Yet the much-praised Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, has demonstrably weakened the effort to fight COVID-19.
During the critical initial weeks of the virus's spread, Tedros parroted Chinese propaganda. He falsely assured a complacent world that the virus was likely not transmissible between humans and did not warrant travel bans. That Tedros was the first WHO director not to have a medical degree was seldom cited by the media.
Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel is known to the public for his past advocacy of the Obama administration's Affordable Care Act. Although he now advises 77-year-old presidential candidate Joe Biden, Emanuel once wrote an article for The Atlantic titled "Why I hope to die at 75," contending that that life after age 75 is, and should be, mostly over -- now an eerie idea in a time of a pandemic that targets the elderly.
Emanuel has often weighed in on the COVID-19 pandemic, sometimes in overly pessimistic fashion by suggesting that some acquired collective immunity and a viable vaccine were not likely to come soon.
Yet Emanuel also has been largely exempt from media criticism. No reporters have questioned his epidemiological expertise despite his background as an oncologist specializing in breast cancer.
The esteemed Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has given conflicting advice on the use of masks, quarantining and the methods of viral transmission. Yet such inconsistency is either ignored or chalked up by the media to the usual learning curve of dealing with a new epidemic.
So why -- other than politics -- is there now a concerted media attack on Dr. Scott Atlas, an adviser to the Trump administration on COVID-19 policy?
Atlas has had a distinguished career as one of world's top neuroradiologists. He has become a national expert on public health policy, especially in the cost-benefit analysis of government programs.
After COVID-19 arrived in the U.S., Atlas consistently warned that government must follow science, not politics, in doing the least amount of harm to its people. He has reminded us that those under 65 rarely die from COVID-19, and that those infected who are younger than 20 usually do not show any serious symptoms.
Accordingly, Atlas has urged the states to focus more resources on the most vulnerable -- those over 65, who account for the vast majority of COVID-19 deaths -- and allow younger Americans to re-enter schools and the workforce with appropriate caution.
Atlas has also warned that the available test data on COVID-19's infectiousness, spread and morbidity must be handled with care, given that those who feel sick are more like to get tested. He argues that those with some natural protection from the virus, either through antibodies from an asymptotic past infection or through T-cells, may be a far larger group than previously thought.
But most importantly, Atlas has warned that government must be careful not to endanger Americans with draconian lockdowns that curtail needed medical examinations, procedures and treatments.
Just as dangerous as the disease may be quarantine-related spikes in mental illness, substance abuse, child and spousal abuse, and depression from lost livelihoods. Children may be suffering irreparable harm from being locked down and kept out of school.
Atlas has shown that these policy choices unfortunately entail bad options and even worse ones, rather than good choices and even better alternatives. He has not played down the dangers of COVID-19 but rather has reminded us to look at scientific data that often belies media sensationalism.
Many in the media, some of his former colleagues at Stanford Medical School and some other Stanford faculty members have claimed that Atlas -- a colleague of mine at the Hoover Institution -- has acted unprofessionally. They allege that he has downplayed the lethality of the virus, implying that he is aiding the administration's efforts to ease out of the quarantine.
Yet few if any of these complainants have cited supporting evidence, either from what Atlas has written or said. Often the accusations turn puerile, suggesting that Atlas can't be a public health expert because he was originally a neuroradiologist.
In fact, rarely reported is that many members of the Stanford community are honored by its medical school receiving global acclaim for its diversity of expert scientific opinion on the virus.
Nobel Prize-winning biophysicist Michael Levitt of Stanford, along with several stellar Stanford epidemiologists, have been praised worldwide for their careful critiques of often media-generated misconceptions -- especially on the overreliance on COVID-19 positive test data to calibrate viral prevalence and morbidly.
How ironic that some critics fault Atlas for not following science, but they do so in a fashion that is completely ... well, unscientific.
(C) 2020 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.
But first, some definitions behind that theory, which posits that shortly before Election Day, God forbid, there is a catastrophic, history-changing, national or international event not intentionally perpetrated by either campaign. Such events could include a debilitating cyberattack; a natural disaster of biblical portions (even more than the current California wildfires, i.e., “the big one”); a nuclear bomb detonation or an attack on the scale of 9/11 or Pearl Harbor; the death of Donald Trump or Joe Biden, or a major health crisis that forces one of them to drop out of the race; a 2008-type financial meltdown; a zombie apocalypse; or something unimaginable.
Yet, even then, would there be a voting shift?
What follows are the reasons why an October surprise is as outdated as direct-mail solicitations.
Voters are numb to “surprises.”
We live in a nonstop, 24/7, breaking news environment where surprises are common, everyday occurrences. Thus, Americans are increasingly incapable of being surprised by political shenanigans. Moreover, behaviors that voters are willing to accept (if grudgingly) from leaders has significantly widened.
Voters are exhausted by all the 2020 calamities.
Given that a pandemic has unraveled every aspect of our economy, society, culture, and well-being, voters are battle weary. Therefore, an October surprise could be viewed as just one more thing piled on. After all, only 29.3% of Americans believe that our nation is heading in the right direction.
Increased early voting diminishes an October surprise.
In September, eight states began early in-person voting. Moreover, an NBC News-sponsored poll found:
“Fifty-two percent of adults say they will vote early — with 19 percent saying they will vote early in person and 33 percent more saying they will vote by mail. About a third of adults, 33 percent, say they will vote in person on Election Day, and 11 percent say they might not vote at all.”
Increased early voting is a phenomenon that radically changes the concept of Election Day and the prospects of an influential October surprise.
September was the new October.
The events of September could resonate like one big October surprise.
The death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the naming of her replacement launched an epic culture-war battle that was long anticipated -- though NOT after early voting had begun. Talk about a “surprise” factor with vast potential: President Trump’s nominee, Judge Amy Coney Barrett, galvanizes both sides at the most critical time when all voters had started paying attention to the election and making plans to vote.
The same galvanization applies to the leaking of Trump’s 2016 and 2017 federal tax returns with the revelation that he only paid $750 in each of those years. This is a classic “October surprise” that Team Biden is using to amplify its ongoing strategic message of “Scranton vs. Park Avenue.” For Democrats in general, Trump’s “$750” is the perfect wedge issue that fits on a campaign button and crystallizes what they believe is his character as a corrupt businessman and failed president.
The question remains whether either of these September events will move the needle, given that 86% of voters had already made up their mind (and that was before Tuesday night’s debate)
And yes, that debate…
What could qualify as an October surprise is if Joe Biden decides to skip the next two debates. Watch RealClearPolitics upcoming poll averages for that answer. Biden may bow out if he thinks he is far enough ahead and does not need to participate in what was widely considered a national disgrace.
(What is clear is that with the advent of widespread early voting, the 2024 presidential debates should occur before that process commences.)
But October still is October.
Saying that the nation is a tinderbox is an understatement, with many unanswered questions hanging in the air.
Could there be legal maneuvering somewhere that could impact the election? (Akin to James Comey’s announcement in late October 2016 of a reopened Clinton email investigation, suggesting to some that he threw the election to Trump?)
Will former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale be accused of money laundering $170 million of campaign funds (possibly impacting late fundraising for Team Trump)?
Could the post office melt down from an avalanche of ballots?
Will Trump continue to denigrate the election process, causing further uncertainty among voters?
Will there be evidence of massive mail-in ballot fraud?
What percentage of mail-in ballots will be rejected in key battleground states?
Will our enemies perceive weakness and launch some aggressive action that requires a military response?
Will the Senate confirm Amy Comey Barrett just days before the election?
With October surprises always expected -- but not always what people expect -- can our nation survive through November without imploding?
The concept of a “traditional” October surprise could be outdated due to overall news numbing, early voting, and entrenched extreme polarization. For example, a devastating surprise came in 2000 when, just days before the election, a decades-old DUI charge against George W. Bush came to light. As Politico put it, “[Karl] Rove believes that without the DUI news, Bush would have won the popular vote, and the mess in Florida would have been avoided.”
But now, would a DUI charge or its equivalent even matter?
Still, there exists the potential for upheaval because, after all, it is 2020 and unfortunately, our nation is emotionally and financially depressed, locked and loaded, and expecting to fight for what is “right” and our “rights.”
Welcome to October, and God help our nation!
Myra Adams is a media producer and writer with numerous national credits. She served on the McCain Ad Council during the GOP nominee’s 2008 campaign and on the 2004 Bush campaign creative team. She can be reached at MyraAdams01@gmail.com or @MyraKAdams on Twitter.
But the very best observation came from an undecided voter in a focus group led by Republican pollster Frank Luntz. Ruthie from Pennsylvania said that debating Trump was like trying to "win an argument with a crackhead."
Go to YouTube and search for videos of arguments with crackheads. You'll see the same unhinged and chaotic aggression, the constant interruptions, that Trump unleashed on both Joe Biden and the debate moderator, Chris Wallace of Fox News. Go look at those videos.
Cocaine users are known for increased irritability, restlessness and paranoia, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. They often become talkative, lack empathy and exhibit a false sense of confidence and power.
We have no evidence that Trump is hooked on crack cocaine or any other controlled substance. But Ruthie's analogy was on to something.
A Harvard Medical School research team led by Hans Breiter found similarities in the brain between coke addiction and a euphoria that leads investors to extreme risk-taking and bad decisions. The newly revealed tax documents show a Trump real estate empire facing collapse.
The headline was that alleged billionaire Trump managed to pay federal tax bills of only $750 in 2016 and 2017 -- and he paid no federal income taxes in 10 of the 15 years before that. Trump did make a ton of money off "The Apprentice" but offset those earnings with his real estate losses, hence no taxes to pay.
The more shocking discovery was the disastrous management of his property portfolio. It was on this that he weaved the illusion of being a wildly successful businessman.
People in and around Atlantic City are less surprised. Starting in 1991, a string of his casinos went under. In a 2009 bankruptcy filing, Trump claimed more than $700 million in business losses. That may lie behind the IRS audit of a $72.9 million tax refund he received but may not have been entitled to.
Manic borrowing and lousy real estate investments resulted in Trump businesses filing six bankruptcies in all. Contractors, creditors and investors got stiffed. "I do play with the bankruptcy laws," he said. "They're very good for me."
This is quite an impressive failure for a man who inherited $413 million (in today's dollars) from his father. Where did that go?
The biggest worry right now is that Trump is personally on the hook for more than $400 million in debt that's coming due soon. To whom does he owe this money? We know he's done much business with Russians and will not criticize Russian President Vladimir Putin. He wouldn't even pursue U.S. intelligence reports that Russia was paying the Taliban to kill U.S. troops.
As for the presidential debate, it wasn't a debate. Trump just kept interrupting Biden and steamrolling Wallace. His cascade of lies amid nonstop barking defeated the best efforts to check him on facts. Wallace couldn't control the pandemonium, though he tried.
There's no point in having more debates like that. Perhaps the moderator could be able to turn off the mic of unruly participants. Still, what is to be gained from another crackhead-style Trump spectacle?
Ruthie says she's now going to vote for Biden. She doesn't need any more debates, or whatever that sad display was. And most of us feel the same.
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Contrary to the public assertion made by a Taylor family lawyer, Cameron, who is Black, said the Louisville police did not go to the wrong address when executing a search warrant. Nor was Taylor shot and killed in her bed, as also publicly asserted by the family lawyer. Ben Crump, a spokesman and defense attorney for the Taylor family, falsely claimed the police went to the wrong address. And in a statement full of inaccuracies, Crump, who negotiated a $12 million settlement with Louisville, said, "Taylor and her boyfriend were asleep in their apartment when Louisville Police burst into the home without warning using a battering ram, in search of a suspect who was already in their custody."
Cameron carefully, methodically and with sensitivity to the Taylor family reviewed the evidence and explained why the law and facts did not warrant murder charges, however massive the intensity of the public's passion for charges. Cameron said: "Evidence shows that officers both knocked and announced their presence at the apartment. The officers' statements about their announcement are corroborated by an independent witness who was near, in a proximity to Apartment 4. ... When officers were unable to get anyone to answer or open the door to apartment four, the decision was made to breach the door." A man inside the apartment fired, striking an officer, and the officers returned fire, killing Taylor.
The anger over Cameron's decision was fierce, ugly and personal. At a press conference arranged by the Taylor family attorney, Tamika Mallory, co-founder of the Women's March, said: "I thought about the ships that went into Fort Monroe and Jamestown with our people on them over 400 years ago and how there were also Black men on those ships that were responsible for bringing our people over here.
"Daniel Cameron is no different than the sellout Negroes that sold our people into slavery and helped white men to capture our people, to abuse them, and to traffic them while our women were raped, while our men were raped by savages."
Sophia A. Nelson, who often appears as a pundit on CNN, tweeted: "Uncle Tom. Step & fetch Negro. The end."
But perhaps the viciousness award goes to retired Los Angeles Police Department Sergeant Cheryl Dorsey, who said: "Let me say this as a Black woman: He does not speak for Black folks. He's skin-folk, but he is not kinfolk. And so just like he thinks they can't speak for Kentucky because he's up there with a Black face, he does not speak for all of us. This was not a tragedy. This was a murder. He should be ashamed of himself."
Cameron is also being attacked because he is not only a Black Republican but also a Black Republican who spoke passionately at the Republican National Convention in support of President Donald Trump. About the opposition to him because he is a Black Republican, Cameron once tweeted: "Yesterday, a liberal attorney said I should stop eating 'coon flakes' in a Courier Journal interview. I am a proud lifelong Republican, part of a diverse KY GOP ticket, and yes I support Donald Trump. It's time to stop telling black Americans what we're allowed to believe."
Women's March co-founder Mallory and Dorsey are exactly why I produced the documentary "Uncle Tom," which addresses the attacks against Black conservatives for the crime of thinking differently. The film, now available on iTunes, Amazon Prime and Roku, has received a 9.4 rating on IMDb and a 98% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
"Uncle Tom" asks simple questions: Are Blacks free to think for themselves? Black conservatives support low taxes, strong borders, choice in public schools. They want to reevaluate the welfare state on the grounds that it destabilizes the American family, no matter the race. Can a Black conservative advocate for school choice and debate its merit without being dismissed as a Black conservative "sellout" for supporting choice? Are Blacks allowed to hold conservative views without being eviscerated by the Mallorys and the Dorseys as self-loathers, coconuts, Oreos, "Uncle Toms" and other names unfit for family consumption?
The New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet, who is Black, once admitted, "The left, as a rule, does not want to hear thoughtful disagreement." Well, the Black left doesn't believe that there is such a thing called thoughtful disagreement -- at least not thoughtful disagreement with a Black conservative.
"Uncle Tom" does not tell viewers what to think. The film says Blacks are free to think for themselves. We would be happy to provide copies of "Uncle Tom" for Mallory and Dorsey.
COPYRIGHT 2020 LAURENCE A. ELDER
DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
Understanding those latter two points is the key to understanding Tuesday night’s face-off between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, because for the first time in years this debate was not pitched toward people like us. Trying to score it by traditional metrics misses the point.
So what was the point? It appears that the president had three goals, two of which he pulled off with varying degrees of success.
The first was to avoid a traditional debate on the merits. Rather than judging it in a vacuum, consider the alternative: A sober affair, consisting of Biden clubbing Trump over the head with 200,000 dead Americans, a historically large GDP contraction in the second quarter, his problematic (and still missing) tax returns, and the myriad other issues that have arisen over the course of his presidency. Trump simply wasn’t going to win that debate, and by avoiding it, he accomplished something he set out to do.
The second was to project dominance. This has been a Trump debate staple for five years now. It began with his derogatory nicknames during the GOP primary season in 2015-2016 and continued with his bizarre snorting and stalking the stage like a beast of prey during the debates with Hillary Clinton. By constantly talking over Biden, needling him, and refusing to accept any direction from moderator Chris Wallace, Trump was attempting to send a message that he was in charge. In retrospect, he previewed this approach for months with his constant attack on Biden as being “weak.”
Did this work? It’s difficult to say. As I mentioned, debates are usually staid affairs, pitched to politically knowledgeable elites who like to evaluate things on the merits. Trump’s debates are pitched to someone completely different. His behavior toward Clinton seemed bizarre and juvenile, and made for classic “SNL” fodder. It also apparently worked reasonably well; the townhall-style debate was one of his best received performances. So the interrupting and refusal to answer questions was off-putting for me, but I recognize that I’m not the target audience.
The third goal is one where I think Trump largely failed. He employed something of a rope-a-dope strategy: Let Biden tire himself out by forcing him to keep talking, arguing with, and correcting Trump, and hope he has an embarrassing misstep toward the end of the debate. It wasn’t an outlandish strategy. If you’ve ever been in an argument with someone who constantly talks over you, misstates things, and dodges your questions, you know how exhausting it can be. Biden also had a tendency to fade down the stretch in the Democratic debates, and he certainly has a penchant for gaffes.
But it didn’t work. Toward the end of Tuesday’s debate, Trump let Biden talk more freely, interrupting less and apparently hoping that he would stumble. There were some missteps, but they were mostly minor, and certainly aren’t the fodder for the 30-second ads Trump was hoping for.
This last paragraph is probably the most important. Trump got some of what he was looking for: He avoided debate on the merits and appeared in charge. But Biden got what was most important for him as well: He defied the image Trump was trying to project of him of a doddering old man. He was lucid, confident, and well-spoken throughout the debate. Normally, that alone wouldn’t be close to enough to earn a debate win, but for a candidate who is up in the polls and who had an absurdly low bar to clear, it probably is enough.
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.
President Trump tried to explain that absentee ballots, which people have to request, are more secure than ballots that are mailed out to everyone on the voter rolls. Many people on these lists have moved or passed away, and the mail-in ballot may fall into the wrong hands.
But even absentee ballots are far from secure. Just this year, Texas convicted a U.S. Postal Service employee for selling a list of absentee voters to vote harvesters. In another absentee ballot harvesting scheme, an affidavit by a retired police captain alleges that a witness heard a Harris County precinct employee bragging that the ballot operation he was a part of “could harvest 700,000 illegal ballots” this November.
As Trump mentioned in the debate, some military ballots cast in his favor ended up in the trash in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In Paterson, N.J., 20% of the votes in this year’s City Council election were deemed fraudulent because of absentee ballot fraud.
A Los Angeles television station found that hundreds of absentee ballots had been cast year after year in the names of deceased individuals. Also in L.A., four men pled guilty to paying homeless people with cash and cigarettes for their votes. The list of similar cases from this year alone is long. But these are hard cases to catch, since both the vote buyer and seller have an incentive to hide the transaction.
Liberals and progressives often argue that we should model the United States on Western European countries, but you never hear them claiming that we should adopt their voting rules. There is a reason for that — most European countries either ban mail-in voting or require people to use photo IDs to obtain a mail-in ballot.
To study this subject, the Crime Prevention Research Center, of which I am president, created a database on voting rules around the world. Here is what we found: Besides the United States, there are 36 member states in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) – essentially a club for industrialized countries. About half of them (47%) do not allow absentee voting unless the citizen is living abroad, and another 30% require a photo ID to obtain an absentee ballot. In 14% of the countries, absentee voting is banned even for those living abroad.
Strict requirements are found around the globe, as well. Many democracies only allow for mail-in voting under extraordinary circumstances. Japan and Poland limit absentee voting to those who possess disability certificates. Only for this year, during the coronavirus pandemic, France has allowed citizens who are sick or at particular risk to vote by mail. Poland will allow mail-in ballots for everyone for this year only. Brazil and Russia satisfy the economic standards of the OECD, but are excluded for various political reasons. Both nations completely ban mail-in voting and require photo IDs for in-person voting.
Among all 43 European countries, 72% ban absentee ballots unless living abroad and another 22% require a photo ID to obtain a mail-in ballot; 19% ban the practice even for those who live abroad. Are all of these countries, socialist and non-socialist alike, Western and Eastern European, developed and undeveloped, acting “without evidence”?
It is not as if officials serving in these governments haven’t heard the same arguments about the importance of ease of voting. Or about how photo ID requirements will supposedly, as one professor in the UK explained, “lead to people not being able to vote.”
These countries have learned the hard way about what happens when mail-in ballots aren’t secured. They have also discovered how difficult it is to detect vote buying. France banned mail-in voting in 1975 because of massive fraud in the island region of Corsica, where postal ballots were stolen or bought and cast in the names of dead people.
The United Kingdom, which allows postal voting, has had some notable mail-in ballot fraud cases. Prior to recent photo ID requirements, six Labour Party councilors in Birmingham won office after what the judge described as a “massive, systematic and organised" postal voting fraud campaign. The fraud was apparently carried out with the full knowledge and cooperation of the local Labour party, and involved "widespread theft" of postal votes (possibly around 40,000 ballots) in areas with large Muslim populations. Labour members were worried that the Iraq War would spur these voters to oppose the incumbent government.
In 1991, Mexico mandated voter photo IDs and banned absentee ballots. The then-governing Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) had long used fraud and intimidation with mail-in ballots to win elections. Only in 2006 were absentee ballots again allowed, and then only for those living abroad who requested them at least six months in advance.
If Trump is delusional for worrying about vote fraud with mail-in ballots, it is a delusion shared by most of the world. Even the countries that allow mail-in ballots have protections, such as government-issued photo IDs. But Americans are constantly assured that even this step is completely unnecessary. The president is right that without basic precautions, our election is on course to become a nightmare that could last for months.
Lott is the president of the Crime Prevention Research Center and the author of “Dumbing Down the Courts: How Politics Keeps the Smartest Judges Off the Bench.”
Reaching back even further into history, however, the Berlin Airlift officially ended on this date in 1949 at a time when both future presidents, John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, were serving in the House of Representatives. But the commander-in-chief who ordered this little-remembered but highly heroic endeavor was Harry Truman. It was a seemingly impossible undertaking, sending 2 million West Germans enough food, clothing, and medical supplies through the air -- for more than a year. But years of war had made the impossible not only possible but routine for American and British military pilots and dedicated mechanics, quartermasters, and ground crews who had hurriedly been mustered back into service.
I’ll have more on this bright chapter in U.S. history, which I’ve written about previously. First, I’d point you to RealClearPolitics’ front page, which presents our poll averages, videos, breaking news stories, and aggregated opinion pieces spanning the political spectrum. We also offer original material from our own reporters and contributors, including the following:
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Trump’s Night: The Return of the Chaos Candidate. Phil Wegmann offers this analysis of the president’s debate performance.
Biden Survives Trump’s Steamroller. Susan Crabtree assesses how the Democratic nominee handled himself.
Where Do the Candidates Stand on Drug Prices? In RealClearHealth, Gerard Gianoli warns that proposals being floated could reduce innovation.
200 Years of SCOTUS Nomination Controversy. In RealClearHistory, Howard Tanzman revisits past contentious fights to seat justices.
How Social Media Shields Itself From Public Scrutiny. Kalev Leetaru finds plenty to fault in the platforms’ declarations of operational transparency.
Missile Defense Is Needed -- Now. In RealClearPolicy, Jerry Rogers argues for funding the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system.
Median Pay Should Be $102,000? In RealClearMarkets, Aaron Brown takes issue with a Rand Corp. assessment.
Scientific Guesswork Has No Place in Court. In RealClearScience, Joseph Annotti explores the Bayer/Roundup case and whether juries are qualified to make decisions about the safety of a product or ingredient.
Can California’s Green Extremism Go National? In RealClearEnergy, Joel Kotkin labels the state’s “Ectopian” goals an energy and climate fantasy.
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No matter what your view of aerial warfare -- and American public opinion in the aftermath of the destruction of cities ranging from Dresden and Hamburg to Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki -- the story of the Berlin airlift is one of heroism and triumph, two words in the subtitle of "Daring Young Men," Richard Reeves’ splendid 2010 book chronicling the effort.
In June of 1948, with Germany and its largest city divided, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin decided to starve West Berliners into capitulation. That half of the city was free. It had been walled off as the eastern-most outpost of liberty behind what we would come to know as the Iron Curtain. At starvation, though, Harry Truman drew a line.
“Give ’Em Hell Harry" launched this effort with his characteristic straight-forwardness. After being told by his military and diplomatic advisers that it was virtually impossible for the U.S. to remain in the city, Truman replied: “We stay in Berlin, period.”
Bunking in barns and muddy tents, the allied crews flew over Soviet-occupied East Germany day and night, dodging sporadic anti-aircraft fire, evading Russian fighter planes, and bringing in enough food, coal, and other essentials to provide for those 2 million people for more than a year.
In the end, these men would fly 277,569 missions into Berlin before the Soviets ended their blockade, delivering 2.3 million tons of materiel, mostly inside C-47s and C-54s that traveled 92 million air miles. One hundred and one fatalities were recorded in the operation, including 31 Americans, mostly caused by airplane crashes.
Fourteen years later, President Kennedy would go West Germany and give his “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech. In 1987, President Reagan went to Berlin to urge the last of the Soviet rulers to “tear down this wall.” But if it hadn’t been for Harry Truman and those daring flight crews, JFK and the Gipper would have had no Berlin speeches to make.
After the successful airlift, West Germany was reorganized into a functioning nation, and the NATO alliance was forged. As for the pilots and crews who had scrambled to active duty in the middle of the night, often when a local policeman knocked on their door and handed them a telegram, they simply went home again when it was over. Some of them, Dick Reeves noted, had forgotten where they had parked their cars the night they answered the call.
Carl M. Cannon
Washington Bureau chief, RealClearPolitics
@CarlCannon (Twitter)
ccannon@realclearpolitics.com
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.
It fit then, and it still fits now: The first Trump vs. Biden debate marked the return of the chaos candidacy.
Though no one who knew him well expected Trump to change because of a trifling factor such as living in the White House for nearly four years, the incumbent president was in classic form Tuesday night. For 98 minutes, he belittled and bullied and berated both his opponent and the moderator -- so much so that he made the debate painful to watch. But what was roundly condemned may have been the plan.
Trump trails former vice president Joe Biden in the RealClearPolitics national polling average by 6.1 percentage points. Figuring he needed a strong showing to close the gap, the campaign studied every Biden debate since 1972. The strategy they came up with entailed having Trump rely on his improv ability rather than employ a structured game plan.
There were just a handful of goals for Trump, a source familiar with the debate prep told RCP:
Knock Biden off his talking points by answering questions from moderator Chris Wallace of Fox News and then posing another one to his opponent. Force him to own up to the less popular parts of his own record. Push the centrist Democrat to own the policy agenda of those on his left flank.
“The more Joe stutters and stumbles and makes mistakes and says things that just don't resonate or make sense,” the source told RCP the day before the debate, “the more we're winning.”
If that approach wasn’t already apparent, it became obvious within the first few minutes when a discussion about the Supreme Court turned into a question about Obamacare. Trump said that a Biden administration would kick 180 million Americans off of their private health insurance and open the door to “socialized medicine.” Biden balked.
"That is simply a lie," he said.
"Your party wants to go socialist medicine and socialist health care," Trump interrupted.
"The party is me. Right now, I am the Democratic Party," Biden insisted.
"And they’re going to dominate you, Joe. You know that," Trump shot back.
It was a redux of what Republicans have long argued, namely that Biden’s moderation is a sham and that the former vice president is little more than a Trojan horse for more progressive ideologies. At one point, after Trump accused Biden of embracing “socialized medicine” and signing off on “the manifesto” of a former Democratic rival, an incredulous Biden replied, “I’m not going to listen to him. The fact of the matter is I beat Bernie Sanders.”
This was a rare denunciation at a moment when Democrats have tried to bind up the partisan wounds of a divisive primary. Trump saw it as an opening to take advantage, declaring that Biden had “just lost the left.” Two minutes later, both men were shouting that the other was the real “liar.”
Much of the debate was wasted with this kind of jawboning, and little policy was actually discussed in detail. But as Trump was trying to peg Biden as a radical, he only succeeded in chasing the Democrat to the center. The Green New Deal? Biden said he didn’t support it. Rioting in the streets? Biden condemned violence. Defunding the police? Biden said he would increase funding. Just as Republicans struggled to define Biden over the summer, Trump was all over the place throughout the night. His punches didn’t land as hard as they did four years ago, and his new opponent was not as easily demonized as Hillary Clinton. But the president never stopped interrupting, which at some point became the issue itself.
Trump said the only reason that Biden was the nominee was because he got “very lucky” (the Democrat sarcastically agreed). He said that Biden was a bad negotiator and that “China ate your lunch.” He said that after nearly five decades in government Biden had “done nothing.”
Trump did not limit his attacks to Biden. Early in the night he began to bristle at questions from Chris Wallace, complaining that “I guess I’m debating you.” From then on, the president regularly disregarded the moderator. He interrupted and demanded more time to answer questions and went his own way. Wallace became so exasperated at one point that he sarcastically offered to switch seats with Trump.
While the president seemed to shred the debate rulebook, he was not always on offense. He was asked about a report in the New York Times that he only paid $750 in federal income taxes. Is that true? Trump insisted that it wasn’t and said he had actually paid several million dollars. “Show us your tax returns,” Biden interjected. Trump, as he has for the past four years, said that he couldn’t release the documents until an IRS audit was finished. And besides, the president continued, he was just trying to get the best deal possible by obeying the rules established under the Obama administration.
“I don’t want to pay taxes,” Trump admitted. “Before I came here, I was a private developer, I was a private businessperson. Like every other private person, unless they’re stupid, they go through the laws. ... He passed a bill that gave us all these privileges for depreciation and for tax credits.”
This would become a theme throughout the night. Although he’s the incumbent U.S. president, Donald Trump continued to run as an insurgent. Pushed to play defense on a topic, he would argue instead that if Biden were president a bad situation would only be worse. For instance, as the death toll from coronavirus exceeds 200,000, Trump insisted the number would have been much higher if he hadn’t closed the country to Asia and Europe.
“If we would’ve listened to you, the country would have been left wide open, millions of people would have died, not 200,000,” Trump told Biden before adding, “I’ll tell you, Joe, you could never have done the job that we did. You don’t have it in your blood. You could’ve never done that, Joe.”
Aside from passing references to ventilators and therapeutics and vaccines, neither candidate discussed the pandemic in detail. They did, however, make things personal.
Trump tried repeatedly to rattle Biden usually with interruptions. Biden responded by complaining that it was “hard to get any word in with this clown.” At another point, after the president kept talking over his answer about the Supreme Court, he asked, “Will you shut up, man?”
This freewheeling approach was not without risks. Asked twice by Wallace if he would condemn white supremacists and tell militias to stand down during moments of urban unrest, Trump said “sure” twice. He told the moderator to “give me a name,” asking, “Who do you want me to condemn?” Biden suggested “the Proud Boys,” a self-described alt-right chauvinist organization.
“Okay, Proud Boys -- stand back and stand by,” the president responded. “But I'll tell you what -- somebody's got to do something about antifa and the left because this is not a right-wing problem, this is a left wing.”
In short order, the group was trumpeting what it saw as an endorsement. Critics took this, specifically the words “stand by,” as a sign that the president was refusing to condemn white supremacists.
The subsequent controversy went viral on social media, an episode that the Trump campaign certainly did not want or expect. Rather, for months Republicans had placed their hopes on a rhetorical slugfest where the president could outmatch his opponent. One of their top priorities? Forcing Biden to discuss his son Hunter. Trump saw his opportunity when Biden referenced the military career of his son.
"He got the Bronze Star. He got the Conspicuous Service Medal. He was not a loser. He was a patriot. And the people left behind there were heroes," Biden said.
Trump interrupted to ask if he was talking about Hunter. Biden said no, he was talking about Beau.
"I don't know Beau. I know Hunter. Hunter got thrown out of the military. He was thrown out, dishonorably discharged for cocaine use," Trump continued.
Biden said that wasn’t true. Trump said that it was.
"Once you became vice president, he made a fortune in Ukraine and China and Moscow and various other places. And he didn't have a job," Trump shot back.
"That is simply not true. My son, like a lot of people, like a lot of people you know at home, had a drug problem. He's overtaken it. He's fixed it. He's worked on it. And I'm proud of him," Biden concluded.
Republicans have been hammering for months on ties between Hunter Biden and foreign nationals, arguing that sweetheart deals and plum business opportunities overseas were only the result of his last name and willingness to trade access to his father for profit. Trump tried to do the same on stage but Biden wasn’t rattled.
The debate continued for several more minutes. More barbs and more personal attacks followed. Both candidates regularly interrupted, and they kept doing so even as Wallace tried to bring the night to an end. “We are going to have to leave it there,” the moderator said, even as Trump kept speaking. “It has been an interesting hour and a half.”
More than anything, the 98 minutes marked the return of Trump as the chaos candidate.
Once again, Biden remains a serious contender to win the Oval Office not so much because of his own strength as a candidate but because of the lack of mainstream support for his opponent – or more precisely in this case -- the president’s inability to operate in anything but bellicose overdrive.
Going into Tuesday night’s debate, the bar for Biden was exceedingly low, especially after President Trump labeled him “Sleepy Joe” and for months relentlessly depicted him as a hollow shell of his former scrappy self. Team Trump tried to raise those expectations days before the debate, but the narrative had been set.
Not that Trump’s latest nickname for the Democratic nominee, Hidin’ Biden, was all that far-fetched amid months of the Democratic nominee remaining cloistered in his Delaware basement, failing to take questions from the media while calling early- morning “lids,” journalism-speak for no additional events for the day.
But as the debate showed, Trump remains his own worst enemy and steps on his own success, leaving Biden looking more presidential simply by not responding to every insult with equal vitriol. Amid the onslaughts, Biden’s best debate responses came when he simply ignored the insults, looked directly into the camera, and spoke to the American people.
“Do you believe for a moment what [Trump’s] telling you in light of all the lies he’s told you about the whole issue relating to COVID?” Biden asked viewers. “He still hasn’t even acknowledged he knew this was happening – knew how dangerous it would be back in February – and he didn’t even tell you.”
Many of Biden’s best lines of the night were clearly rehearsed, but still effective. At one point, he referenced Trump saying about the COVID death toll, “It is what it is.”
“It is what it is because you are who you are,” Biden added.
Trump came back with a substantive rejoinder that Biden labeled his decision to stop flights from China because of the coronavirus as “xenophobic” – arguing that the Democratic nominee would have continued the flights, allowing infected travelers to arrive in the United States and spread the pathogen.
“If we would’ve listened to you, the country would have been left wide open. Millions of people would have died, not 200,000,” Trump retorted.
It’s nothing the president hasn’t said before, but it came off as on point compared to the rest of the 98-minute chaotic brawl full of interruptions and insults in response to serious questions on the pandemic, the Supreme Court, the economy, and months of violent racial unrest.
Even though Biden didn’t let Trump completely throw him off, it was hardly a stellar performance from the veteran Washington pol who has occupied the presidential debate stage 38 times since his arrival on the national scene in 1972, a dozen of them sparring with his fellow Democratic primary contenders in this campaign cycle. At times, Biden got so caught up in defending himself from attacks, he turned to name-calling.
Early on, he labeled Trump a “liar” and “a clown,” and was so exasperated he resorted to the school-yard command to “shut up.”
After the debate, a focus group of undecided voters in key battleground states tended to agree with the challenger. In a virtual gathering live-streamed on the Los Angeles Times’ YouTube channel, they all blamed Trump for setting the gutter-level tone for the face-off, and none of them -- even the few who said the debate left them more inclined to vote for Trump -- were pleased by the president’s constant interruptions or combative personal attacks.
They also were left unsettled by the choppy, mean-spirited exchanges, feeling completely dissatisfied by the lack of substantive answers on plans to stop the upswing in coronavirus cases and unify the country after months of racial unrest.
Instead of having their minds changed by the first candidate tete-a-tete, these voters appeared to fall back on previously held beliefs about each man.
“Biden being center left and Trump being unhinged and, frankly, a poor leader, is what has directed my decision,” a voter identified as “Luke in Wisconsin” told the focus group panel after the debate.
Luke was impressed by Biden’s blanket claim during the debate that “I am the Democratic Party,” when Trump argued that the “radical left” had taken control and would push him to support the far-left policies such as the Green New Deal and defunding the police.
Yet, others in the focus group organized by pollster Frank Luntz faulted the former vice president for failing to say whether he would pack the Supreme Court if he wins the White House and Democrats regain the Senate. Some Democrats have pushed to expand the number of seats on the court in order to confirm additional liberal justices to the bench in response to Republicans moving to place Amy Coney Barrett in Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s seat before the November election.
“Whatever position I take in that, that’ll become the issue,” Biden told debate moderator Chris Wallace of Fox News. “The issue is the American people should speak. You’re voting now. Vote, and let your senators know how you feel.”
Undecided voters in the group expressed concern that Biden tried to duck a question about whether he would have urged local officials to call up the National Guard to quell riots, looting and arson taking place in Democratic-run cities across the country in response to the death of George Floyd and several other black Americans who died at the hands of police this year.
“I don’t hold public office,” Biden responded. “I am a former vice president.”
Biden also stressed that he has made it clear in his public statement that violence stemming from protests should be prosecuted, but the undecided voters weren’t impressed.
“When he was challenged about the riots in Portland, and was asked, ‘You’re the Democratic Party; have you reached out to them?’ he said, ‘Well, I’m not an elected official.’ I thought that was a really poor answer from a former vice president, a lifelong Democrat with incredible influence,’” remarked one member of Luntz’ focus group.
Another unprompted moment of weakness for Biden occurred when he inexplicably defended the violent anarchist antifa movement as “an idea, not an organization,” quoting FBI Director Chris Wray’s recent testimony to Congress, which has resurrected calls for his ouster among some conservatives. Wray also argued that antifa activists are a serious concern for the FBI and the group is a “real thing.”
“ ‘Antifa is an idea’ coming to a Trump campaign ad near you in 24-48 hours,” tweeted Joe Concha, a media reporter for The Hill newspaper, after Biden’s statement.
The focus group participants almost unanimously were outraged by Trump’s refusal to clearly condemn white supremacists, but some participants also said they were deeply dissatisfied with both candidates’ failure to lay out a plan to unify the country and address racial strife.
“As a black woman who is very active in my black community, neither of them told me how they would actually come and talk with us about what we want to see happen and how things would actually get better under their administrations, their leadership,” said an undecided voter identified as Kimberly.
With polls showing Trump still lagging in several key battlegrounds he won in 2016, the president had more to gain from the debates than Biden did. But he stepped on his own message by failing to rein in his penchant to come out swinging and never stop, alienating a large swath of voters in the process.
Biden also missed several opportunities to shine and often seemed to lose his train of thought amid the incessant cross-talk and his own exasperation. Those moments may have been far more awkward and telling if Trump hadn’t come across as an aggressive bully who would make any opponent, and the moderator himself, lose his cool.
For the first time in the history of televised presidential debates, organizers barred handshakes out of coronavirus concerns. It’s a sad but apt metaphor for the 2020 pandemic as well as the year’s brutal politics, but in the end it prevented the nasty exchanges from becoming physical between the two septuagenarian men.
“They were both bickering at each other like two men in a nursing home bickering over the last pudding cup,” one focus group participant remarked.
If polling proves accurate, all Biden had to do was not implode on stage. Based on that low bar, he succeeded. But the debate will be remembered most for striking a new campaign low in nasty exchanges that likely did little to move the needle for either side.
Susan Crabtree is RealClearPolitics' White House/national political correspondent.
These companies increasingly operate today as black boxes. In their view, the public has no right to understand how they function, the rules they operate by, how those rules are decided -- or even what happens to their personal data. In response to questions, the companies answer with either silence or carefully worded statements that avoid transparency.
It is a remarkable commentary on just how opaque social media is that we don’t even know how many posts there are each day across the major platforms. While it is possible to estimate Twitter’s size through statistical analysis of one of its developer data feeds, the company itself no longer publishes regular statistics on the number of daily tweets and retweets and declines to provide such numbers when asked. User counts are reported through self-defined and regularly changing metrics like “active users” instead of simple standardized measures such as how many distinct users tweeted each day. How could Congress ever hope to regulate social platforms – assuming such effort would withstand legal challenges -- when it doesn’t even know how big those platforms are?
When these companies do release actual statistics, they are carefully worded in carefully ways that can cause confusion. Facebook has for several years issued statements such as “99% of the ISIS and al Qaeda-related terror content we remove from Facebook is content we detect before anyone in our community has flagged it to us.” And “we took action on 1.9 million pieces of ISIS, al-Qaeda and affiliated terrorism propaganda, 99.5% of which we found and flagged before users reported them to us.” This statement is frequently misreported, with the New York Times stating that “Facebook said its A.I. found 99.5 percent of terrorist content on the site.” But Facebook’s statement doesn’t say it removed 99.5% of terror content; it says that of the 1.9 million posts it removed as a terror violation, 99.5% of them were first identified by the company’s algorithms (a spokesperson confirmed this as the correct interpretation of its statement). In reality, it is unknown how much terror content is on the platform and either escaped the company’s notice or was deemed not a violation.
What about Facebook’s much-touted fact-checking program? The company goes to great lengths to tout the “independence” of its third party fact-checking partners. Asked in 2018 if Facebook ever requires its fact-checkers to change their ratings, a spokesperson responded that its FAQ page explicitly stated, “Corrections and disputes are processed at the fact-checker's discretion.” (Interestingly, that FAQ page now redirects to a new FAQ that points to a new disputes page that noticeably lacks that language.)
Last May, a spokesperson confirmed that this was still Facebook’s policy, stating, “Third-party fact-checking partners operate independently from Facebook and are certified through the non-partisan International Fact-Checking Network. Publishers appeal to individual fact-checkers directly to dispute ratings.” Yet last month, Fast Company magazine reported that “Facebook may intervene if it thinks that a piece of content was mistakenly rated, by asking fact-checkers to adjust their ratings, a spokesperson acknowledged to Fast Company.”
How does the company reconcile its denials over the last three years that it doesn’t pressure fact-checkers to change their ratings with Fast Company’s revelation that it has done so? Asked about this, a spokesperson clarified that the company doesn’t actually change the ratings itself and that publishers can appeal directly to fact-checkers to dispute ratings. Yet the spokesperson added a third acknowledgement missing from the company’s previous responses: that Facebook may also ask fact-checkers to change their ratings when the company believes they are not in keeping with its definitions.
The company never technically lied. Both times it was asked whether it had ever intervened in a rating, it didn’t deny doing so; it merely issued statements that disputes are at fact-checkers’ “discretion” and that publishers must appeal directly to the fact-checkers in disputes. It simply left out the fact that there was a third route: the company requiring a fact-checker to change its rating. Facebook’s notable omission offers a textbook example of how the company’s silence and carefully worded statements allow it to hide its actions from public scrutiny.
The little transparency that exists for social platforms tends to come in response to leaks to the media.
Prior to The Guardian’s 2017 publication of a trove of internal Facebook moderation documents, there was little public visibility into what precisely the company considered to be “acceptable” versus “prohibited” speech. Only through the leaked documents did the public learn that the company’s official policy explicitly permitted graphic descriptions of violence against women and child bullying, to name just a few surprises, prompting public outcry.
In the aftermath of The Guardian’s release, Facebook bowed to public pressure and published a copy of its moderation guidelines on its website. Yet these rules are apparently unevenly applied. In India, the Wall Street Journal reports that the company silently waived its hate speech rules for important political leaders in an attempt to curry favor with the government. Only after its actions became public was the company forced to reverse course, but it is unclear how many other influential figures in how many other countries may similarly enjoy such exemptions.
Social media companies increasingly partner with academia on research, emphasizing the “transparency” and “accountability” of these collaborations. In reality, there is typically little of either. Take Facebook’s 2014 study in which it partnered with Cornell University to manipulate the emotions of more than 689,000 users. When the researchers submitted it for publication, the journal -- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences -- was initially “concerned” about the “ethical issu[e]” of manipulating users’ emotions without their consent, until it “queried the authors and they said their local institutional review board had approved it” and thus the journal would not “second-guess” the university. Only after public outrage erupted did it emerge that the university’s review board had determined that since only Facebook employees had access to raw user data, with Cornell University’s researchers having access only to the final results of the analysis, that “no review by the Cornell Human Research Protection Program was required.”
This raises concerns over the rigor of the ethical review of Facebook’s latest academic collaboration to actively manipulate volunteers’ Facebook accounts in the lead-up to Election Day, Nov. 3. Neither of the two academic leads nor their institutions responded to multiple requests for comment. The University of Texas, Austin, told RealClearPolitics that it was “learning about the complex issues you raise” and said it would provide a response -- but never did despite multiple follow-up requests. The ethical review board for the project, NORC (National Opinion Research Center) at the University of Chicago, declined to answer any questions about the project, stating, “All inquiries about this project need to go directly to Facebook” while the university itself did not respond. Facebook declined to answer any of the detailed questions posed to it about the research. Asked whether the current effort relied on the same “pre-existing data” exemption used for the Cornell University study to prevent ethical review, none of the organizations, including the designated institutional review board, answered.
Thus, what appears at first glance to be an open, “transparent” academic research initiative turns out to be just as opaque as every other Facebook effort. Indeed, by choosing a private university as the ethics review board for its pre-election effort, Facebook is even able to shield the project from Freedom of Information Act requests.
How might Congress help remedy these concerns? Here are some suggestions.
In the end, as the Washington Post’s motto reminds us, “democracy dies in darkness.” It is time to finally shed light on the inner workings of Silicon Valley.
RealClear Media Fellow Kalev Leetaru is a senior fellow at the George Washington University Center for Cyber & Homeland Security. His past roles include fellow in residence at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Future of Government.
Don't fall for this fear-mongering. Here's a rundown of the false claims, with the facts that disprove them.
Whopper No. 1: Joe Biden warns that Barrett's nomination is "an opportunity to overturn the Affordable Care Act."
There's little chance of that.
Barrett is a true conservative who believes judges should interfere as little as possible in what Congress does. "The harm inflicted by the Supreme Court's erroneous interference in the democratic process," she wrote in 2017, "is harder to remedy than the harm inflicted by an ill-advised statute." That was in an article that expressly dealt with Obamacare.
It's the same bedrock conviction that Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Samuel Alito applied last term in Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Roberts explained that if one provision of a law violates the U.S. Constitution, the Court should use "a scalpel rather than a bulldozer," to excise that provision, while leaving the rest of Congress's work intact.
Obamacare is a 2,572-page legislative colossus -- really three laws stuck together. One part set national rules for health insurance and required everyone to have it or pay a penalty. A second part expanded Medicaid, and a third added a hodgepodge of rules, including calorie postings on menus.
In 2012, the first time Obamacare was challenged, the justices ruled the penalty was a tax, and therefore a constitutional exercise of Congress's taxing power. But in 2017, Congress zeroed out the penalty. The Court is now being asked to decide whether that eliminated the only constitutional basis for the mandate, or even for the entire law.
Expect the conservative majority to surgically remove only the mandate. The good news is that will liberate middle-class buyers, who were priced out of ACA plans and ineligible for subsidies, to purchase coverage they want and can afford, not Uncle Sam's one-size-fits-all plan.
Whopper No. 2: The New York Times warns that "12 million Americans could lose coverage." That's how many people gained coverage through the Medicaid expansion. Despite the gray lady's hysteria, there is hardly a reason to worry. The Court already addressed the constitutionality of the Medicaid expansion in 2012, ruling that states must be given an option not to expand. That issue is settled. Thirty-five have chosen to expand.
Whopper No. 3: Nancy Pelosi warns Barrett's nomination "threatens the destruction of life-saving protections for 135 million Americans with preexisting conditions."
Untrue in every way.
The protections in the ACA for preexisting conditions apply only to people in the individual insurance market, less than 6% of the population, not 135 million people.
More important, there is a consensus across party lines that people with preexisting conditions must be guaranteed insurance. Only a Neanderthal would question it. The issue is how is it paid for.
Obamacare makes healthy buyers shoulder the cost by compelling everyone of the same age to pay the same premium. That's a rip-off, because a tiny 5% of the population with serious illnesses use 50% of the health care.
A better way is for government to pay the cost of the sick, instead of hiding it inside the premiums healthy buyers pay. Twelve states have adopted this solution since 2013, including blue states like Maryland and New Jersey. It's called reinsurance. The Trump administration is funding these subsidies of coverage for people with preexisting conditions.
On Sept. 24, Trump signed an executive order making it national policy to protect patients with preexisting conditions, regardless of what the Supreme Court decides.
No surprise, Pelosi says it's "not worth the paper it's signed on." In fact, experience shows it's the better way forward.
With Barrett on the bench, expect the high court's ruling to pave the way for more insurance options, a fairer way to subsidize people with preexisting conditions and lower premiums.
COPYRIGHT 2020 CREATORS.COM
It's heartbreaking.
My parents moved to California four decades ago. I grew up here. For 33 of the 36 years I've spent on this planet, I've lived here. I was born at St. Joseph's in Burbank; I attended elementary school at Edison Elementary; I went to college at UCLA. I co-founded a major media company here, with 75 employees in Los Angeles. I met my wife here; all three of my kids are native Californians.
This is the most beautiful state in the country. The climate is incredible. The scenery is amazing. The people are generally warm, and there's an enormous amount to do.
And we're leaving.
We're leaving because all the benefits of California have steadily eroded -- and then suddenly collapsed. Meanwhile, all the costs of California have steadily increased -- and then suddenly skyrocketed. It can be difficult to spot the incremental encroachment of a terrible disease, but once the final ravages set in, it becomes obvious that the illness is fatal. So, too, with California, where bad governance has turned a would-be paradise into a burgeoning dystopia.
When my family moved to North Hollywood, I was 11. We lived in a safe, clean suburb. Yes, Los Angeles had serious crime and homelessness problems, but those were problems relegated to pockets of the city -- problems that, with good governance, we thought could eventually be healed. Instead, the government allowed those problems to metastasize. As of 2011, Los Angeles County counted less than 40,000 homeless; as of 2020, that number had skyrocketed to 66,000. Suburban areas have become the sites of homeless encampments. Nearly every city underpass hosts a tent city; the city, in its kindness, has put out port-a-potties to reduce the possibility of COVID-19 spread.
Police are forbidden in most cases from either moving transients or even moving their garbage. Nearly every public space in Los Angeles has become a repository for open waste, needles and trash. The most beautiful areas of Los Angeles, from Santa Monica beach to my suburb, have become wrecks. My children have personally witnessed drug use, public urination and public nudity. Looters were allowed free reign in the middle of the city during the Black Lives Matter riots; Rodeo Drive was closed at 1 p.m., and citizens were curfewed at 6 p.m.
To combat these trends, local and state governments have gamed the statistics, reclassifying offenses and letting prisoners go free. Meanwhile, the police have become targets for public ire. In July, the city of Los Angeles slashed police funding, cutting the force to its lowest levels in over a decade.
At the same time, taxes have risen. California's top marginal income tax rate is now 13.3%; legislators want to raise it to 16.8%. California is also home to a 7.25% sales tax, a 50-cent gas tax and a bevy of other taxes that drain the wallet and burden business. California has the worst regulatory climate in America, according to CEO Magazine's survey of 650 CEOs. The public-sector unions essentially make public policy, running up the debt while providing fewer and fewer actual services. California's public education system is a massive failure, and even its once-great colleges are now burdened by the stupidities of political correctness, including an unwillingness to use standardized testing.
And still, the state legislature is dominated by Democrats. California is not on a trajectory toward recovery; it is on a trajectory toward oblivion. Taxpayers are moving out -- now including my family and my company. In 2019, before the pandemic and the widespread rioting and looting, outmigration jumped 38%, rising for the seventh straight year. That number will increase again this year.
I want my kids to grow up safe. I want them to grow up in a community with a future, with more freedom and safety than I grew up with. California makes that impossible. So, goodbye, Golden State. Thanks for the memories.
COPYRIGHT 2020 CREATORS.COM
The University of Chicago received the highest score – just 64.2 points out of a total of 100; DePauw University was at the bottom, with 44.2 points. The University of Arkansas, the University of Minnesota, UC-Berkeley and Princeton were bunched in the middle with about 53 points.
Even accounting for grade inflation, that still smells like an F.
The College Free Speech Rankings generated by the survey – which was commissioned by RealClearEducation (RCE) in partnership with The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) – are significant because they offer the first-ever national ranking of free speech based on student perceptions. Research firm College Pulse conducted the survey that forms the basis of the rankings.
RCE and FIRE, which ranked the schools, based 80% percent of each school’s score on a series of questions that measured two key aspects of free speech: tolerance for allowing controversial speakers on campus and students’ responses when asked how free they feel to hold open conversations about controversial topics such as abortion, transgender rights, and racial justice. The remaining 20% of the score was based on the freedom students feel to express their opinions, their perception of the administration’s support for free speech and FIRE’s rating of each school’s official policies toward free speech.
An online dashboard provides in-depth results for each school, including comments from students about their campus climate. It also allows users to compare the results for different schools as well as to sort the results according to various criteria, including: rankings by liberals, rankings by conservatives, and rankings by women and by men and by racial minorities. It even allows users to rank schools by the proportion of students who approve, or disapprove, of President Trump.
The most telling and ominous finding is that students may be more directly responsible than administrators and professors for quelling speech. Every school surveyed earned a higher overall score for administrative support for free speech than its final, overall tally. The top-rated University of Chicago, for example, received a score of 91.6 in that category, but a 64.2 overall score.
By contrast, every school received a lower score on questions measuring the freedom students felt to express their point of view than their overall total. The University of Chicago earned a 55.8 on this measure. This suggests that students may be more concerned about blowback from their peers than from their instructors.
Specifically, 60% of students surveyed recalled at least one time when they did not share their perspective for fear of how others would respond. This muzzling starts early, as 58% of first-year students said they had silenced themselves.
Self-identified conservatives said they were more likely to self-censor (72%) than self-described liberals (55%).
In addition, 42% of students said it was acceptable for their schools to punish speakers who make “offensive” statements. Although 82% of students said it was never appropriate to use violence to protest a controversial speaker, 17% said it can be acceptable.
On one level, the survey seems to align with a broader, social-media-driven movement in the United States where the establishment seems more supportive of speech than the general population – or at least large numbers of Millennials and Gen Z members. During the last few decades, for example, the Supreme Court has issued a series of rulings that have reinforced protections for speech even as Twitter mobs and an emerging cancel culture have worked to punish views some find offensive.
Similarly, this survey suggests that many school administrators and professors are demonstrating a greater commitment to free speech than their students. But that raises the questions: How, why and where are students learning to question this bedrock American value?
It is doubtful the homes in which they were raised are more radical than their schools. It seems more likely that our educational institutions – starting with elementary school and continuing on through college – are failing to foster respect for free and open inquiry and expression.
The College Free Speech Rankings should serve as a wake-up call that they must do better.
J. Peder Zane is an editor for RealClearInvestigations and a columnist for RealClearPolitics.
The 1960 presidential debates concerned the policy issues of the day, which both men knew intimately, and they stuck to the issues. There was no preening or boasting, and very little showmanship.
I don’t know what will happen in Cleveland tonight, but after covering the 2016 debates -- and being familiar with both of the 2020 candidates -- it seems a near-certainty that Donald Trump and Joe Biden will not remind anyone of the Jack Kennedy and Dick Nixon who took the stage in 1960. I have higher hopes for Chris Wallace, but we shall see.
America’s civic life was different six decades ago and although the 1960 presidential contest wasn’t beanbag out on the campaign trail, the idea that our elected officials would value country over party wasn’t an idiosyncratic notion advanced by some maverick politician with a war record; rather, it was to be expected.
What’s discordant about Donald Trump and Joe Biden is that they are old enough to remember the two presidential candidates of 1960 -- old enough to recall their debates, actually. The lessons didn’t stick. Or, rather, the wrong lessons of the Kennedy and Nixon’s presidencies is what seems to have imprinted itself. Make no mistake, these were two very flawed men. But they did answer their country’s call during wartime, which Biden and Trump did not, and maybe that’s part of the difference.
In a moment, I’ll offer a vignette about Jack Kennedy from this date in history, one that shows how in times of great national crises, partisan differences can be set aside by people of character, even those with strong political affiliations. First, I’d point you to RealClearPolitics’ front page, which presents our poll averages, videos, breaking news stories, and aggregated opinion pieces spanning the political spectrum. We also offer original material from our own reporters and contributors, including the following:
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Trump’s Debate Strategy: “Sleepy Joe” Is Now “Shrewd Joe.” Phil Wegmann and Susan Crabtree preview tonight’s match-up, for which setting expectations has become a key consideration for the president’s campaign.
Voter Mood Unclear in Key PA County After Trump Visit. Charles McElwee assesses the Hershey area’s changing electorate, and the impact of the pandemic on sentiments there.
Debate Is a Golden Opportunity to Engage Young Voters. Visits to 30 college campuses informs Manu Meel’s sense of what America's future leaders find wrong with today’s politics.
College Free-Speech Rankings Reveal Crisis on Campuses. RealClearEducation editor Nathan Harden unveils survey findings and a new interactive website indicating where college students feel free to speak their minds.
Why College Speech Findings Should Worry Us All. J. Peder Zane laments that schools are failing to foster respect for free and open inquiry and expression of opinions.
Amy Coney Barrett: An Unlikely Mentor. Iraq War veteran Chase Giacomo explains why he became such a fan of the Supreme Court nominee when she was his professor.
Getting to the Sweet Spot in Curbing Methane and CO2. In RealClearEnergy, Richard Kauzlarich spells out competing considerations in curbing greenhouse gases and providing reliable power.
China Is Winning Latin America’s Support. In RealClearWorld, Sarah White spotlights how Beijing is using the pandemic to its advantage in our hemisphere.
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Seventy-eight years ago today, John F. Kennedy, a junior officer in the United States Navy, wrote a gracious thank-you note to Clare Boothe Luce, one-half America's premier power couple. Joseph P. Kennedy was a prominent Democrat who harbored immense political ambitions for his sons, while Clare Luce was a Republican, as was her husband, Time/Life magazine mogul Henry Luce. But Mrs. Luce was a friend of the Kennedy family, and in the dark autumn of 1942, however, she knew that Jack Kennedy was heading into perilous seas as the U.S. war effort against Japan escalated. She took time from her schedule -- she was running for Congress against an incumbent Democrat -- to send young Kennedy, care of his father, a good luck token that had belonged to her mother.
Kennedy, then 25, was already in the U.S. Navy when America entered World War II. Anticipating the worst, he’d enlisted in September of 1941, and was an ensign in a Washington, D.C., office the day Pearl Harbor was attacked.
While at home on leave a year later, his father gave him Clare Boothe Luce’s letter and lucky coin. By then, Kennedy was a lieutenant, junior grade, assigned to PT boat training in Rhode Island. On Sept. 29, 1942, he penned a reply:
“I came home yesterday and Dad gave me your letter with the gold coin,” Kennedy wrote. “The coin is now fastened to my identification tag and will be there, I hope, for the duration. I couldn’t have been more pleased. Good luck is a commodity in rather large demand these days and I feel you have given me a particularly potent bit of it.”
Young Kennedy would need every ounce of positive karma in the Pacific, especially after the small patrol boat he was skippering, PT-109, was cut in half by a Japanese destroyer. Two of the 13 crewman were killed; 11 others were thrown into shark-infested waters. Kennedy, with an injured crewman on his back, swam to the safety of small Pacific islands. The crew was ultimately rescued, and its young lieutenant received a Purple Heart and the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for heroism.
When he recovered from his injuries, Kennedy wrote Clare Boothe Luce again, this time sending a talisman of his own. It was a makeshift letter opener forged from a .51-caliber Japanese bullet and a piece of metal from his boat. “With it goes my sincere thanks for your good-luck piece,” he wrote, “which did service above and beyond its routine duties during a rather busy period.”
John F. Kennedy had many faults, but lack of bravery was never one of them. After his death, his brother Robert said that courage was the trait he valued above all others. JFK's countrymen didn't need to be told that. He'd written a best-selling book about political courage and had displayed physical courage in the Pacific. He never talked about it much, however. In a late 1950s “Person to Person” interview, famed CBS journalist Edward R. Murrow asked him about PT-109. It was, Kennedy replied blandly, “an interesting experience.”
Kennedy’s pride in his service -- and gratitude for his rescue -- was tempered by the knowledge that millions of Americans lost family members in that war. It was an insight he’d come by the hard way. Two of his own men had not survived their encounter in the Pacific; his older brother and his sister Kathleen's husband had also died in combat in World War II.
In “A Thousand Days,” Kennedy historian and aide Arthur Schlesinger recalled how Kennedy handled his hero status when asked about it in his postwar political campaigns: “It was involuntary,” he would say. “They sank my boat.”
Carl M. Cannon
Washington Bureau chief, RealClearPolitics
@CarlCannon (Twitter)
ccannon@realclearpolitics.com
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.
Trump insists that the signs of substance use are plainly visible, if the press would only look.
He watched Biden clash with other candidates early on in the Democratic primary, “and I said there’s no way he could continue.” When he watched Biden go toe-to-toe with Sen. Bernie Sanders, “I said, ‘How did he go from there, with those horrible performances, to where he was, okay?’”
Neither candidate has taken a drug test. No presidential candidate ever has because the Presidential Debate Commission doesn’t have a doping policy. But less than 48 hours before the first 2020 debate, Trump stood behind the White House podium and suggested that Biden might be cheating with performance-enhancing drugs that stave off mental decline and boost cognitive ability.
He did not offer proof. He just asked that reporters “check out the Internet.” His debate coaches, Chris Christie and Rudy Giuliani, sat nearby. They didn’t say a word.
Trump spent the summer questioning the mental dexterity of his opponent. He long-ago dubbed him “Sleepy Joe.” When that didn’t quite stick, the Republican began mocking the Democrat for shying away from public appearances during the pandemic and another nickname was needed. This time it was “Hidin’ Biden.” The terms work on different levels, and Trump will use one or the other -- or both -- to the delight of the MAGA faithful who turn out to his rallies.
But what happens when Biden doesn’t hide and when Biden is not at all sleepy? Some Republicans worry that the bar has been set so low that the challenger can easily exceed expectations. Ahead of the debate, the doping charges appear to be an attempt to explain why the candidate isn’t living up to Trump’s bad branding. Either way, Trump World is doing its best to manage expectations for Tuesday night’s match-up.
As first reported in The Hill, Trump’s campaign sent a list of talking points to congressional Republicans and their staffs. “Biden’s alertness may be suspect,” the document reads, but -- it warned in bold and red and underlined letters -- “DO NOT underestimate his abilities in a debate.”
It isn’t that the campaign fears Trump will perform poorly. Instead, officials caution that the president may not be as polished as his interlocutor because, while Biden has been cramming for the debate, Trump has been dealing with an unprecedented pandemic and foreign affairs. “Joe Biden has had nothing but time to prepare for the debates as he’s hidden in his basement and avoided accountability from voters and the media,” Trump campaign spokesman Ken Farnaso told RCP before adding that “rehearsed, canned responses” will fall flat when compared to Trump’s track record.
The Trump team is right on at least one undeniable point: Biden’s camp does call “lids” early and often. Journalist jargon for when a politician ends travel and press appearances for the day, lids have been called by the campaign with increasing frequency as the debate has approached, so much so that even mentioning the topic elicits an audible groan from Biden’s campaign staff.
“A lid is when you put out word you’re not going to be campaigning today. So, he does a lid all the time,” Trump told a crowd in Jacksonville, Fla., last Thursday. Meanwhile, “I’m working my ass off! I’m in Ohio. I’m in Texas. I’m in Florida. I’m in Michigan. I’m in Wisconsin.”
Between political travel and regular presidential duties, there has been little room for traditional debate prep. Even if the incumbent hasn’t had much time to work on his delivery, campaign Communications Director Tim Murtaugh insists Trump hasn’t lost a step. “The president prepares for debates by being president,” he told RealClearPolitics, “and by his regular engagement with the extremely hostile Washington press corps.” And while the nicknames for Biden have evolved, Murtaugh said no one is taking the opponent for granted: “He is a master debater -- there’s no question.”
But which is it? Is it Biden-the-slightly-senile, as the president suggests and the campaign has spent millions arguing in ad buys? Or is it Biden-the-shrewd-political-operator? Murtaugh suggested it could be both and cited his numerous debate outings as a three-time presidential candidate and two-time vice-presidential nominee.
“It’s clear that Biden has his good days and his bad days,” the spokesman explained. “But when the cameras come on, and it’s time to debate, he has always been able to turn it on, and that’s the Biden we expect to see.”
“He knows when it’s show time,” he concluded.
The Biden camp was somewhat taken aback by the lately offered respect and not a little amused. "There are probably a lot of Tim Murtaughs out there. Is this the same one who's been shouting from the rooftops for months that Joe Biden is mentally incapacitated and is going to withdraw from the debates in fear?” a senior Biden aide told RCP.
“If so, I have questions,” the aide added.
Ohio Democratic Party Chairman David Pepper also had questions. Ahead of the debate in Cleveland, he told RCP that Trump cannot have it both ways. “Why they are moving the expectations all over, I don’t know,” he said. “They apparently think he’s gonna need some kind of wonder drug that makes you good at debates now that they think he’s already amazing.”
Campaigns always try to manage public and press expectations to either capitalize on the subsequent boom or avoid the bust. High expectations can sink an underperforming candidate while low expectations provide a cushion regardless of the outcomes. “You want to go into any debate with your expectations as low as possible,” former White House press secretary Sean Spicer told RCP.
Spicer was also careful not to downplay Biden’s debating abilities. Even then, he predicted that the media would “declare him the winner purely by him just standing up straight.” But he also suggested another way to look at the contest, which will be watched by tens of millions of voters: It might not matter.
Spicer points back to the 2012 debate between former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and President Obama. The Republican seemed to win the first round, and the GOP was ecstatic. But then they learned the hard way that most of the audience had already made up their mind who would get their vote before the debate.
“Say you’re a Patriots fan and they play the Jets, who have a good game,” Spicer said, borrowing a football metaphor. “Acknowledging that [the Jets] had a good game doesn’t mean you’re no longer a fan of [the Patriots].” The same goes for the debates, he continued. “In theory, you can be a Trump supporter and acknowledge Biden had a good debate. It doesn’t mean you’ll vote for him and vice-versa.”
Erik Smith, an Obama-era operative who served as a senior adviser for message development on that successful reelection campaign, said after such a tumultuous, unprecedented year where so many Americans have suffered from the pandemic and the economic shutdown, the entire expectations-setting exercise is a throwback to a different time, one in which the stakes were much lower.
“While ‘working the ref’ might be a fun in normal campaigns, the likely debate focus on the more than 200,000 Americans who died from COVID make those parlor games seem quaint and dated,” he told RCP.
And things were simpler just four years ago. There was no pandemic, no global economic downturn, no widespread effort to defund police. One constant remains, namely that Beltway politicos and cable news analysts expect a poor outing from Trump. They panned his performance. They said Hillary Clinton the winner. He won the election anyway, and a source familiar with the president’s thinking said that’s one of the reasons Trump is sticking with his own method.
Traditional debate prep? “We don't engage in it,” a Trump campaign source said.
“It was much more conversational. We would throw out ideas, and we would throw out a question and he would answer,” the source explained, recounting the last debate cycle. “We never attempted to fill him in with specific language that we wanted him to say. We want Donald Trump to be Donald Trump.”
Few moments were more off-the-cuff and genuine for Trump than when Clinton questioned if her opponent possessed the temperament needed to be president. “It’s just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country,” she said. He retorted: “Because you’d be in jail.”
The back-and-forth “was never rehearsed,” the source recalled, “and it was never discussed.” The zinger came from a freewheeling candidate who made his name in the entertainment industry. “He felt that he was being attacked, and so he dropped that line, and people were like, ‘Oh, my God.’ The place erupted,” the source said. “That's what you can expect.”
This time around, Biden’s legislative record and his propensity for gaffes are likely targets. “Trump is not going to be afraid to remind the people watching that Joe Biden called black men ‘predators,’” the source said in reference to the then-senator’s 1994 crime bill. “Trump is not going to be afraid to remind people that Joe Biden said that a black reporter was on crack,” the source added, citing a recent testy interview.
Republicans close to the president have been studying each of Biden’s debates going back to 1972 when he first ran for Senate. The early conclusion, the source said, is that “this is not the Joe Biden who crushed Paul Ryan eight years ago. This is a very different Joe Biden, and our ability to get him off topic is going to be important.”
To throw the former vice president off track, the source has suggested that Trump will answer a question from the moderator and then pose his own. “I don't think Joe is going to want to answer questions direct from the president. So look, the more Joe stutters and stumbles and makes mistakes and says things that just don't resonate or make sense, the more we're winning.”
Come Tuesday evening, Biden will try to do what no Republican or Democrat has managed to achieve so far. He will try to survive 90 minutes in prime time with a punch-happy populist. The one thing he certainly won’t do is entertain the idea of a drug test.
“Vice President Biden intends to deliver his debate answers in words. If the president thinks his best case is made in urine, he can have at it,” Kate Bedingfield, Biden’s deputy campaign manager, said in a statement Sunday. “We’d expect nothing less from Donald Trump, who pissed away the chance to protect the lives of 200K Americans when he didn't make a plan to stop COVID-19.”
Murtaugh took that “as a ‘no.’” He added, “If there is an explanation for why we see different Joe Bidens all the time, I think voters should have access to the reason.”
Susan Crabtree is RealClearPolitics' White House/national political correspondent.
After leaving the Army, I spent my first year of law school at the University of Notre Dame, where I had the good fortune of studying constitutional law under then-Professor Barrett. There I was, a West Point graduate, older than most of my fellow law students, one of the only students with multiple young children, and almost certainly the only one who, just a few months prior, had been leading meetings with village elders in Afghanistan as an Army officer and platoon leader. To top it off, I was also working through painful physical therapy to recover from injuries I received during my time in service.
To say I felt like a "fish out of water" would have been a massive understatement. But luckily, within the first few weeks, I attended Professor Barrett's "office hours" — a time set aside for students to connect with and ask questions of their professors in a one-on-one setting.
Professor Barrett's welcoming smile and thoughtful questions made it evident that she genuinely cared about her students. During our meeting, she asked about my wife, my children, and my experiences growing up in Montana. I already knew that her brilliance was renowned in both the Notre Dame community and beyond. What I didn’t know — but immediately discovered — is how much she truly loves teaching and getting to know the people around her. Law students are supposed to be terrified of their professors, or that’s what we all learned from the iconic law school film, “The Paper Chase.” But here, outside the office of one of the most esteemed constitutional scholars in her generation, I felt welcome and (somewhat) comfortable at law school for the first time.
My experience is hardly unique. Over the course of the year, I observed many of my fellow students experience the same kind of meaningful relationship with Professor Barrett. Thankfully for us, she had plenty of generosity to go around. I can specifically remember approaching Professor Barrett when pain from my injuries was beginning to interfere with my studies. She encouraged me and helped me. It might seem a small act to some, but for me it was a significant moment that I will never forget.
For the past six years, I have stayed in contact with Judge Barrett. Recently, my wife and I felt called to adopt a child into our home. Knowing that Judge Barrett has adopted two orphans, we reached out to her for advice. Despite the massive demands on her time, she overwhelmed us with the quantity and quality of information, guidance, and direction she was able and willing to provide. We felt so loved and supported by her constant, selfless giving of time and attention.
What is most impressive is that I am only one of the many students who look to Judge Barrett as a mentor. She was once asked in an interview what she most wanted to be remembered for in life. Her response was for people to say that "she loved well." Congratulations, Judge Barrett. Everyone around you — students, lawyers, and professors alike — will jump out of their seats to tell you the same thing: you’ve loved them well.
Chase Giacomo is a former Notre Dame Law School student.
We are told by Black Lives Matter, about 80% of the college professors and their pals in the media, that President Donald Trump is a racist. CNN says it almost every night. It's always wise to judge a man by his deeds, not his words or promises. The Census Bureau report released earlier this month finds that, from 2016 to 2019, Black incomes rose more than in any three years in the history of the United States. The median household income for Blacks is now $45,438. I don't have the latest data in front of me, but data from several years ago would indicate few, if any, other nations on Earth with a higher average Black income than the United States.
Black poverty rates fell to their lowest level ever recorded. Black poverty is still much higher than white poverty, but Black people's economic advancement under Trump (precoronavirus) has been nearly miraculous. Does this sound like the result of a racist president?
One of the more fantastic claims by the BLM crowd is that America discriminates against all minorities, or "people of color." By that, they mean people who are Black, Hispanic or any other race that is not white. But the latest census data on incomes squarely contradict this conclusion -- at least when it comes to family finances and economic opportunity.
The highest-income group in America today is not white-skinned workers. It is Asians. Astonishingly, the median household income of Asian Americans reached just shy of $100,000 a year. (The number is $98,174 to be exact.) In other words, the average Asian family is upper-income. One of America's wonders as a land of opportunity is that an immigrant can come to America dirt-poor from China or India and, within 20 years, move into the middle class or even become wealthy.
How did Asians, many of whom are first- or second-generation immigrants from Japan, Korea, India, China, Pakistan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, etc., race ahead of whites? Perhaps they have a stronger work ethic. Maybe they are more likely to go into occupations in the sciences, engineering or medicine, where salaries are high. Perhaps it is the "tiger moms" effect. Who knows? But what is indisputable from this evidence is this: This couldn't have happened in America if this were a nation that hates ethnic minorities. It could not have occurred in a xenophobic country.
What about Hispanics? Trump has indeed said some very nasty things about Mexicans coming to the U.S. illegally and committing crimes. But Hispanics are doing very well in America. The average Hispanic household makes more than $56,000 a year today. That's not rich -- but it is a massive leap forward from what Hispanics earn in Mexico, El Salvador or Cuba. The gains of Latinos in just the last three years have been extraordinary. Hispanics have also been invaluable in keeping our hospitals, nursing homes, stores and delivery systems functioning during this pandemic thanks to their incredibly strong and admirable work ethic.
I would submit from all this that America isn't the most but rather the least racist nation on Earth when it comes to upward economic mobility.
COPYRIGHT 2020 CREATORS.COM
Stephen Moore is co-founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity and a member of President Trump’s Economic Recovery Task Force.
Trump’s visit wasn’t surprising. In the state’s largely Republican south-central region, Dauphin is the lone Democratic county, which Hillary Clinton carried by less than three percentage points in 2016. Though Democrats have outnumbered GOP voters since 2008 -- when Barack Obama became the first Democrat since 1964 to win the county -- Dauphin still trends Republican in lower offices, from state legislators to county governance.
In other words, Dauphin is competitive for both parties. This year, the county’s largely suburban voters view the election as a referendum on the pandemic era. Their verdict could complicate the path to a Pennsylvania victory for Trump or Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee.
This is particularly evident in Hershey, the town synonymous with chocolate. Most of the municipal area, formally known as Derry Township (population 25,000), went for Trump in 2016. And yet, Hershey contributes to the county’s political unpredictability.
Over time, it has transitioned from a rural company town into a flourishing suburb. To visitors, it’s a major tourist destination -- known for its amusement park, Chocolate World, and resort hotels -- where founder Milton Hershey’s dream reigns supreme. Indeed, the famous chocolate company remains a major community presence. But today, Hershey is also a health care hub. It’s home to Penn State’s research hospital, which is the county’s top private employer.
In recent decades, the Hershey medical center has erased the community’s quaint, blue-collar roots. It’s now home to highly educated transplants -- moderates and progressives less attuned to the town’s cherished past. This transient population is pitted against the largely conservative Pennsylvania Dutch and Italian natives, who believe Milton Hershey’s vision has faded from memory. This demographic shift no longer makes Hershey a reliably GOP area.
The town’s political divisions were only heightened by the pandemic. The crisis has illustrated a tale of two economies. At first glance, Hershey appears to have thrived despite the economic consequences of COVID-19. Along the leafy avenues surrounding downtown, there’s a residential construction boom as large Craftsman homes replace old postwar ranchers. Meanwhile, McMansion-packed neighborhoods define the hills and former farms near the medical center. In this part of town, a tract of bucolic farmland -- dubbed the West End -- is turning into a massive, mixed-use community that will only intensify Hershey’s demographic change.
Biden yard signs are proliferating in these neighborhoods, where many residents are employed in medicine and research. Their political preference reflects a national trend. As the Wall Street Journal noted last year, today’s doctors -- once “America’s quintessential Republicans” -- lean Democratic. According to the Journal’s analysis, in 2018 almost two-thirds of physician campaign contributions went to Democrats.
Hershey’s prosperity, though, is an illusion. Indeed, the pandemic has battered the community. In the spring, the medical center’s vast complex became an ominous site when it restricted visitors and treated coronavirus patients. The dangers of COVID-19 remain a dark reality for the hospital’s employees.
Outside the facility, Hershey has suffered the economic costs of Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf’s emergency lockdown measures, which resulted in the closure of “non-essential” businesses. For a time, Hershey -- dependent on its tourism season -- became a ghost town. It’s now paying the price. Hundreds of employees in its tourism sector, for example, were laid off. Meanwhile, the local government confronts a bleak fiscal future, with lost revenue from its amusement and parking taxes. At one point, there was even talk about foreclosure at the Giant Center, the arena where Trump held a jam-packed rally just days before the 2016 election.
Many Hershey residents express anger over Wolf’s arbitrary -- even illogical -- mandates. In a recent letter to a local newspaper, one restaurant owner wrote that it was “time to call out our Governor for killing the restaurant industry and all of the employees that are associated with it.” This month, a federal judge ruled that components of Wolf’s pandemic restrictions -- including limits on public gatherings -- were unconstitutional. Last week, the judge denied Wolf’s attempt to stop the ruling.
In Pennsylvania towns like Hershey, anger over the governor’s policies could translate into votes against Biden. For now, though, Hershey -- especially in its upper-middle-class neighborhoods -- has never looked so Democratic.
Still, evidence suggests this town has plenty of Trump supporters. In recent weeks, Trump yard signs and flags have appeared everywhere -- including in those wealthier neighborhoods. The president’s latest visit to Dauphin is a reminder that the county is still in play. Suburbs like those in Hershey, moreover, indicate that Pennsylvania remains an unpredictable battleground.
Charles McElwee edits RealClear's Public Affairs page on Pennsylvania. Follow him on Twitter at @CFMcElwee.
Sometime between the Pennsylvania primary in June (when Democratic voters gave Joe Biden their support) and last week, the shrine came down, replaced by one lone yard sign reading, "GIANT METEOR 2020."
Sometimes, disappointing primary election results frustrate voters so much they walk away from their party's nominee. They traditionally decide to do one of three things: sit it out, vote third party or join the opposing party.
Few hope for a meteor to strike the Earth as an option -- but, hey, it's 2020, and we all get it.
Last week, a flurry of elected officials in southwestern Pennsylvania, most of them county sheriffs, chose the last of the traditional options, deciding that after lifelong affiliations with the Democratic Party, they had seen enough change to make them walk away.
In 2008, there were nearly double the number of registered Democrats over Republicans in Westmoreland County, and James Albert was one of them. He had already been elected district judge as a Democrat for over a dozen years, and he would vote for Barack Obama that cycle and again in 2012.
Albert first served his community as a local police officer and then as a county detective and a deputy sheriff before running for district judge. He came out of a short-lived retirement last year and won the race for sheriff as a Democrat.
Today, there are more registered Republicans in Westmoreland County, and Sheriff Albert is one of them. It is a decision he says he took seriously as he watched his party of birth leave less and less room for his pro-life and pro-Second Amendment values with each passing year.
When the party started walking away from supporting law enforcement, Albert had had enough. "What really convinced me," he says, "was the past few months as the country has witnessed these riots where we saw the looting of businesses or arson attacks or the destruction of property, as well as assaults on innocent citizens and attacks on law enforcement. That bothered me. I've for 40 years [been] connected to law enforcement in my life, and it really bothered me."
"Then, David Dorn was killed." Dorn, a retired police officer, was fatally shot during looting in St. Louis in June.
Albert said that for years, when he campaigned as a Democrat at gun bashes, church festivals, ice cream socials and farmers markets, people would say to him, "Oh, you're pro-life," or, "You're an NRA life member," and think he was a Republican. When he tried to explain he was a conservative Democrat, people would say that party was long gone. "They were right, and I just realized it was time for me to go where my values were," he said.
Albert said Gina Cerilli, one of the county's commissioners and a Democrat, told a local paper he had turned his back on the unions who supported him through a number of elections. "I thought, well, that's not true. ... As far as the unions are concerned, I have always been as a Republican," he said.
Jim Custer, like just about everyone in Fayette County in 1983, said that when you turned 18, you registered as a Democrat. "This was the county of coal miners and steelworkers and farmers and blue-collar workers, and that was the party who said they had their back," he said.
After he graduated from Laurel Highlands High School, Custer joined the military. He served four years active Air Force and then three years in the reserve while attending college part time. The intent was to finish college until an opportunity came along to fulfill a lifelong dream. "When I was nearing the end of my active-duty enlistment, there was an announcement that there was going to be testing for state police," he said. Custer spent 22 years as a member of the "first and the finest." When he retired, he decided to run for county sheriff as a Democrat, a position he has held for the past five years.
The 54-year-old married father of two says the drift away from the party on the national level began long ago. His last vote for a Democratic presidential candidate was for Bill Clinton, followed by votes for George W. Bush, John McCain, Mitt Romney and President Donald Trump.
When he was asked by Butler County Sheriff Mike Slupe if he had any problem endorsing Trump alongside 14 other sheriffs, Custer didn't even pause to answer. "Hey, it's great. I don't care who it is. It's still the president of the United States. I spent seven years in the Air Force. Being that close to Air Force One -- that was a big thing for me," he said.
His wife snapped a photo of him holding his "Cops For Trump" sign and put it on Facebook -- and then things got really interesting.
By last Sunday, he'd gone online and quietly changed his voter registration. By Tuesday, he was once again standing with other members of the law enforcement community at a Trump rally in Pittsburgh when the president called him out by name and noted his party change.
"He kind of did my announcement for me," Custer said.
Party affiliation and the emotional connection that goes along with it is complex. It is more than just a name. It is a decision that you likely discussed with your parents over the dinner table when you were 18 or that was passed down through your family's life experiences. It is often rooted in place, profession or a grandparent.
The direction any party takes is always at the risk of shedding people who are unwilling to go along for the ride. For many establishment Republicans, Trump was a bridge too far, and they went toward the Democrats. For Democrats like Custer, the longtime-leftward veer of the party lost them awhile ago.
While these switches in Western Pennsylvania are more about both parties' realignments, it is worth noting Trump did win the state in 2016 on the backs of voters in counties such as Fayette, Westmoreland and the 10 others that surround Pittsburgh.
The calculation Biden seems to be making is the same one Hillary Clinton made in 2016: Run up the numbers in Philadelphia and suburban collar counties, plus Allegheny County, and hope the rural vote remains unenthused. Certainly, those areas are more populated, but you never really know how many Alberts and Custers out there are going to show up -- or how many pro-meteor people are going to stay home.
COPYRIGHT 2018 CREATORS.COM
The question I receive more than any other from non-Jews is: Why are so many Jews on the left?
Before addressing it, I should note that the same question could be asked of Christians and other non-Jews. Why have so many mainstream Protestants and Catholics (up to and including the pope) embraced the left? Why have nearly all blacks, the majority of Hispanics and Asian Americans, the most successful ethnic group in America, embraced the left? And outside of the United States, why have most Germans, French, Canadians, Australians and others in the West embraced the left?
This question could be asked about almost every group in the world.
Nevertheless, it is valid to ask it about Jews because, if any group should be wary of dismantling a society, especially a decent one, it is the Jews. The moment civilization begins to disintegrate, the Jews are the first victims -- never the only, but always the first. That's why Jews have so often been likened to the proverbial canary in the mine. Miners take canaries down with them because when there are noxious fumes, canaries die, and when the miners see the dead canaries, they know there are toxic fumes they must fight, or they, too, will die.
That's why decent non-Jews who don't fight anti-Semitism are fools. They don't understand that anti-Semitism represents a mortal threat to them. Tens of millions of non-Jews were killed because decent non-Jews ignored Hitler early on, dismissing him and Nazism as a Jewish problem.
It is often asked how the most culturally advanced country in Europe, perhaps in the world, could produce Nazism and the Holocaust. Or, as it is often put, "How did the country that gave us Bach, Beethoven, Heine and Schiller give us Auschwitz?"
One answer is that advanced culture and advanced morality are not the same. The Nazis loved classical music.
The other, more important, answer is that civilization is fragile.
It is fragile because civilization consists of human beings, and human nature is profoundly flawed. Exceptional evil is as common as exceptional good. It takes a great deal of effort and a great deal of time to make a decent society. But it takes little effort and little time to destroy a society.
That most American Jews do not appreciate how extraordinarily decent America is -- compared with other countries, not compared with some childish utopian vision -- only proves the lack of relationship between education and wisdom and between intelligence and wisdom.
The left is tearing down America because the left in America is what the left has been everywhere: a purely destructive force. Conservatives and liberals build everything, and leftists destroy everything: music, art, universities, high schools, elementary schools, economies, late-night comedy (for that matter, all comedy), journalism, sports and, now, the sciences. In addition, everywhere the left gains power it suppresses personal freedom, beginning with the most important freedom, freedom of speech.
Every violent demonstration (also known as "riots") over the past six months has been a left-wing riot.
Why, then, does this left-wing destruction not frighten America's Jews? Do they not know the more power the left has, the less freedom they and all other Americans will have? Do they not know how much Black Lives Matter, antifa and the rest of the left loathe Israel? Or do they not care? (The answer is that, increasingly, many American Jews do not care -- especially young Jews, who have been raised by left-wing teachers and left-wing media.) How do they not recoil when statues of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln are violently removed?
Do American Jews not know that the unique esteem in which they (and Israel since 1948) have been held in American society has been entirely due to the Judeo-Christian roots of America's values and its Judeo-Christian identity? Do they not know that in a post-Christian America, they will be just another minority and that, as the left gains influence, nonleft Jews (specifically religious and pro-Israel Jews) will be singled out for opprobrium? (Just look at how Jewish students who publicly identify as Jews, let alone as pro-Israel Jews, are treated on many American campuses.)
We conservatives know the answer to the question, "How did the country that gave the world Beethoven give the world Nazism?"
The answer: Civilization is fragile.
That was true in Germany, and it is true in America.
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Should she be confirmed, he will have made history.
Even his enemies would have to concede that Trump triumphed where his Republican predecessors -- even Ronald Reagan, who filled three court vacancies -- fell short. Trump's achievement -- victory in the Supreme Court wars that have lasted for half a century -- is a triumph that will affect the nation and the law for years, perhaps decades.
Trump's remaking of the Supreme Court for constitutionalism may well be the crown jewel of his presidency.
Consider. If Judge Barrett becomes Justice Barrett, she will join Justices Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to create a constitutionalist core of five justices, a controlling majority.
On the other side would sit the three liberals: 82-year-old Stephen Breyer and Barack Obama appointees Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor.
If Chief Justice John Roberts envisioned a Roberts Court where he would be the swing vote for 4-4 deadlocks, deciding every such case himself, his dream could be about to vanish.
If Barrett is confirmed, the new court becomes "The Five," with its youngest, newest and most charismatic member, a 48-year-old protege of Justice Antonin Scalia, its brightest and rising star.
Consider the credentials of the jurist Trump just named.
Barrett was summa cum laude at Notre Dame Law School, graduating first in her class. She clerked for Scalia, taught law at South Bend for 15 years and has served for three years on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals.
She is a non-Ivy League, Middle American and a devout Catholic and mother of seven, including a special needs child and two adopted children from Haiti. Almost universally, former classmates and colleagues, liberals among them, praise her temperament, brilliance and scholarship.
America's court wars, in which the coming battle over Barrett's nomination may prove decisive, go back half a century.
It was begun in June 1968, as Richard Nixon, victorious in his party's primaries, was moving inexorably to the GOP nomination in Miami Beach and very possibly on to the presidency of the United States.
Chief Justice Earl Warren, an old adversary of Nixon's from California days, was not happy with this. A report in the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Warren "is said to feel that Richard Nixon -- regarded as the GOP's likely presidential nominee -- would be bound to appoint a new Chief Justice pledged to overturn recent court decisions guaranteeing constitutional rights of criminals."
Nixon sent the clipping to me with a note: "Buchanan: Why doesn't [Strom] Thurmond send this to Southern papers -- opinion leaders."
The Inquirer article proved to be on point. In collusion with Chief Justice Warren, President Lyndon Johnson had hatched a plot.
Warren would announce his resignation as chief justice and would make acceptance contingent upon Johnson's nominee to succeed him being confirmed. And that nominee would be Justice Abe Fortas, a court ally of Warren and longtime crony of LBJ. All three were in on it.
When Fortas was confirmed, his vacant seat as associate justice would then be filled by Federal Judge Homer Thornberry, also an ally of Johnson's going back to his Texas days.
Thus would Nixon be preempted, the liberalism of the high court guaranteed, and the Warren Court succeeded for another decade by the Fortas Court.
When LBJ named Fortas, Nixon went silent. But GOP Senators Robert Griffin, John Tower and Howard Baker moved to block Fortas' ascent. They used an argument familiar to us today. The new president chosen in November, not the president retiring in January, should choose Warren's replacement as chief justice.
The attack from Senate Republicans soon zeroed in on Fortas' social liberalism on pornography as manifest in his having voted alone on the court to approve for public viewing films depicting acts of homosexual sex.
Fortas not only failed to win the support of the two-thirds of the Senate he needed to overcome a Republican filibuster, he also failed to win a simple majority, receiving only 45 votes for confirmation. On Oct. 1, 1968,
Fortas asked Johnson to withdraw his nomination, and in the spring of 1969, he was forced to resign from the court in a financial scandal.
Warren would have to swear in Nixon as the nation's 37th president on Jan. 20, 1969, and then watch Nixon replace him as chief justice with Judge Warren Burger in the spring of that same year.
Came then Nixon's losing battles to put Southern judges Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell on the court, Reagan's failure to elevate Bob Bork, and the brutal but failed assaults on Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh.
Now comes Amy Coney Barrett's turn.
If Senate Republicans stay united, then they can realize a victory that generations of their GOP predecessors had hoped to see.
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The "consistent life ethic" gets closer to the heart of what this means. Originating in the Catholic Church, it expands the pro-life concept to include opposition to capital punishment, humane treatment of immigrants and even the wearing of face masks during a pandemic. Trump subscribes to none of the above.
"Why aren't all pro-lifers pro-maskers?" writes James Martin, a Jesuit priest and editor at large of America, a Jesuit magazine. "This should be a no-brainer."
He goes on: "Some people think these precautions are not just inconvenient but an infringement on their civil liberties. I could give you all sorts of arguments about all sorts of other public health measures designed to protect people -- food-safety rules, turn signals on cars and so on -- that people seem fine with. But in these politicized times, even caring for the other person has become political."
In the interest of full disclosure, I believe that women have the right to an early abortion -- with later procedures permitted when a pregnancy goes catastrophically wrong. But I do respect a consistent pro-life position.
From his mocking of those who wear masks to his disdain for social distancing (himself excepted), Trump has worsened a health crisis that has claimed 200,000 American lives. He says that he knew from the get-go that COVID-19 would become a plague but just let it rip.
With just over 4 percent of the world's population, the United States has suffered nearly 20 percent of global coronavirus deaths. The pandemic has been bad elsewhere, but no rich country has done as little to stem its damage as we have.
And Trump still downplays it, telling people in Ohio that the disease "affects elderly people, elderly people with heart problems and other problems. ... That's it."
We see Trump supporters menacing store employees who tell them to wear masks. To be pro-life should mean reverencing the life of the checkout clerk as well as the terminally ill child. And even if these thugs don't believe the expert advice on masks, you'd think they'd have the decency to not harass stressed-out retail workers.
It is intellectually impossible to consider anyone who would take health insurance away from millions of Americans as "pro-life." As we speak, the Trump Justice Department is supporting a lawsuit before the Supreme Court that would blow up the Affordable Care Act. Some 20 million Americans would lose coverage as a result.
From 2014 to 2017, the Medicaid expansion part of the ACA alone saved the lives of at least 19,000 Americans ages 55 to 64, according to a National Bureau of Economic Research study. Yet, Trump no longer makes even a pretense of fixing the ACA, much less offering a replacement, as he promised in 2016.
A true pro-life stance would also recognize the moral duty to care for the Creation, a stance many religious leaders do take. This would extend to concern over the threat that global warming poses to life on our planet, including human life.
The National Bureau of Economic Research predicts that if climate change is left unchecked, higher temperatures could lead to 85 deaths per 100,000 people globally per year by 2100. Counting from today's world population, that comes to a hard-to-imagine half-billion lives lost.
Trump doesn't give a rat's tail about climate change or health coverage or protecting Americans from a deadly pandemic. Accusations that he is running a death cult may sound overheated but are not without basis.
That's who Trump is. Americans claiming to be pro-life should ask whether that's OK with them.
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Americans of all ages need to be active in politics and committed to causes. It is our social responsibility. However, our media and chattering classes seem to encourage only the most aggressive forms of political engagement. Politicians and pundits trade insults on social media, endlessly trying to one-up each other and fuel their audiences’ desire to see opponents humiliated. The talking heads are already preparing their Cleveland debate talking points. Influencers are waiting to hit “send” on a thousand post-debate hot takes.
This chasm is why my organization, BridgeUSA, partnered with Decision Point and the University of North Carolina’s Center for the Science of Moral Understanding – to improve discourse by creating empathy and constructive dialogue through deliberative decision-making. Psychological research shows that thinking through issues and problems creates bonds between people, whereas visceral and emotional debates create enemies. In videos released earlier this month by our alliance, three former members of Congress explained not their views on abortion, racial justice, or climate change – but how they would advise a president of the United States on appointing someone to lead a federal agency.
Without empathy and humility, passionate people assume that people are evil instead of honestly wrong. Legitimate mistakes in the media are “fake news,” while President Trump’s successes are dismissed or attacked by political opponents. And while transforming our toxic political culture into one which prioritizes substance over empty promises, and compelling visions over personal attacks, won’t happen overnight, it can start on Tuesday with Cleveland debate moderator Chris Wallace.
Wallace performed admirably in 2016 during the final debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. He targeted Trump’s tendency to make it up as he goes along, and insisted that Trump clarify his inaccurate comments on the Syrian civil war. He also held Clinton to her own words about opening America’s borders – words from a leaked confidential email that a more sympathetic moderator might have chosen to let slide. He needs to be just as thorough this time around and bring attention to both candidates’ questionable statements. At the same time, he needs to avoid fact-checking every word in real time. As Wallace correctly pointed out four years ago, the candidates should be checking each other. Being informed and confident enough to constructively challenge inaccurate claims is part of the test for the candidates.
One thing Wallace needs to do is get both candidates on record about what they want to accomplish and how they’ll do it. Both Trump and Biden would have to deal with unprecedented division if elected – not just between left and right but within their party. Even if the next president successfully signs legislation, he will likely face serious opposition from the judiciary – something Trump is familiar with due to many injunctions filed during his presidency. The public needs to know how each candidate would overcome all these obstacles, and – most importantly – how the resulting legislation would impact their lives. Wallace will also need to ensure that neither candidate gets away with vague platitudes and personal insults. If he’s diligent and keeps both Trump and Biden focused on the issues, we won’t have to hear what they think about each other yet again, and we might even learn something about their policy proposals.
Trump, Biden, and Wallace can’t fix our political culture. Both candidates are more than half a century older than the rising generation of young voters, and our media is too heavily invested in outrage culture. Nevertheless, a constructive and thorough debate would be a good model for future leaders.
Manu Meel is CEO of BridgeUSA, which is building a student movement to depolarize college campuses and invest in the next generation of leaders.
Trump’s announcement of Barrett for the seat held by the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is launching a high-stakes, fast-track election season fight over confirmation of a conservative judge who is expected to shift the court rightward as it reviews health care, abortion access and other hot-button issues.
Speaking at a news conference Sunday at the White House, the president vowed she will be confirmed “very quickly.”
Biden appealed directly to his former colleagues in the Senate to “take a step back from the brink.”
Biden is urging Senate Republicans not to fan a controversy during an already tumultuous election year for a country reeling from the coronavirus crisis, a struggling economy and protests over racial injustice.
If Trump wins the election, Biden said the president’s nominee should have a vote. But Biden said he should choose the next justice if he prevails on Nov. 3.
“This is time to de-escalate,” Biden said Sunday in Wilmington, Delaware.
No justice has ever been confirmed to the Supreme Court so close to a presidential election with early voting already underway in some states. Republicans believe the fight ahead will boost voter enthusiasm for Trump and Senate Republicans at serious risk of losing their majority. Democrats warn Barrett’s confirmation would almost certainly undo Americans’ health care protections as the high court takes up a case against the Affordable Care Act in the fall.
According to a national poll by The New York Times and Siena College that was released Sunday, a clear majority — 56% — of voters believes the winner of the Nov. 3 presidential election should fill Ginsburg’s seat, versus 41% who said Trump should as the current president. Biden has said he would nominate the first Black woman to the court, but he has not released the names of his potential choices.
The poll, which was conducted Sept. 22-24, had a margin of sampling error of 3.5 percentage points.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi argued that Trump was moving too quickly to fill the vacancy before the court hears a challenge to the Affordable Care Act on Nov. 10.
“It’s not about this justice. It’s about any justice he would appoint right now,” Pelosi said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Trump spotlighted Barrett’s Roman Catholic religion Sunday, portraying her as a victim of attacks on her faith. But it’s her conservative approach to the law, particularly health care access that is drawing opposition from Democrats, not her private beliefs.
“It’s a disgrace,” Trump said.
Pelosi, a practicing Catholic like Barrett, sidestepped any focus on Barrett’s conservative religious outlook, which California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, brought up in Barrett’s Senate hearings in 2017 when Trump nominated her for the appellate bench.
Pelosi said, “What I am concerned about is anyone that President Trump would have appointed was there to undo the Affordable Care Act.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said the Senate will vote on Barrett’s nomination in the “weeks ahead.” The Senate Judiciary Committee is expected to launch confirmation hearings Oct. 12, with a possible Senate vote by Oct. 29 — days before the presidential election.
“The Senate will confirm her next month,” declared Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., on CNN.
With only two of the 53 Republican senators voicing opposition to a confirmation vote before the Nov. 3 election, Democrats appeared outnumbered — and without recourse to block the nomination.
Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the assistant leader, said Democrats can slow down the confirmation by a matter of hours or days, “but we can’t stop the outcome.”
If confirmed, Barrett’s addition would make for the sharpest ideological swing on the Supreme Court since Clarence Thomas replaced Justice Thurgood Marshall nearly three decades ago.
In a memo to colleagues, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer warned of the GOP’s “monomaniacal drive” to confirm the nominee.
Schumer told Senate Democrats, “Our number one job is to communicate exactly what is at stake for the American people if Republicans jam through this nominee. The elimination of the Affordable Care Act is at the top of the list.”
Barrett has been critical of Chief Justice John Roberts’ 2012 opinion upholding the health care law. Ginsburg was one of five votes that saved the law on two prior court challenges.
Weissert reported from Wilmington, Delaware. Associated Press writers Hope Yen in Washington and Bill Barrow in Atlanta contributed to this report.
Even in this highly unusual year of 2020, the economy remains, by a wide margin, the most important issue, according to voter surveys. In this most abnormal year, most voters will still default to the typical driving calculus in making their Nov. 3 decision: Which candidate can make me, and the country, more prosperous? Pre-election polling suggests a wide lead for the president on this key question. A recent ABC News poll shows Trump with an 11-percentage-point lead on the economy in Florida and a 15-point lead in Arizona, both key battleground states.
Voters give him the edge on the economy for good reason, as both pre-pandemic and current metrics provide evidence of the impressive results produced by Trump, especially for the economic underdogs, the strivers. The Census Bureau just reported final numbers for the full year 2019, before our nation faced the epidemiological Pearl Harbor of COVID-19 through the deception and malfeasance of the Chinese Communist Party. The most amazing 2019 economic news was the largest median income growth in American history, by a mile, at a stellar 6.8% for the year. Put in dollar terms, the median household gained over $4,379 in income last year. For comparison, that single-year number represents more income growth than that produced during the entire eight years of the Obama-Biden administration.
The tangible benefits of such rocket-ship growth addressed economic inequality too, as black and Hispanic incomes grew even faster than the overall rate. For the first three years of the Trump presidency, an incredible 2.8 million children were lifted out of poverty, proving the efficacy of tax and regulatory relief, plus trade deals that prioritize American workers.
But looking back at past success is, admittedly, insufficient. Thankfully, America now embraces a very real, present-tense economic renaissance unfolding across our land. While hard work still lies ahead to reclaim the heights of the Trump Boom that our nation enjoyed into the early months of this year, we can also rightly celebrate the incredible recent successes and trajectory of economic revival, as revealed by the hard, on-the-ground data.
For example, just last Friday, the Commerce Department released the latest durable goods report, which showed that orders of core capital goods regained all China virus losses, and have reclaimed the pre-shutdown trend. Even better, the benefits of factories powering back up largely flow to workers. The Labor Department recently reported a new all-time high in average hourly earnings for non-managerial production workers. During Trump’s presidency so far, these manual laborers have welcomed 13.8% average hourly wage growth. That rate of pay increase for people who work their hands – the “deplorables” – is over 4% higher under Trump than during the last four years that Joe Biden was vice president.
A similar V-shaped rebirth is exploding in housing. Last week the Census Bureau detailed August as the best single month for new home sales in over 14 years, since before the 2008-09 credit crisis. Even better, unlike the 2006 homebuilding acceleration, this current housing expansion is not dependent upon widespread mortgage chicanery. As with the factories’ expansion, the benefits of the housing revival flow to working-class people, as construction wages just hit an all-time high. In a related trend, sales of furniture, electronics, and appliances have more than doubled in the last four months from the lockdown lows.
In contrast to this story of renewal and optimism, Joe Biden’s record will be revealed on the debate stage as one of retreat, with a planned regression to policies of slow growth and economic submission to China. The Obama-Biden years provided well for the already-successful, as the owners of assets benefited from globalism and the rise of asset prices. But workers languished.
In fact, during Biden’s vice presidency, only the top 10% of earners saw their household net worth increase over those eight years. The other 90% of Americans moved backward economically. The reality was even worse for minorities. Per Federal Reserve data, black citizens suffered a staggering 30% drop in their household net worth during Biden’s tenure. Though part of that loss resulted from the 2008-09 recession, the widening disparity between white and black households persisted all the way through Biden’s second term.
Pre-Donald Trump, disastrous trade deals inflicted stagnation upon American workers, for decades. Joe Biden was a principal architect of such structures, from NAFTA to China’s inclusion in the World Trade Organization on terms highly advantageous to Beijing. Because of Biden’s constant appeasing of the Chinese Communist Party, America acquiesced to an abusive economic relationship that cost our country more than 60,000 factories and over 3.2 million manufacturing jobs, per the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
We will not retreat to Joe Biden’s economic globalism. We will not again allow the most powerful nation on earth to become an economic supplicant to the Chinese politburo.
Biden may manage the mechanics and tactics of a debate with alacrity. It is true that at times he seems disoriented, but at others he appears in command of the facts. He has participated in at least 38 debates during his nearly half-century in the Washington swamp. Many of these outings have generated deserved praise, such as his 2012 performance vs. Paul Ryan. But, no amount of oratorical skill can possibly counterbalance Biden’s long and painful economic record of defeat.
Steve Cortes is a RealClearPolitics contributor and a senior adviser for strategy to the Trump 2020 Campaign.
Beset by injuries, poor play, and bad luck, the Nats finished tied for last place in their division this year. But 2020 had a couple of bright spots for Washington fans, the brightest being the batting title won by 21-year-old budding superstar Juan Soto.
The kid began the abbreviated season in quarantine after a test indicated he had COVID-19. It was apparently a false positive, and once Soto got on the field there was no stopping him. Going into Sunday’s meaningless final game against the Mets, he was locked in a battle with Atlanta Braves star Freddie Freeman for the batting crown. Soto’s average stood at .346, Freeman’s at .343.The question: to play, or not to play?
Washington manager Davey Martinez penciled Soto’s name into the lineup. The kid walked in his first at-bat and singled in his second. With the Nats ahead in a game that would turn into a laugher, Martinez pulled him, securing the title. Will this one always have an asterisk beside it, even if only in the recesses of our minds, because of the brevity of the 2020 season? Perhaps, but that probably depends on what Soto does in the years ahead. For now, it brings to mind Ted Williams, and his feats on Sept. 28 -- the last day of the season -- in both 1941 and 1960.
I’ve written about Williams’ end-of-season heroics before, as I’ll do again in a moment.
First, I’d point you to RealClearPolitics’ front page, which presents our poll averages, videos, breaking news stories, and aggregated opinion pieces spanning the political spectrum. We also offer original material from our own reporters and contributors, including the following:
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Will Biden “Corruption” Be Off-Limits in First Debate? Frank Miele considers whether moderator Chris Wallace will pursue a topic -- Hunter Biden -- that’s gotten scant critical attention from others in the media.
Can One Justice Stand Against the Hyper-Partisan Tide? Greg Orman’s solution to the power plays that compromise our governing institutions involves an act of self-sacrifice by one of the Supreme Court’s conservative jurists.
2020 Scenario: Wyoming Congresswoman Decides the Outcome. Given the various wild cards potentially impacting this election, Charles Jennings envisions a close vote in the House coming down to one person.
Democrats Bail on Their Mail-Voting Experiment. The left suddenly is pushing in-person voting after early evidence shows postal and election systems aren’t ready for an all-mail election, Logan Churchwell contends.
Older Voters Could Shape Election, But Fewer Volunteer at Polls. Seniors will be a powerful bloc in swing states, even as COVID-19 keeps them from their usual posts at voting locations, Jesse Grady reports.
For College Students, Due Process is on the Ballot. Joe Biden’s vow to reverse reforms in prosecuting campus sex assault cases would abrogate the rights of all involved, Edward Bartlett asserts.
How Social Media Platforms Are Narrowing the First Amendment. Kalev Leetaru considers the impact on democracy when private companies act as the censors the government can’t be.
“Right Makes Might” Explores Pivotal Lincoln-Douglas Debates. Mike Sabo spotlights the new documentary now streaming online.
Middle-Class America and the Spirit of Revolution. Mark Mitchell suggests Black Lives Matter protests are less about racial grievance than generational poverty and property-ownership inequity.
On Campus, COVID Tracking Tools Raise Alarms. Steve Miller has the story in RealClearInvestigations.
How a Worthy Geothermal Bill Was Hijacked. In RealClearEnergy, John Droz Jr. assails the wind and solar industry for piggybacking onto proposed legislation from Sen. Lisa Murkowski.
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On Sept. 28, 1941, the Boston Red Sox were in Philadelphia for a double-header against the Athletics -- the last two games of the season. Neither team was in the pennant race and Williams and the other players were understandably distracted by international events that were inexorably drawing the United States into another world war.
“The Kid,” as Williams was known, was leading the American League in hitting by a large margin. But there was drama anyway. Williams’ batting average, to the last decimal point, was .39995. Rounded off, it came to .400 -- a hallowed mark now, a milestone then -- and the dilemma was whether Williams should risk it by playing in two meaningless games. Opting to play, he went 6 for 8 in the two games, with a double and a homer, raising his average to .406, a mark that has never been approached since.
Williams did go off to war in 1942. A combat pilot in the U.S. Marine Corps, he answered the call in the Korean War, too, and by the time his baseball career ended, Ted Williams had missed nearly five seasons to military service, while making a strong case in support of his stated ambition to be recognized as “the greatest hitter who ever lived.”
As fate would have it, it was also Sept. 28, this time in 1960, that the Fenway faithful caught their last glimpse of Williams. In 1959, with his back hurting, the “Splendid Splinter” (one of Williams’ many other nicknames) had put up the numbers of a journeyman. Although a “kid” no longer, Williams was determined not to go out that way. At 42, he returned in 1960 for a curtain call that lasted all season.
Williams hit .316 that year with 29 home runs. The only one of the 29 anyone remembers today was clubbed off Jack Fisher of the Baltimore Orioles in the season’s home finale. Teddy Ballgame, who had an uneven relationship with Red Sox fans and a toxic one with Boston sportswriters, didn’t do the kind of bat flip that would accompany such a swan song today. He circled the bases quickly with his head down, not so much as acknowledging the lusty cheers of the meager crowd, which had stood and cheered for his last at-bat.
The scene was memorialized by writer John Updike in a classic 1960 New Yorker piece, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” which had held up through the years, and not only for the quality of its prose. The line remembered even today takes place after Williams’ final homer as the crowd begs him to come out of the dugout one last time to take a bow or, more precisely, to tip his cap. These 10,000 New Englanders were Williams partisans. They were the ones who had always been in his corner. But the hurts of the previous years -- some imagined, some real -- had cut too deep; the stubbornness that made Williams who he was, was too profound. “God does not answer letters,” was how John Updike explained it. Ted Williams stayed in the dugout that day, content to let his batting records speak for themselves.
Carl M. Cannon
Washington Bureau chief, RealClearPolitics
@CarlCannon (Twitter)
ccannon@realclearpolitics.com
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.
As with many Catholic politicians, Mr. Biden fell back on the rationalization that he could not impose his “private” beliefs on other Americans. But in Biden’s case, that rings very hollow.
For decades then Senator Joe Biden supported the Hyde Amendment, which disallows federal money for the abortion procedure because that violates the religious rights of Catholics and other religious people. There are exceptions for rape, incest, and serious medical danger to the mother.
The Hyde Amendment was fair because pro-choice Americans can easily donate money to fund Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers thereby assuring legal abortions can be made available to all.
There is no need for the federal government to force religious Americans to fund a life-ending procedure they reject on moral grounds.
But the new, progressive Joe Biden now repudiates the Hyde Amendment in a stunning reversal of conscience. He also selected Kamala Harris, an aggressive pro-choice advocate, as his running mate. Some describe the Biden-Harris ticket as the most pro-abortion political duo in history.
The Democratic platform is very clear: there should be no restrictions on abortion whatsoever. A number of states have rebelled against that using “science” to justify regulations. It is a medical fact that a baby is viable in the womb long before birth. Many legislators believe destroying a fetus after viability is a violation of human rights.
Joe Biden has not responded to that point-of-view and that’s his problem with the Catholic Church. His political posture enables abortion at any time, for any reason. Just this week, the former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States, Archbishop Vigano, warned Catholic voters that killing babies is “demonic.”
With almost 70 million Catholics registered to vote, Biden’s flip-flop on the Hyde Amendment and his political embrace of Senator Harris, could be a problem for him on Election Day.
However, the former Vice President is counting on the Catholic clergy remaining largely silent. The church is frightened, intimidated, and under financial siege due to the clerical abuse of children. Few American priests will speak out on anything.
After Timothy Cardinal Dolan, the nation’s most powerful Catholic voice, said the opening prayer at the Republican National Convention, he was brutally attacked on social and traditional media. Some wealthy Catholic donors even resigned from church boards. The message was heard loud and clear by Catholic clergy in America.
So Mr. Biden may well believe he has little to fear from the Church.
As for Joe’s faithfulness to the faith, who really knows? In 1936, Stephen Vincent Benet wrote a short story entitled “The Devil and Daniel Webster.” In it, a good man sells his soul for prosperity. In real life, it would be unfair to suggest that any politician would ever do that.
Wouldn’t it?
Bill O'Reilly is a former Fox News Channel host. His website is billoreilly.com.
European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini warned the move "has the potential to send us backwards to darker times than the one we already are living in." Then-British Prime Minister Theresa May said the move was "unhelpful in terms of prospects for peace in the region."
Former Secretary of State John Kerry warned it would cause "an explosion in the region." Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., urged Trump not to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital lest the move "spark violence and embolden extremists on both sides of the debate."
The moment shined an unforgiving spotlight on Washington's fecklessness -- really, its comfort with failure that fits within the Beltway's business-as-usual mold versus success reached through unusual channels.
Before Trump, the grown-up thing to do was to give lip service to an embassy in Jerusalem without even pretending to follow through after winning the election, as former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush did.
Likewise, the Senate passed the Jerusalem Embassy Act in June of 2017 -- as it did regularly since 1995 when then-Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., supported the bill, without delivering a doorknob. Feinstein was one of 90 Senators to vote in favor of the measure in 2017, and still, she opposed the embassy move.
Not a single sitting Democratic senator or member of the House showed up for the historic embassy opening in May 2018 after so many years of voting to move the building.
Last month, the United Arab Emirates normalized relations with Israel. Bahrain followed shortly thereafter. Which country will be next? There's talk of Sudan. At Thursday's daily briefing, Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said Trump is "the only president to have overseen the normalization of relations between Israel and two Middle East countries."
In Las Vegas recently, Trump told me that he thought Saudi Arabia would follow "at the right time."
President Barack Obama's Iran deal united Israel and Arab states in opposition to the deal, Jonathan Schanzer of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies noted. To his credit, Trump saw the opening, won the trust of Gulf leaders and showed the world that the path to peace could be paved without Palestinian leaders, if it came to that.
And Trump did it with his real estate developer son-in-law turned White House senior adviser Jared Kushner to broker "the deal of the century."
Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, admitted in The Washington Post Wednesday, "The developments confounded the predictions of many peace process veterans -- me included."
Otherwise, "it would seem the majority of the peace process community is eager to return to the failed paradigm of the past," Schanzer noted. "They are literally pining to return to failure."
In April, former Vice President Joe Biden said that the embassy move was "short-sighted and frivolous" but that since it was done, he would not move the embassy back to Tel Aviv. But: "My administration will urge both sides to take steps to keep the prospect of a two-state solution alive."
Really? Because that worked so well?
I spoke with former Sen. Dean Heller, R-Nev., one of four GOP senators who supported the embassy move on paper and attended the event in real life. He predicted it will be in history books 300 years from now and he credited it for the recent peace pacts.
Heller, who lost a reelection bid in 2018, told me, "I was disappointed that Democrats decided to boycott the event." But, he added, "That's just politics in America today for you."
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Naturally, the mail-voting proponents-turned-nervous-skeptics will lash the president and the Postal Service for their conversions — but that only gets them so far. The growing mountain of evidence shows America faces inherent challenges with an emergency, bulk-mail voting experiment. That trend is not helped by legal agreements between Democratic Party attorneys and chummy state election officials. Citizens are predictably blanching at news of dropped witness requirements in Virginia; allowing mail ballot counting days after Election Day in Pennsylvania and North Carolina; and even weeks later in Michigan. Don’t even get folks started on new ballot-harvesting allowances tucked into some of these deals.
Back when America used to debate policy, conservatives were quick to scold the left for stressing systems to breaking points to justify their utopian replacement. Remember how the public option would eventually lead to single-payer health care? Leftist groups have long pined for federal expansions of mail balloting, and the pandemic delivered the ultimate unwasted crisis. In the early months of the pandemic, mail voting was touted as a logical response to safety and sanitation concerns. It was supposed to be easy, since Oregon and Washington already do it, and millions of Americans rely on behemoths like Amazon and Walmart to get essential goods from click to doorstep.
Beware the central planners short on personal experience with little regard for history. The blowback was immediately obvious.
Just as 2020 primaries started to pick up and several states adopted mass-mail systems, federal data helped set the table for the year: from 2012 to 2018, 28,000,000 mail ballots were declared “unable to be tracked” after leaving county offices; their status is officially considered “unknown.” Another 2.1 million ballots bounced off wrong addresses. More than 1.2 million ballots were rejected upon official receipt. Mail-voting apologists scoffed, saying these missing ballots were probably just in landfills. Wisconsin demonstrated recently how some ballots can get there by way of a ditch.
To get rid of a lawsuit funded by the Democrats, Clark County, Nevada, agreed to send a ballot to every registered voter during the June primary, against the warnings of county employees that it would cause waste and confusion. In the aftermath, the county government disclosed to the Public Interest Legal Foundation that more than 223,000 ballots were sent to bad addresses and were returned to sender. This must have been a major point of concern for Democrats, given that more of these were intended for their voters, as opposed to the GOP.
Novice mass-mail voting officials in New York and New Jersey put on master classes in how to induce panic. In New Jersey, a Paterson City Council election result was tossed after a judge found it was “rife with mail in vote procedural violations.” More than a month after June primaries, The Atlantic declared the “chaos in New York is a warning,” given ballots were still being counted and at least 20% were rejected.
Rejections, above all, keep the mail-ballot hustlers awake at night. The scholarship is clear: first-time mail-ballot users are most prone to see their choices hit the discard bin. The current reject tally for 2020 sits at 550,000 — that’s nearly equal to the numbers for the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections combined.
Mass-mail balloting is proving to be a modern voter-disenfranchisement machine.
Back in June, Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez touted the fun and ease of voting by mail: “Vote while your kids are yelling . . . vote without your pants on . . . vote in your pajamas!”
The mindset of assuming convenience and safety has brought Democrats to this pivot point. It also overlooks the increased demand for manpower from an overwhelmingly aging volunteer population to process all of those ballots — let alone the necessary establishment of mass-balloting supply chains where none existed before.
Vote in person this November. It’s an elegant solution.
Logan Churchwell is communications and research director for the Public Interest Legal Foundation.
When the “Fox News Sunday” host takes the stage on Tuesday to moderate the first presidential debate of 2020, he will for 90 minutes be the most important person in the world.
His questions, his demeanor, his raised eyebrow will signal to millions of voters how they are to assess the two candidates — President Donald John Trump and former Vice President Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.
If his questions are piercing for both, if his skepticism is applied equally to both the Republican and Democrat, then all is well in this corner of the world of journalism. But if instead Wallace accuses Trump and coddles Biden, we will have one more instance of media bias, which has become so rampant that President Trump had to christen it with a pet name — Fake News.
Every day, the supposedly professional press corps cozies up to Biden with softball questions (“Why aren’t you more angry at President Trump?” has to be my favorite!) while accusing Trump of being a mass murderer, a racist and a Putin puppet. So conservatives are entirely justified in having low expectations for the debate and for Wallace, who has exhibited symptoms of Trump Derangement Syndrome more than once.
Wallace can ask anything he wants of Trump. I am confident the president will acquit himself admirably, but the litmus test for Wallace playing fair in the debate will be whether or not he asks any hard-hitting questions of Biden — especially about the new Senate report on the corrupt activities of his son Hunter in Ukraine and elsewhere.
If you have heard anything about the Biden report on CNN and MSNBC, or read about it in your newspapers, chances are you came away thinking that Republicans had made up a series of fake charges against the Bidens. “Nothing to see here. Move along.”
The Washington Post, as usual, was at the front of the pack for Fake News coverage. The Post used its headline to focus entirely on Hunter’s position on the board of the corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma, and claimed that the report doesn’t show that the cozy arrangement “changed U.S. policy” — as if that were the only reason you would not want a vice president’s son enriching himself at the trough of foreign oligarchs.
The story then spent most of its 35 paragraphs excusing Hunter’s behavior either directly or through surrogates such as Democrat senators, and most nauseatingly by quoting Hunter Biden’s daughter, Naomi, who “offered a personal tribute to her father” in the form of a series of tweets, including the following:
“Though the whole world knows his name, no one knows who he is. Here’s a thread on my dad, Hunter Biden — free of charge to the taxpayers and free of the corrosive influence of power-at-all-costs politics. The truth of a man filled with love, integrity, and human struggles.” Oh my, that’s convincing evidence of innocence of wrongdoing. I imagine she also endorses her grandfather for president, for what it’s worth.
The three reporters who wrote the Post piece also spin the facts like whirling dervishes. They say that the report by Sens. Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley “rehashes” known details of the matter. They quote Democrats to say without evidence that the report’s key findings are “rooted in a known Russian disinformation effort.”
The following passage in particular shows how one-sided the story is:
“Democrats argue that Johnson has ‘repeatedly impugned’ Biden, and they pointed to his recent comments hinting that the report would shed light on Biden’s ‘unfitness for office,’ as reported by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, to argue that the entire investigation was orchestrated as a smear campaign to benefit Trump.”
Using the “shoe on the other foot” test, can you ever imagine a similar statement being made in the Washington Post about the Trump impeachment investigation? Let’s see. How would that go?
“Republicans argue that Rep. Adam Schiff has ‘repeatedly impugned’ Trump, and they pointed to his recent comments hinting that the report would shed light on Trump’s ‘unfitness for office’ to argue that the entire investigation was orchestrated as a smear campaign to benefit Biden.”
Oh yeah, sure! The chance of reading that paragraph in the Washington Post news pages would have been absolutely zero.
Perhaps even more insidious was the decision by the editors to push the most significant news in the report to the bottom of the Post’s story. That is the lucrative relationship that Hunter Biden established in 2017 with a Chinese oil tycoon named Ye Jianming. Biden was apparently paid $1 million to represent Ye’s assistant while he was facing bribery charges in the United States.
Even more disturbing, “In August 2017, a subsidiary of Ye’s company wired $5 million into the bank account of a U.S. company called Hudson West III, which over the next 13 months sent $4.79 million marked as consulting fees to Hunter Biden’s firm, the report said. Over the same period, Hunter Biden’s firm wired some $1.4 million to a firm associated with his uncle and aunt, James and Sara Biden, according to the report.”
Then, in late 2017, “Hunter Biden and a financier associated with Ye also opened a line of credit for Hudson West III that authorized credit cards for Hunter Biden, James Biden and Sara Biden, according to the report, which says the Bidens used the credit cards to purchase more than $100,000 worth of items, including airline tickets and purchases at hotels and restaurants.”
The Post also glossed over payments received by Hunter Biden from Yelena Baturina, who the story acknowledges “is the widow of former Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov and is a member of Kazakhstan’s political elite.” What the story doesn’t say is that the payments received by Hunter Biden’s companies while Joe Biden was vice president totaled close to $4 million. Does anyone have even the slightest curiosity why Hunter’s companies received these payments from a Russian oligarch? As Donald Trump Jr. noted, if he had the same record of taking money from foreign nationals, he “would be in jail right now.”
In other words, the headline and the lede of the Washington Post story were entirely misleading. What readers should have been told is that there is a pattern of corruption and inexplicable enrichment in the Biden family that has continued for years and that Joe Biden has turned his back on it.
Seems worthy of the attention of the voters who will determine the nation’s leadership for the next four years. So the most important question at the debate Tuesday night is the following: Will Chris Wallace take the same cowardly path as the Washington Post, or will he demand an answer from candidate Biden as to why influence peddling, conflicts of interest and virtual money laundering are acceptable?
Based on Wallace’s track record, I’m not holding my breath that we will get either the question or the answer, but if we do, I will happily applaud him as the tough-as-nails journalist he is supposed to be.
Frank Miele, the retired editor of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell Mont., is a columnist for RealClearPolitics. His new book “How We Got Here: The Left’s Assault on the Constitution” is available from his Amazon author page. Visit him at HeartlandDiaryUSA.com to read his daily commentary or follow him on Facebook @HeartlandDiaryUSA or on Twitter or Parler @HeartlandDiary.
A return to the wild West form of justice on college campuses would be a travesty. For nearly 10 years, hundreds of students and faculty have been subjected to unfair campus disciplinary hearings. Since 2011, when the controversial “Dear Colleague Letter” on sexual violence was released, 647 lawsuits have been filed against universities, thousands of student transcripts have been permanently stamped with “expulsion” or “suspension,” and countless professors have been fired or censured. There is no limit to the trauma and emotional abuse these persons have experienced.
Instead of referring allegations of criminal sexual assault to local police, campus disciplinary committees were told to handle these cases. It was an experiment that went terribly wrong. Survivors were betrayed by complacent administrators; the accused were disenfranchised of their due process rights; and faculty members were silenced by overly broad definitions of sexual harassment. All of this came at a cost of many millions of dollars. The Department of Education reported that following release of the “Dear Colleague Letter” as the guiding principal for Title IX cases, the number of complaints to the Office of Civil Rights increased nearly five-fold, from 17,724 (2000-2010) to 80,739 (2011-2020). More than 150 lawsuits filed against universities over Title IX proceedings have ruled in favor of the accused students.
A “Faculty Resolution in Support of the Prompt Restoration of Free Speech and Due Process on Campus” was signed by more than 260 higher education faculty members from 43 states, representing a broad range of disciplinary backgrounds and political persuasions. The resolution concluded with an urgent appeal: “The undersigned professors call on lawmakers and university administrators to assure the prompt implementation of new policies that will clarify grievance procedures, enhance free speech, and embrace fairness for all.”
The Department of Education took these accounts and over 124,000 public comments into consideration while drafting the new rule that defines the responsibilities of institutions to respond to allegations of sexual harassment, including sexual assault, under Title IX.'&#'.ord('â').';''&#'.ord('€').';''&#'.ord('¨').';' It clearly defines sexual harassment, restores due process to the accused, and protects survivors during every step of the process.
Most schools, including Amherst College and the University of Colorado-Boulder, have embraced the changes and have responded swiftly to comply with the federal regulation’s posting requirement. The University of Vermont even posted a YouTube video of the training program its staff attended.
Liberals and conservatives both agree the old system is broken and that protections for victims and due process for the accused go hand in hand. The late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg eloquently described this in a 2018 interview with the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center. “The person who is accused has a right to defend herself or himself, and we certainly should not lose sight of that. Recognizing that these are complaints that should be heard. There's been criticism of some college codes of conduct for not giving the accused person a fair opportunity to be heard, and that's one of the basic tenets of our system, as you know, everyone deserves a fair hearing,” Ginsburg said. “It's not one or the other. It's both. We have a system of justice where people who are accused get due process, so it's just applying to this field what we have applied generally.”
The new Title IX regulation from the Department of Education may not be perfect, but it does provide a roadmap to begin to repair our broken campus kangaroo courts. Vice President Biden should understand that we need national standards that are fair to all students. That is the only way to ensure justice for survivors and due process for the accused.
Ed Bartlett is president of SAVE, an organization founded in 2008 to help lead the national policy movement for fairness and due process on campus, at www.saveservices.org.
Unlike most of his Republican colleagues, Romney wasn’t in the Senate in 2016, and therefore didn’t have to take a position on the Merrick Garland appointment stalled to death by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his obedient Republican colleagues. So, you can’t say Romney is being hypocritical. You can say, however, that he’s being short-sighted. By his actions, Romney is expressing his willingness to allow a president he deems unfit for office to make a lifetime appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court so long as that appointment serves the broader goal of a more conservative federal bench. If the 2020 presidential election is close, ironically the only Republican to vote to remove Donald Trump from office may be partially responsible for helping impanel a justice whose first case determines if Trump stays in power.
Romney’s decision to back the McConnell-Trump play also ensures a continuation of the partisan warfare and blind pursuit of power that has so thoroughly compromised America’s governing institutions. In the event that Joe Biden wins the presidency and the Democrats take back control of the Senate, it also ensures the shredding of the last vestiges of credibility of the Supreme Court itself.
America has a history of low-level partisan conflicts that play out with a tit-for-tat pacing. The judiciary, with its lifetime appointments, has become yet another venue for that warfare. Harry Reid eliminated the filibuster for judicial nominations other than the Supreme Court so that he could push through the confirmation of judges to the D.C. Circuit Court and protect Obamacare. That gave McConnell the justification to eliminate the filibuster altogether for Supreme Court nominations to ensure the confirmations of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.
Those who doubt that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer wouldn’t use that same justification if he replaces McConnell to eliminate the filibuster altogether and pack the high court with more liberals are kidding themselves. Only the thinnest thread of pretense is required today by either side to act in an overtly partisan manner. With the tribal drums of the partisan media and Twittersphere beating loudly in unison, a lack of response by Schumer would be viewed as nothing short of an outright betrayal of the unspoken partisan oath – seize power at all costs.
If the Supreme Court is to be saved from the virus of hyper-partisanship, it will take an act of sacrifice by a member of the court’s conservative wing. One justice would need to resign with the very public and explicit purpose of giving Joe Biden the appointment that was taken from Barack Obama. Such a sacrifice would not be lost on the American people: It would be rightly celebrated as a heroic act. It would be the equivalent of the lone protester standing in front of the line of tanks in Tiananmen Square – exposing the corruption of politics as usual. If it succeeded, the court’s legitimacy would be upheld, and the conservative majority would remain intact.
I realize that the very idea of someone in politics making a sacrifice so significant will be met with derision from the chattering class. The naïve notion that anyone in politics isn’t solely out for themselves is almost laughable in a town full of self-servants masquerading as public servants. But hear me out.
Going back to 2016, even if Merrick Garland or another Barack Obama appointee had been seated as Antonin Scalia’s replacement, the court today still would have a working conservative majority. President Trump would have appointed two of the court’s nine members instead of three, which is certainly enough for a first term. Yes, we would have had different rulings on a handful of decisions, but Obamacare would still have been preserved (at least for the time being), Roe v. Wade would still be the law of the land, and the Little Sisters of the Poor would still have prevailed against the heavy hand of the federal government. In short, the damage wouldn’t have been permanent.
But that didn’t happen. And to rectify the hardball GOP tactics that kept Garland off the court, neither a Senate Majority Leader Schumer nor a newly elected President Biden can simply remove Neil Gorsuch and have a do-over. But what Democrats apparently can do – and some are already vowing to do – is use McConnell’s actions as a pretense to pack the court. And if they make the decision to cross that line, they won’t stop with simply adding two justices to rectify the sins of the past. The court will seat four new justices, creating a 7-6 liberal majority.
Make no mistake, this wouldn’t be a proportionate response. It would seriously accelerate the hyper-partisan warfare that has paralyzed Washington. But it follows a relentless pattern of partisan escalation. It’s a response that all but guarantees a 17-member Supreme Court the next time the Republicans control the White House and the Senate. While some Democratic Party optimists may profess that will never again happen, the American people have a funny way of surprising their elected masters, particularly with the stench of corruption in the air.
To protect the sanctity of the court, someone needs to walk this conflict back from the edge. It won’t be our warring partisans in Congress who, as Mitch McConnell has demonstrated, cannot let any opportunity go to waste. Anyone expecting Chuck Schumer to be the better man hasn’t been paying attention. No, our savior will have to come from the Supreme Court’s own ranks, specifically from its conservative wing.
So, is there a potential hero among the five Republican-appointed justices? Someone willing to spend more time with their families and favorite hobbies? Someone content to contemplate what was sacrificed while fly-fishing or making $100,000 speeches as the man who saved the Supreme Court? We’ve produced public servants like that in the past. One of them was from my state of Kansas.
In 1868, America was still trying to heal from our country’s most divisive period – the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln’s subsequent assassination – and Andrew Johnson had become an accidental president. Relations between the White House and Senate Republicans, who themselves were divided, were volatile. After the House impeached Johnson for firing a member of his cabinet, the president’s fate was in the hands of the Senate.
In an initial straw poll among the 36 Republicans in the chamber, one man stood alone against the tide. He saw his party’s tactics for what they were, an attempt to remove a political adversary and diminish the presidency in the process. He rose above partisanship and voted “no” against convicting President Johnson – saving the presidency in the process.
His name was Edmund G. Ross. He lost his next election and was drummed out of the Republican Party. His story was chronicled almost 90 years later by another senator, John F. Kennedy, in his book “Profiles in Courage.” In the opening pages of that book, the future president called courage “the most admirable of human virtues.” The volume is itself a testimony to how rare a trait it is in politics. In defining it, JFK borrowed a line from Ernest Hemingway, who described courage as “grace under pressure.”
Today, we could use a little grace in American politics. Justice Alito, is it time to hire a speaker’s bureau? How about you, Clarence Thomas?
Greg Orman is a Kansas entrepreneur, author of “A Declaration of Independents,” and a former independent candidate for governor and senator of his state. His website is www.greg-orman.com.
She can thank Sen. Dianne Feinstein.
It was, after all, the California Democrat who questioned her faith. The ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee peppered Barrett about her Catholicism during the appeals court confirmation process, insinuating that the nominee’s religion clouded her legal judgment. “Dogma and law are two different things,” Feinstein lectured. “And I think whatever a religion is, it has its own dogma. The law is totally different. And I think in your case, professor, when you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you.”
Conservatives were furious. They were also delighted. Until then, Barrett was an elite only in narrow judicial circles. Feinstein, a non-lawyer herself, made Barrett into a populist hero with just six words: “The dogma lives loudly within you.”
Right-wing corners of the Internet lit up with memes celebrating the judge and mocking the senator. And the message was simple: “Hell, yeah, the dogma lives loudly.” One meme depicted Feinstein as Darth Vader uttering the melodramatic words, and around that time White House counsel Don McGahn got a bright idea. He had coffee mugs made, each stamped with Feinstein’s infamous words. And, sources tell RealClearPolitics, for the last three years the best way to flaunt one’s conservative credentials in this White House was to roll into a morning meeting with a “dogma” mug.
Badges of honor at the time, those mugs are now a necessity. White House aides may lose some sleep and will need caffeine in the days to come. The battle over Barrett and the seat of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is just now beginning. It will be a bitter one.
Trump introduced his third high court nominee in the Rose Garden on Saturday, praising Barrett as “a woman of unparalleled achievement, towering intellect, sterling credentials, and unyielding loyalty to the Constitution.” Her name had been leaked to the New York Times, and it had been reported earlier that Trump was saving “saving her for Ginsburg.” Conservatives were not surprised – and they continued to be delighted.
The president quipped on Friday at a campaign stop that whomever he nominated "hopefully will be on that court for 50 years." If confirmed, the 48-year-old jurist might very well serve a good portion of those years, shifting the ideological course of the court to the right, at least for the time being.
“You are not there to decide cases as you may prefer. You are there to do your duty and to follow the law, whatever it may take,” Trump said Saturday. He told more than a hundred supporters gathered at the White House that “this should be a straightforward and prompt confirmation.”
Then, as if to clarify her dogma, Barrett explained her originalism and textualist while referencing her old boss, the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
“I love the United States, and I love the United States Constitution,” she said reading from prepared remarks. “I am truly humbled by the prospect of serving on the Supreme Court.”
Just hours earlier, the Barrett family was spotted at their Indiana home, piling into their minivan for a trip to the airport, and there were seats reserved at the White House for the entire brood. Trump thanked each of her seven children for “sharing your wonderful mother with the country.” He noted that “if confirmed, Justice Barrett will make history as the first mother of school-aged children ever to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.”
The nominee spoke openly about her family, noting that “while I am a judge, I’m better known back home as a room parent, a carpool driver, and a birthday planner.” The crowd loved it, and the nominee later thanked her family for their support -- and even the babysitter, who was also at the White House.
Republicans hope that the choice will resonate with suburban women ahead of the election and blunt attacks from Senate Democrats. “This should be a straightforward and prompt confirmation. Good luck,” Trump joked. “It’s going to be very easy. It should be very quick. I’m sure it will be extremely noncontroversial. Well, we said that last time.”
Since Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation and with the presidential election just weeks away, Democrats have hardened their stance. They argue that Republicans are being hypocritical by making a Supreme Court nomination this close to Nov. 3, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has already warned that “nothing is off the table” if his party gains control of the upper chamber. His allies have floated everything from impeaching Trump a second time to packing the court for the first time since 1867.
But those threats will have little immediate impact. Republicans control the Senate, and there do not appear to be any parliamentary procedures that can stop Majority Leader Mitch McConnell from fulfilling his promise to give the nominee a floor vote. Trump wants a speedy confirmation because he expects the election to “end up in the Supreme Court, and I think it’s very important we have nine justices.”
The Biden campaign tried to frame Barrett as an opponent of both Obamacare and abortion. In a statement released while Trump was still talking, the Democratic nominee took issue with the conservative Barrett replacing the late liberal Ginsburg.
“The United States Constitution was designed to give the voters one chance to have their voice heard on who serves on the Court. That moment is now and their voice should be heard. The Senate should not act on this vacancy until after the American people select their next president and the next Congress,” Biden argued. His wishes won’t be honored. A source close to the president confirmed to RCP that the White House expects a Barrett confirmation by Oct. 29.
Republicans and Democrats are preparing for a bruising fight in the meantime. So is Barrett, and that’s part of the reason Trump picked her. Again, the judge can thank Feinstein.
Trump was watching when the senior California senator tried to take Barrett to task over her faith. “He saw firsthand how she was a tough, independent, forceful person and was able to withstand the previous confirmation well,” the source close to the president said. “Those things are important.” Plus, this isn’t the first time the two met. Trump and Barrett sat down during the Kavanaugh process, and her poise, the source said “obviously stuck with him.”
While the back-and-forth with Feinstein helped catapult Barrett, the White House still takes credit for her selection. She is a favorite with the conservative movement, the source said, but she owes her success to Trump: “That’s the part that people are missing here – it’s not the movement that’s forcing the president’s hand. It’s the president who conditioned the environment to get the movement to so vigorously support her.”
It was McGahn who brought up Barrett in discussions with Trump when he was putting together a list of potential Supreme Court and appellate court picks during the presidential transition in late 2016. Leonard Leo, on leave from the Federalist Society, and James Burnham, who also would go on to work for the Trump White House counsel’s office before joining the Justice Department, quickly signed off on the addition.
“That’s how it all started – really getting her on that list and then getting her nominated for that Circuit Court seat,” the source familiar with the process told RCP. “She wasn’t extremely well known in Indiana political circles even though she was well-known in national legal and judicial circles. So, it took a little effort on Don’s part to get things teed up because there were some other people whose names were being thrown in by political leaders in Indiana.”
The focus now shifts from inside judicial baseball to Senate brawl. Nonetheless, Mark Meadows predicted that confirmation would be relatively swift. The chief of staff, who will serve as a “Sherpa” for the nominee on Capitol Hill, told reporters on Saturday that Republicans will evaluate Barrett and her credentials “in an expeditious manner.” After reviewing her resume himself, Meadows said he hoped “she would get confirmed before the first of November.”
Much of that is up to McConnell, who controls the Senate calendar. "As our nation continues to mourn Justice Ginsburg and honor her trail-blazing legacy, it does seem fitting that another brilliant and talented woman at the height of their shared profession would follow in her footsteps onto the court," he wrote in a statement before urging “all 100 senators” to treat “this serious process with the dignity and respect it should command." That includes Feinstein, whom Barrett will see a second time.
Susan Crabtree is RealClearPolitics' White House/national political correspondent.
Narrated by Lincoln historian Allen Guelzo, it features noted scholars Michael Burlingame, Lucas Morel, and Charles Kesler exploring the most famous series of political debates in American history. Between August and October of 1858, little-known country lawyer Abraham Lincoln squared off against Illinois Sen. Stephen A. Douglas in seven towns across Illinois. The hoped-for prize for the winner? A seat in the U.S. Senate.
Produced by Madison McQueen Films -- creator of the documentary “No Safe Spaces” featuring Dennis Prager and Adam Corolla -- the topic that “Right Makes Might” examines is just as relevant now as in the days leading up to the Civil War: Is America fundamentally defined by slavery or freedom?
In 1858, America stood at a crossroads. The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 effectively repealed the 1820 Missouri Compromise and allowed slavery to spread into the territories west of the Mississippi River. To make matters worse, in its Dred Scott decision, the Supreme Court found that Congress did not have the power to ban slavery in the territories. The American experiment in liberty and equality looked like it was coming to an end.
Known as the “Little Giant” for his short stature but mighty rhetorical skill, Douglas stirred the audience’s anti-black prejudice by arguing that Lincoln and the Republican Party stood for radical abolitionism. His solution to the slavery question: popular sovereignty, which allowed people living in the territories to vote on whether they wanted slavery or not.
Though this policy sounds consistent with majority rule and the principles of republican government, Kesler argues that it amounted to nothing more than the principle of “might makes right -- that if the majority has the power, it ought to have the right to rule.”
By contrast, Lincoln believed that “right makes might” -- a famous phrase he would utter two years later in his consequential Cooper Union address.
As Morel argues, Lincoln and the Republican Party attempted to work prudentially “against slavery but in a constitutional way” by arguing that Congress had the power to restrict slavery in the territories and that, even more importantly, the Declaration of Independence’s principle that “all men are created equal” included both blacks and whites.
In Lincoln’s view, slavery was a universal wrong that no majority could sanction because it undermined everyone’s natural rights. Race was an arbitrary characteristic that had no bearing on an individual’s right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
The American Founders and Lincoln, says Burlingame, did not believe that everyone was equally talented or intelligent; but they insisted that all human beings have the equal freedom to “progress as far as their talent, ability, industry, and virtue will take them.” Recognizing this truth would unleash an “incredible economic dynamism” and give citizens the freedom to better themselves, their families, and their communities.
Although from our contemporary perspective, Lincoln’s repeated rejection of granting full voting rights to blacks seems abhorrent, Kesler argues that “to rush towards the perfect realization” of full political equality in 1858 would have guaranteed a war. Instead, Lincoln sought to answer the question: Were blacks human beings, with rights that needed to be respected, or were they simply objects that could be used as a master saw fit?
Though Lincoln went on to lose the Illinois Senate race, he ultimately triumphed over Douglas in the presidential election two years later despite not being on the ballot in 10 Southern states.
How can Lincoln help guide America today as we find ourselves again embroiled in national controversies over race and slavery?
According to Morel, Lincoln teaches Americans to speak in the “language of the founding” and to see themselves as fellow citizens who share a common purpose and a common humanity. On the subject of race, Burlingame contends that we should remember Lincoln as “a martyr to black civil rights just as much as Martin Luther King Jr.” Kesler adds that by studying Lincoln’s statesmanship, we can realize that we sometimes need “uncommon people to save” the nation.
“Right Makes Might” demonstrates how Lincoln’s statesmanship and prudence can help guide us today just as it did in the Civil War era.
Mike Sabo is the editor of RealClear’s American Civics portal.
Is race really the central issue in what has been happening? Are white Americans simply incapable of recognizing their deep-seated racial prejudices? That’s what Black Lives Matter and its progressive supporters, black and white, claim. Racist individuals exist, of course, and always will. But most Americans are not racists. Most Americans are far less concerned about race than they are about providing for their families and living at peace with their neighbors. Something other than racism is driving these protests, even as rhetoric about racism is widely employed.
Here’s a thought experiment: would riots be occurring if America were overwhelmingly a middle-class, property-owning society? What if persistent, generational poverty disappeared tomorrow, replaced by propertied citizens possessing middle-class virtues such as self-control, independence, thrift, concern for the future, and neighborliness?
The profound suffering of the American underclass is being manipulated by self-righteous grievance professionals who graduated from elite colleges and universities, where they were indoctrinated into critical race theory by radical professors who despise America. They are using race as a weapon in a war to transform the United States, and they are willing to engage in intimidation, violence, and property destruction to achieve their ends. They detest middle-class Americans who work hard, acquire property, and care for it.
In attacking private property, the revolutionaries are striking at one of the bedrock institutions of a free society. The American republic was designed for a propertied citizenry; the ownership of property cultivates the independence necessary for self-government. Consider the words of Thomas Jefferson, from an 1814 letter describing American society to a British correspondent: “We have no Paupers . . . Most of the laboring class possess property, cultivate their own lands, have families, and from the demand for their labor are enabled to exact from the rich and the competent such prices as enable them to be fed abundantly, clothed above mere decency, to labor moderately and raise their families.”
Alexis de Tocqueville, a French visitor to these shores in 1831, noted that the battles over property and property rights so common in Europe were unheard of in America, which he attributed to the vast majority of Americans being property owners. Tocqueville noted that revolutions threaten property; thus, societies where property is broadly owned are naturally inoculated against revolutionary energies. Widely distributed property, according to Tocqueville, helps to cultivate a respect for the property of others—and this spills over into respect for the rights of others more broadly. A propertied citizenry is not given to rioting, revolution, or the wanton destruction of property.
No one understood this better than Karl Marx, who claimed that Communism could be summed up in a single sentence: “abolition of private property.” He argued that the first step in the Communist revolution was to “win the battle of democracy.” This victory would require a fundamental social change: the populace needed to become proletarian, which is to say, economically insecure and bereft of capital. Once that occurred, the revolution would be initiated at the ballot box, private property would be abolished, and society would be remade. The America that Tocqueville saw, however, had no such proletarian class.
This is no longer the case. Poor blacks know that something is amiss—but the problem is not systemic racism. It is systemic poverty, brought about by a complex array of social and political forces that affect poor whites as well as blacks: broken families, especially absentee fathers; schools that fail to educate, and an anti-education culture; welfare policies that create dependence and undermine an ethic of work indispensable for entry into the middle-class; regulations and cronyism that create barriers to entry and reward gigantic corporations at the expense of small businesses and entrepreneurs. It’s not hard to see how groups like BLM could manipulate these facts to create a narrative of systemic oppression where blacks, along with white progressives, join forces to “burn it down.”
America must strengthen its middle class; it must also mark out a clear path for the poor to reach the middle class, though the obstacles here are complex. They include social pathologies that can only be solved by individuals committing to personal responsibility, stable families, education, and hard work. In addition, failed policies ostensibly aimed at helping the poor have instead reduced them to a permanent—and understandably angry—underclass. No one wants to be permanently dependent on another, even if the object of dependence is not a person but the state. Resentment mixed with shame, fueled by a pernicious ideology of racial resentment, leads to chaos in the streets.
Assaults on private property will in the short term fortify Trump supporters and spur many undecided middle-class Americans to support a president who, despite his many flaws, forcefully condemns such violence and destruction. Yet this same destruction of property also fuels the revolutionary fervor of the proletarian underclass and its progressive accomplices. An obvious question presents itself: does the American middle class—along with those, black and white, not yet there but who identify with its values and aspirations—still constitute the majority of citizens? Or has a new kind of citizen risen to ascendancy on the debris of our smoldering cities? If the answer is the former, then our republic will remain intact, despite its deep wounds. If the answer is the latter, then we are witnessing the twilight of a noble experiment, and the coming dawn will bring a whirlwind of destruction, wiping out blessings that so many Americans have long cherished— including individual liberty and the institutions that have supported it.
Mark T. Mitchell is dean of academic affairs at Patrick Henry College and the author, most recently, of "Power and Purity: The Unholy Marriage that Spawned America’s Social Justice Warriors." He and over 1,000 similarly concerned scholars and citizens recently made common cause in an open letter published on RealClearPolitics. This article is part of an ongoing "Liberty and Justice for All" series.
Older voters traditionally have among the strongest turnout numbers on Election Day. However, with the COVID-19 outbreak still looming, and research still indicating that older individuals are at a greater risk of being seriously affected by the virus, many are worried about being able to safely head to the polls.
This could have a major impact on the election outcome. A new bipartisan poll conducted by AARP indicates that voters 50 and over are poised to play an especially consequential role in key battleground states like Florida, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. With these states still considered toss-ups, voters 50 and over will surely be a major factor in who comes out on top.
While efforts have been underway to ensure that at-risk Americans can vote by mail this November, it is still essential that in-person voting remains a safe option for anyone who feels more comfortable casting their ballot in-person, as well as others who may simply have no other choice.
Several roadblocks still exist before that’s possible. For one, the vast majority of poll workers in recent years have been older Americans, with more than half being 61 or older. Now, many poll workers are asking themselves whether lending a hand on Election Day poses a risk to their health.
Things are made even worse by the fact that poll workers are increasingly difficult to find. With a significant percentage now second-guessing whether they can participate this year, already dwindling volunteer numbers only complicate the situation.
That’s why officials must make a concerted push to encourage younger Americans to get involved on Election Day. Thankfully, organizations across the country, ranging from AARP and Power the Polls, to even high-profile celebrities, athletes, and sports organizations, are raising awareness and urging more people to serve as poll workers in their communities.
If these efforts are successful, we can overcome the challenges and ensure that everyone is able to head to the ballot box in-person while also observing all local health guidance and remaining socially distanced.
Americans 50 and older are set to play an even bigger role in this upcoming election than they ever have before. The outcomes decided this November will shape the future of our nation and because of this, we cannot afford to leave any eligible voters without a voice. In the midst of a pandemic and a nationwide poll worker shortage, we need younger Americans to recognize this opportunity and step up as poll workers, so everybody can have their say without fearing for their health or that of their families.
Jesse Grady is a Juris Doctor candidate at the University of Maryland, a Master of Business Administration candidate at Johns Hopkins University, a former regional field director for the Texas GOP, and a former staff member of President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.
These shifting dynamics prompt a fundamental question: What does it mean for democracy when the First Amendment is continually narrowed by private companies stepping in to act as the censors that the government can’t be?
Throughout American history, the First Amendment has enshrined the right of all Americans to hold and share beliefs without fear of government repression. With few exceptions, the government cannot forcibly deter its citizens from expressing views with which it disagrees. Yet it is important to remember that these protections do not extend to the private entities within whose walled gardens we often hold our societal debates. Twitter can legally label the president’s tweets as “false” while Facebook can legally set its own standards regarding when threats of “state use of force” can be made. The platforms can legally ban users, including heads of state, threaten to bar elected officials for statements they dislike, designate people as “dangerous individuals” and restrict circulation of content its fact-checking partners deem to be true but “missing context.” How is it that a private company can now designate an American citizen as a “dangerous individual” whose right to speech in the digital world can be revoked?
In extending their reach to elected officials over the past year, social platforms are increasingly seeking to wield influence over American policy. Twitter allegedly threatened to ban Sen. Tom Cotton from its platform if he didn’t delete a tweet encouraging law enforcement to crack down on violent looting, while Facebook noted it could establish official guidelines regarding when the U.S. government would be permitted to use force against its citizenry and bar official government threats of force in violation of that policy.
Threatening politicians with bans for unpopular speech and actively flagging and even deleting statements the platforms dislike allows social media companies to encourage self-censorship in which elected officials, fearful of being blocked from a major connection to voters, will restrict what they say.
At the same time, the courts have repeatedly ruled that President Trump’s Twitter account constitutes an official U.S. government account and thus the president is prohibited from blocking users with whom he disagrees. Yet, if the president’s Twitter account is an official publication of the government in the eyes of the judiciary, why is Twitter permitted to censor it?
The companies have even begun to wade into the legal system, curtailing posts arguing that the actions of Kyle Rittenhouse — charged with fatally shooting two people during civil unrest in Kenosha, Wis. — were in self-defense. Twitter went a step further to suspend the account of Rittenhouse’s lawyer for “glorifying violence” after the attorney publicly touted his client’s innocence and announced a fundraiser to help cover his legal costs. Only after a public outcry did the company reinstate the account, offering only the terse explanation that “this account was incorrectly actioned.” If private companies can now render their own judgment on court cases and bar arguments of guilt or innocence with which they disagree, what impact will that have on jury pools of the future?
The fact-checking landscape is also becoming more complex. Rather than stick to simple “true” and “false” ratings, fact-checking on Facebook now includes labels like “missing context,” which does not dispute a claim’s veracity, but rather argues that, like all arguments, there is an opposing view.
A Facebook spokesperson noted that this “missing context” rating was added just last month at the recommendation of its fact-checking partners. Interestingly, the rating was recently cited by the platform in its removal of an ad. Regarding the ad’s criticism of Michigan Sen. Gary Peters, the fact-checker noted, “That’s a prediction we can’t fact-check.”
While Facebook touts the independence of its fact-checking partners, the business magazine Fast Company noted recently that the platform “may intervene if it thinks that a piece of content was mistakenly rated, by asking fact-checkers to adjust their ratings, a spokesperson acknowledged.” Asked how often this occurs, the company did not reply, but did confirm that it periodically intervenes in fact-checker ratings when it believes they are not in keeping with its definitions.
At the same time, social media platforms are facing increasing pressure to define ever more of our societal debate as prohibited speech. As but one example, the NAACP’s #StopHate campaign earlier this year grouped “climate denialism” into the same category as “white supremacy, militia, antisemitism, violent conspiracies, Holocaust denialism.”
Such redefining of the public debate as “hate speech” mirrors the wording used by China earlier this year as it strengthened its grip over Hong Kong. After a number of teachers were reprimanded for teaching topics relating to human rights and democracy, a spokesperson for Hong Kong’s Education Bureau offered that the teachers were not punished for “a particular political view” but rather for “express[ing] their views in hate speech or through violence.”
As private companies increasingly sweep aside First Amendment guarantees, they have been granted incredible powers not just to arbitrate what constitute acceptable ideas but to ultimately decide what constitutes “truth.” Where might these trends take us? For the answer, ask your friendly Amazon Alexa device, “Is Apple/Facebook/Google/Twitter/Walmart a monopoly?” In each case it will cite search results from the web to argue that each is a monopoly. On the other hand, ask whether its manufacturer, Amazon, is a monopoly and without hesitation Alexa repeats the built-in answer: “No, Amazon.com is not a monopoly.”
RealClear Media Fellow Kalev Leetaru is a senior fellow at the George Washington University Center for Cyber & Homeland Security. His past roles include fellow in residence at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Future of Government.
First, I’ll point you to RealClearPolitics’ front page, which presents our poll averages, videos, breaking news stories, and aggregated opinion pieces spanning the political spectrum. We also offer an array original material from our own reporters, columnists, and contributors this morning, including the following:
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Warning Signs in Pennsylvania of Mail Ballot Chaos in November. Mark Hemingway reports on court decisions and other factors likely to complicate an already contentious battle in a key state.
Latino Support Lagging for Biden? We Don’t Buy It. Headlines warning of diminished Latino support for the ticket ignore history and seem to be based on a single Florida poll, argue Lionel Sosa, Maria Cardona & Albert Morales.
Amy Coney Barrett, Clear Second Amendment Backer. The circuit court judge on President Trump’s short list for Supreme Court justice has a solid record on Americans’ right to own guns, John R. Lott Jr. writes.
An Answer to Urban Violence: Take Politics Out of Policing. Illinois Senate candidate Mark C. Curran Jr. argues that city police chiefs could better respond to urban unrest if they reported to civilian review boards rather than mayors.
Joe Biden’s China Dilemma. In RealClearEnergy, Rupert Darwall asks whether, as president, Biden would push a climate-change agenda with Beijing or act to protect Taiwan, since doing both appears to be impossible.
Biden’s Long History of Voting Against Catholic Values. In RealClearReligion, Tom McClusky examines the nominee’s record in the Senate.
Will the President Socialize Health Care? In RealClearHealth, Christopher Sheeron warns against an executive order to ban surprise medical bills.
Copyright Law Favors Oracle in Dispute With Google. In RealClearPolicy, Curt Levey assesses the computer code case, which the Supreme Court will consider next month.
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-- “What is the difference between a bookkeeper in New York City’s garment district and a Supreme Court justice? One generation. … In America, land of opportunity, that prospect is within the realm of the achievable.” -- RBG, in remarks made at a swearing-in ceremony of immigrants, National Archives, Dec. 18, 2018.
-- “Dissents speak to a future age. It's not simply to say, ‘My colleagues are wrong and I would do it this way.’ But the greatest dissents do become court opinions and gradually over time their views become the dominant view. So that’s the dissenter's hope: that they are writing not for today, but for tomorrow.” -- interview with Nina Totenberg, aired on National Public Radio, May 2, 2002.
-- “I’m dejected, but only momentarily, when I can’t get the fifth vote for something I think is very important. But then you go on to the next challenge and you give it your all. You know that these important issues are not going to go away. They are going to come back again and again. There’ll be another time, another day.” -- to ABC News correspondent Lynn Sherr, at the first Ruth Bader Ginsburg Distinguished Lecture on Women and the Law, New York, Nov. 15, 2000.
-- "[T]he first thing we do is we go around the room, each justice shaking hands with every other. And that’s a symbol of the work that we do as a collegial body. That is, you may be temporarily miffed because you receive a spicy dissenting opinion from a colleague, but when we go to sit on the bench … it’s a way of saying, ‘We’re all in this together.’ We care about this institution more than our individual egos and we are all devoted to keeping the Supreme Court in the place that it is, as a co-equal third branch of government and, I think, a model for the world in the collegiality and independence of judges." -- to Brian Lamb of C-SPAN, 2010.
-- “To make life a little better for people less fortunate than you, that's what I think a meaningful life is.” -- a conversation with Jane Shaw, dean for religious life at Stanford University, Feb. 6, 2017.
Carl M. Cannon
Washington Bureau chief, RealClearPolitics
@CarlCannon (Twitter)
ccannon@realclearpolitics.com
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.
Pence, Ivanka Trump and Secretary of Labor Eugene Scalia stood by on the city’s north side as owner Flora Westbrooks, near tears, pointed at what remained of Flora’s Hair Design.
“I never thought this would happen,” Westbrooks said. “Not to me.”
“We’re with you,” Pence told her.
Pence and President Donald Trump’s eldest daughter later went to a listening session with a “Cops for Trump” group and business owners. Trump has been campaigning on a law-and-order message for weeks and is eager to put Minnesota in play four years after he narrowly lost the state to Hillary Clinton.
“I want to be clear: There’s no excuse for what happened to George Floyd, and justice will be served,” Pence told the crowd at an airport hotel. “But there’s also no excuse for the rioting and looting and violence that ensued. And those who engaged in acts like these will be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law.”
Floyd died May 25 after a white police officer pressed his knee into the handcuffed Black man’s neck during an arrest captured on bystander video. His death set off protests around the world, including some that became violent. Property damage in Minneapolis alone is estimated at roughly $100 million.
After Floyd’s death, a majority of Minneapolis City Council members pledged to abolish the police department and replace it with a new agency that would take a more socially minded approach. Their hopes of taking the idea to voters in November was blocked by a city commission and won’t happen before 2021, if ever.
The talk of abolishing police came as Minneapolis saw spiking violent crime, as many other big cities did, and also as some residents complained that police response times had slowed. Morale in the department has been down, and dozens of officers have retired or are seeking disability leave.
“We are expected to be the handyman that fixes everything, and it’s not possible,” Matthew Hagan, a Hennepin County sheriff’s deputy and president of the Minnesota chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police, told Pence.
Pence said men and women in law enforcement deserve respect every day, and if people want better-trained officers, they need more funding.
“We’re not going to defund the police — not now, not ever,” Pence said. “The American people want us to stand by law enforcement and stand by our African American neighbors and all of our neighbors who’ve been impacted by the violence in our cities.”
Matt Seyko Thao, a 30-year-old from West St. Paul, said he thinks the Trump campaign is using law-and-order messaging to court those who were unsure about calls to defund the police earlier this summer.
“He’s here to give relief to the people who go support the police, people who say ‘what happens if the police are gotten rid of,’” he said. “It’s all a political ploy ... and he’s here for the wrong reasons.”
Pence’s visit to the city where Floyd died prompted Minneapolis leaders to ask Gov. Tim Walz to activate the National Guard as a precaution. The governor’s office said 100 guard members were made ready out of what Walz called “an abundance of caution.”
The Trump campaign’s visit came a day after several hundred demonstrators rallied at the state Capitol in St. Paul before marching onto an interstate to protest a Kentucky grand jury’s decision not to bring homicide charges against Louisville police officers who fatally shot Breonna Taylor, who was Black and unarmed.
Kate Bedingfield, deputy campaign manager for Joe Biden, said in a statement: “Nothing Vice President Pence says today will distract voters from the truth: four years of the Trump-Pence Administration’s chaos and division has made Minnesotans’ lives worse.”
Pence told business owners that he sensed their feeling of helplessness as they watched the unrest unfold in May. He said that shouldn’t happen.
“It was hard to stand there and see your business burn. Everything you worked for,” Westbrooks said. “I just want my business back. I just want another start.”
Ivanka Trump said the Trump administration will do what America does best “and help you and others like you rebuild, because that’s what we need to do.”
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Mohamed Ibrahim contributed from Minneapolis.
Sounds far-fetched, but it could happen. Should election chaos, actively abetted by President Trump and his followers, lead to an inconclusive vote in the Electoral College, the Constitution clearly states that the House, and not the Supreme Court, elects our next president. And the court, with strict constitutional textualists on its bench and a proud legacy of political independence, will likely agree, even with a new Trump appointee.
A House vote to elect the president would be close. Under the 12th Amendment to the Constitution, this vote would be by state delegation rather than by individual member. Republicans control 26 delegations, Democrats 23, with the Pennsylvania delegation split 50/50. The District of Columbia, despite having three votes in the EC, would not vote. Given this math, and the partisan nature of this Congress, a House vote would likely give Donald Trump a second term.
Unless, perhaps, Joe Biden wins convincingly in Pennsylvania, and one of that state’s nine Republican House members decides to honor the wishes of Pennsylvania citizens and cast a vote for Joe Biden. The House delegation count would then be 26-24 in favor of Republicans. At this point, all that would be necessary for Biden to win is for one more red state delegation to flip, since in the event of a 25-25 vote, Speaker Nancy Pelosi breaks the tie.
The Biden campaign would be turning over every rock to get one more red state delegation into its column. Their focus would likely be on the five states whose delegations consist of a single member: Alaska, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming. The Bidens would quickly discover that four of the members from these states are staunch, unequivocal Trump supporters; but one, occasionally, has stood up to the president and criticized him publicly: Rep. Liz Cheney. The sole member of the Wyoming House delegation, and the last representative to cast a vote.
Cheney is no Lincoln Project Republican. She blasted Biden’s choice of Kamala Harris for vice president, calling her “a radical” with a voting record “to the left of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.” She said this choice cast doubt on Biden’s claim to be a moderate. Cheney’s voting record in the House, for the most part, has been red-meat Republican. Her father was one of the most reliably conservative Republicans in American politics for three decades.
But Liz Cheney was a strong voice of opposition when Trump threw our longtime Kurdish allies under the bus. She supported Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman during House impeachment hearings regarding Trump and Ukraine, and did so at a time when this Purple Heart winner was being vilified. She conceded on Fox News that on matters of foreign policy, she and the president have “some disagreements.” (Trump, displaying his typical level of graciousness, tweeted that she was an advocate of “endless wars.”) She has defended Dr. Anthony Fauci repeatedly. A group of prominent Republican House colleagues recently questioned her party loyalty — and by Trumpian standards, perhaps they are right.
Progressive Democrats regard Cheney’s opposition to Trump as tepid. Yet she is behind only the late John McCain and Mitt Romney in challenges to the President by Republican members of Congress.
Liz Cheney picks her battles carefully, but once she decides to engage, she comes out with guns blazing. She’s from Wyoming, after all, and this is not her first political rodeo.
Could she bring herself to cast the decisive vote for the Biden/Harris ticket and give Democrats the White House the next four years? Could the daughter of Dick Cheney, Republican archvillain for a generation of liberals, be the one to fulfill Democrats’ dreams of a world without Trump?
It’s possible.
In response to recent Trump election hoax rants, Cheney tweeted, "The peaceful transfer of power is enshrined in our Constitution and fundamental to the survival of our Republic. America’s leaders swear an oath to the Constitution. We will uphold that oath."
The odds of this election making it to the House are greater than you may think. All that’s necessary is that the chaos president and his followers disrupt the staid Electoral College process enough so that neither candidate gets the magic number of 270 elector votes. For that to happen, Trump need not change vote counts. He simply needs to delay them, because the Electoral College’s Dec. 14 “safe harbor deadline” — the day states need to deliver their official state results to the EC — is set in constitutional stone.
If fomenting confusion and causing delays that result in the election moving from the EC to the House is Trump’s secret plan, he has much in his favor. This will be the first modern election conducted in the midst of a pandemic, and many states will struggle with unprecedented numbers of mail-in ballots. Curtesy of Trump’s blatant politicization of the U.S. Post Office, we can expect mail delays. The first Republican lawsuits and Justice Department legal actions aimed at blue and swing states have already been filed. Russia is again producing a constant stream of fake news. There could be a COVID-caused shortage of poll workers, and the menacing presence of Trumpian poll watchers, along with a host of other problems. The one certainty about this election: It will be the most chaotic in modern history -- which, given current ambiguous law governing contested elections, could easily lead to an EC stalemate.
If this election were come down to the Wyoming delegation in the House, how would Liz Cheney vote? Nobody knows. But the Biden campaign should make it its mission to find out.
And Liz, if you are listening, remember that if you were to cast your vote against Trump, he would be out of power virtually that instant. Your place in American history would be secure. I doubt you would agree today, but by late December you may see your House vote not as a choice between Trump and Biden, but between American democracy and Putin-style autocracy. No pressure.
Charles Jennings is a senior fellow at The Atlantic Council.
On Thursday, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany highlighted Republican concerns in the Keystone State. “It’s a system that’s subject to fraud,” she said at a press briefing. “I can confirm for you that Trump ballots, ballots for the president, were found in Pennsylvania.” The FBI and state police are now investigating after the U.S. attorney’s office reported that nine military ballots were found discarded in Luzerne County – and seven of them had been cast for Trump.
While the GOP is focused on the risks of mail-in ballots, Pennsylvania Democrats are expressing worries that security measures for mail ballots will disenfranchise their voters. Earlier this week, Democratic Philadelphia City Commissioner Lisa Deeley sent a letter to the Republican leaders of the Pennsylvania legislature warning that a recent state Supreme Court decision threatens to upend November’s elections by disallowing mail-in ballots that aren’t returned in “secrecy envelopes.” Secrecy envelopes are an additional envelope or sleeve that make it difficult for poll workers and others to see through the return envelope and read what’s on the ballot, and generally make ballots harder to tamper with.
“It is likely true that the number of naked ballots” — those lacking secrecy envelopes — “we received in the June primary was at least between 15,000 to 20,000. Philadelphia is likely to receive about twice as many mail ballots in the general election as we did the primary,” she wrote. “This would mean 30,000 to 40,000 ballots could very likely be thrown out in Philadelphia alone. That number could rise to over 100,000 statewide.” She ended her letter urging the legislature to pass a law allowing the state to accept ballots without secrecy envelopes.
In 2016, Donald Trump won Pennsylvania by a mere 44,292 votes out of more than 6 million cast. “At the core of the PA ‘naked ballot’ controversy is this: Are Republicans prepared to deal with the societal consequences of the presidency being decided by the invalidation of 80k-120k mail ballots on a technicality?” asked Dave Wasserman, an elections analyst for Cook Political Report and NBC news.
Republicans in the state, however, counter that measures such as secrecy envelopes are a necessity, not a technicality – and point out that 16 other states require similar additional envelopes or sleeves for ballots.
“There's a crying need [for election security],” Charlie Gerow, a veteran GOP strategist who’s worked on presidential campaigns in Pennsylvania since 1976, told RealClearPolitics. “Philadelphia just recently had a guilty plea and a major election fraud case that involved a Democrat election judge stuffing ballot boxes, not just in one election, but in multiple elections. And the U.S. attorney down there, William McSwain, who was the only guy in Philadelphia actually fighting crime as a prosecutor, has now made additional charges, including against former Congressman Michael ‘Ozzie’ Myers, who you may remember from ABSCAM days.”
Domenick J. DeMuro, the former judge of elections and Democratic Party official in Philadelphia, pleaded guilty in May. For his role in bribing DeMuro, Myers was charged in July with “conspiring to violate voting rights by fraudulently stuffing the ballot boxes for specific candidates in the 2014, 2015, and 2016 primary elections, bribery of an election official, falsification of records, voting more than once in federal elections, and obstruction of justice.”
However, while the Pennsylvania state court’s decision on secrecy envelopes has Democrats fuming, Republicans are upset by another of the court’s election mandates. State law says that mail ballots must be received by 8 p.m. Election Day, but the state Supreme Court recently ruled that ballots can be accepted up to three days after the election. Given the pandemic-related rise in mail ballots this election, Democrats have been arguing that extended deadlines are necessary to make sure large numbers of voters are not disenfranchised by post office problems and the more complicated procedures involved in filling out and counting mail ballots.
This has angered Pennsylvania Republicans, who say the court is legislating from the bench. The court’s decision admits, “Indeed, there is no ambiguity regarding the deadline set by the General Assembly.” Instead, the court justifies overriding the law as written by citing the Pennsylvania Constitution’s broad requirement that “Elections shall be free and equal; and no power, civil or military, shall at any time interfere to prevent the free exercise of the right of suffrage.”
Conservatives have been crying foul ever since the decision was handed down. “How does that [state constitution] language empower judges to ignore the ballot deadline?” asked a recent Wall Street Journal editorial. “We’ll wait while readers search for emanations and penumbras.”
But even more concerning to Republicans than extending the deadline is that the state Supreme Court also ruled that mail ballots without postmarks proving they were submitted before the election deadline on Nov. 3 will be counted. “We conclude that a ballot received on or before 5:00 p.m. on November 6, 2020, will be presumed to have been mailed by Election Day unless a preponderance of the evidence demonstrates that it was mailed after Election Day,” reads the decision.
Pennsylvania Republicans have already announced plans to petition the U.S. Supreme Court, and earlier this week asked the state Supreme Court to halt its decision. In a filing submitted Monday, they argue that the state court’s decision “creates a serious likelihood that Pennsylvania’s imminent general election will be tainted by votes that were illegally cast or mailed after Election Day.” Other voices on the right are even blunter about the consequences of this decision. At the pro-Trump American Greatness website, veteran GOP campaign operative Ned Ryun argued this week that Pennsylvania’s ruling was evidence “Democrats plan to cheat.”
Whether the U.S. Supreme Court will intervene in the case is unknown, as is how the recent death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg might affect a potential ruling from a court with only eight justices. “The strongest realpolitik argument for why the Supreme Court would take this case would be to resolve the issues now rather than in an inevitable lawsuit after the election,” says Ilya Shapiro, CATO Institute legal scholar and author of a recent book on judicial nominations and the high court. “If the court takes it, however, it wouldn't be to split 4-4, so if the justices feel that's the most likely outcome, they won't take the case.”
In the meantime, Pennsylvania Democrats have launched an ad campaign informing voters of the issues surrounding naked ballots and instructing them on how to make sure their mail ballots get counted. Even celebrities are enlisting in the effort to educate state voters. While this might help more ballots get counted, an ad campaign is unlikely to completely resolve mail balloting issues expected to arise in the Keystone State in November.
Ultimately, concern over legal battles surrounding how to count mail ballots is unlikely to be localized just in Pennsylvania. Last month, The Washington Post reported 534,000 mail ballots were rejected across the country in primary elections earlier this year, which typically see a significantly lower turnout than presidential elections. For comparison, there were 318,000 mail ballots rejected in the 2016 presidential election and just 254,000 rejected in the 2012 presidential election.
With the expectation of a close race in Pennsylvania and other swing states, the idea that November’s election will produce chaos seems to be the one outcome both right and left can agree on. In her letter to the legislature, Deeley warned mail ballot issues could create “significant post-election legal controversy, the likes of which we have not seen since Florida in 2000.”
Logan Churchwell, the spokesman for the conservative Public Interest Legal Foundation, which is dedicated to litigating election integrity issues, is inclined to agree. “November is going to be a train wreck involving a clown car getting rear-ended into a burning dumpster full of old tires, to be precise,” he said.
Mark Hemingway is a writer in Alexandria, Va. You can follow him on twitter @heminator.
Media sources continue to report, for instance, that Joe Biden’s support is “soft” among Latino voters. This is not only factually inaccurate; it ignores the history and complexity of Latinos in the United States.
Headlines warning of lagging Latino support for the Democrats’ 2020 national ticket seem to be based on a single poll of Cuban American voters in Florida. The last Democratic presidential candidate who won Cuban Americans was John F. Kennedy. That was 60 years ago. Following the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Cubans’ backing of Republican candidates contributed to multiple Republican victories, including George W. Bush and Donald Trump.
Political reporters and editors need to widen their aperture when looking at the Latino electorate.
The growing Puerto Rican vote is firmly behind Biden, largely because of Trump’s dismissive approach to Puerto Rico after hurricanes and earthquakes killed 6,000 and left 10,000 homeless. Thousands of Puerto Ricans have moved to Florida where they can now vote. We expect their turnout to be strong because they are angry and motivated.
The Central American and South American vote in Florida is also growing and it is fearful of Trump. Many see him as having the impulses of the dictators they have come here to escape. Trump’s penchant for praising autocrats around the world belies his efforts to paint Joe Biden as a radical and a socialist. In the past 10 days Trump mused that should he win reelection, he would negotiate a third term because “he’s entitled to it.” Just this week, he would not commit to a peaceful transfer of power should he lose the election. This is in keeping with the likes of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Fidel and Raul Castro in Cuba -- and Vladimir Putin in Russia.
Huge numbers of Hispanics will be first-time voters in 2020, and as a result many are undecided. But history suggests that down the stretch, undecided Latino voters break for Democrats by a 2-to-1 margin.
In 2012, a weekly tracking poll found that just 55% of Latino voters were certain to vote for President Obama with another 9% leaning toward him, but not certain. All told, it was 64% for Obama with 12% undecided. By Election Day, the same poll found Obama with 73% of the Latino vote, a gain of 9 points. Today, a similar pre-election tracking poll finds Biden running at about the same rate as Obama in 2012, at 65% support.
Many of the polls cited in stories about Biden’s lack of Latino support are notorious for missing the mark on basic polling methodology with respect to Hispanics, often basing their results on small samples that will garner a margin of error of plus or minus 10 points, which is never reliable.
A foundational practice of accurate Latino polling is offering interviews in Spanish. This is not a regular practice of many mainstream pollsters. Reputable pollsters who know how to accurately poll Latinos consistently find 40% or more of Hispanic respondents in Florida and in Texas opt to take surveys in Spanish. If pollsters do not offer Spanish-speaking interviews, their surveys are suspect.
Since 1980, Hispanics have been receptive to both major political parties. President Reagan earned 37% of the Hispanic vote during his 1984 reelection campaign. In 1996 Bill Clinton won 72% of the Hispanic vote in his successful reelection bid. They swung to George W. Bush in enough numbers that he would carry some 40% of the Hispanic vote in 2004.
As the largest non-white voting bloc in this election – there will be 32 million eligible voters in November – Latinos can have outsized power. In Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania alone, there are more than 1,100,000 eligible Latino voters. That is many more than the margin of 78,000 votes in those three states that handed Trump the presidency.
But while Latinos can be the deciding factor in the election, it is irresponsible to put the burden of a Biden victory on their shoulders alone. It’s time that political reporters begin writing stories that share the burden and put the onus on white voters. Ironically, it is estimated Biden will only need roughly 40% of the white vote to win.
Americans, of all backgrounds, need to ensure they all come out to vote and that their voices are heard, as together, we are all facing unprecedented peril against a group of people who will do everything in their power to stay in office, no matter how unethical, unprecedented or unlawful those actions might be.
Now that is a story we can all get behind.
Albert Morales is senior political director at Latino Decisions polling firm and a former director of Hispanic Political Outreach at the DNC, spearheading the party’s Latino strategies under three different DNC chairs.
Did you hear about any of these victims? Chances are you didn’t. So frequent have been the murders of children and other innocent civilians in one of Chicago’s most violent years ever, they are rarely more than local headlines.
Chicago's problems are not isolated issues. Since the death of George Floyd in May, 550 municipalities witnessed peaceful protests that turned violent, resulting in widespread looting, rioting, and vandalism. Police cars were tipped over and set on fire, officers were pelted with urine and feces, frozen water bottles, bricks and, in one case, a skateboard. The civil unrest has also affected the livelihoods of business owners from Portland to Washington, D.C., and Kenosha to Atlanta.
Many businesses had to close for prolonged periods; frequently, their insurance policies covered little to none of the damages. The future loss of revenue in these areas is hard to estimate, but it could be enough to bankrupt some cities and turn what were once vibrant tourist destinations and shopping districts into ghost towns. Some family-owned shops will never recover or reopen.
Twenty city police chiefs across the country have resigned since the civil unrest began four months ago. Most of them were forced out by their mayor, i.e., due to political pressure -- not because of incompetence, an inability to lead, or dissatisfaction from the people or their fellow officers.
Why did this happen? Because of “stand down” orders from mayors like Chicago's Lori Lightfoot, unwilling to expose protesters to the law, and complicit state’s attorneys, like Cook County’s Kim Foxx, unwilling to prosecute them. According to their own statistics, the Chicago Police Department solves only one out of six homicides. Commit a crime in the Windy City and you are almost certain to get away with it. (Although Lightfoot has somehow seen to it that dozens of Chicago’s finest are deployed to her neighborhood, protecting her house around the clock.)
Most police chiefs, no matter the size of the city they serve, do not want to give their officers an order to stand down. They want safe streets and schools and business districts that know looters will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. But most large urban police chiefs are selected by the mayor with the confirmation of city councils. Their jobs are contingent on the mayor’s approval, not the voters’. Sadly, it is the mayor’s will that the police chief must follow, not the will of the people. And the mayors of major urban centers like Chicago, Minneapolis, Portland, and Seattle have communicated directly with their chiefs of police and told them not to make arrests unless absolutely necessary.
What is the answer? To take the politics, and political appointments, out of policing. A sheriff, unlike a city police chief, answers only to the voters -- the residents of the community he or she serves -- and is therefore liberated to the job without political pressures. Once hired, the police chief should have no direct contact with the mayor, who should have no ability to instruct the chief in how to run his or her department.
The residents of our cities would be better served if the police chief reported to a civilian review board comprised of independent law enforcement officials and specially selected members of the public. The chief should have a yearly contract and should only be removed for cause. The chief should be beholden, in other words, only to his or her peers and members of the community -- those that the chief’s decisions most directly affect.
On a recent visit to Chicago, Attorney General William Barr attributed a recent and modest decline in homicides to the federal government’s “Operation Legend” initiative, a nationwide program meant to stem illegal gun sales and transport of firearms across state lines. Hours after Barr’s press conference there, which should have been a moment of encouragement and unity for police, citizens and elected officials alike, Mayor Lightfoot instead turned the moment political, noting with ire that President Trump would not use Chicago as a “prop” and disputing Barr’s claims about the success of the initiative. Though invited to the press conference, Lightfoot was a no-show, as was the police superintendent, David Brown. Sens. Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth were also notably absent. A moment of progress and potential for peace was reduced to a moment of posturing.
And so, tragically, the violence and murder of the innocent will continue. Residents of American cities -- large or small -- will never be safe, nor will justice genuinely be served so long as the police chief has to answer to a politically motivated mayor who knows little to nothing about law enforcement. It’s time for the politics in policing to end. Otherwise, get used to lawlessness and expect the mayhem to continue and, perhaps, become even worse.
Mark C. Curran Jr. is a former criminal defense attorney, state and federal prosecutor, and the longest-serving sheriff of Lake County, Ill., elected for three consecutive four-year terms. He is currently the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, running in a three-way race against incumbent Dick Durbin and an independent, businessman Willie Wilson.
It makes sense to crack down on fraud, but not at the expense of those fleeing communism and religious oppression.
The people of the world experiencing oppression for being Christian and those in the last remaining communist countries who are oppressed for merely having a religion are in need of the United States to resume its traditional role of being the country that will take them in.
The Trump administration needs to fix the refugee resettlement program to make sure that people with a good faith claim of refugee status can seek refuge in the United States. A Presidential Determination announcement on the number of refugees the U.S. will accept for the next year is coming soon. The President has an opportunity to lead the global fight against religious persecution and individuals fleeing communism and other oppressive regimes.
President Donald J. Trump used the American peoples' heartburn over immigration to launch his campaign to the White House, and he is politically smart to keep his promises on that issue. But it is not going to hurt the President's reelection effort -- and it may help him with Cuban refugees in Florida -- to open the doors to those oppressed by other governments for their religion. Politico reported in July of last year that the Trump administration considered slashing refugee admissions to zero. When you see the chaos in Hong Kong today, I think most Americans would agree that the American tradition of allowing good faith refugees from Hong Kong makes sense.
Our nation was founded by refugees. The first refugees who hit our shores 400 years ago were the Pilgrims who fled religious persecution in England. The 1965 immigration bill was a means to give preference to people fleeing communism from Vietnam, Cambodia, Cuba and Soviet bloc nations and served as a tool to fight communism. Trump could use the refugee system to fight China by allowing refugees of the Chinese so-called national security law in Hong Kong to seek refuge here in the U.S.
The Trump administration's fight against socialism should contain the same tools the U.S. used to defeat Soviet communism, including a refugee program that allows those targeted by communist governments to be safe here. Former Republican Rep. from Wisconsin Reid Ribble writes in The Wall Street Journal, "While President Trump has rightly critiqued the autocratic tendencies of socialism, on his administration's watch the U.S. has increasingly turned away victims of communism and religious persecution." He cites numbers showing a refugee admittance number coming down from 85,000 in 2016 to 18,000 this fiscal year, putting the country on track for a 90% decline in refugees.
Ribble cites one number that stands out. Only seven Cuban refugees have been resettled in the U.S. since the beginning of 2018. Think about the stories of Sens. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Ted Cruz, R-Texas, to see two children of refugees from communist dictatorships that have gone on to be leaders of the Republican Party and role models for young Latinos. The past Trump administration position makes one worry about future leaders from Venezuela, Cuba and Hong Kong who will not be let in under the status quo.
The Refugee Council USA sent a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on July 13 making the case that the Hong Kong situation should be addressed through "utilizing the US Refugee Admissions Program [USRAP] to resettle those who are in harm's way and do not have other options for protection." An upcoming Presidential Determination for next year could solve these problems, if the Trump administration can address fraud directly and restore some reasonable numbers of refugees to let in next year.
Let's not abandon the least of these who need our help, and there are many across the globe who need a place to seek refuge from truly evil governments.
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Erick Erickson is editor of TheResurgent.com.
Norm No. 1: When Democrats are in charge of both the Senate and the White House, they are free to nominate and confirm any justice they please, as quickly as they please, as they did in the cases of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
Norm No. 2: When Democrats only run the White House, they are free to nominate any SCOTUS justice they please, and they also get to dictate whom Republicans are allowed to confirm, as they tried to do in the case of Merrick Garland -- blessed be his memory.
Norm No. 3: When Democrats run neither the nomination process nor the confirmation process, they get to dictate who is confirmed to the Supreme Court, as they argue today in the case of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's replacement.
Norm No. 4: If Republicans fail to adhere to all these rules, Democrats have a license to burn everything down to the ground. (And, of course, I only mean that 90% metaphorically.)
When Joe Biden implores us to "cool the flames that have been engulfing our country," he isn't speaking to Democrats, who have now threatened to pack the courts, eliminate the legislative filibuster and Electoral College, make D.C. a state and use impeachment as a political cudgel to stop a constitutionally legitimate confirmation process, but rather to warn moderate Republican senators that they shouldn't do what he argued was their "constitutional duty" only four years earlier.
In his Senate speech during the debate over Merrick Garland, Mitch McConnell argued that presidents "have a right to nominate, just as the Senate has its constitutional right to provide or withhold consent. In this case, the Senate will withhold it."
McConnell's contention was indisputably true. It is also true that denying Garland a confirmation vote was a political risk. Voters had a chance to punish the GOP for that position -- or not. Yet, scores of liberal pundits and politicians concocted preposterous arguments to claim that the Republicans were illegally "stealing" the seat, which, if true, means that McConnell is, at worst, a hypocrite and that his critics are, at best, demanding that Republicans break the law.
In a New York Times op-ed in 2016, Biden maintained that McConnell had a "constitutional duty" to give the president's nominee a vote. If this is true, Biden is now arguing that McConnell's four-year-old political decision should trump the constitutional order. If it isn't, then he was lying. Per Biden, McConnell abandoned his "responsibility to the voters of this nation" back then. Surely, his stance now is better?
As a matter of fact, the then-vice president not only argued that denying Garland a vote was unconstitutional but also made the case that it was imperative for the country to have a full complement of nine judges in case the Court was asked to adjudicate an election dispute. He claimed that as Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, a position he held for decades, he would have moved forward with a nomination "even a few months before a presidential election." In other words, Biden has forsaken a 36-year position and let the GOP Senate majority leader's 2016 position become the norm in perpetuity.
Of course, no one believes that.
When examining "norms," it's worth our remembering that four years have passed since the Garland nomination and that one of the events that transpired in those intervening years was the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh. I'm pretty sure Biden's running mate, Kamala Harris, wasn't cooling "the flames that have been engulfing our country" when she entered unsubstantiated gang-rape charged against an eminently qualified Supreme Court nominee into the record. Nor was Dianne Feinstein when she leaked the allegations against Kavanaugh to the media before allowing her fellow senators to see them. Nor was Senator Ed Markey, who refused to meet with the nominee, calling him "illegitimate" before asking even a single question. Nor was Senator Mazie Hirono when she said that Kavanaugh didn't deserve the presumption of innocence.
Republicans should remember that indecent partisan spectacle every time Democrats are lecturing them about Donald Trump and "norms." They should also recognize that they have been breaking judicial norms since Robert Bork's nomination. Trump is correct that Chuck Schumer would give zero pause in confirming a justice today had roles been reversed. This is one reason why unilaterally surrendering to these always-evolving standards would amount to political malfeasance.
Long story short: Democrats keep inventing imaginary new "norms," and then threatening to blow up long-standing, real-life standards of American governance if the GOP fails to surrender to them. That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works.
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David Harsanyi is a senior writer at National Review. Follow him on Twitter @davidharsanyi.
The indictment starts with his annoying habit of inventing insulting nicknames for his opponents and critics. You can add to the list as you will and perhaps come up with enough names for a 700-plus-word newspaper column.
But Trump hasn't been the only one disregarding norms of late. Consider the question of whether and when the president and Senate should fill the Supreme Court seat vacated by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
The historic precedent is clear, as set out by National Review's Dan McLaughlin. When a vacancy occurs in a presidential year and the opposition party has a majority in the Senate, the president can nominate, but the nominee almost always isn't confirmed.
There have been 10 such vacancies in the history of the republic. Presidents made pre-Election Day nominations in six cases, but only one nominee was confirmed before the election. That was back in 1888.
Presidents whose parties had Senate majorities selected nominees in election years 19 times, and 17 of those nominees were confirmed. One of the two rejections came in 1968, when President Lyndon Johnson's nominee for chief justice, Abe Fortas, was blocked by a bipartisan filibuster.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell thus was following precedent when he blocked consideration of Barack Obama's nominee to fill Antonin Scalia's seat; he is also following precedent by promising a floor vote on Trump's nominee to fill Ginsburg's.
It is Democrats who are inconsistent here. If you think a president's nominee is entitled to a vote from an opposition Senate, then, a fortiori, you think she's entitled to a vote from his own party's Senate.
You may not think such flip-flopping violates a norm. But Democrats' threats to pack the Supreme Court with additional justices if they win the presidency and a Senate majority certainly does.
The Supreme Court has had nine justices since 1869. After his landslide reelection, President Franklin Roosevelt tried to add up to six more in 1937. That was soundly rejected, even though his Democrats had a 76-16 majority in the Senate and a 334-88 majority in the House.
Another assault on institutional norms is Democrats' proposal to admit Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico as new states, though neither meets long-established requirements for new statehood, as I argued in The Washington Examiner last week.
A third is to somehow abolish the Electoral College on the grounds that it and the Senate are unfairly tilted in favor of Republicans. But, currently, each party holds 10 of the 20 Senate seats in the 10 largest-population states and 10 of the 20 Senate seats in the 10 smallest-population states. Not much of a tilt!
Similarly, any Electoral College tilt to Republicans is of short duration. In both 2004 and 2012, incumbent presidents were reelected with 51% of the popular vote. But that netted Democrat Barack Obama some 332 electoral votes and Republican George W. Bush only 286.
Hillary Clinton's edge in popular votes came from California. That's because, since 2000, for the first time since 1820, our largest-population state is voting far out of line with the national average.
That puts the party favored there at a disadvantage, just as a party whose votes are heavily clustered in relatively few congressional or legislative districts is at a disadvantage compared with a party whose votes are more evenly spread around.
Democrats can try to compensate for this by changing or evading the Constitution, but amendments must be approved by 38 state legislatures -- and 50 if they eliminate states' equal representation in the Senate.
A more practical and speedy response, and one that doesn't violate norms, is to modify your political positions and rhetoric. It may satisfy liberals' pride to pile up votes in California and the coastal Northeast by denouncing deplorables in the flyover states. But it's also feasible to win more votes there.
It was done in the 1990s. Bill Clinton twice carried nine of the 10 states touching on the Mississippi River, carrying their electoral votes 95-7. In 2016, Hillary Clinton lost eight of 10, 65-30.
Meanwhile, Brookings scholar Shadi Hamid in The Atlantic forecasts that if Trump wins, Democrats "will be unwilling, even unable, to accept the result ... resulting in more of the social unrest and street battles that cities including Portland, Oregon, and Seattle have seen in recent months." Doesn't post-election violence violate norms?
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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.
So Joe Biden promised. Since the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, however, Biden has refused to produce a list of Black female judges and scholars whom he would consider for the now-vacant seat.
What is his problem?
Donald Trump had no such reluctance. In 2016, he listed a slew of candidates from among whom he promised to pick his justices. True to his word, Trump elevated federal appellate court judges Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.
Since the Kavanaugh confirmation, Judge Amy Coney Barrett has been openly discussed as a potential Trump choice to succeed liberal icon Ginsburg. Why is Biden so reluctant to reveal some highly qualified Black female judges? His refusal suggests that the kind of high court judges that America wants is not the liberals' issue. It is Trump's issue.
The president will announce his choice Saturday, after the mourning period for Ginsburg is over. Mitch McConnell's Senate is expected to confirm the new justice in late October.
With the court's ideological balance at stake, the battle from now to Nov. 3 is thus for all the marbles: control of the House, the Senate, the presidency and the U.S. Supreme Court.
Rarely has there been an election in which the stakes were so high, the ideological gulf so great and the outcome in such doubt.
The polls show Biden ahead, but Democrats are visibly nervous. Of greatest concern -- the possibility that, Tuesday night, Biden, in the first debate, with his verbal and mental lapses occurring frequently now, could kick it all away in front of millions of voters.
On the court issue, Democrats are exhibiting something akin to panic. They are warning that if a conservative jurist like Barrett is confirmed, Democrats may retaliate by "packing" the Supreme Court -- increasing the number of justices from nine to 11 and installing two new liberals -- if they win the presidency and Senate.
If a Scalia constitutionalist is nominated and confirmed this year, says Sen. Chuck Schumer, "nothing is off the table next year."
Other Democrats are threatening to pack the Senate by granting statehood to D.C. and Puerto Rico. This would add four new Democratic Senators and formally convert the United States into a bilingual nation.
Nancy Pelosi has threatened a new impeachment of the president if he appoints a new justice to fill Ginsburg's seat. Yet, this is what Article II of the Constitution directs Trump to do.
Activists are talking about "burning down" the system, and given what we have witnessed in Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis and Louisville, the BLM crowd and its media camp followers should be taken seriously.
Should Democrats win the Senate and White House, they will face one obstacle to imposing the Biden-Bernie-Socialist-AOC agenda on the nation. Only the filibuster, the ability of a Senate minority, through extended debate, to delay, and occasionally frustrate, the will of the majority, would stand in the way of their turning their radical agenda into law, as LBJ did with his massive majorities in 1965.
This is no idle threat. Even Barack Obama is calling for abolition of the filibuster, stripping a Republican Senate minority of its last weapon of resistance in the world's greatest deliberative body.
Another danger facing the GOP is its demographic demise if it fails to control immigration.
Currently, white folks, who produce the vast majority of GOP votes, are 60% of the nation. The Black population is 12-13%, Hispanics 18%, Asian Americans 7%.
The GOP demographic crisis: The white population is steadily diminishing as a share of the electorate. Hispanics and Asians, who vote 2-1 Democratic in presidential elections, are the fastest-growing minorities and are being fed by the largest streams of migration.
A few years hence, the GOP will face the fate it failed to avert in California. Once the Golden State was Nixon and Reagan country, as those two Republicans carried California on all seven presidential tickets on which they ran from 1952 to 1984.
Moreover, former red states such as Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona are now swing states, and Texas is trending that way.
Democrats, too, have a white folks problem.
At the party's apex are Speaker Pelosi and Majority Whip Steny Hoyer, both octogenarian white folks. Senate Minority leader Schumer and Minority Whip Dick Durbin are white septuagenarians.
Presidential nominee Joe Biden is a 77-year-old white man who would be older than our oldest president, Ronald Reagan, was the day he left office.
The last white man appointed to the Supreme Court by a Democratic president was Stephen Breyer back in 1994. At 82, he is now the oldest justice serving.
The days of white liberals dominating the rising party of America's people of color may be over this decade.
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On Hunter Biden:
--Despite having no known expertise in the energy sector, your son Hunter Biden was paid large sums of money to sit on the board of Burmisa, a Ukrainian natural gas company, while you were vice president. Tell us about this financial arrangement and did it have any influence over U.S. foreign policy while you were President Obama's pointman on Ukraine?
--U.S. Senate committees released an interim report on Wednesday documenting that Hunter Biden received $3.5 million in wire transfers from a Russian billionaire whose husband was the former mayor of Moscow. Nine of the 11 wire transfers were sent to an investment firm co-founded by Hunter. Additionally, records obtained from the U.S. Treasury Department by the GOP-lead Senate committees "show potential criminal activity relating to transactions among and between Hunter Biden, his family and his associates with Ukrainian, Russian, Kazakh and Chinese nationals."
--What can you disclose about your son's dealings with foreign governments and officials while you were vice president? And did any of these relationships present a conflict of interest?
--The Senate report also notes some of the financial transactions are linked to what "appears to be an Eastern European prostitution or human trafficking ring." Is this true?
The coronavirus pandemic:
--Mr. Biden, you and your supporters are blaming President Trump for his handling of the coronavirus, a worldwide pandemic that originated in China and has to date taken over 200,000 American lives. Yet, while you were vice president, the H1N1 flu pandemic infected 60 million Americans and killed thousands of Americans. No one blamed you or President Obama for it. If you believe the current administration is responsible for every fatality during a pandemic, does that mean you and the Obama administration are also responsible for the 12,469 Americans who died from H1N1 on your watch?
--On numerous occasions, you've said that if elected president, then you, in contrast to President Trump, will listen to the scientists and the "experts." What happens if the "experts" are wrong? For example, last January, the World Health Organization -- which you and the Democratic establishment fully support --downplayed the virus. On Jan. 14, the WHO tweeted, "Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China." We now know that's 100% false. The virus is highly contagious, spreading to 213 countries and killing nearly 1 million people globally. If you're elected president, will you blindly listen to the so-called experts or think for yourself and make your own decisions?
Foreign policy:
--In addition to voting for the Iraq War while a U.S. senator, on your watch while vice president, ISIS established a caliphate, killed and tortured Americans and spread its deadly tentacles around the world. Syrian Dictator Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons against its people while approximately 500,000 perished during its brutal civil war. China's trade abuses against the U.S. were left unchecked. Russia annexed Crimea and invaded Ukraine. North Korea and Iran advanced their nuclear weapons programs. Four Americans were killed in Benghazi -- including a U.S. ambassador -- and a global refugee crisis took place. What do you say to voters who question your ability to handle U.S. foreign policy if elected president?
Criminal justice reform:
--Mr. Biden, you championed the highly controversial 1994 Crime Bill which disproportionally incarcerated a generation of Black men. Why should people of color and the Black community trust you to have their back today when it comes to criminal justice reform?
U.S. election:
--Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor of New York City, has pledged to spend $100 million to help you win the state of Florida. He's also raised $16 million with help from Hollywood millionaires and big tech CEOs such as Twitter's Jack Dorsey to pay off thousands of criminals' debts so they can vote. Yet, for years, Democrats have railed against big money in politics. Do you support millionaires and billionaires buying influence in elections? And if not, will you reject Bloomberg's money and other deep-pocket donors?
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The Supreme Court question before us has the potential to take things even further. For many decades, the Senate required a 60-vote supermajority to confirm judges. This Senate rule meant the system would not work without some level of consensus. That's not always fun for the side that doesn't get its way, but it adds a level of stability that helps our country ride out the waves of our political emotions.
Former Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was the first to begin to erode our current system. Reid decided it was too hard to get his judges through with a supermajority requirement, so he and his fellow Democrats unilaterally changed the rules to allow them to ram through judges up to the appellate court level on a 51-vote majority basis. This worked to get Reid's judges through. It also marked the end of our consensus system in the Senate and the start of our pure power politics system.
What followed was predictable. Republicans took power back in the Senate, and they not only followed Reid's example but also expanded it to include Supreme Court votes. This, of course, enraged the left and added to the cycle of extreme partisanship we are still experiencing.
Now even moderate Democratic Senators have indicated they may favor getting rid of the filibuster altogether in the Senate, if they take power next year. This means that instead of needing 60 votes for tough legislation, absolutely everything could be passed with a simple majority. The top leaders, including former Vice President Joe Biden, are indicating that if they are elected and can't implement their agenda with a 60-vote requirement, they will kill the filibuster altogether. The actions they are talking about taking include truly radical concepts such as the Green New Deal and expanding the Supreme Court and packing it with their own judges to effectively neuter another supposedly coequal branch of our government.
In the face of this insanity, we are now presented with the sudden and tragic death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg close to our coming election. Many of the same Democrats who were just talking about killing the filibuster to push through a radical agenda are now sending out talking points about how tradition requires that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell hold off on a vote to let the next president decide on our new nominee after the election.
Democrats seem to want it both ways. But we are either operating under pure party politics or we are sticking with comity, tradition and stability. I would love another conservative justice, but, more importantly, I'd like a country that begins to heal and doesn't swing back and forth every two years from the partisan agenda of one side to the partisan agenda of the other. Given how split our country is, with the voters in the middle swinging back and forth every few years, this is exactly what we should expect. But based on their own actions, how can Democrats expect McConnell and President Donald Trump to do anything short of using every ounce of political power at their disposal to usher in a new conservative Supreme Court justice?
As Democrats scream about this, they should pause to consider their own role in how we got here. Democrats followed up Reid's destruction of the filibuster for judges with a truly brutal and underhanded attack on Brett Kavanaugh, an honorable family man forced to fight with every ounce of his being to restore his reputation after the most salacious and evidence-free charges from the likes of sham artists such as Michael Avenatti (remember him?), who peddled made-up gang rape stories. The moderate Republicans that Democrats are now hoping will break with Trump and McConnell were outraged by this behavior and by the fact that mainstream Democratic politicians joined the character assassination. Republicans have not treated Democratic nominees this way and, in fact, have given most Democratic nominees substantial bipartisan votes for confirmation. This is the way the system should work. Democrats who are screaming about it now need to look in the mirror and ask how anyone should take them seriously as they hop back and forth from the most brutal partisan politics to calls for civility and tradition as the moment suits their interests. Wonder how McConnell is able to keep moderates like Sen. Mitt Romney on board for a vote? He should thank the Democrats now complaining most. They made his job a lot easier.
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Since his Aug. 11 selection of California Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate, Biden has had 22 days where he either didn’t make public appearances, held only virtual fundraisers or ventured from his Delaware home solely for church, according to an Associated Press analysis of his schedules. He made 12 visits outside of Delaware during that period, including a trip to Washington scheduled for Friday to pay respects to the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
During the same time, President Donald Trump had 24 trips that took him to 17 different states, not counting a personal visit to New York to see his ailing brother in the hospital or weekend golf outings.
Biden’s aides insist his approach is intentional, showcasing his respect for public health guidelines aimed at preventing the spread of the coronavirus and presenting a responsible contrast with Trump, who has resumed large-scale campaign rallies — sometimes over the objections of local officials. Still, some Democrats say it’s critical that Biden infuse his campaign with more energy.
Texas Democratic Party Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa said not traveling because of the pandemic was a “pretty lame excuse.”
“I thought he had his own plane,” Hinojosa said. “He doesn’t have to sit with one space between another person on a commercial airline like I would.”
Hinojosa argued that Biden prioritizing visits to Texas and Arizona could boost Latino turnout and potentially reduce the pressure on him to sweep Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — where he has focused much of his travel so far.
“We are campaigning safely and effectively, and our message is reaching voters in battleground states and generating the enthusiasm and energy we need to beat Donald Trump,” said Biden spokesman TJ Ducklo.
The race between Biden and Trump has been generally consistent for months. Biden has maintained a comfortable lead in most national polls and has an advantage, though narrower, in many of the battleground states that will decide the election.
But polls that showed competitive races or even Democratic advantages in traditionally Republican states proved to be false indicators for Democrats in 2016.
Four years later, Biden faces persistent questions about whether his campaign is organizing and connecting with voters. When he visited Charlotte, North Carolina, on Wednesday for a Black economic summit, Collette Alston, chairwoman of the local African American Caucus, said she only found out with one day’s notice — when she saw it on TV.
Just 16 people attended the event and Alston warned that Biden wasn’t reaching locals she thinks he needs to — “the people that are like, I don’t care, I really don’t want to vote.”
“I do believe that he can win North Carolina,” Alton said. “Can he win it based on what he’s doing right now? No. That’s not the way to win it.”
Biden’s swing state visits often seem tailor-made for a television package: A small, socially distanced roundtable or town hall, always with fewer than 25 people; occasionally a stop at a local business or a visit with first responders; and then hours of back-to-back local media interviews.
Beyond traveling more, Biden is being urged by some Democrats to expand his message. While he has given standalone speeches on issues like criminal justice reform, climate change and, last weekend, the Supreme Court vacancy, Biden largely ignores those issues during his campaign stops. When he appears before voters, he’s generally laser-focused on the virus and the Trump administration’s mismanaging of it.
When a grand jury decided Wednesday not to bring charges against police officers directly involved in the killing of Breonna Taylor, he offered condolences to her mother but declined to comment about the specifics of the case on camera. He later issued a more detailed written statement.
David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s former strategist and adviser, said the Biden campaign is “wise” to concentrate on the pandemic because it’s an “anchor around the President’s neck.” But he said it would be a “missed opportunity” for Biden if he didn’t speak up more about the Supreme Court going forward, especially the impact it could have on healthcare.
“The future of the Affordable Care Act and particularly the future of protections for people with preexisting conditions is a very close issue, and it’s what drove Democrats to victory in 2018,” Axelrod said.
Biden’s aides say the relatively light schedule, small events and message discipline reflect the biggest issue still confronting most Americans today: the coronavirus pandemic. Biden also has sought to offer a responsible contrast to Trump and his rallies, where thousands forgo masks.
“Every time Trump shows up and has a mask-less rally and says this thing is overblown, Democrats are winning the COVID battle,” said Jim Kessler, an executive vice president of the moderate Democratic group Third Way.
Biden maintains a vigorous schedule even when he’s not traveling. His campaign has become a fundraising powerhouse through largely virtual events. He raised a record $364 million in August that has allowed him to blanket the airwaves across the country and outspend Trump.
Still, Trump sees the contrast in travel as an opportunity to argue that his packed schedule shows he’s outworking Biden. The president seized on the Biden campaign’s announcement shortly before 9:30 a.m. Thursday that he wouldn’t have any public events for the day.
Biden spent the day preparing for his first debate against Trump next week.
“Did you see he did a lid this morning again?” Trump said of Biden during a rally Thursday night at an airport hangar in Jacksonville, Florida. “A lid is when you put out word you’re not going to be campaigning today. So he does a lid all the time. ... I’m in Texas. I’m in Ohio. I’m in North Carolina, South Carolina. I’m in Michigan. I’m all over the place.”
Biden’s aides counter that they see evidence in public and private polling that the virus remains top of mind for most voters, and that they have a compelling case to make that much of the crisis is Trump’s fault. They also say their focus on small, high-impact events gets results.
Still, the cautious approach isn’t shared by Biden’s wife, Jill, who has already ventured as far away as Maine and spent Thursday making four stops in Virginia. She’s going to Iowa, another state her husband has yet to visit in recent months, on Saturday.
Hillary Scholten, a Democrat seeking an open House seat in Michigan, spent a morning last week touring a food bank in Grand Rapids, the state’s second-largest city, with Jill Biden. She’s aware that Joe Biden may not follow suit.
“People would want to see him here,” Scholten said. “That being said, there is a global pandemic.”
Weissert and Fram reported from Washington.