RealClearPolitics Articles

The winter storm that recently devastated Texas, leaving millions without power, water, and heat, is the latest example of why we need a renewed and serious national focus on infrastructure. For years, people have discussed our crumbling roads and bridges and called for the federal government to prioritize investing in infrastructure, which, as a concept, has strong bipartisan support. The pandemic sharpened this focus by broadening our definition of infrastructure: Remote schooling has highlighted the need for improved broadband and greater equality of access to digital communications; the...

FRIEDENS, Pennsylvania -- Imagine if you had a job. A good job, one that required skill and critical thinking and had a broad impact in the community where you lived. A job you didn't just show up to do. It was a job you were good at, and because of it, you were able to provide a roof over your family's head, put your children through college or help pay for their wedding, and once a year, it gave you the ability to carve out a week or two to take the family on vacation. Now imagine that job becomes the center of political debate, one far removed from the Laurel Mountains, where this town...

Thursday, in its first military action, the Biden Pentagon sent two U.S. F-15Es to strike targets of Kataib Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed Iraqi militia just inside the eastern border of Syria. The U.S. strikes were in retaliation for a missile attack on a U.S. base in Irbil, capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, which killed a contractor and wounded a U.S. soldier. "We're confident that the target was being used by the same Shia militia that conducted the strikes," said Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. But Democratic Sens. Tim Kaine and Chris Murphy want to know where President Joe Biden got his...

Donald Trump was never forever. The former president is 74, obese and the subject of serious criminal investigations. Resurfacing after disgracefully inciting a rampage on the Capitol, he addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference. The delivery was tired and the grievances now boring. The big difference is he's no longer in power. Thanks to Trump, Democrats now hold the presidency and majorities in both houses of Congress. That the authoritarian clown show no longer threatens America makes it considerably more entertaining. The speech was predictably heavy on attacks against the...

The great tragedy of our time is that liberals vote left. Virtually every value liberals have held for a century is now held by conservatives and scorned by leftists. Therefore, America, in serious jeopardy of being lost, will be saved when people convince the liberals in their life that the left, not the conservative, is their enemy. This process begins by establishing whether a friend or relative is a liberal or a leftist. If it turns out that he or she is a liberal, it is worth engaging in respectful dialogue on the issues of the day. If the friend or relative is a leftist, you can...

NEW YORK (AP) — Democrats across the country celebrated New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo as the face of governing competence as President Donald Trump fumbled his administration’s response to the exploding pandemic last year. Now, the Democratic governor is struggling through a sexual harassment scandal that’s testing the limits of his party’s support as Democrats grapple with one of the first political headaches of the post-Trump era. So far, few Democrats have come to Cuomo’s rescue. But they haven’t explicitly condemned him, either. Both of New York’s...

Good morning, it’s Tuesday, March 2, 2021. Today is the 117th birthday of Dr. Seuss, real name Theodor Geisel, who made a career out of making children laugh and adults think. And sometimes the other way around. He certainly got political satirist Art Buchwald chuckling, and thinking, in 1974 as the Watergate scandal consumed Washington. Ted Geisel sent the liberal columnist a Dr. Seuss book he’d written two years earlier titled “Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now!” In the copy the author sent to Buchwald, he exchanged Marvin Mooney’s name for Richard...

Dear Yoshiro Mori, I can’t imagine what you’ve been doing ever since you were forced to resign from your position as president of the Tokyo Olympics. Twiddling your thumbs? As the world now knows, your swift downfall came after your ill-advised remarks, made after a plan was announced to double the proportion of women on the board of the Japanese Olympic Committee. “Women are very competitive,” you noted. “When one of them raises her hand, they probably think they have to say something, too. And then everyone says something.” It’s true, women are...

Over at MSNBC, they are calling those who think like me “Dead-Enders,” people who will follow Donald Trump into the bunker and die with him. It’s supposed to be an insult. That’s all right. I’ve been called worse -- domestic terrorist, white supremacist, racist. None of those slurs are accurate, but they sure do hurt. Which is the point. My smart-beyond-her-ninth-grade-education mother warned me about the power of political name-calling a long time ago. Back in the 1960s when I was a precocious ninth-grader myself, my mom told me never to join the Students for a...

After the Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, concluded that a $15-an-hour minimum wage provision could not be part of a budget reconciliation bill, House progressives -- including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Pramila Jayapal and Ro Khanna -- all sung from the same song sheet: an “unelected parliamentarian” should not be allowed to block a minimum wage increase. They want the parliamentarian overruled or fired. But how can progressives in good conscience suddenly treat unelected government officials as illegitimate? Progressives have defended unelected...

Good morning, it’s Monday, March 1, 2021. On this date in 1872, Ulysses S. Grant signed legislation preserving the splendors of Yellowstone. In the process, President Grant helped create the template for a vast national park system that Western writer Wallace Stegner once described as “the best idea” America ever produced. Although I dearly love Yellowstone and America’s other “crown jewels,” including Yosemite (the first national park I visited as a boy, and a place set aside, during the Civil War, by Abraham Lincoln), I’d describe freedom as...

WASHINGTON (AP) — As Congress begins debate this week on sweeping voting and ethics legislation, Democrats and Republicans can agree on one thing: If signed into law, it would usher in the biggest overhaul of U.S. elections law in at least a generation. House Resolution 1, Democrats’ 791-page bill, would touch virtually every aspect of the electoral process — striking down hurdles to voting erected in the name of election security, curbing partisan gerrymandering and curtailing the influence of big money in politics. Republicans see those very measures as threats...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The House approved a $1.9 trillion pandemic relief bill that was championed by President Joe Biden, the first step in providing another dose of aid to a weary nation as the measure now moves to a tense Senate. “We have no time to waste,” Biden said at the White House after the House passage early Saturday. “We act now — decisively, quickly and boldly — we can finally get ahead of this virus. We can finally get our economy moving again. People in this country have suffered far too much for too long.” The new president’s vision...

To illustrate the flaws of socialist thinking about wealth distribution, legendary free market economist Milton Friedman was fond of telling people that the economy isn’t a pizza, with only so many slices available to be divided fairly among everyone. In reality, Friedman explained, the economy is technically limitless — one person’s having X amount of money does not mean that there is only Y amount of money left over for everyone else. However, while a pizza may not be totally applicable as a metaphor for the economy as a whole, it is an excellent metaphor for a small...

In the weeks since Donald Trump departed the White House -- and during the four years he resided there – we were constantly told that conservatism is in crisis. Then again, crisis seems to be a recurring condition for conservatism, or, more precisely, for the American conservative movement. By and large, these crises have proved fertile. American conservatism’s resilience over the last seven decades -- its ability to shift weight and adjust focus to achieve a suitable balance -- suggests that what appears as calamitous disarray involves salutary adaptation, sometimes painful and...

WASHINGTON -- Democratic House members are using the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill riot and the coronavirus pandemic in a scary effort to censor conservatives -- and get Big Media to do their dirty work for them. Remember when the left believed in more speech as the solution to bad speech? Those days are gone. On Monday, Reps. Anna Eshoo and Jerry McNerney, both California Democrats, sent letters to CEOs for cable providers, satellite providers and other platforms to voice their issues with conservative news outlets Fox News, Newsmax and One America News Network. The letters asked executives of such...

In the face of congressional inaction, it is time for the states to lead on citizen equality and make America a “more perfect union.” One way states can begin doing this is by passing legislation supporting the self-determination of all U.S. territories, and in the case of Puerto Rico -- which has repeatedly voted for statehood -- to support its admission into the union on equal footing with all other states. Such moral leadership from the states is essential to correcting America’s historic wrongs that have relegated those living in U.S. territories to second-class...

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden said Friday that Iran should view his decision to authorize U.S. airstrikes in Syria as a warning that it can expect consequences for its support of militia groups that threaten U.S. interests or personnel. “You can’t act with impunity. Be careful,” Biden said when a reporter asked what message he had intended to send with the airstrikes, which the Pentagon said destroyed several buildings in eastern Syria but were not intended to eradicate the militia groups that used them to facilitate attacks inside Iraq. Administration...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States launched airstrikes in Syria on Thursday, targeting facilities near the Iraqi border used by Iranian-backed militia groups. The Pentagon said the strikes were retaliation for a rocket attack in Iraq earlier this month that killed one civilian contractor and wounded a U.S. service member and other coalition troops. The airstrike was the first military action undertaken by the Biden administration, which in its first weeks has emphasized its intent to put more focus on the challenges posed by China, even as Mideast threats persist. Biden’s...