double taxation, distorting investment decisions and reducing economic efficiency, not to mention encouraging aggressive planning for more tax avoidance.
Last, the administration's plan ignores one of its usual priorities: the fact that many U.S. companies must compete on the international stage. Raising the corporate income tax at home makes them less competitive abroad. According to the Cato Institute's Adam Michel, if Biden is successful in raising the corporate income tax to 28%, the U.S. would have the second?highest such rate among the market-oriented democracies that make up the OECD. America would instantly become less attractive for multinational corporations and mobile capital.
In an era where economic literacy should guide policymaking, reverting to such tax hikes is a step backward -- a misstep we can ill afford amid the delicate dance of post-pandemic recovery and an increasingly competitive global economy.
COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM.
Veronique de Rugy is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.
The network TV stories that night were the closest thing to "fair and balanced" we've seen in a long time. The Republicans decried the double standard, that Donald Trump is being prosecuted and Biden is not. The Democrats complained Hur's report made Biden look feeble-minded (like nobody's drawn that conclusion).
But let's take a look at the bigger picture. While Hur was conducting his investigation, we joked that you should put his face on a milk carton. He was missing from the press.
Hur was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland in January 2023. Bill D'Agostino reported at NewsBusters that over about nine months of morning and evening news coverage -- from Feb. 1, 2023, through Nov, 20, 2023 -- ABC, CBS and NBC spent just four minutes and 52 seconds on Hur's inquiry.
But then there's the breakdown. ABC aired 204 of those 292 seconds, or 70% of that airtime. NBC barely offered a minute (64 seconds), and CBS offered one paltry 24-second news brief.
That's not the way they covered Russian collusion and Robert Mueller, is it? They obsessed almost daily over that probe. From Jan. 20, 2017, through Dec. 31, 2018, NewsBusters reported the Big Three evening newscasts alone aired 2,092 minutes on investigations of Trump's alleged collusion with the Russian government. It should not be surprising that this was the single most covered topic in their coverage of Trump in that time frame.
Here's some rough math: Trump was punished with 858 overwhelmingly negative minutes on Russiagate in 2018, while Biden drew less than five Hur minutes over most of 2023. Very roughly, that's about 170 to 1. But remember, the 858 number is only the evening newscasts.
If Trump was "scandal-plagued," the newscasters were the plague. If they made the political weather, it was a daily hurricane for Trump, while Biden was rewarded with Mostly Sunny.
That doesn't mean Trump was damaged. In 2018, Trump's approval rating actually improved, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average. But that's not how the anti-Trump media designed it.
These numbers underline the fraudulence of former Washington Post editor Martin Baron's slogan, when he claimed, "We're not at war. We're at work." Metaphorically, they were at war under Trump as the Scandal Police, and now they spend most days at the donut shop.
This is why the media has a major trust problem with anyone who's not a Democrat. Trump gets Scandal Police brutality. Biden scandals are avoided until they cannot be avoided, and then reporters often repeat the taunting mantra "no evidence, no evidence." As if it's not their job to look for evidence.
This bifurcated media approach to scandal presents each and every Democrat prosecutor of Trump -- whether elected or appointed by Biden -- as nonpartisan and apolitical. Well, unless someone like Hur spurs a bad news cycle for Biden -- then he's a "Trump appointee" -- ahem, before he became a Biden administration appointee. The Biden Justice Department is also treated like it's as pure as newly fallen snow.
People see through this. But journalists keep thinking the people are stupid when they don't accept their preaching. Their eternally smug self-righteousness ensures they will never be trusted again.
COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM
In the hot seat Tuesday was Robert Hur, until recently the special counsel whose investigation of Biden's mishandling of classified information ended with the decision not to charge Biden criminally.
As his report noted, Hur did not say Biden did nothing wrong. But he believed a jury probably would not convict a former president who could be seen as a "well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory."
File that under Damning with Faint Praise.
Back to Jordan's question. The GOP firebrand offered his own answer as to motive -- "the oldest motives in the book, pride and money."
On the money front, Jordan was referring to the $8 million advance paid to Biden for his second book. In the process, Biden opened up to his ghostwriter.
It is the pride element that interests me today. The then-vice president saved classified information that he believed bolstered his disagreement with President Barack Obama's decision to send additional troops to Afghanistan in 2009.
Biden especially did not want to surrender handwritten notes -- which he no doubt believed would make him look better than Obama on "Afghanastan," which Biden frequently misspelled.
My read: Biden knew what he was doing, but he couldn't help himself. Ego.
Some Republicans argue there is a double standard. Biden has not been charged with document violations even as former President Donald Trump has been.
The thing is, the Biden misdeeds pale next to the Trump document misbehavior charged by special counsel Jack Smith. The Justice Department has charged the former president with willful retention of national defense secrets (at Mar-a-Lago), obstruction of justice and conspiracy. Trump has pleaded not guilty.
Also, Biden sat down for five hours of interviews and opened doors for investigators.
Trump has done neither. Yes, Trump has an absolute right not to incriminate himself, but he loses points in the court of public opinion.
Another bad look was evident when Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., berated Hur for his links to "known" members of the Federalist Society, a conservative and libertarian legal organization. And: "You are a Republican though, aren't you?"
"It is a measure of our times that prosecutors are now greeted with McCarthy like demands to know if they are or have been a member of the Federalist Society," George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley wrote on X.
Hur made this much clear: He did not exonerate Biden.
The report also acknowledged that the Afghanistan documents are 15 years old and the war is over.
And really, who would want an American president to be tried for behavior that many Americans suspect other former presidents practice? Ronald Reagan kept diaries, if back in an era of fewer scolds.
The bottom line is the report found that Biden kept classified material when he shouldn't have done so and he knew he shouldn't.
In February, Biden wrongly told reporters he did not share classified information -- "with my ghostwriter, I did not. Guarantee you. I did not."
According to the Hur report, Biden did share national security documents with his ghostwriter. Does he not know that or not remember?
COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM
Debra J. Saunders is a fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Chapman Center for Citizen Leadership. Contact her at dsaunders@discovery.org.
The transgender movement can be traced back as far as 1952, when trans woman Virginia Prince launched a publication titled Transvestia: The Journal of the American Society for Equality in Dress. Following that, the movement experienced rapid expansion, culminating in a riot in Los Angeles within seven years. The unrest originated as a retaliatory response to the Los Angeles Police Department, which was perceived to have engaged in harassment of the LGBTQ community. Then, in 1966, there was another riot. In 1969, another riot. Finally, as a result of the 1996 publication Transgender Warriors by American lesbian activist Leslie Feinberg, the term "transgender" gained widespread usage.
Today, 1.6% of Americans, or 4,800,000 adults aged 18 or over, say their gender is different from their sex assigned at birth. However, that number is on the rise, as 5.1%, or nearly 15,000,000 young adults aged 18-29, fall into that category. This can be attributed to a litany of factors, including changing education environments in classrooms, social media and more.
The "marked incongruence between (a person's) experienced or expressed gender and the one they were assigned at birth" defines gender dysphoria. As of now, gender dysphoria's causes remain unknown, and it does not have an established treatment. The term "gender dysphoria," which is frequently used in the medical field, has itself become a subject of political controversy.
Today, despite the small numbers of transgender people in the United States, the movement has permeated nearly all facets of life.
Educators raise LGBTQ flags in classrooms nationwide and educate students in the elementary school age range that their designated gender at birth may not always reflect their true identity. Such a serious injustice necessitates rectification. Students in elementary school have limited knowledge regarding sexuality; therefore, being informed that they could be of a different gender can be confusing to them -- it can change them even if they never wanted to be changed.
It is worth noting that around 80% of children who experience gender dysphoria as children eventually overcome it and opt not to identify as transgender as adults. In addition, depression among children who overcome gender dysphoria is extremely uncommon. However, according to the Trevor Project, a national organization dedicated to preventing suicide among LGBTQ youth, around 60% of transgender youth experience symptoms of depression, and 70% experience anxiety. Depression affects approximately 5%-6% of the general population. In addition, around 0.5% of the general population has attempted suicide, while nearly half of transgender youth have considered suicide, and nearly 20% have attempted it.
But what causes this depression? Could it be bullying? Could it be that transgender rights are persistently violated? Of course not. On the contrary, transgender people are thriving. Their rights are enshrined in state constitutions, they are protected by numerous state laws, they are given more protections by schools than any other class of students; transgender people may have more rights than the average person.
Of course, we can't forget drag story hour, where numerous elementary schools throughout the country have males dressed in scant attire read books about transgenderism to children. It is unnecessary to expose children to males in little clothing in order for them to hear stories. The mind of a child is sacred and must not be exposed to these sorts of things. It can corrupt the mind and, as we've seen, may lead them down the road of gender dysphoria and ultimately depression.
Tragically, transgenderism has compromised the rights of biological women. Undoubtedly, women continue to advocate equality in the United States. Women continue to face significant disparities in the workforce and in public life. However, before the complete realization of gender equality for women, transgenderism emerged and complicated the situation. At this time, males beat women in all aspects of life. Do you recall 2015, when Caitlyn Jenner was named "Woman of the Year" by Glamour magazine? The recipient of that award was not a woman who had struggled her entire life to be a woman in a world dominated by men. It was taken from a biological woman by a man.
Likewise, transgenderism has entered the realm of athletics. Transgender males have emerged victorious in athletic competitions against biological women on a multitude of occasions. Men have won significant accolades in swimming, wrestling, golf, snooker and even weightlifting, the sport that exemplifies strength disparities. Men who underwent the transition from male to female are often found to have been mediocre at best among their male counterparts.
And how about sex changes for minors? It is plausible that the notion that a child could undertake surgical gender transition from their biological to an alternative gender would be utterly absurd and repugnant to the average person. However, 54% of Americans oppose legislation that criminalizes providing medical care for gender transition to minors. Science and common sense support the notion that by our mid-to-late 20s, the brain has reached complete maturity and development. This is why children often engage in foolish behavior without contemplating the repercussions, why a contract formed by a child is deemed void in legal terms, and why alcohol consumption hinders the development of children's minds. Yet, when it comes to transgenderism, all that goes out the window.
Men are not women, and women are not men. This is the reality everyone on this Earth must face until their death.
America has been divided along lines of common sense by the transgender movement: those who support it and those who do not. The rise of transgenderism will persist as long as rational individuals remain reluctant to express their opinion on the matter.
COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM
During the school year, I live in an apartment tucked into a college dorm. I eat most of my meals in the dining hall with undergraduates. We discuss everything from classes and life's meaning to vacation plans and Taylor Swift. It's exciting and energizing to hang out with them.
We've always been pretty sympatico when it comes to political views. Women should have control over their own bodies; diversity among its citizens is an American strength; we need to confront climate change; Biden won the 2020 presidential election; etc.
No longer. I wised up in the wake of the murderous Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7.
Here's an example of what I'm talking about: Last week at dinner, two brilliant undergraduates encouraged me to express my views on the Israel-Hamas war. I plunged into the troubled waters. After a few minutes, one of them asserted Israel had instigated the attack as an excuse to invade Gaza. They believed there was no other explanation for the success of the attack given Israeli superiority in military power and intelligence assets.
Dumbfounded, I pointed out that over 1,200 Israelis had been murdered in the attack. As a percentage of population, that's equivalent to 30-plus 9/11 attacks. Would Israel really be complicit in the murder of so many of its citizens? I also brought up the Israeli withdrawal of its troops from Gaza in 2005. Why would they want to come back? These arguments and others were received by eyes rolled at my naivete.
I shouldn't have been surprised. In the hours after Hamas violated a ceasefire and attacked Israel on Oct. 7, a statement written by the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee held the "Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence." Ryna Workman, president of NYU's Student Bar Association, wrote in a student newsletter that the Hamas atrocities were Israel's "full responsibility."
According to a recent poll, 60% of college-aged Americans (18-24), agree that the Hamas attack was justified, compared to only 9% of those over 65, Moreover, some two-thirds of these college-aged Americans see Jews as oppressors. Now, mind you, that's Jews, not just Israelis. The number of antisemitic incidents in the U.S. rose 361% in the three months following the Oct. 7 attack. Apparently, American Jews are being held responsible for the actions of a foreign country.
Facts just don't seem to matter. NYU's Workman and others condemn Israel's "settler colonialism." Jesus, a Jew, was preaching to his co-religionists there 2,000 years ago. Referring to Jesus, the Gospel of John reads, "Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God." Jews were in the Holy Land before Christians or Muslims. They were there when the land was conquered and colonized by the Babylonians, Seleucids, Romans, Crusaders, Ottomans and British.
There are cries to send the Jews back to where they came from. About half of all Israeli Jews trace their ancestry to Arab and other Muslim-majority countries where they were forced out after the founding of the State of Israel.
A United Nations report found Hamas committed "rape and gang rape" in its Oct. 7 attack There was credible evidence of "genital mutilation, sexualized torture" along with "mutilation of corpses, including decapitation." Young American progressives, who supported the #MeToo movement against sexual abuse and who condemned Donald Trump when a jury found him a rapist, said nothing in response. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) refused to vote for a House condemnation of "countless instances of rape, gang rape, sexual mutilation" perpetrated by Hamas.
Young Americans concerned about racism in this country (count me in) try to apply their American-centric views to Israel. "We are also freedom fighters who have been grossly mislabeled and violently targeted for standing up against injustice to our people," said Black Lives Matter Phoenix on social media. Those who are raping and murdering refugees from Arab countries, members of families that have lived in Israel for centuries, and American citizens at a music festival are civil rights protesters?
There's a certain racism involved, too, in supporting Hamas. Hamas attacks are validated without reservation, and Israel's responses are condemned without nuance. Palestinian Arabs do have agency. They have rejected opportunities to set up a Palestinian homeland. For example, in 1947, the United Nations voted to partition the British mandate in Palestine into majority-Arab and majority-Jewish states. The Jews accepted and declared the independence of the State of Israel. Palestinian Arabs and neighboring countries tried to conquer the entire territory.
In 2000, Yassir Arafat, chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, rejected the Israeli proposal for a Palestinian Arab state. Former president Clinton stated, "I regret that in 2000 Arafat missed the opportunity to bring that nation into being and pray for the day when the dreams of the Palestinian people for a state and a better life will be realized in a just and lasting peace." As noted, in 2005, the Israeli Defense Forces left Gaza. In 2006, Hamas, whose charter calls for the elimination of the State of Israel and for the death of all Jews, took over Gaza. Students do not seem to know all this history.
My goodness, there is a need for peace and humanity in the Middle East. There is an urgent need for the end of violence and the replacement of Hamas by Palestinian Arabs who want peace. Support for Israel's right to exist does not mean support for the current Netanyahu government. As the poet John Dunne knew, every death "diminishes" us all.
I will keep expressing my views when asked and hope students reach their own conclusions based on facts and study, not reflex and prejudice.
COPYRIGHT 2024 KEITH RAFFEL
DIST. BY CREATORS
Needless to say, real estate developers are all for YIMBY -- though not necessarily where they themselves live.
The YIMBY movement has gained steam as a solution to the alleged shortage of "affordable" housing, a vaguely defined concept. Its backers now comprise a diverse group combining the left and the right for not always the same reasons. It is a blunt tool, however, and bad politics.
Zoning is intended to serve local needs and desires. The best examples consider geography, history and existing infrastructure. But states are now bullying towns to just build, build, build. Look, America is a big place. We don't all have to stuff ourselves into a handful of urban corridors.
This is not a defense of all zoning laws. There are good arguments for easing regulations to let homeowners build accessory apartments, often sweetly referred to as "granny flats," or to rent an apartment over the garage. Duplex (two-family) homes can be a nice addition to a neighborhood of single-family houses.
And in many places, a case can be made for allowing taller structures near rail stations. That kind of building happened naturally around Dallas' 93-mile commuter rail line. But at the time of it the lines' construction, many of the stations were surrounded by open land.
Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte got a bunch of YIMBY hugs when he pushed through a law forbidding local governments to enact zoning laws. (Anything goes? I don't know.) A photo on Bloomberg News showed a sign heralding a future 82-house development outside Culbertson, Montana. The sign was surrounded by empty land to a distant horizon. Montana isn't Connecticut.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul's plan to force building in already congested suburbs is being jeered for good reasons. The townspeople don't want high rises to obliterate their familiar downtowns.
The argument for trading quality of life for cheaper housing is a loser. Hey, if you really want to build more housing in Manhattan, why not erect towers on all that wasted land in Central Park? Imagine how much cheaper housing would become in Paris if they leveled all those six-story Belle Epoque buildings and erected apartment blocks in their place.
A battle rages in San Francisco over plans to put a 24-story apartment building at the foot of Telegraph Hill, whose steep streets and quaint cottages grace a jillion postcards. A group backing it, YIMBY San Francisco, represents developers claiming their dedication to affordable housing. But only a fraction of that project's units would be "affordable" -- and 10 of them would go to people earning up to 120% of the area's median income. So much for "granny flats."
Towns in densely populated Eastern Massachusetts are up in arms over the state's MBTA Communities Act. It imposes strict demands to build multifamily housing in towns served by transit.
In a letter of protest sent to Gov. Maura Healey, the Select Board of Wrentham argued that they were not against adding to the housing supply but that the bill would force the town to increase its population by as much as 13% without any state funding. Wrentham doesn't even have municipal sewage.
The Wrentham selectmen stated well the threat they see in the housing requirement -- that it "will lead to the destruction of the small-town New England charm we've come to love."
"Yes in My Backyard" so often means "Yes in Your Backyard." But No. We don't have to roll over for developers.
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“There’s even a reference that I don’t remember when my son died,” the president fumed at a press conference last month the day the Hur report was published. “How in the hell dare he raise that?”
A steady chorus of condemnation followed, outrage summarized by first lady Jill Biden, who wrote in a fundraising email to Democratic donors, “I can’t imagine someone would try to use our son’s death to score political points.”
Except that Hur did not. The president, not the prosecutor, first raised the issue of Beau Biden’s death – and its timing. And while the president quickly recalled the anniversary of his son’s passing, according to the transcript of his five-hour interview released Tuesday, the president struggled to remember the correct year.
“What month did Beau die? Oh, God, May 30-,” Biden began to say while working out a timeline of his steps after the vice presidency but before running for president himself. “2015,” Rachel Cotton, a White House lawyer, replied. The president then asked, “Was it 2015 he had died?”
The transcript, which detailed that exchange, along with his testimony before Congress hours later, undermined the caricatures of Hur that had been cultivated throughout his investigation of Biden’s handling of classified documents. The prosecutor was stone-faced in front of lawmakers, repeatedly declining to speculate beyond the established facts of his investigation, quoting chapter-and-verse from his report. “I did not sanitize my explanation,” Hur said of the report’s conclusion, “nor did I disparage the president unfairly.” Neither side was satisfied with that by-the-book routine.
To Rep. Hank Johnson, a Georgia Democrat, Hur was an opportunist “doing everything you can do to get President Trump reelected” in hopes, he speculated, of later securing a federal judgeship. Not to be outdone, for declining to bring charges against Biden, Rep. Tom Tiffany, a Wisconsin Republican, accused Hur of being “part of the Praetorian Guard that guards the swamp.”
Hur, who was appointed U.S. attorney for Maryland during the Trump administration and confirmed unanimously by the Senate, rejected both characterizations, insisting, “Partisan politics played no part whatsoever in my work.” The report he produced, he continued, “was independent and fair.”
Republicans and Democrats on the committee were already entrenched in their opinions about the investigation and tried to turn the hearing into a contest over whose handling of classified documents and whose mental acuity was worse: the former president or the current one.
Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz advanced a “senile cooperator theory,” alleging that Hur declined to charge Biden because he cooperated with the investigation and because he was an elderly man with poor recall of the facts. Hur disagreed, replying, “based on the evidence,” that he concluded he couldn’t prove “beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury” that Biden intentionally broke the law.
Other Republicans saw an opportunity to put political points on the board. Wisconsin Rep. Scott Fitzgerald attempted to read a definition of senility into the conclusion of the special counsel.
“Mr. Hur, based on your report, did you find that the president was senile?” he asked after quoting Webster’s dictionary. Curt in his response and unwilling to go beyond his published findings, Hur replied, “I did not. That conclusion does not appear in my report.”
On the mental acuity front, more than one Democrat used their time for questioning to play videos of Trump forgetting the names of world leaders, confusing sitting members of Congress for his political rivals, and garbling pronunciations.
The White House welcomed the conclusion of the investigation, particularly the decision by the special counsel not to bring charges. Their longstanding gripe has, instead, been with Hur’s characterization of Biden as a forgetful old man. California Rep. Adam Schiff gave voice to those West Wing concerns by blasting Hur for making “pejorative reference to the president” and choosing to knowingly “ignite a political firestorm.”
When Hur bungled the title and tenure of a former Biden administration official, Dana Remus, a spokesman for the White House counsel’s office, smirked, “It turns out, people just mess up sometimes. Even when they aren’t elderly or well-meaning.”
The hearing lasted little more than three hours, two hours less than the interview with Biden. Its ramifications now rest on the public interpretation of why Hur didn’t bring charges against the president. The debate will likely turn on the issues of innocence and exoneration.
When Washington Rep. Pramila Jayapal hurriedly asserted that Biden had been exonerated, Hur interrupted with a line that will likely play on a loop in attack ads this November. “You exonerated him,” she said, noting the lack of charges. “I did not ‘exonerate’ him,” the lawyer countered as the congresswoman continued, “that word does not appear in the report.”
Rep. Darrel Issa was quick to clarify that Hur had neither found Biden guilty nor innocent. “You did not reach an idea that he had committed no wrong, you reached a conclusion that you would not prevail at trial and therefore did not take it forward,” the California Republican prodded.
“Correct, congressman,” the special counsel replied.
The White House was quick to fall back on an ironclad constitutional principle.
“Well, in America, we do have the presumption of innocence,” White House counsel spokesman Ian Sams told reporters gathered outside the West Wing, “and when a prosecutor spends 15 months investigating a case only to determine that there is no case here and that there will be no charges, and that the case is closed, it only affirms the innocence of the president.”
Philip Wegmann is White House correspondent for RealClearPolitics.
The lack of national media attention and scrutiny on these incidents make the situation worse. These antisemitic students feel no shame because the country has appeared to stop caring about antisemitism from the left.
Gone is the outrage we saw on Capitol Hill just a few months ago when presidents of top universities couldn’t condemn calls to murder Jews. Predictably, the news cycle has moved on, and the public has lost interest. But I haven’t, and neither have Jewish students at these institutions. They live it every day.
The bottom line is that college campuses are still not safe for Jewish students. That’s why I have submitted 33 Title VI complaints to the Department of Education asking the agency to investigate universities that failed to protect Jewish students under the law, and I am doing everything I can to inform the public about the need to root out antisemitism in higher education.
Antisemitic professors, students, and staff are still in their positions, and antisemitic views and demonstrations have not gone away. The incidents at Tufts and Berkeley are just the two latest examples. Last week, Harvard hosted a Rutgers University professor who previously appeared on a panel with a member of Hamas who promised “a million more” Oct. 7-style attacks.
Another example of antisemitic sympathy occurred at Stanford University where the administration conceded to meet with student protesters demanding the school condemn and boycott Israel.
These examples prove that higher education officials are not doing enough to combat antisemitism before anti-Jewish incidents occur on campus. Nothing has improved.
Title VI is a component of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that prohibits recipients of federal funding from discriminating against individuals on the basis of race and national origin. Such discrimination can be grounds for the federal government to deny funding.
Of the 32 Title VI complaints I have filed with the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) against universities that mishandled antisemitic incidents or did nothing to address Jew-hatred on campus, 11 investigations have been opened. This is a good start but more needs to be done.
I am optimistic that the Title VI investigations will yield results because the process has more humanity than I ever expected. OCR lawyers are passionate about their jobs, and I have heard anecdotally that these investigations give Jewish students and alumni hope.
Institutional ineptitude is bad, but the media’s coverage of higher education’s dysfunctions is worse. The mainstream media has fumbled its coverage of campus antisemitism and chooses not to scrutinize Jew-hating students and staff. It chooses not to ask tough questions of antisemites and does not investigate institutional discrimination beyond the republication of sanitized press releases.
Mainstream media needs to report antisemitic incidents like the one at Berkeley thoroughly, with the old-school investigative curiosity that journalists used to possess. The current lack of curiosity enables antisemites to thrive on campus.
Without the media going beyond perfunctory reporting, antisemites do not face external accountability and scrutiny. The moral outrage needed to cleanse America of Jew-hatred has disappeared in the void of meaningful journalistic investigations. The broken systems that Liz Magill and Claudine Gay represented during their disastrous congressional testimonies ended up being no more than a glorified extended news cycle.
Any member of the public can file a Title VI complaint against a college or university. Concerned citizens with examples of antisemitic discrimination should use the complaint system to hold higher education institutions accountable.
Title VI investigations are long bureaucratic processes that have no immediate impact on daily campus life. That’s why continued media scrutiny and outside pressure are so vital. Higher education is unable to redeem itself, so outside forces must force institutional reform for the better.
Parents, alumni, and donors need to speak out too. I encourage everyone who is deeply concerned about ideologically driven hate and intolerance on campus to stand up and file Title VI complaints.
Don’t forget that these examples are only the incidents we know about. Too much Jew-hatred goes unreported because students fear the consequences of speaking up. Title VI investigations can empower those who have felt unable to stand up and make a difference.
Zachary Marschall is the editor-in-chief of the Leadership Institute’s Campus Reform and an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Kentucky.
Fast-forward to Feb. 22, 2024, when Georgia nursing student Laken Riley was bludgeoned to death allegedly at the hands of an illegal migrant, Jose Ibarra, a member of the notorious Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. Democrats are accusing Republicans of trying to "score cheap political" points by demanding that migrants be vetted before being allowed in the U.S.
Kelly Girtz, Democratic mayor of Athens, Georgia, where Riley was killed, insists the focus should be on the individual perpetrator, not migrants. That's ridiculous. Was the focus only on Derek Chauvin, the cop with his knee on Floyd's neck?
Riley's murder should ignite demand for rigorous vetting of migrants entering the U.S.
Riley is dead because the Biden administration lets anyone in and lies about it.
Ibarra was first arrested for illegally crossing into the U.S. in September 2022. But Customs and Border Protection kept him less than 24 hours before releasing him to go anywhere in the U.S. he chose. Zero vetting.
Internal Department of Homeland Security documents show Ibarra is a gang member. But former Border Patrol officers explain that the Biden administration wants "migrants out of our hands and out of our custody as fast as humanly possible." No time to check records.
DHS claims that migrants admitted into the U.S. undergo "robust security vetting."
That lie was exposed on Friday when a federal judge ruled on a lawsuit challenging the Biden administration's airplane parole program, which allows 30,000 migrants per month from Nicaragua, Cuba, Haiti and Venezuela to fly into the U.S. The judge's ruling set aside the lawsuit because the plaintiffs lacked standing. Even so, Judge Drew Tipton's ruling is important because he pointed to evidence showing that any migrant who schedules an appointment using the CBP One app, buys a plane ticket and arrives in the U.S. gets in. A staggering 98% are approved. A migrant would have to punch the Customs and Border Protection agent in the nose to have a problem.
Yet White House spokesperson Angelo Fernandez Hernandez doubled down on the standard lie Friday, again claiming migrants must "pass through a rigorous vetting process."
The mainstream media shamelessly repeat that fiction. CNN said on Friday that migrants using the CBP One mobile app "are thoroughly vetted." Laughable.
The lack of vetting, whether at the southern border or in President Joe Biden's new CBP airport parole program, produces tragic consequences.
In January, Tammy Nobles testified before a House panel about the murder of her 20-year-old daughter Kayla Hamilton, who was allegedly raped and strangled to death with an electric cord by an illegal migrant robbing her of $6.
Nobles explained that all DHS "had to do was make one phone call to El Salvador to know he was an MS-13 gang member on the list."
DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who didn't attend the House hearing, insisted afterward that American deaths at the hands of illegal migrants "should not be politicized."
No one said that about Floyd's death. Is Hamilton's life also worth less than Floyd's?
The Washington Post, USA Today and other publications cite several studies, from the Cato Institute, Stanford University and elsewhere, purporting to show immigrants have committed crimes at a lower rate than people born in the U.S. These studies assess data from several years, even decades, ago. Some don't distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants. Most important, these studies ignore the new reality. Venezuela and El Salvador are emptying their prisons and sending their gang members to the United States, according to FBI sources. Americans need to be protected from these killers.
The issue facing Biden and his party is not whether to call Ibarra "illegal," "undocumented" or a "newcomer." The brutal truth is he's a Tren de Aragua gang member. And he should have been stopped at the border before he killed Riley.
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It marked the end of an experiment that lasted almost a century testing the premise that godless secularization, turning control of people's lives over to other people to rule them, who decide what others need and how they should live and conduct their lives, is the answer for mankind.
In the free world, the collapse of the Soviet Union was cause for celebration. In the USA, it was widely viewed as a victory of the American way of life -- a free nation under God.
But let's not get confused between things and the names we give them.
Our own country -- despite the words in our founding documents about freedom and God -- has been on a path adopting the same premises about human reality that lead to the collapse of the communist world.
This was evident in President Joe Biden's message to the nation in his State of the Union address.
Biden, in so many words, delivered a message that the path for a better, wealthier, fairer America is more government.
Despite the reality that the country is being crushed with staggering debt, the result of runaway government, Biden and his party celebrate this and want even more.
The words find their way into numbers in the budget for the next 10 years that the president has just submitted to Congress.
Federal spending in this budget will stand in fiscal year 2025 at $7.3 trillion. One-quarter of our national economy consumed by the federal government.
This amounts to a 14% increase from where federal spending stood in the last quarter of 2023 -- $6.4 trillion.
Per the president's spokesperson in the White House, this budget "invests in all of America to make sure everyone has a fair shot, we leave no one behind."
Translation: government will accumulate more power and decide what is fair and achieve its aims with more government paid for with other people's money.
The beautiful language of leaving "no one behind" means government expansion into every area of our lives, including subsidized child care for families earning $200,000 and below.
The bill for the massive new spending, per the president's budget, will be paid for with a total of $4.9 trillion in tax increases on the wealthy and on corporations.
I say "supposedly paid for" because expansion of government under the premises of raising taxes on the most successful sectors of our economy never works.
Renown economist Arthur Laffer and Heritage Foundation economist Stephen Moore just published data showing that when President Donald Trump cut the highest individual tax rate and cut the corporate tax rate in 2017, the percentage of overall taxes paid by the wealthiest 1% of the population increased.
Before the Trump tax cuts, the top 1 % paid "a little more than 40% of the income taxes collected," per Laffer and Moore.
After the tax cuts, that percentage increased to almost 46%.
This was not something new. Laffer and Moore show data going back to 1980 showing general correlation of lower top tax rates with a larger percentage of overall taxes paid by the top 1%.
Freedom means unleashing productivity and creativity. Absence of freedom means punishing both and therefore getting less of both.
It's why the Soviet Union collapsed. Godless secularism doesn't work.
The latest edition of CURE's "The State of Black Progress" shows the uniform failure of expansion of government into health care, education, housing and retirement, all in the name of "fairness" and no one being "left behind."
The truth really is it's more than this. It's about politicians who love power buying it with gifts given with other people's money. Harsh to say, but this is reality.
Only 19% of Americans are satisfied with the direction of the country, per Gallup.
Most Americans feel something is wrong. We need leadership to take us back to freedom and God.
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Star Parker is an author and president of CURE, the Center for Urban Renewal and Education. She can be reached at urbancure.org.
Because of his crime concerns, Rayfield is now doing something he thought he'd never do in his life: buying a gun and going to target practice. So is his wife.
"I see what's taken place in cities across the country," said Rayfield, who is well-respected in the community for his years of volunteer efforts for various Philadelphia organizations. "I travel a lot. I've been to every major city in the last year in the country."
Rayfield is a 60-year-old former executive at CBS Radio who took the skills he learned in the news business for over three decades into the organic spirit business as an entrepreneur. His new gun decision, he said, was "largely influenced by a lot of the social policies that are really impacting our cities coming out of the death of George Floyd and COVID."
"We decided, as somebody who had never fired a gun in my life, that it was about time to be open-minded and considerate," he explained of taking gun safety lessons through a program that uses certified instructors.
"The final straw was sort of seeing what's taking place as a result of what's going on in Gaza and how that's impacting college campuses and the rise in antisemitism," he said.
Rayfield is by no stretch of the imagination an uninformed voter. He says he knows what is at stake in this year's presidential election, yet he finds himself unhappy with his choices thanks to issues such as crime and the southern border crisis.
"Well, first of all, I would never vote for Trump, never, but I don't feel great about Biden at all, and I would not vote for Kamala Harris."
Rayfield says he is hoping for two things: Either a third-party candidate emerges who would ensure Trump loses, or Biden dramatically deciding over the summer to bow out.
"I'm hoping that maybe during the convention, he pulls the Lyndon Johnson and says that he's not going to run again and they've already identified somebody ... it would have to be anyone else but Biden and Harris," he said.
Pennsylvania is arguably once again the most important state in the country in determining who the next president will be. Trump narrowly won it in 2016, but Biden narrowly won it in 2020.
If Biden wants to hold on to that narrow margin of victory, he cannot afford to lose one vote -- in particular, voters such as Rayfield, who is a reliable Democrat, lives in the Philly suburbs and does not espouse the social justice requirements demanded of Biden from the progressive left.
Yet Biden has lost him.
Chris Borick, a political science professor at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania, says the reality is that neither Trump nor Biden has much of a margin of error in this evenly divided state.
"It's hard to imagine large shifts in the electorate short of a historic event," Borick said. "Biden has a number of weak links in his coalition, and while many of his 2020 voters wouldn't flip to Trump, the lack of enthusiasm for Biden can translate into some voters taking a pass on the election or taking a flyer on a third-party candidate."
Rayfield isn't the only part of the Biden coalition that is detaching from the president, who won the state by a single percentage point in 2020. A large chunk of that support came from Black voters, 92% of whom chose Biden.
Muhlenberg's survey of voters in Pennsylvania in late December showed Biden only garnering the support of 52% of people of color while Trump was earning a solid 29%, an eye-popping number for a Republican presidential candidate.
The survey also showed that 65% of registered voters in Pennsylvania don't believe Biden deserves to be reelected.
Larry Ceisler, a Democratic Philadelphia-based public affairs professional, says Biden cannot afford to lose someone like Rayfield when the current president is facing his left flank saying they are not going to vote for Biden because Biden has not sided with the Palestinians in Gaza.
"It could be a real problem," said Ceisler.
"Neither Biden nor Trump can afford to lose votes because you look at the states that are going to be competitive ... and you're talking a handful of votes across all these states," he said.
"So while it bothers me that Biden is sort of pulling back on Israel, or at least talking a different game because he's concerned about Michigan, and Trump is now sending out mixed messages on abortion, both candidates and their teams realize how tight things are."
Ceisler was referring to Biden's remark at a press conference in which he criticized Israel's military operations in Gaza.
Ceisler said if Biden goes too far in favor of the Palestinians, he loses legacy Democrats like Rayfield, but if he seems too supportive of Israel, he loses young social-justice-type voters. Losing too much of either group could open the door for a third-party candidate.
"It is unbelievable to me that they are willing to say, 'OK, well, we'll let Trump win, who is even going to be more supportive or more contrary to what we feel about Gaza and all the other things we care about are going to go down the drain,'" he said of young progressives who have voiced their decision to either stay home or vote for a third-party candidate.
For example, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., pleaded with Michigan Democrats to vote "uncommitted" in the state's Feb. 27 primary rather than for Biden.
Ceisler said this clamoring on the far left leads him to believe there are people and organizations on the left that want Biden to lose, "because I think that they want to rid the Democratic Party of the influence that comes from sort of the establishment centrist part of the party."
Between 1996 and 2016, Pennsylvania was a reliable electoral win for Democratic presidential candidates, but it kept getting tighter every four years.
In 2020, Trump narrowly lost the state. In 2024, Pennsylvania is up for grabs. But if Biden is losing middle-of-the-road suburban Democrats like Rayfield, then his problems are deeper than many realize.
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Instead, Glazer did something truly shameful: he used his Jewish background and his Holocaust film to attack Israel.
"Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people, whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza," Glazer intoned nervously.
There are a bushel of lies in this single sentence. First, there was no "occupation" of Gaza prior to Oct. 7; the Israelis abandoned Gaza in 2005 and turned it over to the Palestinians, who promptly tore down Israeli infrastructure and elected Hamas, who themselves turned Gaza into a full-scale terror ministate. Second, no "occupation" could justify the wholesale slaughter of some 1,200 innocents in Israel and the taking of 250 hostages on Oct. 7. Third, it is certainly not "Jewish and the Holocaust being hijacked" to point out that Hamas literally targets Jews for extermination, just as the Nazis once did. And finally, Israel is taking extraordinary measures to protect civilian life in Gaza; Israel has taken measures no military in history has taken, including sacrificing the lives of its own soldiers to go door-to-door in a terrorist-ridden urban hellscape.
In fact, Glazer has it all backward. It is he who is using his Jewishness and the Holocaust as a weapon -- in favor of Hamas. Glazer has little actual involvement in Judaism on a day-to-day level -- he grew up reform and there is little evidence of his Jewish practice today. But he's happy to pull out his Jewishness card -- to say that he, As A Jew, stands against Israel defending itself. This allows him to garner plaudits from his fellow political left-wingers, all the while maintaining his status in the intersectional hierarchy. Jews, as it turns out, are only allowed in the intersectional hierarchy so long as they use their Jewishness to attack Israel, or whatever the left-wing cause of the day is.
In reality, Glazer is the villain of his own film. In "Zone of Interest," there are no Jews: all we can hear of them is their screams from beyond the wall. Otherwise, they are nameless, faceless victims. And those are precisely the kinds of Jews Glazer likes. He's happy to use their corpses to win Oscars, even as he attacks the live Jews defending themselves from the ideological descendants of the Nazis, Hamas.
All of which makes sense. After all, as author Dara Horn has pointed out, people love dead Jews. It's the live ones who are so problematic for people like Jonathan Glazer. The live ones have the unfortunate habit of fighting back and making life uncomfortable for doctrinaire left-wingers who want to be accepted in their morally benighted social circles.
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On the March 8 edition of PBS's "Washington Week With The Atlantic," moderator Jeffrey "Obama Is Awesome" Goldberg cued up New York Times book reviewer Carlos Lozada to discuss his article "What I Learned When I Read 887 Pages of Plans for Trump's Second Term."
What surely delighted Goldberg was Lozada's hot take. The Heritage book is "not about anything as simplistic as being dictator for a day, but about consolidating authority and eroding accountability for the long haul."
Here's what is unsaid. Conservatives would like to impose more political appointees on the executive branch because they feel the permanent bureaucracy is stacked with "progressives" who treat conservative presidencies as an occasion for clandestine warfare.
Under President Donald Trump, both career appointees and political appointees leaked to liberal media outlets with all kinds of anonymous "resistance." One wrote a New York Times op-ed and then a book under the byline "Anonymous." The author later revealed himself as political appointee Miles Taylor, who was barely 30 when he became a deputy chief of staff in the Department of Homeland Security.
As Lozada noted in reviewing the "Anonymous" book, it was full of "stuff we already know." It was written to be bought by Trump haters who loved MSNBC guest snark like Trump is "like a 12-year-old in an air traffic control tower, pushing the buttons of government indiscriminately."
This, we know, is what Lozada means by "eroding accountability," making it harder for liberal rags like The New York Times to undermine the Republican president from within. No one on PBS is going to ask him if anonymous sourcing "erodes accountability." Because "accountability" is a one-way street for them.
The incentive structure is different for the bureaucracy under Democrats. Nobody at The New York Times wants an anonymously sourced war on the president. No major book publishers want a "tell-all" book lacerating the liberals for acting like 12-year-olds ... or like feeble octogenarians.
Anonymous sourcing at the Times isn't used for trashing the White House anymore. It's now reserved for the most pedestrian stories on Team Biden. In January, John Kerry was leaving the State Department to join the Biden campaign, and it was announced "at a hastily arranged meeting, said the person, who asked to remain anonymous in order to discuss personnel matters."
Under Biden, liberal journalists are expected to preach the most preposterous gospels. Lozada proclaimed on taxpayer-supported TV that the Heritage team wants "to politicize the Justice Department ... It's very overt. They emphasize how, for instance, the White House Counsel's Office and the DOJ have to work as a team. That's a quote."
The "accountability" specialists of the pro-Biden media somehow can't concede that the Biden Justice Department is aggressively prosecuting their opponent as a campaign strategy. Their press statements boast how their prosecutions in the Jan. 6 riot are massive and still unloading indictments.
Liberal reporters warn of Trump's "retribution" and couldn't possibly imagine that Biden's seeking retribution through his Justice Department. Their "news judgment" is perfectly partisan. Implying Biden's DOJ is nonpartisan is the most wretched misinformation you could publish.
The Heritage folks are not wrong to assert that the Left controls the permanent bureaucracy and they're very upset that conservatives have gotten organized. Other Republican presidents have taken their "mandate" seriously, but the "deep state" -- especially defined as the anonymous sources perennially pushing statism -- remains an entrenched and powerful foe.
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Sean Trende is senior elections analyst for RealClearPolitics. He is a co-author of the 2014 Almanac of American Politics and author of The Lost Majority. He can be reached at strende@realclearpolitics.com. Follow him on Twitter @SeanTrende.
So the November lineup will feature Joe Biden, the incumbent Democrat, vs. the man Biden unseated in 2020. But that’s not necessarily the full story.
Quadrennial gadfly Jill Stein is running under the Green Party banner this year. And progressive college professor Cornel West is running “for truth and justice” as an independent candidate. Another independent, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose father was assassinated the night he won the 1968 California Democratic primary, is qualifying for the ballot in several key states. So the 2024 race has a potential “spoiler” or two (or three). Or more.
The reform group No Labels is trying to field a “unity ticket” of centrists that would give Americans a choice -- as No Labels sees it -- between a Democratic Party that has careened into Woke Leftsville and Republicans who have followed The Donald blindly into MAGA-land.
No Labels insists that if it fields a ticket, it will do so with every intention of winning, not spoiling, the 2024 presidential election. But who, exactly, are these knights in shining armor? We don’t yet know. So stay tuned.
With that teaser, I’d direct you to RCP’s front page, which contains the latest poll averages, political news and video, and aggregated opinion pieces ranging across the ideological spectrum. We also offer the usual complement of original material from our stable of columnists and contributors:
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RCP on SiriusXM. On yesterday’s edition, Tom Bevan, Andy Walworth, and I discuss the 2024 State of the Union address and the president’s choice of the word “illegal” vs. “undocumented” in referring to Laken Riley’s killer. We also discuss the new Deseret Values Poll and the Academy Award winners and losers, whilst Andy interviews journalist Matt Taibbi, a winner of the RCP Samizdat Prize for his work last year on “The Twitter Files.”
How GOP Must Respond to the Abortion Issue. Frank Miele offers Republican candidates advice on how to protect the unborn without overstepping constitutional constraints.
Anti-Americanism Fans the Flames of “The New Antisemitism.” Peter Berkowitz repudiates the oppressor narrative pushed by progressives that is now being used to target Jews and supporters of Israel.
On Housing, Trickle-Down Democrats Have Failed Americans in Need. Michael Weinstein argues that blue-state politicians are harming their constituents by enacting housing policies that only benefit the ruling class.
If Biden Is Serious About Border Security, He Must Start With Venezuela. Doug Schoen cautions that the recent influx of gang-affiliated immigrants will mean an uptick in violent crime.
Are Civil Commitments the Future in the War Against Homelessness? Kate Farmer maintains that cities will need to decide whether to force the unhoused mentally ill off the streets and into treatment.
Alarming Religious Freedom Trends in Democracies Demand Attention. Rev. Johnnie Moore reminds us that while we are often made aware of the oppression of faith-based groups in totalitarian regimes, we need to pay attention to abuses closer to home.
Bidenomics and the American Family. At RealClearPolicy, Akash Chougule submits that despite the president’s pride in his signature economic program, voters are unconvinced.
Nonprofits See Threats to Privacy Ahead of 2024 Elections. Also at RealClearPolicy, Matt Nese warns that even though Americans vote in private booths, their support for groups that educate voters may soon be made public.
EATS Act Is True “Chaos in the Marketplace.” More from RCPolicy: Marty Irby contends that new legislation has the alarming potential to undermine our safety, our state sovereignty, and our national security.
Hope for Retirement Security for Women 50+. At RealClearHealth, Hadley Heath Manning stresses that leaders must focus on solutions for those who can’t find new work but can’t afford to retire.
We’ve Seen This Hate Before. At RealClearEducation, Samuel Abrams writes that antisemitism is resurgent among young people and we can’t afford to ignore it any longer.
The Parent Trust Gap in Education. Also at RealClearEducation, Goldy Brown and Christos Makridis point the way to bridging the divide for better outcomes for families.
There’s a Therapist Under Ocean Blvd. At RealClearBooks&Culture, Sheluyang Peng reviews Abigail Shrier’s new book, “Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up.”
Poland Needs To Speed Up Modernization To Resist Russian Attack. Writing for RealClearDefense, Sarah White observes that Warsaw continues to upgrade its suite of military hardware, especially in the areas of armor and air defense.
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Carl M. Cannon
Washington Bureau chief, RealClearPolitics
@CarlCannon (Twitter)
ccannon@realclearpolitics.com
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics and executive editor of RealClearMedia Group. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.
Here is a list my top five half-truths and in some cases outright fabrications:
1. "My administration cut the deficit by $1.7 trillion."
This isn't just a little bit false, it's an extraordinary and audacious misstatement of fact. The baseline deficit over 10 years, as measured when Biden came into office versus the latest forecast, shows nearly $6 trillion added to the debt since Biden arrived on the scene.
So how does a $6-trillion addition of red ink possibly equate to a $1.7-trillion reduction in the deficit? Someone didn't pass his basic math exam in high school. It's disheartening that Biden and his speechwriters thought they could get away with this one.
2. "We will make the rich pay their fair share."
The top 1% of American tax filers now pay an all-time record-high 46% of taxes. This is according to Biden's own IRS. If they paid an equal share of their income, they would be paying closer to 26% -- not 46%. Does Biden think the rich should pay ALL the taxes? This also doesn't include the hundreds of billions of dollars of taxes paid by the businesses they created.
3. "I inherited an economy [from Donald Trump] that was on the brink ..."
Actually, the economy grew by -- ready for this? -- 33% in the third quarter of 2020 and 4.1% in the fourth quarter of 2020. The economy was in a full-scale COVID-19 recovery when Biden came into office.
Oh, and inflation then was 1.4%, not the 5.5% average rate under Biden.
Gas prices were $2.39 per gallon -- about $1 lower than today.
4. "Fifteen million new jobs created in three years."
This is an intentional attempt to distort reality. It IS true that 15 million more Americans are working today than in 2020.
What ISN'T true is that these are "new" jobs. Some are, but most aren't. In fact, two of every three jobs "created" under Biden were simply jobs that went away during COVID-19 then came back after the pandemic was over and blue states FINALLY reopened their businesses. This distortion would be like comparing the number of jobs on a Sunday and then taking credit for all the people going back to work on Monday. Comparing the first three years of the Trump administration versus Biden's first three years, the rate of NEW job creation was higher under Trump.
"Inflation keeps coming down and mortgage rates will come down as well."
Mortgage interest rates under Biden have more than doubled. When Biden came into office, the rate was 2.9%, and it averaged about 3.5% under Trump. Under Biden, the rate skyrocketed to 8%, and now nationally it stands at 7.1%. Consequently, according to data from Redfin, the average mortgage payment on a 30-year mortgage for a median-value home has risen from roughly $1,000 a month to nearly $2,000 a month today. Under the Biden plan, some homebuyers will receive a $400 monthly taxpayer subsidy on their mortgage. Even with the new handout, they are STILL roughly $600 a month worse off under Biden policies. Biden is the enemy, not the friend, of the dream of homeownership.
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Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation and an economist at FreedomWorks. His latest book is “Govzilla: How the Relentless Growth of Government Is Devouring Our Economy.”
In the words of the Catholic News Agency:
"When asked by the interviewer, Fabio Fazio, how he 'imagines hell,' Pope Francis gave a short response. 'What I am going to say is not a dogma of faith but my own personal view: I like to think of hell as empty; I hope it is.'"
I have a different -- indeed, completely opposite -- view.
I should make it clear that I, too, hope that sometime in the future -- hopefully the near future -- no one will be sent to hell. That would mean goodness had finally so prevailed on Earth that not one person was deserving of punishment in the afterlife.
But as of this moment, I fervently hope that some people are in hell -- or whatever one wishes to call punishment after life; just as I hope some people are in heaven -- or whatever one wishes to call reward in an afterlife.
Why? Because if no one is punished after death, that would mean either there is no God or, equally depressing, it would mean God is not just.
It should be added that if no one is punished, the corollary would mean that no one is rewarded. Pure logic dictates it is not possible to have an afterlife in which people were rewarded but not punished. It would mean either everyone is rewarded -- which would mean there is no justice -- or only some are rewarded. But if only some are rewarded, that means those who are deprived of reward are thereby punished.
It shows how little serious thought is given to the subject that a vast number of people do not think the existence of a heaven and a hell are important subjects and/or dismiss them as religious nonsense.
This absence of serious thought can be easily demonstrated. Let's imagine a society in which there were no rewards or punishments. I suspect almost no one -- though not no one, as we shall see -- thinks that would be a good society. How many people would want to live in a society in which murderers and rapists were never punished while people who engaged in exceptional goodness were never rewarded?
If that doesn't make the case, let's not imagine a whole society. Let's imagine a school. Would you send your child to a school in which students who routinely disturbed their classes and flunked all their subjects were never punished and students who excelled behaviorally and academically were never rewarded?
I assume not. So why, then, would anyone want such a scenario for all of life? Why would anyone want people who committed terrible evils not to be punished and people who committed heroic, self-sacrificing good acts not to be rewarded?
This is why I wrote that there is an absence of serious thought on this issue. What people would find utterly objectionable in their society or even just in their child's school, they are at peace with regarding life.
But there is more to this issue. People are in fact increasingly at peace with no reward or punishment in this life. This is the egalitarian impulse that is coming to dominate intellectual life. More and more people are in fact advocating such a society. No more "retributive justice." No more merit-based standards. No more valedictorians. No more failing grades. No more SATs. Indeed, no more standards. No more bail. No more punishment if you are caught stealing less than a thousand dollars' worth of goods. No more prosecutors who prosecute. Only "equity."
I am convinced that is what animated Pope Francis' words. Note that he said he was stating his opinion, not church dogma. And as a man of the Left, he's uncomfortable with reward and especially punishment. As an egalitarian, the thought that anyone is in hell disturbs him.
So, why do people who think like the Pope oppose rewards and punishments?
Because rewards and punishments mean that one must make judgments about better and worse -- morally, academically and in most other spheres of life. It's better to just assume no one is better than anyone else. That is what has animated participation trophies -- no one, not even a team, is better or worse. In much of the contemporary intellectual world, the greatest sin is judging sin. And when you do away with sin, you do away with hell.
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Yet with the rise of urban homelessness – and its high correlation with serious mental illness – state-ordered psychiatric care is witnessing a rapid revival. Across the United States, city mayors are loosening their involuntary civil commitment laws, making it easier for prosecutors to compel mentally ill individuals off the streets and into care. In a convergence of urban crises – mental health and homelessness – civil commitments are poised to become a part of American cities’ future. But what might such a future look like?
Involuntary civil commitment is the legal process whereby individuals suffering from a serious mental illness are detained and given compulsory psychiatric care. Unlike standard criminal commitments – where an individual is detained, tried, and incarcerated if they’re guilty – there are no charges raised. Instead, a hearing considers an individual’s mental state and status as a potential threat to themselves or others. If the person meets their state’s standard for commitment, they are ordered to undergo compelled psychiatric care, typically at a government-sponsored treatment facility.
Recently, legislators presiding over cities with burgeoning homelessness have pushed to lower this threshold for commitment. California’s state legislature moved this year to broaden its commitment standards, expanding its prior requirement of “grave disability” to include persons rendered unable to provide for their basic needs or protect their own safety. The law also widened its definition of mental health conditions to include substance use disorders, and established a new court system called CARE Courts exclusively for involuntary civil commitments. City leaders such as Portland mayor Ted Wheeler and New York City mayor Eric Adams have come forward in support for similar policies.
Legislators and advocates argue that these changes are the only way to save individuals with severe mental illness from a pernicious cycle of streets, hospitals, and jails. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration estimates that around 30% of the nation’s chronically homeless population suffer from a mental health condition. Many of this population cycle through jails, typically for “nuisance” crimes like loitering and vagrancy. While in jail, their conditions are most often left untreated, and their recidivism rates are high. Others risk perishing in deteriorating street conditions, with cities like Los Angeles witnessing over a 50% increase in homelessness deaths from 2019 to 2021 alone.
“The status quo has forced too many of our loved ones to die with their rights on,” urges National Alliance on Mental Illness advocate Teresa Pasquini for NPR. After 20 years of watching her schizophrenic son be “failed, jailed, treated, and streeted,” Pasquini criticizes the public health system for its inaction.
Yet these new commitment policies are met with staunch opposition from multiple sides. Disability Rights California, a progressive nonprofit that filed a petition opposing Gov. Gavin Newsom’s CARE Act, asserted that expanded civil commitments laws over-diagnose and misdiagnose severe mental health conditions, particularly among vulnerable populations and communities of color. Libertarians and civil rights organizations like the ACLU recall America’s ugly history of forced institutionalization, condemning civil commitment expansions as unconstitutional deprivations of liberty, privacy, and the right to be left alone.
Dr. Jeffrey Singer of the Cato Institute, a leading libertarian think tank, criticizes the policies: “You may have a mental health problem, but nobody has a right to force you, without your informed consent, to undergo change,” he says. “Civil commitments basically amount to other people deciding for you that you are not capable.”
Cities with pervasive urban homelessness are at a crossroads, and in the months ahead, they must grapple with two sharply opposing views on what is considered “compassionate” for their mentally ill. Do they choose to respect mentally ill individuals’ autonomy rights, but risk standing by as their suffering worsens, and chances of incarceration and physical harm increase? Or do cities loosen their legal standards and compel such individuals into psychiatric care, infringing on their liberty but potentially saving them from a life on the streets, possibly even from death?
Pushed from all sides, the fate of these policies – and the elected officials promoting them – remains to be seen. Perhaps involuntary civil commitments will emerge as the critical tool for success against mental illness in homelessness. Or perhaps, as with the institutionalization era, the nation will look back on today’s rapid expansion of civil commitments as the repeat of a grave historical error.
For now, it’s up to America’s cities to decide.
Kate Farmer is a freelance reporter on public safety for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and a Social Mobility Fellow with Young Voices.
Democrats and the left-wing media seem almost gleeful that many Republicans are driven by conscience to oppose abortion, and they dare them to sponsor federal legislation that would restrict abortion rights (they are not reproductive rights) either to 15 weeks of pregnancy or to six weeks, or even altogether. They claim that such a restriction would push women voters into the Democratic camp.
Maybe so. But there has to be more to our national conversation about abortion than merely who it helps or hurts politically. This has to be a human issue, and as a human issue, it is terribly complicated.
I was a 14-year-old high school freshman in 1970 when the state of New York legalized abortion. My mother had explained to me the importance of giving women this right in order to prevent the tragedy of what were commonly called “back-alley abortions.”
The idea was that desperate women would pursue illegal abortions, either on their own or with the help of non-medical providers, and would thus risk death or serious injury in unsafe conditions. It made perfect sense to me that to prevent those tragedies, the state agreed to decriminalize abortion.
Then, three years later, the Supreme Court said that all women in the United States had a constitutional right to abortion. At the time, it seemed like a good way to protect women from unscrupulous abortionists and to ensure that they could have safe abortions if needed.
But the legal reasoning of Roe v. Wade never made sense. There was clearly no explicit constitutional right to abortion in the U.S. Constitution, nor was there any enumerated federal power that granted either the court or Congress the power to regulate abortion. In fact, it was clear that under the 10th Amendment, it was a power that was “reserved to the states.”
That was the argument for reversing Roe v. Wade and allowing states to make their own determination about whether abortion was an acceptable or unacceptable practice, and it was that logic that the Supreme Court used nearly 50 years later to overturn Roe in the Dobbs decision and return the power to regulate abortion to the states.
By that time, I had been a pro-life conservative for many years. What changed my mind? Back in the mid-1980s, when I was still a good liberal, I belonged to the National Organization for Women, and through a process of everyone else backing out, I became the first (and probably only) male president of our local chapter in Kalispell, Montana, and was responsible for arranging topics and guest speakers for each meeting. The one and only abortion doctor in the Flathead Valley approached me about speaking to the group, and I signed him up. Little did I know it would be a life-changing experience.
Dr. Armstrong arrived at the meeting early and waited patiently at the table until it was his turn to speak. Then he reached into a satchel and withdrew several bottles that he then placed on the table. Each bottle contained a fetus at various stages of development. The largest, he explained, was from a late second-term abortion, and in his mind, all of the specimens were just tissue, no different than a tumor that had been sliced out of a cancer patient.
But it was not the same for most of us in attendance. The women who were there were unsettled by the display and quickly passed the bottle with the largest fetus around the table as if to avoid it. But there it was, and it was unavoidable – a fully formed human being, with fingers and toes, lips and eyelids, resting ghoulishly in a bottle of formaldehyde. I can’t speak for my fellow members of NOW, but for me, abortion was no longer just an abstract concept. It was a baby ripped out of its mother’s womb and deprived of the same chance the rest of us cherished – the chance to live a life for good or for bad, for better or for worse, but a life that was entirely human. I finished my term as president, but then I stopped attending meetings, and eventually, I asked the national organization to remove me from its membership rolls.
Because once you see an aborted fetus as a human being, you must take responsibility for what your country has done. By the time I saw a fully formed fetus on display like a carnival exhibit, the country had already experienced more than 10 million legal abortions performed post-Roe. By now, of course, that number is past 60 million. That, to me, in my wakened state, was essentially a holocaust of potential lives, an unimaginable loss of humanity.
Remember, originally the argument for legal abortion was that women would pursue dangerous illegal abortions if there were no medical assistance available and thus would put themselves at risk of death. But now more than 50 years later, we need to question our assumptions.
In 1972, according to the CDC, legally induced abortions led to 24 deaths of pregnant women, whereas illegal abortions caused 39 deaths. That was the year before Roe v. Wade. As a result of Roe, the number of deaths of women caused by illegal abortion did shrink down to the low single digits within a few years. So, legalized abortion did indeed save some women’s lives, perhaps a few hundred over the last 51 years.
But how can that justify the death of 60 million babies? That is one of the questions that we as a nation have to grapple with.
Of course, if there had been no Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion nationwide, there still would have been legal abortion in many states such as New York. You can easily assume that even if some states had chosen to keep abortion illegal, as many as 40 million infants would have still been aborted, so the Supreme Court is not solely responsible for all those deaths.
And that brings us to the political question before Congress and before America today. In its Dobbs decision, the Supreme Court returned the power to regulate abortion to the states. Many conservative politicians object to allowing abortion to occur legally anywhere, and some of them have talked about trying to pass some kind of nationwide ban on abortion.
While noble in intention, such a move would be legally invalid and would simply repeat the error of Roe in the opposite direction. There is no constitutional authority by which Congress can pass laws on abortion.
As I have done before, let me note again that Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution enumerates these very limited powers of Congress: Raise taxes; borrow money; regulate international commerce and commerce among the states; establish a process for naturalizing citizens; coin money and punish counterfeiters; establish post offices; establish copyright and trademark laws; establish lower courts; regulate pirates; declare war; raise armies and a navy; provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections, and repel invasions; and to create and maintain a small district that shall be the seat of government.
Search as you might, there is no constitutional provision that gives federal lawmakers the power to make rules concerning a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy or a government’s right to force her to carry her pregnancy to term.
I don’t know why it is so hard for members of Congress to grasp that simple fact. Democrats are just as guilty when they talk about passing a law guaranteeing the right to abortion. The only means for the federal government to regulate abortion would be by proposing and then successfully adopting a constitutional amendment that specifically established a right or a restriction. Short of that, any legislative action at the national level would be totally invalid.
That’s why every Republican member of Congress and every Republican candidate for Congress should be prepared to explain to voters that they will not support unconstitutional legislation to ban abortion. To a genuine conservative, there can be no shortcuts or workarounds that ignore the Constitution. This may aggravate some pro-life voters, but candidates can still be pro-life without seeking an unconstitutional solution.
Republican pro-life candidates must run on a platform of supporting efforts to overturn or restrict legal abortion in all 50 states, but they must be honest with their voters. It can’t happen with national legislation, but only on a state-by-state basis. No matter how much we wish it otherwise, there will be legal abortion in Democrat-controlled states for the foreseeable future. But now it is clear that the responsibility for those abortions, for that holocaust if you will, is not because of a court decision but because of choices made by individuals.
As long as we live in a free society, we have to live with the consequences of freedom. Legal abortion is one of those consequences. It can’t be waved away with a political gesture, and it should be talked about with a full understanding of its impact on our society. Democrats intend to play political games with the issue this November, and President Biden already began that process in his State of the Union address last week. But Republicans must not take the bait. If they want to seize a majority in both houses of Congress, they must be prepared to answer the question that the left-leaning media will hit them with repeatedly, “Are you in favor of a federal ban on abortion?”
The answer must be honest and understanding: “I am against abortion because I consider it the taking of innocent life, but I am a ‘Constitution First’ Republican. I will not vote for any laws that do not fall under the powers granted to Congress by Article 1, Section 8. If anyone can show me the language in the Constitution that permits Congress to regulate abortion, I will vote to do so. But until then, I will support the Supreme Court’s decision to return the responsibility for abortion legislation to the states, and I will fight tirelessly as an advocate for innocent life in my own state and others.”
It should be noted, finally, that such a pledge would not just impede Congress from improperly trying to legislate rules about abortion; it would also prevent Congress from trying to regulate vast swaths of our public life. Read Section 8 for yourself. It is time that Congress and the president both return to the very limited jobs that the Constitution intended and stop meddling where they have no business.
Frank Miele, the retired editor of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Mont., is a columnist for RealClearPolitics. His newest book, “What Matters Most: God, Country, Family and Friends,” is available from his Amazon author page. Visit him at HeartlandDiaryUSA.com or follow him on Facebook @HeartlandDiaryUSA or on Twitter or Gettr @HeartlandDiary.
As Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan and Bishop David J. Malloy have lamented, “Sadly, 80% of the world’s inhabitants live in countries where there are high levels of governmental or societal restrictions on religion.”
But totalitarian countries aren’t the only places where religious freedom is under attack. Increasingly, freedom of religion is under direct governmental attack in democracies despite the fact that they recognize it as an inalienable right.
For instance, in the United States, it took the intervention of the Supreme Court after years of contentious and costly legal battles to uphold the right to pray publicly, wear religious dress, gain equal access to public buildings for religious clubs, and be granted reasonable accommodations for religious observances.
Shamefully, in Japan, in what one religious freedom authority has called “the worst religious liberty crisis in the democratic world,” the government is aggressively pursuing the revocation of the legal status of an influential minority church, a move with disturbing implications for other minority religions like Jehovah’s Witnesses and evangelical Christians. If the Japanese government succeeds, it will be a gift to the communists who aim to destroy Japan.
In Nigeria, which accounts for almost 90% of all Christians martyred worldwide each year – over 52,000 since 2009 – the targeting of Christians “is being carried out with the complicity of the government.”
In France, the “Upholding Republican Values” law, enacted in 2021, provides authorities with broad powers to monitor and dissolve religious organizations and groups they determine to be promoting ideas contrary to French values. The French constitution includes the concept of secularism, and the law prohibits wearing conspicuous religious symbols in public spaces such as schools.
In India, the most religiously diverse country in history, too little is being done to address rogue mobs of vigilantes who routinely defame Christian and Muslim communities in defiance of India’s pristine constitutional protections for religious communities.
All of the democracies above enshrine the freedom of religion in their constitutions – but then again, so do the constitutions of China, Russia, North Korea, and Cuba. The words in a constitution or statute are not automatically and frictionlessly translated into the everyday lives and realities of the individuals to whom those freedoms belong. As one religious freedom advocate has written,
Constitutional guarantees of liberty are essential, but not sufficient. Religious freedom as a legal right means little unless people of all religions are safe to practice their faith, wear their religious garb, speak their truth and in other ways follow their conscience without fear of discrimination, persecution or violence.
Freedom of religion may not seem all that important to you, but it should. Religious freedom is crucial for promoting and protecting all human rights, as it is interdependent and interrelated with other human rights. The scholar and jurist Gerhard Robbers put it this way:
Freedom of religion is a key freedom for human rights. Where there is no freedom of religion all other freedoms suffer, and when there is freedom of religion flourishing, other freedoms are flourishing as well. … He who forgets religion, forfeits life.
Indeed, freedom of religion directly correlates with the stability and prosperity of a society. As the current U.S. International Religious Freedom ambassador Rashad Hussain observed: “Countries and societies that protect their religious freedom are more likely to be safe and prosperous, and countries that do not protect religious freedom are less likely to be stable.”
We must not overlook the freedom-of-religion violations happening in democracies. A failure to adequately focus on violations that occur in democracies is not only a disservice to those being targeted. It also diminishes the moral authority of democracies that is so desperately needed in order to apply pressure on behalf of those languishing under authoritarian regimes.
The day before his assassination, in his last speech, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said:
All we say to America is, “Be true to what you said on paper.” If I lived in China or even Russia or any totalitarian country, maybe I could understand the denial of certain basic First Amendment privileges, because they hadn’t committed themselves to that over there. But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of the press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right.
King was surely correct then, and his words continue to ring true today – we must be vigilant and demand that our governments’ practices conform to our governments’ principles. If our advocacy for religious freedom is to have any impact on people living under authoritarian regimes, we must not overlook the violations happening in democracies that have pledged themselves to better. We should take a lesson from the good book. They will know us by our fruits.
Rev. Johnnie Moore was twice appointed to the U.S. Commission for International Religious Freedom, serving under Presidents Trump and Biden. He is president of The Congress of Christian Leaders.
The transformation did not occur all at once. The ancient and enduring hatred of Jews had been on the rise for years in Western liberal democracies before thousands of Hamas jihadists invaded Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, to commit unspeakable acts of depravity mostly against Jewish civilians. In a staggering instance of blaming the victim, antisemitism surged in the days and weeks following the slaughter.
Israel had hardly begun to defend itself when American campuses and the streets of London and other European cities exploded with demonstrations against the Jewish state. Protesters condemned not only Israel’s conduct but also its very existence. On the same day that thousands of Hamas jihadists murdered, raped, mutilated, and kidnapped Israeli civilians, 34 Harvard student organizations spoke the thoughts of many American intellectuals and pro-Palestinian protesters in Europe in an online statementdeclaring “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”
Criticism of Israel is no more inherently antisemitic than is criticism of the United States inherently anti-American. However, blaming Jews collectively for Israel’s policies, holding Israel to standards to which no other country is held, and denying Israel’s right to exist – an indignity to which no other UN member state is routinely exposed – express antisemitism.
While focused on Israel and the Jewish people, antisemitism also imperils liberal democracy – in America and throughout the West – which requires government and citizens to respect the equal rights that inhere in each person and to tolerate differences of opinion and alternative ways of pursuing happiness. What begins with the Jews, moreover, never ends with the Jews. Antisemitism’s resurgence in the West reflects a dysfunction within liberal democracy that creates room for and energizes other forms of intolerance and violence.
In “The New Antisemitism,” a lengthy essay published in late February in Time magazine, Noah Feldman addresses the fraught question, “Why won’t antisemitism die, or at least die down?” Wishing to approach the tense subject with “charity and sensitivity” and hoping “to encourage introspection,” he did not want “to accuse anyone of antisemitism, but to explore the topic in a way that deepens our understanding of where it comes from, and where it’s going.”
A Harvard Law School professor, Feldman goes a long way toward capturing the spirit of the new antisemitism by distinguishing it from older forms. He rightly argues that the new antisemitism derives from fashionable ideas within our universities revolving around the distinction between oppressor and oppressed. But it is not merely, as he gently contends, the misapplication of those ideas that incites hatred of Jews. It is also the ideas themselves.
For much of history, Feldman observes, religion fueled antisemitism. Christians blamed the Jews for killing Christ and resented them for clinging to their ancient faith. Meanwhile, Middle Eastern Muslims treated Jews as second-class citizens though protecting them, like Christians, as “people of the book.” But, argues Feldman, times have changed. Organized Christianity repudiated antisemitism. And Islamist antisemitism springs not from traditional Islamic texts, he somewhat tendentiously maintains, but from tropes imported from Europe.
In the 19th century, with religion’s decline and enlightenment’s rise, antisemitism took on new hues and shapes. Jews, according to Feldman, were reviled as supreme capitalists and as supreme communists. Either way, antisemites alleged, Jews ran the world, which damaged humanity because they were an inferior race. Nazi Germany set out to exterminate the Jewish people. The Soviet Union merely persecuted, imprisoned, and tortured them.
While antisemitism taints the contemporary far right, Feldman recognizes that “the most perniciously creative current in contemporary antisemitic thought is more likely to come from the left.” Leading strands of progressive thought converge in postcolonial theory – a fashionable set of ideas that explains the conduct of great powers like the United Kingdom and the United States as driven by the racist and rapacious determination to dominate non-white peoples and foreign lands.
Postcolonial theory, which is deeply entrenched in American universities’ Middle East studies programs, understands politics exclusively through the lens of oppressor and oppressed while typically classifying Israel among the villains. “The core of this new antisemitism lies in the idea that Jews are not a historically oppressed people seeking self-preservation but instead oppressors: imperialists, colonialists, and even white supremacists,” writes Feldman. “This view preserves vestiges of the trope that Jews exercise vast power” at the same time as “It creatively updates that narrative to contemporary circumstances and current cultural preoccupations with the nature of power and injustice.
The contemporary critique, however, does not fit Israel’s complex reality. While “the concept of imperialism was developed to describe European powers that conquered, controlled, and exploited vast territories in the Global South and East,” explains Feldman, “The theory of settler-colonial white supremacy was developed as a critical account of countries like Australia and the U.S., in which, according to the theory, the colonialists’ aim was to displace the local population, not to extract value from its labor.” Contrary to the imperialism narrative, however, “Israel is a regional Middle Eastern power with a tiny footprint, not a global or continental empire designed to extract resources and labor.” And in opposition to the theory of settler colonialism, in 1947, the UN voted to establish a Jewish state and an Arab state. Five Arab armies’ efforts to destroy Israel after it declared independence in 1948 created the Palestinian refugee crisis. Half of Israel’s Jewish population is not ethnically European and more than 20% of its citizens are Arabs.
“To emphasize the narrative of Jews as oppressors,” writes Feldman, “the new antisemitism must also somehow sidestep not only two millennia of Jewish oppression, but also the Holocaust, the largest organized, institutionalized murder of any ethnic group in human history.” Nevertheless, the new antisemitism seized on the terrible war of self-defense forced on Israel by Hamas’ monstrous assault to contend that the Jewish state is perpetrating genocide against Gazan Palestinians. This obscene calumny advances the goal, argues Feldman, “of erasing the memory of the Holocaust and transforming Jews from victims into oppressors.”
Israel’s war aims – destroy Hamas’ ability to govern in Gaza and to wage war and secure the hostages’ release – are lawful, Feldman stresses. And while one can quarrel with this or that targeting decision, Israel strives, as the laws of war require, to protect noncombatants to the extent possible consistent with the achievement of its legitimate military goals. Meanwhile, contrary to the laws of war, Hamas has converted urban areas into battle zones. That makes the jihadists prima facie responsible – morally and legally – for the tragic loss of thousands of noncombatants’ lives in Gaza and the reduction of much of the territory’s civilian infrastructure to rubble.
Feldman effectively shows that the imposition of postcolonial theory on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict fuels and is fueled by the new antisemitism. To leave matters at that, however, obscures the damage done by the theory itself.
Postcolonial theory – an offshoot of which is the diversity, equity, and inclusion industry now entrenched in America’s universities, corporations, and federal bureaucracy – is an all-embracing ideology. It does not merely call attention to power and injustice – what school of social and political thought does not? – but rather reduces human affairs to relations of power while forcing all people into the crude categories of oppressor and oppressed.
The practical results of American universities’ promulgation of postcolonial theory are as pernicious as they are inevitable. Postcolonial theory sows ignorance because no single binary distinction can capture the complexity of human affairs. Among those who style themselves the oppressed, it foments scorn for the past, resentment of the present, and a haughty sense of entitlement to special privileges in the future. For those classified as oppressors, it fosters guilt among the more impressionable, and anger and resentment among those who reject blame for crimes dating back centuries in which they played no part and deny their complicity with the supposed stealth norms and invisible structures that purportedly continue to subjugate minorities and women.
Postcolonial theory typically targets the United States as the greatest oppressor. It is a short step to indicting Israel, America’s leading friend and partner in the Middle East and the region’s only rights-protecting democracy, as a co-conspirator.
Feldman is righter than he realizes in counseling that, “The best way to start climbing out of the abyss of antisemitism is to self-examine our impulses, our stories about power and injustice, and our beliefs.”
The self-examination, which will redound not only to the benefit of Israel and the Jews but also to that of liberal democracy in America, should begin on U.S. campuses, whose fashionable anti-Americanism fans the flames of the new antisemitism.
Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. From 2019 to 2021, he served as director of the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. State Department. His writings are posted at PeterBerkowitz.com and he can be followed on Twitter @BerkowitzPeter.
In theory, Democrats in blue states are supposed to represent the poor and the working class, but the record shows a different reality. During the Obama administration, 95% of income gains went to the top one percent. Bill Clinton abolished welfare as we knew it and brought us the North American Free Trade Agreement, which eliminated countless good-paying factory jobs. Today’s California – led by Gavin Newsom – is now the most glaring example of income inequality. Despite spectacular wealth, the Golden State is the nation’s poorest based on the sky-high cost of living.
In each instance, Democrats relied on an unfettered market to address society’s ills. Barack Obama believed that the market could make healthcare more affordable. Clinton believed that mass incarceration and a smaller safety net would create incentives, solving poor people’s problems. And Newsom now believes that the free market can solve California’s affordable housing crisis.
Democrats once mocked Ronald Reagan’s trickle-down theory – that if you showered privileges on the super-rich, it would trickle down to the underprivileged. But what did they actually learn from the Reagan era?
While trickle-down Democrats sound different than Reagan, they have a whole lot in common. The belief in the supernatural power of the marketplace to solve all problems is based on a false premise that unregulated capitalism meets human needs rather than extracting profit for privileged elites.
There is no doubt that capitalism can advance innovation and economic vitality. But gorging on too much of a good thing makes you sick. People should be free to pursue great wealth as long as their urge is necessarily constrained by the resources that are required to feed, house, educate, and treat everyone. That is an investment in the quality of life for society as a whole, but it is not the case today.
The failure to house California’s population is the most glaring example of trickle-down economics gone wrong. Rather than regulating rents that keep increasing, Newsom has fought tooth and nail against rent control. Instead of requiring developers to include truly affordable units in their mega-projects, they have been granted a king’s ransom in government incentives and exemptions. Even this giant wealth transfer wasn’t enough: California taxpayers also have shelled out tens of billions to the affordable housing industrial complex that has been wasted on stopgap band-aids or $1-million-per-apartment boondoggles.
The result? The greatest homeless crisis since the Great Depression. And there is no end in sight. Democrats like Newsom continue to kowtow to Big Real Estate. From Nathan Click to Jim Deboo and Ace Smith, Newsom’s inner circle is all on the take from the California Apartment Association, which vehemently opposes any form of rent control.
Is it so hard to understand why the poor and the working class feel betrayed? They have faithfully given their votes to Democrats for decades, only for their leaders to turn around and pander to billionaire real estate interests. Conditions have become so extreme that tens of millions of people are desperate for answers, but all they get from trickle-down Democrats are the same, warmed-over vulture capitalist non-solutions to their problems.
If change is to come, it will have to come from the bottom up. Corporate Democrats who owe their offices to the super-rich won’t challenge the hegemony of American billionaires. The creative policy fixes to issues like housing, which is a human right, will come from citizen action that demands better from our elected officials. It will come from ballot initiatives like the one that expands rent control, which is up for debate in California this year.
Otherwise, Americans will turn to reactionary policies that only increase suffering. The choice is ours.
Michael Weinstein is the president of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF), the largest global HIV/AIDS organization, and AHF's Healthy Housing Foundation.
Quite simply, the stream of criminals pouring over the nation’s Southern border is now a tsunami with potentially disastrous implications, not only for America’s national security but also for President Biden’s reelection chances. Unless the president takes bold action to seriously strengthen the border, voters are likely to punish him in November.
That being said, any attempt to address the border issue is doomed if the president does not confront the problem at its source.
Venezuela, the largest source of illegal immigrants, is rapidly becoming a failed state, and its strongman leader, Nicolás Maduro – who has deepened economic and military ties between his oil-rich nation and other hostile regimes such as Russia, China, and Iran – is reportedly emptying the country’s jails, pushing criminals and gang members north, right over our porous border.
According to a former Venezuelan official, Maduro “is releasing convicted criminals on the condition that they would emigrate from the country to the United States.” Unsurprisingly, these criminals are establishing local cells of the same criminal gangs, particularly Tren de Aragua, which is notorious for drug trafficking, human smuggling, and kidnappings for ransom.
Law enforcement is sounding the alarm, with a senior FBI agent recently warning that Tren de Aragua is “rapidly expanding its criminal empire,” particularly in New York and Miami, where the FBI says gang members are behind a series of robberies and at least one murder.
Given the 340,000 Venezuelans encountered at the Southern border last year alone, the FBI is seriously concerned that these gangs will have little problem finding new recruits to further their expansion.
A South American dictator opening his jails and dumping criminals in American cities sounds more like a movie than real life, but the data is clear. Coinciding with a surge in Venezuelan migration to the U.S. is a drop in violent crime in Venezuela to levels not seen in nearly a quarter-century.
Notably, violent deaths in Venezuela declined from 35.3 for every 100,000 people in 2022 to 26.8 per 100,000 in 2023 – the lowest since 2001, according to a Bloomberg report. Meanwhile, the same report quotes the director of the Venezuelan Violence Observatory, who points out that “gangs have emigrated due to the lack of opportunities to commit crimes.”
For his part, last year President Biden struck a deal with Maduro, offering sanctions relief in exchange for increased political liberalization – specifically, holding free and fair elections – and consenting to deportation flights of migrants from the U.S. to Venezuela. The deal was supposed to be a victory for Biden, who could claim to be taking a tougher approach.
Early last month, however, those flights abruptly stopped after deporting just 1,300 migrants. Some speculated that the move owed to Biden’s reimposition of sanctions after Maduro reneged on his promise to hold free and fair elections.
While the attempt to stop the uncontrolled flow of migrants may have been admirable, the president should have known better. Never close to anything resembling an ally, Venezuela under Maduro has solidly aligned itself with the new “axis of evil” alongside Russia, China, and Iran.
The relationship between these countries should deeply worry the White House, particularly in light of intelligence reports indicating that Iran is looking to build a naval base in Venezuela, China’s increasing investment in the country, a massive influx of Russian weapons into Caracas, and Maduro’s strong support for Russia following its invasion of Ukraine in 2022 – critical for helping both countries skirt U.S.-led sanctions.
Additionally, Venezuela’s role in hosting Russian troops and advanced air defense systems, not to mention the deep connections between Maduro and Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, which has a heavy presence in the South American country, cannot be overstated, particularly in light of Hezbollah’s daily attacks on Israel since its war with Hamas began on Oct. 7.
Viewed in this light, it is clear that Venezuela represents more than just an immigration problem, but an extreme foreign policy and national security challenge. The Venezuelan threat extends far beyond the typical debate over immigration – and solving it lies squarely within the president’s remit.
It also constitutes a rapidly expanding political vulnerability for Biden, one that he has so far failed to address.
Indeed, last month, Americans ranked immigration as the most important issue facing the country, the first time since 2019 that it has topped the list. Nearly 3 in 10 (28%) Americans chose immigration, 8 points ahead of the second-place issue, the “government,” and more than double the portion identifying the economy (12%) and inflation (11%), per Gallup polling.
Worse still for Biden is that while the president’s general approval rating is a substandard 40%, his approval on immigration is a dismal 31%, according to the RealClearPolitics Average.
Voters do not trust Biden to address the issue. A majority (52%) of swing state voters say that they trust Donald Trump – rather than Biden – to handle immigration, while just 30% trust the president, per Morning Consult polling.
To be sure, while Biden does not bear full responsibility for the recent collapse of a border security deal in Congress, he is not powerless to deal with the issue, even if through executive order.
Even passing a border security bill would do little to stem the problem, anyway. Many solidly blue states and cities define themselves as “sanctuary cities,” barring them from cooperating with immigration officials – even when illegal migrants commit felonies, as Mr. Ibarra did in New York prior to killing Ms. Riley.
To be clear, unless President Biden takes concrete steps to strengthen the border and deal with Venezuela, his reelection would – justifiably – be in serious jeopardy.
Ultimately, Biden must close our Southern border and make it unmistakably clear to Maduro that dumping criminals on American shores will not go unpunished. Nor will Maduro’s deepening ties with hostile nations, which include hosting an Iranian naval base in the Americas.
Next, Biden should put America’s full economic, political, and diplomatic weight behind free and fair elections in Venezuela. The carrot and stick: the promise of much-needed sanction relief, or the threat of increasingly tough sanctions.
If Biden doesn’t do so, he will have to explain to the nation why he could not bring a South American dictator to heel and therefore endangered the safety of all Americans. That’s hardly a winning campaign strategy.
Douglas Schoen, a Democratic consultant, is the co-author of “The Threat Closer to Home: Hugo Chavez and the War Against America” (Free Press, January 2009)
Republicans gave freshman Alabama Sen. Katie Britt a televised platform to counter President Biden’s State of the Union address Thursday night. She didn’t hold back.
“Right now, our Commander in Chief is not in command,” she said. “The free world deserves better than a dithering and diminished leader. America deserves leaders who recognize that secure borders, stable prices, safe streets, and a strong defense are the cornerstones of a great nation.”
The similarity between the two performances? Both were over-the-top on the shrill-o-meter. Biden yelled his way through his remarks while Britt alternated between strained smiles and grim, overwrought warnings about the state of the country and its future.
The 42-year-old mother of two spent 17 minutes blasting Biden on everything from his claims that the country is safer under his watch, to his “despicable” job handling the border crisis, to his claims that “Bidenomics” had tamed inflation.
From her kitchen table in Montgomery, Ala., Britt launched her remarks with a zinger, slamming the speech as “the performance of a permanent politician who has actually been in office far longer than I’ve been alive.”
Britt previously served as chief of staff to now-retired Sen. Richard Shelby and decided to run for his seat when he stepped down. She defeated Rep. Mo Brooks in Alabama’s Senate primary in 2022 before winning the general election.
Until now, Britt has remained mostly understated, working across the aisle with some Democrats but establishing a solidly conservative voting record. Her name has been floated as a possible running mate to Donald Trump. Thursday night provided her first real spotlight on the national political stage.
The kitchen setting was designed as a prop that would play to voters’ pocketbook concerns about living under inflation. This is where she said she and her husband, Wesley Britt, a former University of Alabama football star, often discuss their myriad worries about the direction of the country under Biden’s leadership, she said.
“The American Dream has turned into a nightmare for so many families. The true, unvarnished State of our Union begins and ends with this: Our families are hurting. Our country can do better,” she said.
While some viewers on social media mocked Britt for her dramatic, breathy delivery, Trump heaped praise on her remarks as the just-right reality check on many of Biden’s boldest claims.
“Katie Britt was a GREAT contrast to Angry, and obviously very Disturbed, ‘President,’“ Trump wrote on his social media site. “She was compassionate and caring, especially concerning Women and Women’s Issues. Her conversation on Migrant Crime was powerful and insightful. Great job Katie!”
Britt deconstructed Biden’s claims in his address, starting with the border, recalling how the president unraveled Trump’s immigration policies after his inauguration.
“President Biden inherited the most secure border of all time,” she said. “But minutes after taking office, he suspended deportations, halted construction of the border wall, and announced a plan to give amnesty to millions. We know that President Biden didn’t just create this border crisis. He invited it with 94 executive actions in his first 100 days.”
Britt didn’t hold back in describing the brutalities inflicted on some immigrants who made the dangerous journey to the United States and were victimized by cartel members along the way, recounting that, during a visit to the Texas border, one underage migrant told her that she had been repeatedly gang raped. She also lambasted the administration over the tragic death of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley who was murdered, allegedly by an illegal immigrant from Venezuela while jogging on the University of Georgia campus.
“President Biden’s border policies are a disgrace. This crisis is despicable. And the truth is that it is almost entirely preventable,” Britt said. Addressing Biden directly, she added, “Innocent Americans are dying, and you only have yourself to blame.”
But Biden’s failed policies hardly end there, Britt argued. Rejecting his claims that inflation has been cooling, dropping from 9% to 3%, “the lowest in the world and trending lower.”
“We have the worst inflation in 40 years and the highest credit card debt in our nation’s history,” she said. “Hard-working families are struggling to make ends meet today. And with soaring mortgage rates and sky-high childcare costs, they are also struggling to plan for tomorrow.”
“The American people are scraping by while the president proudly proclaims Bidenomics is working! Bless his heart. We know better,” she said. She then slammed Biden for failing to realize the economic crunch average Americans face from high groceries and near-record gas prices.
“Let’s be honest,” she said. “It’s been a minute since Joe Biden pumped gas, or a ran a carpool or pushed a grocery cart.”
Britt also impugned Biden’s claim that he’s made the country safer, arguing that the opposite is true, that Democrats have “coddled criminals,” defunded the police, and let repeat offenders walk free.
She also tried to push back against Democratic arguments that Republicans are trying to wrest away Americans’ freedom when it comes to abortion and other reproductive rights. A court ruling in Britt’s home state of Alabama deemed frozen embryos as children and put in vitro fertilization treatments in jeopardy. Republican leaders over the last two weeks have pushed back against the court’s ruling and have tried to reassure voters that those procedures, in contrast to abortion, are not threatened.
In her response, Britt tried to sell that message, saying Republicans “strongly support continued nationwide access to in vitro fertilization. We want to help loving moms and dads bring precious life into this world.”
She went on to cast Biden’s policies as not just hurting Americans at home but also making the United States “a punchline on the world stage.”
“From abandoning our allies in Afghanistan to desperate pushing another dangerous deal with Iran, President Biden has failed. We’ve become a nation in retreat,” she said. And the enemies of freedom see an opportunity.”
When it comes to China, Britt said Biden is showing his weakness, not just in his failure to stand up to Beijing, but in his actions.
“The CCP knows that if it conquers the minds of the next generation, it conquers America,” she said. “And what does President Biden do? Well, he bans TikTok for all government employees but creates an account for his own campaign. Y’all can’t make this stuff up.”
Britt agrees with Biden that the nation is at a crossroads but blames him, not his predecessor, for leading us down a dark path.
Not surprisingly, the antidote she offers is pursuing Republican policy goals and reinstalling Donald Trump as president.
“Here’s the good news. We, the people, are in the driver’s seat. We get to decide whether our future will grow brighter, or whether we settle for an America in decline,” she said. “Well, I know which choice our children deserve – and I know the choice the Republican Party is fighting for.”
Britt endorsed Trump in December, penning an op-ed for her local newspaper, arguing that “the results of his strong leadership as the 45th President of the United States are clear for all to see” after three years of Biden’s policies.
“Together, we can reawaken the heroic spirit of a great nation. Because America, we don’t just have a rendezvous with destiny, we take destiny’s hand and we lead it,” she said.
Susan Crabtree is RealClearPolitics' national political correspondent.
This doesn’t mean that the exercise was meaningless. Many Republicans have been saying that in terms of his mental acuity, the current president is, well, one taco short of a combination plate. It seems the president passed that test, which should provide some measure of relief to loyal Americans of any party or faction.
Also, today is Friday, the day of the week when I pass along a quotation meant to be uplifting or educational. Today’s words of wisdom come from two U.S. presidents, the current incumbent and a Republican commander in chief who also had to bat away concerns about his age and mental adroitness to win reelection. (Ronald Reagan pulled it off, too, and then some.)
First, though, I’d direct you to RCP’s front page, which contains the latest poll averages, political news and video, and aggregated opinion pieces ranging across the ideological spectrum. We also offer the usual complement of original material from our stable of columnists and contributors. Recent highlights include the following:
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Biden’s State of the Union Strikes Campaign Tone. Phil Wegmann reports from the gallery.
Katie Britt Rips Biden Over Age, Border, Inflation. And Susan Crabtree covers the GOP response.
Trump Never Lost Control of the GOP. He Only Tightened His Grasp. Phil Wegmann looks at the presumptive Republican nominee and his indomitable grip on what is now clearly his party.
Loudoun County and Super Tuesday. Matt Taibbi explores the issues that make the wealthy Virginia enclave an outlier.
Big Mysteries Surround the Predictable Presidential Rematch. Peder Zane asks the questions that launch the coming eight-month election season.
Nothing New Under the Sun? Campaign Departures and Parallels. Rick Marschall draws surprising comparisons between the 2024 election and the last time a president won a non-consecutive second term.
No Labels Could Give U.S. Someone To Vote For, Not Against. Greg Orman submits that there’s still time to field a ticket that gives Americans a more optimistic choice.
The Transfer Portal. Jack Hamilton and Bettsie Miller connect the dots between the professionalizing of college sports and the self-aggrandizement that subverts our political process.
Hey Senate: Don’t Fumble This No-Brainer Tax Bill. Adam Brandon implores Congress to put enterprising American taxpayers first and let them keep more of their hard-earned money.
Pro-Choice Democrats Fight To Make Abortion the Only Option. Marjorie Dannenfelser shines a light on the progressive agenda to defund and eliminate pregnancy resource centers.
When Classical Learning Meets Public Education, the Dialogue Isn't Always Socratic; and Which Great Books Can Withstand the Canon Fire? In these two articles in RealClearInvestigations, Vince Bielski reports on a major flashpoint in the post-pandemic disruption of traditional public schools: opposition to schools that focus on liberal arts and the Western canon.
Ukraine’s Secret Weapon in War With Russia. At RealClearPolicy, James Glassman relates the importance of the Eastern European country’s private sector in the territorial conflict with Putin.
Slouching Toward World War III. At RealClearDefense, Francis Sempa again argues that the U.S. and the West in general are ignoring the real center of gravity -- China and the Pacific -- as they spend vast sums supporting Ukraine.
Replicating TX Energy Miracle Key To Winning Young Conservatives. At RealClearEnergy, Stephen Perkins makes the case for legislation that satisfies the concerns of all voters.
FDA Won’t Say How It Spends User Fees. At RealClearHealth, Michael Chamberlain works to uncover the murky details of the agency’s connection to special interest groups.
Americans’ Economic Confidence Dims in March. At RealClearMarkets, Raghavan Mayur takes a look at the latest gauge of consumer sentiment and what it signals about taxpayer stress levels.
Social Media Companies Aren’t Common Carriers. Also at RealClearMarkets, Harold Furchtgott-Roth & Kirk Arner look at two cases before the Supreme Court and how their outcomes will set important precedents.
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On June 8, 1982, President Ronald Reagan appeared before British members of Parliament at the Palace of Westminster to explain his vision of the status of the Cold War. The Soviet Union and the bloc of nations under its control, he said, were in the throes of “a revolutionary crisis” within its own borders. The system, he added, was nearly bankrupt.
“It is the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of human history in denying human freedom and human dignity to its citizens,” Reagan proclaimed at Westminster. “It is also in deep economic difficulty.”
Reagan rhetorically tossed back at the Soviets the old Leon Trotsky boast, by proclaiming that he believed “freedom and democracy will leave Marxism and Leninism on the ash heap of history.” This was not “containment” Reagan was discussing, but ultimate triumph over Soviet-style communism.
But it was the following year when Reagan really walked into the foreign policy china shop and began clumsily breaking things, or so it was portrayed. It was March 8, 1983 -- 41 years ago today -- in a speech to the National Association of Evangelicals.
The president warmed to his task gradually, prefacing the gist of the speech with ruminations about his own religious faith and the animating beliefs of the nation’s Founding Fathers.
The most memorable passages of the address had little to do with that, however. Reagan believed that the “nuclear freeze” movement then sweeping the West was misguided and dangerous: that it not only undermined his hopes of real nuclear reductions by both sides, but was also based on a false moral equivalency between the United States and its adversaries. Reagan would have none of it. He referred to the Soviet Union as “the focus of evil in the modern world,” and made news -- and history -- with this passage:
“So in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware of the temptation of pride -- the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.”
The “evil empire” speech engendered mass hysteria from Reagan’s critics, and even some of his friends. With the advantage of four decades’ hindsight, Ronald Reagan was proven correct in both his predictions and his perceptions, and his boldness hastened the demise of that empire. But totalitarian impulses were not permanently excised from Russia when the Cold War ended, nor from the hearts of would-be autocrats around the world and here at home. Only last night, President Biden was warning about the dangers in Eastern Europe -- and reprising another tough Ronald Reagan speech about Russia and its leaders. Observant conservatives were quick to point out last night that Biden wasn’t a fan of Reagan’s famous challenge to Mikhail Gorbachev at Germany’s Brandenberg Gate. But better late than never, I say.
Here is what Biden said last night.
“It wasn’t that long ago when a Republican president, Ronald Reagan, thundered ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’ Now my predecessor, a former Republican president, tells Putin: ‘Do whatever the hell you want.’ My message to President Putin, who I've known for a long time, is simple: We will not walk away. We will not bow down. I will not bow down.”
And that is our quote of the week.
Carl M. Cannon
Washington Bureau chief, RealClearPolitics
@CarlCannon (Twitter)
ccannon@realclearpolitics.com
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics and executive editor of RealClearMedia Group. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.
The president yelled often. He sparred back and forth with Republicans. Keeping the Democratic Party’s liberal base at bay hasn’t put Biden in a strong position to get himself reelected: He has a lower approval rating at this point in his presidency, just 39% per the RealClearPolitics Average, than the three previous presidents. He may have achieved a necessary political resurrection by focusing on one of them: The subtext of Thursday night’s State of the Union was the looming rematch of the 2020 campaign. And while Biden never uttered the name “Donald Trump,” he made no less than a dozen references to “my predecessor” in a speech focused less on an enumeration of accomplishments and more on the coming electoral contrast. Biden made that clear from the jump.
Moments after handing copies of his remarks to Vice President Kamala Harris and Speaker Mike Johnson, Biden quoted and then tore into Trump. “My predecessor, a former Republican president, tells Putin, quote, ‘do whatever the hell you want.’ That’s a quote,” he said of how Trump promises to deal with the Ukrainian land war.
“I think it’s outrageous, it’s dangerous and it’s unacceptable,” Biden added, in what would be a trendline throughout the night. Allies had been encouraging the president to be more aggressive. He delivered while delving into a favorite theme: the survival of self-government. Democracy itself, Biden insisted, was at risk with his old rival waiting at the gate this November.
“Not since President Lincoln and the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under assault here at home as they are today,” the president warned before tying together his political rival and a foreign dictator. “What makes our moment rare is that freedom and democracy are under attack,” he continued, “both at home and overseas, at the very same time.”
The domestic threat: His predecessor who sought “to bury the truth of January 6th.”
The international threat: Russian President Vladimar Putin, whom Biden warned, “We will not walk away. We will not bow down. I will not bow down.”
To deal with the former, Biden chided Republicans to accept what he called “a simple truth,” namely that “You can’t love your country only when you win.” To address the latter, the president did what he has done ever since Russian tanks began rolling across Ukraine, specifically to send more financial and military aid.
While the critique against Trump was constant and implicit, Biden delicately attempted to shore up his left flank. Dozens of pro-Palestine protestors attempted to blockade the presidential motorcade as it traveled east from the White House to Capitol Hill. He arrived only a few minutes late, but Biden cannot afford any roadblocks within his own party this November. The thousands of “uncommitted” protest votes cast in the Democratic primaries are a flashing hazard.
Biden delivered his most forceful assessment of the treatment of civilians in Gaza. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress and an outspoken critic of the administration’s support of Israel, could be seen wiping away tears as Biden said that “more than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, most of whom are not Hamas,” a reference to disputed numbers from the Hamas-aligned Gaza Health Ministry. Biden called again for a temporary cease-fire. He also announced that the United States would establish “a temporary pier in the Mediterranean on the Gaza coast” to bring needed humanitarian aid.
The calls for a cessation in the fighting were an olive branch to progressives, especially younger foreign policy-minded ones, who have split sharply with the president’s backing of Israel. There were no such alms offered to Republicans. Biden was ready for a fight on the right. He took a step back with mock surprise and a smile when walking into the chamber as Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene reached out to get his attention.
Johnson had warned Republicans not to break “decorum” by heckling or making outbursts, but after Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report described Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory,” a high-profile back-and-forth is exactly what the president wanted. And he got it.
Green wore a red blazer, a red MAGA hat, and a white t-shirt that read “say her name, Laken Riley.” The name belongs to a nursing student from Georgia who was murdered last month. Jose Antonio Ibarra, an illegal immigrant from Venezuela charged with her murder, was arrested in New York previously, but was not detained or deported.
The tragedy has become a brutal avatar in the ongoing debate over border security. When Biden began discussing immigration, Green shouted, “Say her name!” He tried to comply but flubbed the pronunciation, erroneously calling the slain student “Lincoln Riley.”
Biden acknowledged Riley as “an innocent young woman who was killed by an illegal,” irritating progressive Democrats like Texas Rep. Joaquin Castro who later told reporters that the president was trafficking in dangerous rhetoric. But Biden offered sympathies to her parents. He confused everyone with an off-script non-sequitur of a rebuttal, asking, “How many of thousands of people have been killed by illegals?”
The White House has sought to shift the blame for the border crisis by first arguing that Trump left them an unworkable, inhumane system and more recently blaming him for blowing up a compromise package. Biden again urged passage of that now shredded legislation, but vowed he would not, as Trump has, “demonize immigrants saying they ‘poison the blood of our country.’”
The exchange, though perhaps not decisive, gave the Biden’s reelection team what it wanted. His advisors worry when Biden swings between extremes, sometimes lashing out angrily at reporters and other times responding to criticism in a literal soft-spoken whisper. On Thursday, he was undeniably assertive. The president even picked a fight with the Supreme Court.
The Biden-Harris campaign has promised to make abortion rights a center piece of its reelection strategy. The president addressed Latorya Beasley, a social worker from Alabama seated in the gallery, who conceived “thanks to the miracle of IVF,” a fertility treatment made illegal in that state. He also directed the attention of the chamber to Kate Cox, a Texas woman who had to travel out of state for an abortion due to legal restrictions. Both cases, he said, were the result of “the chaos” that resulted from Trump-appointed justices on the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade.
“With all due respect, justices, women are not without electoral or political power,” he said looking at members of the high court who sat feet away stone-faced. “You’re about to realize just how much you’re right about that.”
Biden also took a populist stance in attacking the wealthy for skirting taxes and corporations for, among other things, selling bags of chips “with fewer chips.”
He noted that unemployment was down and inflation was slowing without using the kind of jargon that economists spout. He also never said “Bidenomics,” a favorite term that progressive pollsters warned wasn’t breaking through. He asked voters to “remember” the economic pain of the pandemic and how he inherited “an economy that was on the brink.” By contrast, he continued, “our economy is the envy of the world.”
The president also yoked together two of his hobby horses. He often says that billionaires ought to pay more in taxes and that Social Security should not be cut. In front of Congress, Biden said both and together when surveying the “two ways we have to go on Social Security.”
“Republicans will cut Social Security and give more tax cuts to the wealthy,” he claimed, though the GOP has not called for such cuts.
“I will protect and strengthen Social Security and make the wealthy pay their fair share,” he concluded.
In the end, the speech was an us-vs.-them routine, more pointed in its identification of class and wealth than Biden has previously embraced. Progressive pollsters who huddled with the White House insisted that kind of rhetoric would lead to a boost in the polls. Eager for a second term, Biden adopted the argument during what could be his most viewed speech before the election.
The White House did not downplay the stakes, and while there is little chance that the big legislative reforms Biden wants will become law during an election year, one goal was achieved: A gaffe-free evening. Other than the occasional cough or allowing two words to slur together, the president mostly avoided mistakes. He could not escape one awkward moment, however.
“Abbey Gate,” Steve Nikoui, the father of one of the Marines killed during the Afghanistan withdrawal, shouted from the gallery. “Second Battalion, First Marines!” Biden looked up briefly as the bereaved father was arrested by Capitol Hill Police and then returned to his prepared remarks.
While Biden was fiery for much of the evening, he sought to disarm Republican critiques that the 81-year-old elder statesmen isn’t physically up to a second term. The president did it with a joke. “I know I may not look like it,” he smiled, “but I’ve been around a while. And when you get to my age certain things become clearer than ever before.”
“My lifetime has taught me to embrace freedom and democracy. A future based on the core values that have defined America. Honesty. Decency. Dignity. Equality,” he said.
“An American story of resentment, revenge, and retribution. That’s not me,” he concluded in an aggressive, and perhaps polarizing, State of the Union address.
Philip Wegmann is White House correspondent for RealClearPolitics.
The 2024 presidential campaign has begun, earlier than usual but promising no predictability. There is curiosity about a candidate’s third run, and the precedent of a non-consecutive second term. Donald Trump’s presumptive candidacy has clear precedents. He will be the fifth former president to run for reelection … and, almost implausibly, all in that exclusive club were New Yorkers. Martin Van Buren, Millard Fillmore, Grover Cleveland, and Theodore Roosevelt were former presidents who sought another term in the Executive Mansion – that is, not immediately succeeding themselves.
In many ways the contemporary Republican Party could be called the Trumpublican Party, so much has it been transformed. History will sort out how much Donald Trump has been the architect or the legatee. Van Buren had to join the new anti-slavery Free Soil Party; Millard Fillmore was the nominee of the Know-Nothing Party; and Theodore Roosevelt placed second, beating the Republican incumbent, on the Progressive (“Bull Moose”) ticket. These men ran under new designations because they were unable to transform the party establishments of their former parties.
To the extent that Trump has wrought change in his party and across the political landscape, enabling his renomination, there are parallels – if not coincidences – found in the person of Democrat Grover Cleveland and the election of 1888.
Cleveland is the only president, thus far, who managed to serve two non-consecutive terms. He was the 22nd and the 24th president – a historical contortion due to the single term of Republican Benjamin Harrison in between. Contested results, corrupt vote counts, and unresolved accusations surrounded the 1888 campaign.
Among the coincidences and parallels we observe today, Grover Cleveland (1837-1908) in several ways foreshadowed Donald Trump. An instrument of reform, Cleveland attempted to “drain the swamp” of his time, championing Civil Service reform. He benefited from a public revulsion against corrupt politics, fueled in no small part by the assassination of President James Garfield in 1881 by a frustrated office-seeker from a rival political faction.
Cleveland also addressed the nation’s economy. As unlikely as it may seem today, the federal government had a Treasury surplus. Cleveland thought it was immoral for the government to unnecessarily hold public funds, even devoting 100% of his 1887 Annual Message to the subject (surplus, tariffs, taxes), the only time a State of the Union message has addressed a single topic.
Without going too far afield, some of Cleveland’s personal matters included “events that cast their shadows before.” A sexual scandal erupted in the midst his 1884 campaign: accusations that he had fathered a child while a bachelor in Buffalo. It was a stink bomb in the staid environment of Victorian America, but Cleveland admitted the fact … and the public largely moved on. Two years later he further startled society by marrying his 21-year-old ward. The pretty Frances Folsom enchanted America, and became, as a fashionable first lady, often a more popular figure than the president himself.
President Cleveland’s administration was successful enough to easily secure his party’s renomination in 1888. The Republicans had no clear favorite. The party’s 1884 candidate, James G. Blaine, was the “Tattooed Man” frequently caricatured as bearing his career’s many sins, and he declined to offer himself. The GOP’s political calculus indicated that New York State (Cleveland’s home) and Indiana were crucial to its success. So Indiana’s former senator, Benjamin Harrison, was nominated.
Despite an almost wonky, sophisticated level of debates on tariff schedules and “protectionism” of industries, the Cleveland-Harrison contest was rife with thievery. Political corruption, and the temptation to affect voting results are, like the poor, always with us. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose – the more things change, the more they stay the same. In 1888 elections were even more susceptible to cheating than our contemporary campaigns.
In virtually every voting district, voting was on the “honor” system – no identification required. But when ballots actually were cast, many districts required a vocal declaration of the voter’s choice, so secrecy was non-existent … and party managers (or those who bribed voters) could keep tabs. Further, printed ballots (usually gaudy and recognizable from a distance) were provided by the political parties themselves; and these “tickets” (giving rise to the name we still use) were deposited in glass jars. Once again, poll watchers hired by the parties could observe how “their” people voted.
The Republicans, particularly in the “swing state” of Indiana, devised another strategy in the presidential election. Brazenly, instructions printed on party letterhead were sent to campaign workers ordering them to “arrange voters in blocks of five” to visit the polls and enforce discipline – in practice, to vote as blocs. And, by implication, these groups were directed to visit additional polling places, to vote more than once. Even Pennsylvanians were recruited and paid to visit Indiana and vote multiple times.
The Hoosier State was narrowly carried for Harrison and Republicans. There was an outcry against the “Blocks of Five” scandal, but action was never taken. With Indiana in the bag, the Republicans carried the national Electoral vote by a whisker … despite the fact that Cleveland and the Democrats won the popular vote across the nation. (By the way, a secret voting system devised in New South Wales – the “Australian Ballot” – was widely adopted in the U.S. by 1892.)
Harrison’s administration was relatively undistinguished. He threw a bone to the Civil Service Reform movement by appointing a young but notable reformer as commissioner overseeing that work – Theodore Roosevelt, still in his twenties, and whom Cleveland would retain when he succeeded Harrison four years later.
The 1892 rematch was fought largely on the same issues as in 1888: Civil Service reform and economic matters but in another context, as the Republicans had distributed the surplus and revenues from taxes on manufactured imports, largely to Civil War pensioners and domestic “infant industries.” During the rest of the decade, the “Gay ’90s” were not uniformly gay. A Depression followed the economic disruption; a Free Silver movement accompanied the rise of the rebellious Populist Party that split Democrats and Republicans establishments alike; and the Spanish-American War in 1898 ushered in the American Century.
The 1888 presidential campaign’s consequential aspect was arguably electoral chicanery, as important as the surplus and tariffs were to the debate. And the similarities between Grover Cleveland and Donald Trump are striking. But “Blocks of Five,” or their contemporary incarnations, might suggest parallels or cautions for 2024.
As Solomon wrote in Ecclesiastes: There is nothing new under the sun.
Rick Marschall is a former political cartoonist and frequent commentator on popular culture. His 75th book, “The Most Interesting American,” about Theodore Roosevelt, was recently published by Post Hill Press. He blogs at MondayMinistry.com/blog.
The headline was "Fact Focus: Claims Biden administration is secretly flying migrants into the country are unfounded." Spagat had to redefine all sorts of words like "secretly" to defend President Joe Biden's fly-over-the-border policies.
The Spagat dispatch began: "In his Super Tuesday victory speech, former President Donald Trump elevated false information that had gone viral on social media, claiming the Biden administration secretly flew hundreds of thousands of migrants into the United States."
AP noted that on Jan. 26, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (if you can call them that) reported "327,000 immigrants were vetted and authorized for travel." The government flew in more than 67,000 Cubans, 126,000 Haitians, 53,000 Nicaraguans and 81,000 Venezuelans.
Trump said, "Today it was announced that 325,000 people were flown in from parts unknown -- migrants were flown in airplanes, not going through borders ... It was unbelievable."
How was this false? Spagat elastically argued, "But migrants are not being flown into the U.S. randomly." Trump never said "randomly," or "secretly." He said "parts unknown."
Trump referred to an article by the Center for Immigration Studies, which AP calls a "group that advocates for immigration restrictions." Todd Bensman of CIS found CBP's migrants arrived at 43 airports, but the CBP refused to divulge which ones, using an exemption under the Freedom of Information Act for "law-enforcement sensitive information."
But this doesn't look like law enforcement. It looks like government-enabled illegal immigration.
You might think AP would loathe FOIA exemptions. But Biden critics aren't allowed to say the government "secretly" flew them in, even though we don't know where they flew in from, or where they landed. Spagat reported Bensman told him, "he doesn't consider the program secretive, but finds it 'enigmatic' and 'lacking transparency.'"
AP apparently doesn't care much about a lack of transparency when they have Democrats to defend against the Orange Menace.
So here's how AP's Plastic Man "fact-checks" Trump: "The migrants are not coming in from 'parts unknown,' as Trump charged. CBP vets each one for eligibility and publishes the number of airport arrivals from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela." Wait one doggone minute. On the CIS website, Bensman explained the "parts unknown" is defensible: The people eligible for this parole program have to be nationals of one of nine countries, "but can fly to the U.S. from anywhere."
Bensman later revealed what Spagat emailed to him: "This is a fact check on Trump and [Elon] Musk, not on CIS's report. ... I know all too well that reporters can't control how audiences interpret their work but want to ask if you wish to comment on whether Trump and Musk amplified your findings correctly."
Bensman said he told Spagat he didn't think Trump's line "rose to an inaccuracy. Government 'authorization' of those flights should be enough to cover Trump's statement that 'migrants were flown in airplanes' from 'parts unknown' because the government still won't release to CIS the departure airports in foreign countries."
Just for fun, I searched through years of the "Alejandro Mayorkas" tag at APNews.com, looking for any fact-checking of Biden's impeached Homeland Security Secretary. I found nothing, zero, zilch. But they leap on Trump for criticizing Biden.
Mayorkas can repeatedly utter the preposterous lie that "the border is secure" and the AP Fact Check squad waves him along, just like Mayorkas waves in hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants each year.
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With Nikki Haley's withdrawal, there will be no more significantly contested primaries or caucuses -- the earliest both parties' races have been over since something like the current primary-dominated system was put in place in 1972.
The primary results have spotlighted some of both nominees' weaknesses.
Donald Trump lost high-income, high-educated constituencies, including the entire metro area -- aka the Swamp. Many but by no means all Haley votes there were cast by Biden Democrats. Trump can't afford to lose too many of the others in target states like Pennsylvania and Michigan.
Majorities and large minorities of voters in overwhelmingly Latino counties in Texas's Rio Grande Valley and some in Houston voted against Joe Biden, and even more against Senate nominee Rep. Colin Allred (D-Texas).
Returns from Hispanic precincts in New Hampshire and Massachusetts show the same thing. Biden can't afford to lose too many Latino votes in target states like Arizona and Georgia.
When Trump rode down that escalator in 2015, commentators assumed he'd repel Latinos. Instead, Latino voters nationally, and especially the closest eyewitnesses of Biden's open-border policy, have been trending heavily Republican.
High-income liberal Democrats may sport lawn signs proclaiming, "In this house, we believe ... no human is illegal." The logical consequence of that belief is an open border. But modest-income folks in border counties know that flows of illegal immigrants result in disorder, disease and crime.
There is plenty of impatience with increased disorder in election returns below the presidential level. Consider Los Angeles County, America's largest county, with nearly 10 million people, more people than 40 of the 50 states. It voted 71% for Biden in 2020.
Current returns show county District Attorney George Gascon winning only 21% of the vote in the nonpartisan primary. He'll apparently face Republican Nathan Hochman, a critic of his liberal policies, in November.
Gascon, elected after the May 2020 death of counterfeit-passing suspect George Floyd in Minneapolis, is one of many county prosecutors supported by billionaire George Soros. His policies include not charging juveniles as adults, not seeking higher penalties for gang membership or use of firearms and bringing fewer misdemeanor cases.
The predictable result has been increased car thefts, burglaries and personal robberies. Some 120 assistant district attorneys have left the office, and there's a backlog of 10,000 unprosecuted cases.
More than a dozen other Soros-backed and similarly liberal prosecutors have faced strong opposition or have left office.
St. Louis prosecutor Kim Gardner resigned last May amid lawsuits seeking her removal, Milwaukee's John Chisholm retired in January, and Baltimore's Marilyn Mosby was defeated in July 2022 and convicted of perjury in September 2023. Last November, Loudoun County, Virginia, voters (62% Biden) ousted liberal Buta Biberaj, who declined to prosecute a transgender student for assault, and in June 2022 voters in San Francisco (85% Biden) recalled famed radical Chesa Boudin.
Similarly, this Tuesday, voters in San Francisco passed ballot measures strengthening police powers and requiring treatment of drug-addicted welfare recipients.
In retrospect, it appears the Floyd video, appearing after three months of COVID-19 confinement, sparked a frenzied, even crazed reaction, especially among the highly educated and articulate. One fatal incident was seen as proof that America's "systemic racism" was worse than ever and that police forces should be defunded and perhaps abolished.
2020 was "the year America went crazy," I wrote in January 2021, a year in which police funding was actually cut by Democrats in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Denver. A year in which young New York Times staffers claimed they were endangered by the publication of Sen. Tom Cotton's (R-Ark.) opinion article advocating calling in military forces if necessary to stop rioting, as had been done in Detroit in 1967 and Los Angeles in 1992. A craven Times publisher even fired the editorial page editor for running the article.
Evidence of visible and tangible discontent with increasing violence and its consequences -- barren and locked shelves in Manhattan chain drugstores, skyrocketing carjackings in Washington, D.C. -- is as unmistakable in polls and election results as it is in daily life in large metropolitan areas. Maybe 2024 will turn out to be the year even liberal America stopped acting crazy.
The disorder in America's metropolitan centers and wreaked by illegal and un-deported immigrants on the border and as far afield as Athens, Georgia, seems to be politically overshadowing the sickening disorder wreaked by Trump supporters and tolerated if not encouraged by Trump himself.
Chaos and disorder work against incumbents, as they did in 1968 when Democrats saw their party's popular vote fall from 61% to 43%. It's unfortunate there's not a more fitting political beneficiary of any such recoil than Trump.
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Michael Barone is senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.
Learning that state officials aren't empowered to simply toss leading presidential candidates off ballots came as a great surprise to many incredulous left-wingers. Once you've convinced yourself Trump led a Hitlerian putsch that nearly overthrew democracy, every crackpot legal theory aimed at stopping him sounds not only morally justified but legally sound.
Just last week, progressives were fuming that the Supreme Court hasn't expedited Trump's immunity claims to fit with President Joe Biden's campaign schedule.
The deeper problem, though, is that the Left -- but, really, anyone who is Trump-obsessed -- can't seem to comprehend the notion of neutrality in law or principle. Here, for instance, is how the Associated Press framed the court's decision: "Supreme Court restores Trump to ballot, rejecting state attempts to hold him accountable for attack on Capitol in 2021."
That is, most definitely, not what happened. SCOTUS ruled on the constitutional question. Whether Colorado thinks it's holding Trump accountable -- and the contention that he engaged in "insurrection" is, let's just say, highly debatable -- is another story.
In any event, the case is another reminder that the Supreme Court is perhaps the only functioning institution of government. By "functioning," of course, I don't mean the court "moves the country forward," "upholds democracy," "keeps us safe," or any of the other twaddle leftists insist constitutes good governance. I mean a court majority takes its constitutional mandate, as written, seriously.
No, SCOTUS doesn't get every case right. Sometimes, led by the chief justice, it is perplexingly Solomonic. But it is wrong within the contours of normal. Congress, on the other hand, has handed its responsibilities on war, spending and governing to the executive branch. At this point, we are far more likely to see a congressman dunking on someone on social media than acting to defend the document he swore to uphold.
Worse, Democrats are often cheerleaders for more executive abuse. The White House, also abnormally, feels unfettered in regulating the economy and our lives with no oversight from the legislative branch or voters. Biden openly ignores the court. The most obvious example is the unconstitutional student loan "forgiveness" plan, a transparent effort to bribe younger voters.
Sure, the Colorado ballot case was so weak that even Justice Sonia Sotomayor couldn't go along with Democrats. That's rare. If it weren't for originalists (for lack of a better word), the country would have been plunged into chaos long ago, and not only on the political front.
In July 2020, the Supreme Court's approval rating stood at 58 percent. A few months earlier, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer threatened justices with a "whirlwind" if they ignored the will of the Democratic Party. Democrats have been ratcheting up their attacks on the court since former President Barack Obama used his State of the Union to publicly castigate it upholding the First Amendment.
Since that time, a concerted project among donors, politicians and major media organizations to smear and delegitimize the high court has been underway. It's working. As of the last poll taken, the court's approval rating had fallen to 41% and its disapproval was at 58%, most of the change driven by left-wing voters.
Most of the justices have been impressively resistant to the pressures of politics. The court, obviously, was conceived to be impervious to the vagaries of public opinion. This is an upsetting notion for people like Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), one of the nation's leading conspiracy theorists, who believes low poll numbers are proof of a legitimacy problem. What, one wonders, does that say about the 12% approval of Congress?
Every time the Left suffers a setback at SCOTUS, they accuse justices with long histories of consistent judicial philosophy of corruption. When the conservatives lose -- as they did recently with North Carolina redistricting and the case covering gender dysphoria under disability laws -- the media act like it is some huge surprise that the court didn't act reflexively partisan. This, like so many of the contemporary Left's accusations, is just projection.
The reason the Left has a poor record in front of the court -- and the trend goes back to Obama's historic string of losses -- isn't that SCOTUS is bought. It's that the contemporary Left's vision of governance conflicts with the Constitution. If the Left doesn't destroy the court, it is likely blue states will begin ignoring it.
But for now, SCOTUS remains perhaps the last institutional bulwark against lawlessness and nuttery.
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David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist. Follow him on Twitter @davidharsanyi.
A cursory glance at Merriam-Webster is instructive. That venerable dictionary defines "democracy" as "government by the people" or, more elaborately, as "a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections."
Simple enough. But someone ought to remind our nation's liberal elites and the foot soldier activists of today's Democratic Party.
On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a unanimous rebuke of the recent Colorado chicanery that rendered former President Donald Trump ineligible for the state's GOP presidential primary ballot. That all nine justices agreed with Trump's core legal argument -- state actors cannot strike from the ballot alleged "insurrectionists" absent specific implementing legislation from Congress -- is nothing short of remarkable.
For months, liberal pundits and anti-Trump legal "experts" assured us that the 14th Amendment "insurrection clause" argument for Trump's ballot disqualification was ironclad. Who can forget how, after the Colorado Supreme Court legitimized Trump's removal in December, one-time conservative judicial stalwart turned Trump Derangement Syndrome patient zero J. Michael Luttig opined that the court's logic was "masterful," "brilliant" and "unassailable." Left-wing cable news outlets platformed countless other guests who ceaselessly pushed the same argument.
In the end, the argument garnered zero votes at the Supreme Court. Even Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson didn't debase themselves by going along with such a half-baked, anti-democratic ruse. So much for "unassailable" logic!
One of the great ironies of our present age is that democracy's would-be eponymous outfit, the Democratic Party, has become an enemy of democracy itself. The fact that party activists across numerous states pursued the extraordinary tactic of literally banning their leading opponent from the ballot is emblematic. But the anti-Trump criminal prosecutions and other unsavory lawfare tactics Democrats are also now weaponizing give the game away: Democrats hate democracy and harbor immense disdain for normal Americans' beliefs.
Put simply, they don't want to leave the country's fate in our hands.
Hence, the current bizarre spectacle of Democrats ostentatiously bragging about the need to save "our democracy" while simultaneously pursuing some of the most anti-democratic stratagems in modern American history. Anything, it seems, to prevent the American people themselves from deciding the 2024 election. To the warped Democratic mind, nothing is more "democratic" than preventing the actual demos from having its say. The horror!
An on-air MSNBC panel during the left-wing network's Super Tuesday coverage was paradigmatic. Analyzing exit polling from Virginia, hosts Rachel Maddow and Jen Psaki could not believe voters ranked immigration as their top issue. "Well, Virginia does have a border with West Virginia," Maddow quipped, as the others guffawed along with her.
Liberal elites to Americans suffering the myriad consequences of a wide-open southern border: Drop dead.
That's literally "drop dead," actually, in the case of Laken Riley, the former nursing student tragically murdered two weeks ago by an illegal alien in Athens, Georgia. (Say her name, liberal media.) That's literally "drop dead," as well, for the majority of the 110,000-plus Americans who died of drug overdoses in 2022 -- 70% of which were caused by fentanyl and other synthetic opioids trafficked across the border.
The reality is that during Joe Biden's presidency, which has overseen the most illegal immigration and the most beleaguered southern border in American history, every town is a "border town." The MSNBC clowns might delude themselves to the contrary, as they retire at night to their gated communities, driven by their chauffeurs. But that reality is still reality.
Those Americans who want their border secure, their communities safe and their wages spared suppression by illegal alien labor are the "rubes" whom liberal elites are so passionate about denying from the democratic process that they will invert democracy itself to do so. Destroy democracy in order to save it -- don't you see?
The good news is that most Americans will not tolerate it. Biden's polling is in the gutter and the Democrats' sprawling anti-Trump lawfare apparatus is on life support.
Laugh all the way to a crushing loss in November, ladies. Let's see who's laughing then.
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Democrats will claim some level of moral superiority. After all, the party that started the Civil War is very high-minded these days about what they have labeled an insurrection. The reality of Jan. 6, 2021, is that it was a multi-hour temper tantrum conducted by the most well-armed group of American ever and they did not bother bringing their guns.
Republicans, of course, claim Democrats are the immoral party for supporting abortion rights and transgenderism. Republicans, Democrats tell us, support a serial adulterer conman who duped people into believing the 2020 election was stolen, festered an insurrection and even now is swindling people out of money to pay his lawyers.
Democrats, Republicans tell us, are led by a human Roomba who shuffles back and forth across stages, who lacks the capacity to make his own decisions and who presides over a family that got wealthy off Joe Biden's position in government. His party champions Black Lives Matter, which in turn has rioted across America, burned down small businesses and declared property damage is not actually violence because of insurance. Even now, many loud voices in the Democratic Party are championing antisemitic views and voices calling for the elimination of the Jewish state and its people.
The Democrats would tell you Republicans are authoritarian and a threat to democracy. Democrats just tried to take Donald Trump off the ballot in several states in defiance of democratic norms until blocked by a unanimous United States Supreme Court.
Republicans will tell you Democrats want to put boys in girls' locker rooms and advance transgender issues. Democrats will tell you Donald Trump has Caitlyn Jenner's support and has even wavered on pro-life positions.
The back and forth leads inevitably to one inescapable conclusion: Neither party really has any business making moral claims of righteousness in 2024. They are both parties of deviancy in varying degrees. The press corps, with its biases toward Democrats, are prone to really believe Jan. 6 was an insurrection and treat Democrats' moral attacks on Republicans with far more legitimacy than they ever would give moral truth claims of the GOP. But the reality is both parties are asking Americans to choose not the lesser of two evils, but the evils of two lessers. Either way, Americans are asked to pick the evil of their choice.
Republicans will assure everyone their side is not really evil; Democrats are evil. Democrats will assure everyone they are not really evil; Republicans are evil. Republicans will surround themselves with evangelical pastors to insist their flocks vote righteously. Democrats will surround themselves with secular saints doing the same. Everyone will quote Scripture and neither party has a real interest in loving their neighbor unless their neighbor agrees with them politically.
Most Americans are just going to get through this election year with the enthusiasm of someone headed to a colonoscopy. They will not be voting for the moral claims of either party because they see both parties complicit in $34 trillion in national debt and squandering America's leadership of the Western world. Both parties have made the nation vulnerable to our enemies. Both parties will assert that, actually, their party is the party of truth, justice and the American way. Neither really is.
For most Americans, they just want to be left alone. They want a sound economy. They want to feel safe in a chaotic world. They'll be badgered, bullied and hectored by both sides demanding Americans pick them. Many will stay home. Plenty will go vote, and they will vote for the party they think is in their family's best interest. Right now, judging by the best polling from the best pollsters, that benefits the GOP, which means the Democrats' moral preening is about to go off the charts.
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Erick Erickson is editor of TheResurgent.com.
The nightmare ended 10 months later, after the heroic French defense stopped the final German push. But the respective armies ended up in the same position as when the battle started.
After the failed preemptive Russia attack on Kyiv in February 2022 and the subsequent collapsed Ukrainian six-month-long "spring" counter-offensive of spring 2023, the Ukrainian war has now similarly deadlocked.
Russia has failed to annex Ukraine. It has not expanded much beyond occupied Crimea and Donbas.
Yet Ukraine seems unable to push back the Russians to where they started in February 2022, much less recover lost areas grabbed earlier in 2014.
Although neither side has published reliable and comprehensive dead and wounded statistics, the war has now likely reached a horrific Verdun-like total of 600-700,000 combined casualties.
Perhaps 10 million of Ukraine's prewar population have fled the country. Due to the massive refugee exodus, the country may have shrunk below 35 million.
In other words, Russia now has a population seven times larger, a gross national product 10 times greater, and an area over 30 times the size of current Ukraine.
Still, if NATO and the United States can continue to arm Ukraine, it is as unlikely that Russia can annex Ukraine, even as it is doubtful that Ukraine can ever regain territory lost prior to 2014.
As human costs grow and the stalemate continues, talk of peace agreements arises each month.
For Ukraine and its allies, there is a growing, but private, realization that Kyiv will not recover the majority Russian-speaking Donbas and Crimea that were lost a decade ago during the inert Obama administration.
Indeed, during the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations, there was no effort either in Ukraine or among its allies to take back by force what Russia had de facto absorbed in 2014.
So what could possibly be the outlines of the armistice agreements that are increasingly being floated in the media?
Perhaps something near what Ukraine and Russia reportedly discussed a few weeks after the failed 2022 Russian invasion.
That plan would result in the institutionalization of the decade-long Russian control of the Donbas and Crimea, coupled with guarantees of Ukrainian sovereignty along the pre-February 2022 lines.
Some have further suggested that Ukraine would not become a member of NATO, but would be armed to the teeth to deter or destroy likely future Russian aggressors.
If such plans were previously floated and are reportedly now revisited, what would be the advantages and downsides for both Russia and Ukraine?
Russian President Vladimir Putin would have to explain -- as much as any dictator does -- to his people why he started a war that cost some 500,000 Russians dead and wounded, shattered his military, and resulted in no additional territory but a vastly diminished Russian reputation.
His supposed upside would be that he alone finalized the absorption of the resource-rich Donbas and Crimea and stopped Ukraine from joining NATO.
Ukraine could counter that its bravery and allied aid inflicted the most grievous damage to the Russian military since World War II. Furthermore, guarantees to rebuild and rearm the now-veteran Ukrainian military could deter the 71-year-Putin from a repeat invasion.
Ukraine would lose its valid claims to the Donbas and Crimea. But again, apparently neither the Obama, Trump, prewar Biden administration, NATO members, nor Ukraine itself ever had any agenda or ability to forcefully wrest back what Putin had stolen.
But what if there is no deal?
By the end of 2024, the current status quo may well result in a combined million dead and wounded.
European nations will still talk aggressively. But increasingly, they will taper off their aid and quietly consider Ukraine out of sight, out of mind.
The emerging toxic anti-Western alliance of China, Iran, and Russia will likely strengthen. Third-party opportunists like Turkey, Vietnam, the Middle East, and southern hemisphere nations will increasingly be drawn closer into this new Axis orbit.
Measures to break the years-long deadlock will mount, with Ukrainian calls for far more and deadlier Western weapons, even as their manpower declines.
Demands will increase for strategically logical, but otherwise dangerous, escalatory attacks on Russian bases and supply depots inside Mother Russia and against the Black Sea Fleet.
Russia, in turn, will up its now-serial nuclear threats and keep targeting civilians. Deadlocked wars have a way of turning the once frightening and unimaginable into the normal and likely.
There is already crazy talk about the insertion of NATO ground troops into the war, while Russia threatens to attack other Western nations.
The only thing worse than an armistice with no clear winner or loser is an endless war with more than a million casualties.
(C)2024 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of "The Case for Trump." You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.
Will Nikki Haley Endorse Trump? Haley never had a path to the nomination, but she definitely had plenty of well-heeled backers happy to fund the one Republican willing to attack Trump. After Tuesday’s thumping, she has finally thrown in the towel, though it’s not clear if she is listening to the people or whether the donors have abandoned her. She has reportedly not decided whether she will honor her pledge to the Republican National Committee to support the party’s ultimate candidate. In public statements, it is not her conclusion that Trump is “totally unhinged” that is giving her pause about backing him to be the leader of the free world, but his sensible effort to stack the RNC with his own people. On Sunday, displaying verbal gymnastics that would make Bill Clinton proud, she said, “The RNC [I pledged to] is now not the same RNC.”
If she believes this, it is a profound misreading of democracy. GOP voters selected Trump, not the RNC. Oh, the irony! As Democrats and Never-Trumpers issue bogus warnings about the grave threats Trump poses to democracy, our democratic system is the only reason he is poised to win the nomination. If candidates were still anointed by leaders in smoke-filled rooms, Trump is the last guy they would have picked. The Republican party is a bottom-up party in which voters – many of whom, horrors of horrors, do not possess college degrees – still reign.
This is in stark contrast to the Democratic Party. Since its early days as an instrument of Southern planters and Northern machines before giving way to the modern era’s progressive technocrats, the party has always been a top-down organization controlled by elites who claim to know what’s best for the people. That’s a major reason why Biden, despite low poll numbers and the belief among his own voters that he is too old to be an effective leader, faced no real primary challenge. He was the party’s pick.
Will Democrats Force Biden From the Race? While a Biden-Trump rematch seems assured, the race promises many monkey wrenches. Recognizing that their scorched earth attacks may be backfiring – Trump seems to be proving the adage “What does not kill me makes me stronger” – Democratic leaders spooked by Biden’s unpopularity are ramping up their panicked calls for him to step aside. But the pooh-bahs are facing strong resistance from the candidate. This is not surprising. They made a Faustian bargain in 2020 when they settled on Biden in large part because he had no core beliefs. The man who turned against bussing during the 1970s and supported 1994’s law and order crime bill because those were politically convenient stances was easily transformed into a crusader against alleged white supremacy and a champion of DEI and trans rights.
What they didn’t count on was Biden’s heroic self-image. His multiple plagiarism scandals reveal his rare ability to convince himself that other people’s ideas are really his own. Despite all evidence, he believes he is the smartest guy in the room. His insistence on repeating false stories – on everything from the deaths of his first wife and his son Beau, to his trips on Amtrak and his handling of classified documents – suggests he lives in a fantasy world where his tall tales are true. Democratic leaders are going to have a hard time convincing the president, who apparently believes he is leading the race, to stand down. The people love me, man.
How Do You Solve a Problem Like Kamala? Never say never in politics. Given Biden’s age – and Trump’s for that matter – health issues could arise. But Democrats are in an especially tough position because Harris is just as unpopular. If Biden were to step aside, it would be hard for the party of identity politics to bypass the first black vice president for a person of pallor like Gavin Newsom or Amy Klobuchar. In this context, Michelle Obama seemed the only viable option until she closed that door once more this week. Harris may be Biden’s ace in the hole.
Will Lawfare Finally Sink Trump? Trump’s position as the Republican nominee seems assured, but he faces even stronger headwinds than Biden. Some are rooted in the Democrats’ corruption of the legal system. Those 91 felony counts may be a hit job, but they will take time and money to defend. Trump has great energy, but it is not limitless. Those attacks have clearly boosted his campaign, but it is hard to predict what impact a criminal conviction, if it comes, might have on swing voters. The Supreme Court may have unanimously rejected Democrats’ effort to kick Trump off the ballot – again, they really don’t trust voters – but his opponents are sure to concoct other bogus lines of attack that Harvard law professors and New York Times scribeswill describe as serious threats until they are eventually debunked. Look for Russia collusion 9.0, 10.0, etc.
Will Trump Ultimately Sink Trump? But, as with Biden, Trump’s potential pitfalls are also rooted in his psychology. A born salesman, he talks in hyperbole – I had the largest crowd, the biggest tax cuts, the best economy – that keeps fact-checkers busy. Having made his fortune running a family business, he values loyalty above all else. When people he expects to serve fail to bend the knee, he lashes out. Hence, his mockery of Haley and his dismissal of every other Republican who opposes him as a RINO. Trump thrives on such conflict; he runs toward every fight. This is catnip for voters fed up with politics as usual, but it turns off plenty of others. It may also cost him a close race if, for example, Haley decides to run as a third-party candidate, offering a haven for disenchanted Republicans.
At bottom, Trump seems incapable of rising above himself. He has his moments, as when he recently told Fox News presenter Laura Ingraham “I don’t care about the revenge thing. … My revenge will be success.” But just when you think he’s figured out how he should act, he goes back to being his brawling self. Authenticity will only take you so far in politics. Be yourself, sure. But also be presidential.
These are our choices America, the ones we knew we’d get and long dreaded. The next eight months will remind no one of Periclean Athens, but they won’t be boring. Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
J. Peder Zane is an editor for RealClearInvestigations and a columnist for RealClearPolitics.
“Why not have a good night chime for our own athletes,” he said, “to let its sweet cadence have a last word with them before they sleep, to speak of love and loyalty and sacrifice for their university, and of hope and inspiration and endeavor for the morrow?”
The celebration of athletics as a bootcamp for good citizenship echoed across American campuses as football caught on. Six years before Stagg called for tucking players in their beds with ringing bells, a Yale faculty committee linked selflessness with the playing field, not the classroom: “The athlete is working for Yale, the student for himself.” University presidents praised football for inculcating fair play, courage, and democratic teamwork.
The university, wrote Abraham Flexner, a historian of higher education, is an “expression of an age, as well as an influence operating upon both present and future.” With that in mind, it is worth asking how college athletics are nurturing civic-mindedness today and how the lessons are spreading throughout our society.
A dismaying answer can be found in a new development in college sports, the online transfer portal. The portal, which in 2018 replaced a more restrictive and cumbersome process, facilitates players leaving their teams for one at a different university. Players announce on the portal they want to leave, and coaches make offers to the ones they want.
This exercise in loyalty-shifting takes place on a grand scale. In the 2023 portal year, 2,303 players from Football Bowl Schools (FBS) transferred. This was an 18% year-over-year increase. To put this another way, 20% of all FBS players swapped jerseys.
Although the 2024 year is not over, 538 FBS players entered the portal on the opening day of the current cycle. That was a 17% increase over the first day of the previous year.
According to the most recent NCAA data, the number of players who entered the portal in 2022 – all sports, all divisions, and both sexes – totaled almost 21,000. This number is larger than the average university student body. About two-fifths of these students do not find a new home. Some stay put; some leave school without a degree.
For coaches, the transfer portal is a way to upgrade the team. For the players, it is about getting more playing time and, they hope, a better financial deal. The latter is facilitated by another new development dating from 2021. NIL, as it is called in shorthand, allows athletes to receive money for selling their name, image, and likeness.
Previously, teams recruited players by offering them scholarships. The rules have loosened on the premise that if colleges can make heaps of money by putting players on the field, players should pocket some of the loot by endorsing products the way professionals do.
Here, too, the statistics are eyepopping. In 1956 the NCAA allowed teams to give players $15 a week in laundry money. Now collegiate football support groups confect seven-figure NIL deals (let’s call them salaries) to attract and retain the most coveted loyal players, plus the supporters throw in other emoluments. Last year the University of Utah’s Crimson Collective advertised that every scholarship player would be given the keys to a new $61,000 Dodge truck, according to the New York Times. The average salary for a starter in a major football school exceeds $100,000.
Collectives such as these operate outside the control of the university. They try to pass themselves off as tax-exempt charitable foundations.
De facto transfer portals also exist for coaches, who portal themselves to grab lavish financial packages, such as the use of two cars to drive to work (who doesn’t need that?) and interest free loans to buy a home, even though their annual paychecks are in the millions. Many loyal coaches are not above jumping ship before the season is over, even if their old team is heading for a bowl.
This is a long way from the days when teams were run by a student manager and practices were called by the team captain, two responsibilities that help develop leadership.
Love, loyalty, and sacrifice have given way to free agency, pay for play, and cheating. This latter virtue comes about when a coach violates a rule that prohibits contacting players before they independently decide to enter the portal. This “tampering,” as it is euphemistically called, involves enticing players into the portal by telling them what deal they would get by transferring their loyalty.
College is meant to be a pathway to life and, indeed, the life lessons learned in big-money collegiate sports appear broadly in our society. We are becoming a transfer portal society writ large. The portal mentality expresses itself in corporate greed, which has led to income inequity. It is expressed in the propensity for victimhood in place of perseverance.
It is expressed, too, in the attitude that loyalty to institutions or democratic values is outmoded. Here the portal metaphor becomes almost literally true, although the portaling is involuntary. Unwanted individuals are shoved out.
Rather than finding ways to work together, progressives and anti-woke militants cancel people who don’t buy into their orthodoxy. School administrators are fired for not taking sides in ideological wars, rather than being celebrated for promoting teamwork and tolerance, which are some of the very best ways to produce good citizens.
Politics, where many Big Men and Big Women on Campus often end up, is the scene of egregious portaling.
Instead of rowing together to pass meaningful legislation, members of the House of Representatives focus on impeachments, something that was once rare, and removing members of the opposition party from committees, which was also rare. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of those removed from a committee assignment in previous Democrat-controlled Congress, learned no useful lessons from it.
Greene has threatened to out-portal House Speaker Mike Johnson if he supports aid for Ukraine. She vowed to do this by calling for a motion to vacate the chair. The motion requires a vote on whether the speaker stays in office. It would require the beleaguered Johnson to struggle to obtain another slim majority vote to stay in office. Little wonder he usually has the bewildered look of a freshman fraternity pledge after a night of hazing.
Then there is Donald Trump. He boasts that if he is reelected, he will indict President Biden as well as investigate (apparently with the same goal in mind) his erstwhile Republican opponent Nikki Haley, his former Attorney General William Barr, and his former chief of staff John Kelly. Trump says he will criminally charge Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg for indicting him. Trump will also portal large numbers of civil servants, whose labors to keep the system running smoothly are inconvenient for his agenda.
The transfer portal is a me-first transaction that unhinges us from our values. It is about expediency, not principles. The circumstances differ depending on the arena in which they occur.
Politics offers myriad opportunities for self-aggrandizement that subverts the democratic principles politics is supposed to serve. Gerrymandering puts representatives in lopsided districts that they can easily win without any effort to compromise with the other party. The primary system favors hyper-partisan candidates not representative of the aspirations of the broad middle of the country. The introduction of television on the floor of the House of Representatives encourages members to treat legislative proceedings as an opportunity for political theater in which they have a starring role.
For collegiate athletics, the contradiction is inherent in the very term itself. Sports programs have as much to do with education as home economics does with economics. Intercollegiate sport is an entertainment mega-business with large television contracts, winsome cheerleaders, and piped-in music to keep the fans pumped up. Education is a quiet endeavor. It is not designed to be watched sitting on a couch with a bottle of beer in one hand and a corndog in the other.
This commercial element appeared in the first ever intercollegiate contest, a rowing meet between Yale and Harvard in 1852 at Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. A railroad company paid all the bills. It wanted to promote tourism to the area.
This was the original sin of college athletics. Seeing the opportunities to invigorate alumni and show up in the rah-rah sports sections of newspapers, university presidents pressed forward. Stagg was given professorial rank at the University of Chicago, one of the most rigorous institutions of higher education in the country.
In the mid-1950s the NCAA marketed the term “student-athlete,” which, historians tell us, had the ancillary benefit of fending off a worker compensation claim over the death of a college football player. Over time the conflation of education and sports became complete. In a poll of Louisiana citizens in the early 2000s, more than half of respondents agreed that a recent national football championship by Louisiana State University “made for a better academic university.”
You cannot blame young athletes for wanting to be paid for butting heads on the field to entertain wealthy alumni sitting in air-conditioned suites. Nor can you blame Dartmouth University basketball players for voting this week to form a union, which the university has resisted. “Dartmouth seems to be stuck in the past,” one of the players said. “It’s time for the age of amateurism to end.”
But you can also question how good the transfer portal is for students generally. As Clemson coach Dabo Swinney has noted, many “will end up with no degrees and make decisions based on the wrong things.”
You can wonder, too, about the values being passed along in locker rooms when some players drive Porsches after practice while others walk back to their dorm. You can ask if the $35 million in student fees and university subsidies given annually to the University of Connecticut athletic department is in the best interest of an institution that was created to do something entirely different.
You can ponder where all of this is heading.
At the very least we should call things what they are. In the case of collegiate sports, it is a business. Then we should ask what institutions of higher learning are doing elsewhere on campus to instill “hope and inspiration and endeavor for the morrow.”
Bettsie Baker Miller is a former Louisiana civil servant, industry association spokeswoman, and community volunteer.
Not only do Republicans continue to beat Biden on the question of the economy, independent voters “equally trust” Biden and former President Trump to protect Social Security, a notion that in more normal times would be considered “absurd.”
At least, that is the assessment of Adam Green, the co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and Data for Progress, who previously urged the White House to put the tired “Bidenomics” term out to pasture.
Now, they are offering the White House a full menu of new talking points backed up by polling to improve the president’s odds. It starts with Social Security.
“Let’s pick a new fight where Republicans can’t even pretend to match our position,” Green said in an interview with RealClearPolitics. The strategy is simple. Because Republicans are not willing to raise taxes on the wealthy, he said, previewing the argument he wants Biden to make, “let’s tie together the idea that they want to cut taxes on billionaires and cut Social Security.”
After initiating that populist turn, according to Green, Biden should stick the landing with a counter agenda of “ensuring billionaires pay their fair share and using that money to protect Social Security.” If the president says words like that in front of Congress and on the campaign trail, he promised, they’d see a double-digit turnaround. Biden has a long way to go.
According to internal polling conducted by Data for Progress last October, independent voters split 31% to 30% between Biden and former President Trump when asked who they trust more to protect Social Security benefits. Among non-college educated voters, the numbers are even worse: 41% prefer Trump over 35% who picked Biden on the issue.
But the progressives brought new, more optimistic polling to the White House. According to a survey conducted in January, Biden can go from losing to Trump 45% to 47% to winning 49% to 42%. How? One simple switch per the memo they shared with Biden’s team: “President Biden and Democrats want to increase taxes on billionaires and protect Social Security from cuts.”
This isn’t exactly groundbreaking stuff. Biden ran on both issues in 2020, and the president has adopted this kind of framing before, most recently when he was in Las Vegas last month. “Instead of protecting Social Security and Medicare like I am,” he told a group of supporters, “Trump and his MAGA friends want to give another multibillion-dollar tax cut to the super-wealthy.”
Green and company insist they aren’t remaking the wheel so much as they’re yoking together two of Biden’s favorite hobby horses. But Republicans might not be so easily cowed on Social Security as they were in years past.
During his last address to Congress, Biden called out “some Republicans” who want “Medicare and Social Security to sunset.” The chamber erupted with boos from the right. “So folks, as we all apparently agree, Social Security and Medicare is off the books now, right?” Biden pivoted as members of both parties cheered. “We’ve got unanimity.”
Trump may have done more to shift the debate on the right, though. He borrowed Democratic talking points to pillory Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as “a wheelchair over the cliff kind of guy” for voting with former House Speaker Paul Ryan to reform entitlements. DeSantis later joined Trump in vowing not to “mess with” Social Security.
More than anything, the progressives argue for reframing the terms of the debate, and they especially don’t want Biden to borrow any vocabulary from economists. Even when presented with quotes from economists showing inflation and unemployment going down, voters still say the economy isn’t working for them.
“We just cannot keep talking about inflation and unemployment rates when that’s not what people are thinking about,” Green said. Biden should ditch macroeconomic verbiage and go micro. Their recommendation: Talk about the price of gas, the price of groceries, and the price of prescriptions.
This kind of targeted conversation may suit Biden, who has gone after corporations for high prices on everything from packaged meat to concert tickets. Green and company want more of that to blunt the advantage Republicans currently enjoy on the economy.
According to their polling conducted in February, when asked if they trust Democrats or Republicans more on the economy, Biden’s party loses by six percentage points, 38-44%. Again, the progressives believe proper framing can get the president out of a jam.
After telling voters that “Democrats support increasing Social Security benefits, increasing taxes on billionaires, and cracking down on corporations that improperly jack up the price of gas, groceries, bank fees, and prescription drug prices,” the numbers flipped. In that light, Democrats suddenly led Republicans 45% to 40%.
The White House has received plenty of advice from allies and outside well-wishers. This year, they may be especially receptive. The State of the Union could easily attract the largest audience Biden enjoys between now and Election Day, and for the first time in his presidential career, he trails his predecessor in the polls.
With a little reframing, Green and company believe Biden can turn that around.
Philip Wegmann is White House correspondent for RealClearPolitics.
On Feb. 13, 2021, then-Senate Majority Leader McConnell declared to his colleagues that insurrectionists attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 "because they had been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on Earth -- because he was angry he'd lost an election." McConnell went on to say, "There is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day."
And yet, because of how McConnell reengineered the process for confirming federal judges, Trump may never suffer any consequences for his actions. Judges ushered through the Senate confirmation process by McConnell may hand the November election to Trump.
Let me explain.
Three members of the Supreme Court -- Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett -- owe their seats to how McConnell gamed their confirmations. Gorsuch took over the seat on the court left vacant by the 2016 death of Justice Antonin Scalia. An hour after Scalia's death was announced, McConnell announced, "This vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president." A nomination that, under the Constitution, belonged to President Barack Obama, went nowhere in the 11 months remaining in his term. Obama's nominee then-Chief Judge Merrick Garland did not even get a hearing.
In his 2016 memoir, McConnell wrote, "The Senate is the only legislative body on earth where a majority is not enough -- most things require sixty votes to pass." McConnell had the 60-vote requirement for Supreme Court justices eliminated in the first months of Trump's term so that Trump's nominee Gorsuch could be confirmed by a majority 54-45 vote.
McConnell's hypocrisy was shown when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died with only four months left in Trump's term. He rammed through Amy Coney Barrett's confirmation only one month after her nomination. In his memoir he'd called the Senate "a place where nothing is decided without a good dose of deliberation and debate."
Without the abolition of the 60-vote requirement, there's no way Brett Kavanaugh would be on the Supreme Court. Accused of lying under oath and of sexual assault, Kavanaugh was confirmed by a 50-48 vote.
By all rights, then, the seat held by Gorsuch should have been Merrick Garland's, the seat held by Kavanaugh should have been held by someone who could have garnered 60 confirming votes and the one held by Barrett by someone nominated by Joe Biden.
How much difference would that have made?
The Supreme Court has just rejected a major threat to another Trump term. Judges in Colorado ruled that Trump should be taken off the state's ballot because of the 14th Amendment's bar on candidates who have "engaged in insurrection or rebellion" against the United States or "given aid or comfort to its enemies." Upon review, five members of the U.S. Supreme Court, including Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, held that a statute must be passed by Congress for such a disqualification to take effect. The Supreme Court ruled less than three months after appeal and less than a month after oral argument.
While the court moved at lightning speed in a case that would keep Trump on the ballot, the Supreme Court is moving molasses-slow in the Washington, D.C. case where Trump has been indicted for a "criminal scheme" to obstruct Joe Biden from taking office. Trump claims absolute immunity for any actions he took as president. His attorney has argued that unless convicted in a Senate trial first, a president would not face criminal charges in the courts even for ordering Navy Seals to assassinate a political rival. There is little chance Trump will win this argument. Trump's appeal was in December, and the oral hearing is not until April. Who knows when the decision will come and the trial can proceed?
Current polls show Donald Trump leading incumbent President Biden in the presidential race. However, an NBC poll released in February shows Biden pulling into the lead if Trump is convicted of a felony before the election. The Supreme Court's procrastination may mean the D.C. case is not decided by then. Trump's strategy is to delay. If he does win the presidency, he can have the Justice Department drop all federal charges.
It sure appears as though the current Supreme Court with its three Trump appointees moves quickly when it will help Trump and slowly when that suits him.
McConnell's influence has reached beyond nominations to the Supreme Court. Of 678 authorized federal district court judgeships, McConnell ensured the confirmation of 179 Trump nominees. Confirmed by a lame duck session of the Senate after Trump was defeated for reelection in November 2020, Judge Aileen Cannon was assigned the case where Trump was indicted for hiding top secret documents at his Mar-a-Lago residence. Federal prosecutors want the case to begin in July. Trump's lawyers argue that it should be postponed until next year. Cannon thus far has shown little urgency in moving forward.
In 2021, McConnell said Trump "kept repeating election lies and praising the criminals" even "with police officers bleeding and broken glass covering Capitol floors." And yet he has just endorsed him for a new term in 2024. Why not? It's his machinations and hypocrisy that might put Trump back in the White House.
Alas, what a legacy.
COPYRIGHT 2024 KEITH RAFFEL
DIST. BY CREATORS
One can sympathize with a parent's desire for predictable schedules. But if they can't be flexible enough to occasionally show up at work an hour early, they may need a different employer.
Many global businesses, particularly in finance, may need everyone together at a time when they can confer with colleagues in other time zones. As the article notes, "early-morning work hours are a hallmark of the finance and healthcare industries as well as education, and a standby of high-powered executives."
But what made 8 a.m. such an outrageously early hour? To a lot of working Americans, 8 a.m. is practically lunchtime. Firefighters, police, nurses and emergency room doctors work the entire night. (Some are lucky if they get home by 8 a.m.) In rural America, the cows have already been milked by 6 a.m.
About 16% of full-time employees work on "alternative shifts," according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Meanwhile, a gust of entitlement blows from some of these squawks about early meetings. "If I have to push myself to an 8 o'clock meeting," 36-year-old Jake Rudy is quoted, "I really had better have a good reason for being there." Keeping his job could be a good reason.
If an early meeting has to happen, Lorna Hagen said, managers should notify workers well in advance. Fair enough, when possible. But speaking in Gen-Z she added, "companies have to be very intentional about what conditions they set."
I once had an editing job that started at 6 a.m. As part of my interview, the boss sternly asked me, "You are going to be here at 6 a.m., right?" I answered, "Yes, that's the job" and was hired.
I've since developed enormous respect for those who rise in the early hours to serve the 9-to-5ers. During a stay in Kirkland, Washington, I recall visiting the only place that served coffee at 6 a.m. It was a downtown Starbucks where two young women served pre-dawn lattes with unforgettable cheer. They had opened the place at 5:30.
As for my 6 a.m. editing job, true, I didn't like having to haul out of bed at 4:30 a.m. to dress and catch a downtown bus to the office. But navigating pre-dawn Manhattan now remains one of my most fabulous dreamscapes.
Because of the early hour, buses were few, so I'd catch the same one every day. I got to know the bus driver (when did he get up?) and also the janitors on their way to opening downtown office buildings. We formed something of a club.
The bus passed through Times Square at around 5:45 a.m. -- a strange bewitching hour where late night met early morning. You could look up at the second floors and see revelers still dancing under disco balls. On street level, meanwhile, a small army of trucks was bringing danishes to the city's coffee shops preparing to open for the morning commuters.
Look, workers can rightly fight off demands to answer non-urgent emails after dinner. But the boundaries they draw have to be consonant with the terms of employment. If someone routinely working 9-to-5 is expected to show up at 8 a.m. for a special meeting, well, that's the job. As the song goes, take it or shove it.
COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM
The Constitution of New York states unequivocally, "every citizen shall be entitled to vote..." This provision's meaning is so obvious that it has been painful to see the far-left liberal New York City Council pass a law that violates it. It is evident that the New York City legislature misplaced their reading glasses, as they would not have enacted a law that contradicts the New York Constitution in such a bizarre way.
The majority opinion, authored by appellate Judge Paul Wooten, stated, "The plain language of this provision provides that the right to vote in 'every election for all officers elected by the people' is available exclusively to citizens."
Unsurprisingly, pro-immigrant organizations denounced the decision, calling it "shameful" and saying it "disenfranchise[s] residents." Disenfranchises? Really? This remark is as illogical as it is absurd. The only people disenfranchised by this law are United States citizens. Voter disenfranchisement entails impeding an individual's ability to exercise their right to vote or diminishing the value of their vote. The reason the Electoral College is reviled by the Left is because, according to their worldview, it confers greater value on specific votes than others, especially in smaller states.
The right to vote is sacred. However, the Left has forgotten that it must be earned, not given. Not earned in the conventional sense of passing a test to acquire, like the racist literacy tests of the past; rather, acquired through enduring the complexities and challenges associated with being a citizen. Becoming a citizen is not a simple task; individuals must either be so lucky as to be born in the United States, or endure a laborious and sometimes yearslong application process. There are discernible indicators in both processes that demonstrate an individual is prepared and deserving of the right to vote.
A person born in the United States has lived and grown in that country. They have gone through the government-mandated educational system and complied with the laws of this country for their entire lives; they have fulfilled their responsibilities through compliance and, in the case of some, hardship brought upon by our laws. Individuals who obtain citizenship have demonstrated their readiness to undertake substantial obligations and sacrifices to integrate into a foreign nation. They have sworn allegiance to a new nation after navigating a complex legal system, and many have become proficient in a foreign language.
Nothing of the sort applies to noncitizens. There are undoubtedly many noncitizens loyal to this country, but they, like everyone else, must undergo the same process to demonstrate that they have earned the right to vote. It is inequitable to accord equal weight to the votes of transient individuals who enter the country for economic purposes, return their funds to their country of origin, or who are mere public charges, in comparison to those who have sworn allegiance to the United States and who have gone through the process to become a citizen.
Through the news, we tragically witness the disloyal individuals who come here and commit heinous acts daily. Migrants assaulting police officers, MS-13 gangs wreaking havoc on the population, migrants stabbing innocent people in Georgia. These tragedies have become routine occurrences. Should these individuals, whose sole intention is to cause harm or act selfishly, be permitted to vote? Undoubtedly not. Should individuals who immigrate in pursuit of economic prosperity gain the right to vote? Eventually, but only after enduring the same trials and tribulations that each and every American has also endured.
The foundation of the United States is immigration. Each of us is an immigrant in some capacity. Our right to vote has been acquired through either our unwavering allegiance to the United States or our successful completion of the trials and systems established by the country. If an individual claims your vote lacks significance, you should explain the arduous journey you undertook to earn that privilege and the actions you undertook as a citizen. It just might convince someone to reconsider their position.
COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM
At age 82, McConnell offered, "One of life's most under-appreciated talents is to know when it's time to move on to life's next chapter."
President Joe Biden, 81, and former President Donald Trump, 77, should watch and learn.
Trump frequently has dismissed McConnell as a RINO (Republican in Name Only). That term used to be reserved for candidates deemed to be insufficiently conservative, but now the Trump base lobs it at any Republican who doesn't go all in for the man who lost the 2020 presidential contest.
Only Trumpers haven't fared as well in elections since Trump lost the White House. Apparently, the new GOP establishment isn't into winning anymore.
McConnell's most consequential moment came in 2016. After Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died suddenly, President Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland, the present attorney general, to fill the new court vacancy.
McConnell, then top dog in the Senate, promptly announced that the Senate would not hold hearings for Garland before the November election. It was a move that infuriated the left -- and encouraged evangelical voters to turn out the vote lest Democrats take control of the nation's top court.
Today the balance of the Supreme Court is 6-3, with a majority of justices picked by GOP presidents. For that, you can thank Mitch McConnell.
McConnell is a grown-up on foreign policy. He sees the value in funding Ukraine's defense against Russian aggression and supporting NATO.
The easier path would be to nod in agreement to Trump's isolationist tendencies. But McConnell told The Washington Post, "On this one, I'm motivated more by what's the right thing for America, and I'm willing to take the heat."
As former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley suspended her presidential campaign Wednesday, she noted that Congress has too many followers and not enough leaders.
McConnell is the exception. He is a longtime practitioner of the long game -- a phrase he used in the title of his 2019 memoir to describe the tenacity and planning required to win inside the beltway.
In "The Long Game: A Memoir," McConnell credits his mother especially for instilling in him the discipline required to heal and walk after he was stricken with polio at age 2.
There's little love between McConnell and Trump. They haven't spoken in three years, since McConnell criticized Trump for being "practically and morally responsible for provoking" the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Approximately 335 participants have been tried and sentenced to periods of incarceration, according to the Department of Justice.
And yet, McConnell endorsed Trump on Wednesday, after Haley's announcement.
I was disappointed, because it's apparent McConnell doesn't think much of the former president.
But then, as I thought about it, that's who McConnell is. He wants a Republican president. He wants the GOP to take back the Senate and control both houses. And he'll do what it takes to win.
As McConnell told The Washington Post, "The most important number is 51. I've never tried to broker what kind of Republican. What I always am interested in is: Can they win?"
COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM
Debra J. Saunders is a fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Chapman Center for Citizen Leadership. Contact her at dsaunders@discovery.org.
Crystal, who eventually left Turning Point to attend law school and was recently offered a coveted clerkship with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, had other things on her mind when Mayer’s story was published. Her grandmother – a maternal figure who primarily raised her – had terminal cancer at the time and would pass soon after. Amid such grief, and unbeknownst to Crystal, Mayer’s story would become the catalyst for a years-long effort by the mainstream media to exile her from public life.
The cruelty of the attacks on Crystal, which have unfolded in waves over the last seven years, has become so relentless that it was called out this week by Steven Lubet, a prominent progressive law professor at Northwestern University, in the opinion section of Slate Magazine – a left-wing publication. “Let Crystal Canton move on,” Lubet wrote, condemning the ongoing character assassination against her as “a classic demonstration of punching down” and “a campaign to make her an unemployable pariah.”
I first met Crystal at a small party thrown by her roommate in 2019. There was still a cake in their kitchen celebrating her recent admission to law school. Within a few hours, Crystal shared details of her heartbreaking cancellation with me: She had worked for Turning Point and was falsely accused in the pages of The New Yorker of sending racist text messages.
The episode derailed her life. Friends and colleagues no longer spoke to her. She became something of a pariah even in conservative circles, where, regardless of whether people believed the accusations, many were terrified of being associated with someone publicly accused of racism. It was the type of genuinely traumatic experience you hardly want to recount to someone you’ve just met, but better than letting them discover through a Google search.
In the years since, Crystal and I have become close friends, allowing me a front row seat to much of the fallout from the media’s ongoing smear campaign against her. We were together when Washington Post associate editor Ruth Marcus published her first in a series of opinion pieces tracking Crystal’s career developments and arguing that she was an irredeemable racist who should be permanently relegated to the fringes of society. High profile articles along these lines materialized with each of Crystal’s professional achievements: starting law school, securing a prestigious federal clerkship, and now, accepting the Supreme Court clerkship with Justice Thomas.
I hesitate to dignify the accusations of racism with a response, but, from the five years or so that I’ve known Crystal, I can agree categorically with the assessment of Justice Thomas, who, if anyone needs reminding, grew up under segregation in the Jim Crow South: “I know Crystal Clanton and I know bigotry. … Bigotry is antithetical to her nature and character.”
The texts Crystal was accused of sending are bizarrely out of character both in content and tone, and evidence has become public in the years since casting serious doubts on the allegations.
Crystal is a kind, honest, wonderful person who has been unfairly maligned throughout most of her adult life. I suspect she’s a far better person than many of her detractors in the media, who have spent the better part of a decade obsessively smearing her.
Attempts at personal ruin through lies and deception are the blood sport of an unfortunate number of politicians, pundits, and press alike. Such calumny is as old as civilization, and anyone who achieves a high level of distinction in public life knows to brace for it, no matter how wrong it may be. Still, it is especially sad and dehumanizing when this kind of wrath is inflicted on a bystander to hurt another. Crystal has now faced that twice – in 2017, when Jane Mayer was seeking to destroy Turning Point founder Charlie Kirk and his organization, and since then, as Mayer and Marcus have both sought to demonize Justice Thomas by associating Crystal with him.
It’s obvious that Crystal has never really been the target – manufacturing stories about a young lady making her way through the early stages of professional life is just a convenient way to get at the other “big fish” with whom the detractors disagree. For Marcus and Mayer, two journalists whose highly talented and ideologically driven daughters frequently brush with prominent people and institutions themselves, you would think they would understand the recklessness and injustice of this kind of behavior.
Laurel Duggan is a Washington, D.C.-based writer covering culture and politics.
“We want to have unity,” Trump told a crowd gathered at Mar-a-Lago, “and we’re going to have unity, and it’s going to happen very quickly.” On the eve of perhaps the greatest political comeback in modern American history, his remarks were relatively subdued by his standards. He never mentioned his former UN ambassador, Nikki Haley, almost as if the competition did not exist and a third nomination was guaranteed all along.
His control of the GOP will soon be complete, a fact that allies and Trump confidants tell RealClearPolitics reflects an uncomfortable reality for whatever small pockets of resistance still exist on the right. Trump did not regain control, they insist. He only strengthened his grasp.
“It was always President Trump’s party,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said of the last four years, “and it never changed.” The only difference is her colleagues on Capitol Hill, the ones who doubted him or expressed interest in alternatives. “All those dumbasses,” she said, “are finally waking up.”
The vanguard of Trump 2.0, Greene came into Congress pledging fealty to the former president. “They tried to call me fringe,” recalled the Georgia Republican who began her time in office right after his exit and then achieved her own celebrity in the wake of Jan. 6 as “the RINOs reared their ugly head and tried to regain control.” But the insurgency was short lived, and soon during his exile, colleagues started asking her for selfies. And then advice.
“Now they come up and ask,” she reported, “‘how do I get ahold of Trump? Do you know who I should contact on his team? I’d really like to go down to Mar-a-Lago to endorse him.’”
Greene, perhaps the most loyal MAGA lieutenant in Congress, finds the ordeal understandable but “pathetic.” As Trump continued his march through the early states, more and more members of the House GOP caucus “are bending the knee trying to make amends.”
But there was a time when Republicans could be forgiven for believing the fever of Trump was broken. It was in the immediate wake of Jan. 6. Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy reportedly vowed to push him to resign, and even the Senate minority leader quietly toyed with impeachment. That day, a little-known freshman from South Carolina summed up the mood. “All of those accomplishments,” Rep. Nancy Mace said of Trump’s first term on her first day in Congress, “are wiped out today.”
In those days, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts recalls of a perception he believes was mistaken, “people assumed that perhaps President Trump's control over the movement was waning, particularly before he officially announced his run for the presidency again.”
And then a mutiny ended McCarthy, McConnell announced his resignation, and Mace endorsed Trump, citing the same record she once insisted had gone up in smoke on Jan. 6. On the verge of his third GOP nomination, Roberts said “it’s obvious Trump never lost control.”
Allies and observers make a distinction here. There is the official party apparatus, conservative media, and the donor class: an amorphous lump they call the “elite.” And then, voters. Of that latter group, Roberts said, “Everyday Americans on the center right always believed strongly that Trump was still the leader of the conservative movement and of the country.”
The elite, “almost to a person,” said longtime Trump confidant Steve Bannon, “abandoned him, but not the base.” The conservative activists and the high propensity votes, “the deplorables,” he said, repurposing the infamous Hillary Clinton slight, “they were with Trump 100% and were just waiting for a call to arms.”
“The key to all this,” the one thing necessary to keep his political career alive, Bannon added, was for Trump to “be adamant that the election was stolen.”
The call to arms first came at CPAC in March of 2021 when the former president claimed the 2020 election was “rigged,” vowed that his political “journey” was “far from over,” and said Biden had moved the country from “America first to America last.” It was what former Vice President Pence would later describe as “populism unmoored to conservative principles,” and the base loved it.
By refusing to concede, Trump tacitly refused the mantle of a former president, a factual yet verboten title inside the halls of Mar-a-Lago. Instead, by disputing the election, Trump presented himself to his supporters not as a former president but as a president-in-waiting.
Despite dozens of court cases, and the testimony of allies like former Attorney General Bill Barr, the claim has become GOP orthodoxy among voters. Six in 10 Republicans, by some counts, believe 2020 was illegitimate. “Knowing the scale of people that think it was stolen, if he wants another shot, he was gonna get another shot,” Bannon said. “That's just logic.”
And Trump deployed all the perks, pageantry, and powers given to former presidents to cultivate an image of an incumbent. He already led a massive populist movement, and though out of office, he clung to the levers of power that directed the party. Mar-a-Lago became a MAGA clearinghouse as politicians in power sought his permission and candidates courted his endorsement.
Even in exile, Trump exercised a veto, inserting himself into everything from the McCarthy mutiny to debates over foreign aid to Ukraine. “He is the leading voice, the most influential voice, and his voice carries the most weight,” admitted House Freedom Caucus Chair Bob Good of Virginia, who incurred Trump’s wrath by daring to endorse Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. “It hasn’t changed since he was elected in 2016, and it has certainly been the same now for seven years.”
DeSantis once seemed capable of breaking that stranglehold. At least on paper, the conservative governor offered an answer to the question of whether Republicans would accept Trumpism without Trump. He set out to become unimpeachable on the issues, offering social and fiscal conservatives the kind of policies they had only previously dreamed of. It didn’t work: He was overcome by events.
Trump refused to debate; the pandemic that had made DeSantis famous receded from memory; and a myriad of legal challenges made the frontrunner a martyr overnight. The perfect storm, DeSantis told RCP in the closing days of his campaign was “beyond my control.” He dropped out after a disappointing second place finish in Iowa but not after calling Haley “a repackaged form of warmed-over corporatism.”
“Trump always had a majority of the party even at his weakest,” said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, “but it became a crushing dominance as people looked at the alternatives and asked who was strong enough to truly withstand the corruption and dishonesty of the deep state and force profound change.”
The race seemed competitive until legal indictments provided a boon to the former president. Ahead of his first arraignment last year, John McLaughlin, Trump’s own pollster, admitted in an interview with RCP that “this is really helping us.” This was accurate. Trump led the RealClearPolitics Average at the beginning of April by 17 points. After his arraignment, no challenger came within 30 points of the frontrunner.
“He was always going to win, but the lawfare,” Greene said, referring to the 91 state and federal counts against Trump, “caused a lot of people to just say, ‘Fuck you.’ All the indictments did was solidify his support even further.”
Trump converted his dizzying and confusing legal trouble into political currency by warning his supporters that his enemies “are not coming after me,” rather “they are coming after you, and I’m just standing in the way.” The jiu-jitsu created a phenomenon whereby he made common cause with an aggrieved base while turning his weaknesses into strengths. Explained Roberts, “Trump is the icon of what the regime wants to do to us.”
Haley could not pierce a loyalty calcified by nearly a decade of scandal and drama. “It's basically he fought for them,” she said trying to make sense of his most ardent supporters. “They want to fight for him, even though they know he may not win.” The last woman standing, she was the only candidate to meaningfully challenge the MAGA juggernaut from the center, even telling reporters before Super Tuesday that she was fulfilling the prescription offered in the infamous RNC autopsy.
“Look at the rallies, these people are actually coming in. It didn't happen with Mitt,” Haley said of Utah Sen. Mitt Romney who failed to defeat former President Obama, triggering the 2012 retrospective that Trump later tore to pieces as he remade the GOP in his own image. “It didn't happen after Mitt. It’s happening with us,” she bragged of how her supporters included all races as well as “gay people” and “trans people.”
Whatever tent Haley constructed, it collapsed under the weight of Trump. While she won over a significant share of the vote in early states, Haley only managed to win two contests, the Washington, D.C., and Vermont primaries. She watched the results roll in at a private victory party with campaign staff and made no public remarks Tuesday. And early Wednesday morning, Haley announced her plan to exit the race, conceding defeat but not immediately disclosing any endorsement decision.
For many, Haley represented the old guard of the party. She was the last remnant of the faltering Reagan-Bush coalition, a conservative fusionism quickly going extinct. McCarthy is gone from Capitol Hill, and McConnell announced last week he will soon step down from leadership. Republican National Committee Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel will also soon depart her post.
“This is what winning looks like. We're making progress, and we’re in a better place institutionally,” said Russ Vought, Trump’s former OMB Chief and the CEO of Center for Renewing America. He said the latest Trump Revolution, in its size and scope, rivals the takeover of the 2010 Tea Party as “the decision makers are more aligned with where the grassroots are.” All of this, Vought added, was a testament to Trump, who “never lost his grasp on the Republican party or the conservative movement.” Despite the challenges, he concluded, “the result was a tightened grip.”
While Trump now calls for unity, a kumbaya moment may not be in order. His campaign has vowed to blacklist staff who worked for rivals, and the former president warned donors that if they gave to Haley they would “be permanently barred from the MAGA camp.” The resentment runs deep as Trump allies contemplate dollars and days not spent focused on defeating Biden.
“We've spent two fucking years and $390 million dollars only to limit our possibilities at taking back the White House. To me that is an unforgivable sin,” Bannon said of time and money poured into the primary. “I will never forgive these people because, we’re going to win it back, but it’s so much harder than it needs to be.” He makes little allowance for the traditional primary process because “this is not the 1950s, and it’s not Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.”
“These are not normal times. They stole a presidential election, and two thirds of the fucking voters that go to the polls, and work, and are activists, believes that to the core of their being. They believe in it actually as much or more than Donald Trump,” Bannon added of what he sees as a betrayal by Trump’s rivals, “and that's where they never got.”
Once held at arm's length by some in her caucus, Greene now finds herself in high demand. She says her colleagues now seek her counsel as they adjust to Trump’s total control of the GOP. “He radicalized the Republican party,” the Georgia firebrand said of the immediate of effect of Trump’s second coming, and “eradicated the RINOs.”
For anyone in her party not convinced by Trump’s resounding victory, Greene warned with a laugh, “the beatings will continue until morale improves.” After all, it is still Trump’s party.
Philip Wegmann is White House correspondent for RealClearPolitics.