Elizabeth Warren’s Native American Problem Isn’t Going Away

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Monday, September 30, 2019

‘I have listened and I have learned” said Elizabeth Warren at a forum of Native American voters in Iowa last month. “Like anyone who’s being honest with themselves, I know that I have made mistakes. I am sorry for the harm I have caused.” Did any reporter ask her what harm, specifically, she’d caused, or what, specifically, she’d learned? Did any reporter ask her if her “mistakes” were ones anyone could have made, or ones she believed any of her peers, either at Harvard or in the Senate, had also made?

No, they did not.

I suppose people think that the controversy over Warren’s past claims of Native American ancestry has been put to bed, with Warren rising in the polls because she has plans for everything, including for Native Americans. But in fact, the controversy has not been put to bed, and it shouldn’t be. It points to Elizabeth Warren’s ambitions and lack of integrity, and forces us to ponder whether the rules really apply to those who would make them.

The media have certainly done their best to help Warren in putting the controversy to bed, though. The Boston Globe — in a story that briefly acknowledged that Warren’s “political enemies have long pushed a narrative that her unsubstantiated claims of Native American heritage turbocharged her legal career” — gave ample space to her own much-more-charitable version of events. Her reporter-defenders have pointed out that until a certain time in her life, she declined to participate in affirmative-action programs, though even they have had to admit that the crucial leaps in her academic career — her landing a job at the University of Pennsylvania and then moving on to Harvard — occurred after she began listing herself as a racial minority. The year before Harvard Law School hired her — and trumpeted her as the first woman of color so hired — it had been subject to major, headline-grabbing protests for giving tenure to four white men.

Of course, Warren could have been deluding herself as well. She claims that her belief in her Cherokee heritage came from longstanding family lore. But the fact that she participated in the now-cringe-inducing Pow Wow Chow cookbook and plagiarized her recipes from a French cookbook suggests a certain awareness that she was perpetrating a racial fraud. And then there is the fact that Cherokee Indian is not so much a “socially constructed” racial category as a specific, legally defined identity: You are a Cherokee when the Cherokee nation recognizes you as a member on its rolls. Surely someone who identified as a Native American academically and socially in the way Warren once claimed she did would have sought such official status. But she didn’t.

Warren has repeatedly claimed over the years that her parents’ marriage was rejected by racist grandparents because of her mother’s Cherokee ancestry. But Cherokee genealogist Twila Barnes has said there’s simply no evidence of Cherokee genealogy in Warren’s family. Warren’s mother was not some racial outcast, but the popular daughter of a prominent local family. And there’s no evidence of the romantic elopement, or racist animus on the part of her paternal grandfather, Grant Herring, who regularly played golf with Carnal Wheeling, a recognized Cherokee.

The media haven’t really known how to handle this story. Like a Geiger counter in a North Korean nuclear-weapons lab, the reaction of the “smart set” on Twitter was wildly disconcerting when Elizabeth Warren announced the results of her spectacularly ill-conceived DNA test earlier this year. At first, the trace amounts of Native American heritage were held up as proof against Donald Trump’s attacks. Then, as geneticists and common sense intervened in the discussion, it became obvious that Warren’s Native American roots were negligible.

As the social-climbing Warren begins to gain over actual socialist Bernie Sanders, I expect the Sandernistas to unload on the contradictions between the upwardly mobile Left’s hatred of cultural appropriation and the changing racial identity and falsified family history of its darling Warren. If she survives that and wins the nomination, she’ll face a general election in which the same basic problem remains.

I predict that should she make it that far, everyone will just try to change the subject.

Do They Mean It This Time?

By John Hirschauer

Monday, September 30, 2019

I don’t envy Nancy Pelosi.

The base of her party has been apoplectic for the better part of three years. Not without help — from the moment that Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton, elected Democrats have carefully built up a sense of panic and scandal around the Trump administration, a sense that, in fairness, has been unwittingly and clumsily abetted by the behavior of the president and his aides. Escalated by the breathless outrage of the media, a shroud of illegitimacy has enveloped the Trump White House from Day 1, and this shroud has, in turn, allowed the base of the Democratic party to avoid facing democracy’s colder realities, such as: Sometimes you lose. And it’s not necessarily anyone’s fault — not Russia, not racism, not rednecks — but your own.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t try to pretend otherwise.

First came efforts to undo the Trump presidency via the Electoral College by flipping enough electors to reverse the result (watching progressives, I must add, make use of the electoral college’s anti-democratic features was quite a sight to behold). After that failed, a California Democrat launched an “Impeach Trump Leadership” PAC, meant to coopt the impeachment pretexts du jour — emoluments-clause violations, speculative mental ailments, Representative Al Green’s impassioned say-so — and give each of them something like professional sanction. Then, of course, came the Russia probe, with all its unseemly partisan pomp: the trivial “bombshells,” the seething media firestorm, the discursive public hearings, the televised predawn arrest of Roger Stone (helicopters in the air!), and the theatrical build-up and relative inconsequence of the Mueller Report.

All the while, the adult wing of Pelosi’s party sat idly by, never drawing any substantive line between itself and the ceaseless outrage and hyperbolic furor that so characterized their fellow Democrats. Pelosi, for her part, realized the electoral harm that had been wrought by a rabid, vindictive coterie of progressives in her party. She told The New York Times Magazine:

Yes, on the left there is a Pound of Flesh Club, and they just want to do to them what they did to us. . . . I have those who want to be for impeachment and for abolishing ICE. Two really winning issues for us, right? In the districts we have to win? I don’t even think they’re the right things to do. If the evidence from Mueller is compelling, it should be compelling for Republicans as well, and that may be a moment of truth. But that’s not where we are.

But now that House Democrats might — might! — finally have sufficient predicate to pursue impeachment, Pelosi faces another challenge: to convince the American people that this iteration of Trump hysteria is the genuine article, and that this animal is different from the one that gave birth to Rob Reiner, Keith Olbermann, and the rest of the farcical hyenas who made such a mockery of the Russia probe.

The latest pretext for impeachment has, at minimum, the whiff of impropriety: President Trump’s conversation with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky includes references to military armaments (Zelensky brings this up, saying, “We are almost ready to buy more Javelins from the United States”) and reciprocity in the same conversation where Trump solicits an investigation into his political opponent. Much of the alleged quid pro quo occurs in the conversation’s subtext. Ukraine needs our aid for its conflict with Russia, which, as Michael Brendan Dougherty points out in these pages, is a ubiquitous reality in American–Ukrainian diplomacy. But both Pelosi and the American electorate know that even if this Ukrainian phone call serves as an adequate predicate to impeach a duly elected president, that impeachment — whether it’s because Trump is a boor, because he’s trying to “take away health care,” because he’s a serial philanderer, because he allegedly slept with a porn star, because he has a “mental illness,” because he lost the popular vote, because he is ignorant on most matters of domestic and foreign affairs, whatever — has been the stated goal of much of Pelosi’s caucus from the day Trump was elected.

It’s hard for me to shake the feeling, in other words, that impeaching Donald Trump has always been the Democrats’ intended end, begging for sufficient means from the moment he won the White House.

Pelosi knows that. She also knows that, barring a pro-impeachment consensus in both chambers, a Senate acquittal could well redound to the president’s electoral benefit in 2020. But after seven moderate members of the House cosigned an op-ed in the Washington Post voicing their support for impeachment, she also knows she could lose her caucus. “Just impeaching Trump for his bad behavior isn’t worth it,” she told the New Yorker. “But, if he challenges our system of checks and balances as he is doing, if he undermines our democracy, our electoral system, as he is doing, if he undermines his own oath of office as he is doing, it is a challenge to our Constitution.”

Pelosi hopes this latest allegation meets muster. Perhaps the seventh time will be the charm.

The Australia Story Isn’t a Story

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Monday, September 30, 2019

The Australia story is not a story. Per the Times:

President Trump pushed the Australian prime minister during a recent telephone call to help Attorney General William P. Barr gather information for a Justice Department inquiry that Mr. Trump hopes will discredit the Mueller investigation, according to two American officials with knowledge of the call.

And this is bad because?

And like the call with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, the discussion with Mr. Morrison shows the president using high-level diplomacy to advance his personal political interests.

Does it? Because it seems pretty unreasonable to me to (a) invest the power of investigation in the executive branch, (b) demand the executive branch conduct an investigation, and then (c) claim that if that investigation ever intersects with the personal political interests of the head of that executive branch, it’s ipso facto illegitimate. What is our standard here? “You must investigate this topic, but don’t ask any questions that might redound to your benefit”? Come now.

There’s no suggestion of a quid pro quo here. And there is nothing odd about Trump’s asking these questions of Australia given that Australia contributed information into the Five Eyes system that, eventually, informed the Mueller investigation and had serious effects on American politics.

Perhaps the problem is that it would be illegal and untoward for President Trump to ask world leaders to cooperate with Attorney General Barr, and/or that it’s not within Barr’s powers to speak with foreign law enforcement officials about what his prosecutor needs from them?

Is that it? Here’s the Times again:

Justice Department officials have said that it would be neither illegal nor untoward for Mr. Trump to ask world leaders to cooperate with Mr. Barr. And it is within Mr. Barr’s powers to speak with foreign law enforcement officials about what his prosecutor needs from them.

Ah.

As I said on The Editors podcast last week, I think that the Ukraine call was “pretty bad.” This? This is a non-story.

Elizabeth Warren’s Wealth-Tax Trap

By Veronique de Rugy

Thursday, September 26, 2019

A tax on wealth would be economically destructive, fiscally ineffective, and possibly unconstitutional

It seems like everyone is talking about the wealth tax. Many Democratic presidential hopefuls have endorsed it as a way to address income-inequality concerns. There is also the promise that it would raise much money from the richest Americans and pay for all the new entitlements Democrats think Americans lack. However, a careful examination of the evidence reveals that such a tax is unlikely to achieve any of these goals. It is also misguided, as the negative consequences from the tax will reach far beyond the richest Americans.

Consider the version of a wealth tax proposed by Elizabeth Warren. She was inspired by the work of French economist Thomas Piketty, who made the case for a global wealth tax in his blockbuster 2014 volume Capital in the 21st Century. Since then, Warren has tapped the research of UC Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman (each of whom is also French).

Senator Warren’s proposal is straightforward. It would target the “richest 0.1 percent of Americans.” Households with a net worth of $50 million or more would pay an annual tax of 2 percent on every dollar of net worth above $50 million and 3 percent on every dollar above $1 billion. Warren believes that with this wealth tax she can raise $2.75 trillion over ten years, which is a good thing because she has a ton of new programs that she would like to implement.

A main problem with her tax is that the net worth of a rich person isn’t as straightforward as proponents of wealth taxes would like you to believe. Net worth includes all assets, some of which are easier to value than others. The value of assets such as stocks, bonds, and real estate are pretty easy to measure. But many other assets — such as cryptocurrencies, trusts, and private businesses — are harder to assess.

That’s why wealth taxes are always so hard to administer and so easy to avoid. It makes them a terrible vehicle for raising money. And it explains why many governments used to have a wealth tax but few still do today. According to a paper by Daniel Bunn of the Tax Foundation, “the number of current OECD members that have collected revenue from net wealth taxes has grown from nine in 1965 to a peak of 14 in 1996 to just four in 2017.” He adds that “among those four OECD countries collecting revenues from net wealth taxes, revenues made up just 1.45 percent of total revenues on average in 2017.” Yes, it is a difficult tax to collect.

France was one of the four countries that had a wealth tax in 2017, but it dropped the tax in 2018. (Belgium adopted its own wealth tax, meaning that the total number of countries with a wealth tax today is still four.) I would think that if the French government — of all governments! — dropped the wealth tax, that should be a powerful clue that the levy isn’t all that Warren dreams it will be. But apparently the senator thinks she can avoid any problems by implementing anti-avoidance measures such as a repressive 40 percent exit tax on any targeted household that attempts to emigrate, minimum audit rates, and increased funding for IRS enforcement. Warren clearly doesn’t believe in freedom from persecution.

But there are deeper problems with a wealth tax. First, there seems to be a profound misunderstanding of what wealth is and where the money will come from. Listening to politicians who support the levy, you get a sense that rich people use their wealth almost exclusively to fund extravagant consumption. Tax their wealth and these rich people will simply downgrade their houses — and still be left with gigantic palaces — or otherwise reduce their unnecessary consumption expenditures.

Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Instead, that wealth is tied up in other wealth-producing activities. It’s invested in companies; it is used to fund R&D that will create better goods and services for consumers; it is the capital that innovators and producers borrow from banks to grow their businesses.

Over at the Tax Foundation, Kyle Pomerleau and Nicole Kaeding add that capital is easily spooked by higher tax rates — and the more mobile, the more easily it’s spooked. This sensitivity is heightened by the fact that the tax is applied to wealth that has already been subjected to the income tax. That’s the case, for instance, with dividends from corporate stocks. This double taxation obviously creates a real disincentive to accumulate capital. For all these reasons, the rich taxpayers who cut the IRS wealth-tax checks will be only a subset of those who will feel the burn from the tax. Every dollar that goes to the IRS to pay the new tax is one less dollar of capital that could be lent and/or invested for innovation, business expansion, and worker training. In short, economic growth that benefits us all, especially the poor and middle classes, will inevitably be slowed.

Incidentally, the wealth tax’s negative impact on investments was one of the reasons mentioned by the French government in 2017 for ending it. In its place, the government imposed a tax on real estate, which is easier to assess and is imposed on assets that are much less flighty than are equity and debt claims.

There is also a question as to whether a wealth tax in the United States would even be constitutional. Most experts will agree that, with the exception of the income tax, which is authorized by the 16th Amendment, the Constitution prohibits federal direct taxes that are not apportioned by population. The question then becomes whether the wealth tax is a direct or an indirect tax. On this point experts disagree. Even if implemented, the wealth tax may end up being tied up in the courts for years.

Finally, it is worth noting that the renewed interest in the wealth tax is based on concern about income inequality. The Piketty book, which itself was based in part on a 2003 paper by Piketty and Saez, fueled that narrative. Then, in 2016, Saez and Zucman, who are now advising Warren (while Piketty has endorsed her wealth-tax proposal), published a paper that found that the share of total wealth held by the top 1 percent in the U.S. increased from 24 percent in 1980 to 42 percent today. In recent years, however, a small but growing number of scholars (see the work of Scott Winship and Phillip Magness) have questioned the statistical foundations of these papers.

For instance, Magness highlights new findings by the Federal Reserve that offer a sharp departure from the Saez/Zucman narrative. The Distributional Financial Accounts (DFA) series of quarterly data on household wealth concentration from 1989 to the present shows that the wealth share of the top 1 percent increased from about 23 percent to 29 percent between 1989 and 2012. That’s significantly smaller than the 14-percentage-point jump reported by Saez and Zucman.

The Congressional Budget Office offers another perspective, this one using post-tax income measures, as opposed to the pre-tax measures used by the Berkeley economists. A recent paper by Stephen Rose at the Urban Institute looks at different studies across the economic spectrum. Rose reports that the findings by Piketty and Saez are outliers. It must be their French technique.

This matters because the widespread embrace of the Saez/Piketty/Zucman narrative about income inequality fuels the recently growing enthusiasm for a wealth tax in America. It would be a shame to base our tax policy on a flawed academic fad. In addition, an extensive academic-literature review performed by Scott Winship — who now heads the Social Capital Project for the Joint Economic Committee of Congress — and published in 2013 in National Affairs reveals that there is “little basis for thinking that inequality is at the root of our economic challenges, and therefore for believing that reducing inequality would meaningfully address our lagging growth, enable greater mobility, avert future financial crises, or secure America’s democratic institutions.”

If that is the case, making inequality reduction the be-all and end-all policy goal to justify the implementation of a wealth tax reveals either disdain for the findings of academic studies or a very serious and ugly dislike of wealthy people — or, perhaps, both.

I will conclude with a word of advice: Democrats should be careful that their relentless pursuit of much higher taxes on the wealthy doesn’t backfire. A new poll by the Cato Institute’s Emily Ekins finds that while 55 percent of Americans believe the distribution of wealth in the United States is “unjust,” 71 percent of Americans feel more “admiration” than “resentment” toward the rich, 69 percent agree that billionaires “earned their wealth by creating value for others,” 75 percent disagree that “it’s immoral for society to allow people to become billionaires,” 62 percent disagree that billionaires are a threat to democracy, and 62 percent oppose redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor.

The Radicalism Arms Race

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, September 29, 2019

The fear of radicalism runs deep in our national DNA. So does the love of it. It’s democratic politics as the ultimate on-again/off-again romance.

The Founders themselves feared that various centrifugal tendencies — faction, passions, democracy itself — would turn the country away from its republican virtues and hence from its shared purpose and ideals, replacing these with various radical enthusiasms. Our progressive friends who at the moment are in a rage about the limits our Constitution puts on democratic passions are a very good example of why those limits were put in place.

Americans have frequently followed a pattern of flirting with radicalism of one kind or another — usually nationalism, and usually in a time of war — and then retreating from the edge when the crisis has passed. Woodrow Wilson’s “war socialism” pulled the United States in a distinctly national-socialist direction, and Warren G. Harding’s “return to normalcy” campaign pulled it back. After the trauma of the Great Depression and World War II, the grasping autocracy of Franklin Roosevelt’s government — his New Deal was a frankly nationalist enterprise, from its politics to its aesthetics — limped on during the Truman administration but was dissolved during the Eisenhower years, a time of broad and deep but not radical conservatism.

The somewhat milder radicalism of the Kennedy-Johnson programs and the more genuinely radical movement against their war in Vietnam resuscitated Richard Nixon, who ended the war and, like Eisenhower (whom he had served as vice president), took a consolidating and cautious approach to the social-welfare initiatives of the preceding administrations. Nixon had a few radical tastes of his own, such as wage and price controls, but it was his venality and abuse of power that provoked a national reaction in the form of Jimmy Carter, who brought to an end the career of the rather more promising Gerald Ford. (A liberated Ford presidency is one of the great what-might-have-beens of modern American politics.) Carter’s failures, which damaged Americans’ pride, begat Ronald Reagan. The radicalism of the Reagan administration — which was radical in the sense of being the first (and last) ideologically and programmatically conservative presidency — was unusual in that the rejoinder to it came in the form of the “kinder, gentler” politics of his vice president, George H. W. Bush, rather than the installation of a president from the opposite party. We think of vice presidents as likely presidential contenders, but Bush was the first sitting vice president elected to the presidency since Martin Van Buren in 1836. (And before Van Buren, it was Thomas Jefferson.) The vote for Vice President Bush was a vote for moderated continuity — for the same, but less of the same.

George H. W. Bush was the president at the end of history: The Cold War was over, economic menaces such as runaway inflation seemed to be a thing of the past, and the great game was won. Jesus Jones went to No. 2 on the Billboard charts with a catchy song about perestroika. The millennial party was getting started early, and so the nation decided to let their guard down, take a break from granddad and his apple-a-day prudence, and live a little with Bill Clinton, the former milk-and-water student radical who promised to spend a bit of that peace dividend on such comfort projects as national health care and the like.

And then something strange happened: Instead of reacting to radicalism with a push for a new return to normalcy, Americans reacted to the relatively moderate “New Democrat” and his celebrity pretensions with a dose of radicalism in the form of Newt Gingrich and the 1994 Republican “revolution.” George H. W. Bush was held in low esteem as a compromiser, but his son George W. Bush of Texas soon was riding high. He was a lot like his father (that is to his credit) and much more like his brother, the governor of Florida, than is generally admitted. George W. Bush was no right-wing radical, but he pushed the right cultural buttons (Texan, evangelical, the owner of a professional sports franchise, and as much of an anti-East Coast elitist as a product of Phillips, Yale, and Harvard Business School could be expected to be) and he came to Washington as a conservative reformer oriented toward education and other domestic concerns. There might have been a return to normalcy, even after the agony of the Florida recount.

Maybe.

The events of September 11, 2001, put that possibility forever into the past. The George W. Bush who had been skeptical of nation-building became the George W. Bush of the democracy project. The peace dividend evaporated, along with the peace. The nation was at war, and the Long War, like the two world wars, bred radicalism — radicalism that ran hard in both directions. But the world wars ended. The Long War does not.

The trauma of 9/11, the divisions of the Iraq War, and the fearful disorientation of the financial crisis left Americans agitated and anxious — but not in a way that put them in the mood for another return to normalcy. The pendulum began to swing madly: The trauma of the Bush years begat the Obama presidency; the radicalism of the Obama presidency begat Trump; the radicalism of Trump (which is not, for the most part, a matter of policy) begat . . . much that is undesirable: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, “resistance,” and the mainstreaming of socialism as a basic current of the Democratic party; Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in a crazypants radicalism arms race over whether we should confiscate the accumulated savings of the affluent at a rate of 2 percent a year or at a rate of 8 percent a year; a turn toward a politics of implacable hatred and demagoguery in both of the major political parties.

It is sobering to realize that there are young Americans serving in Afghanistan today who had not been born on September 11, 2001, who have only known post-9/11 politics and a post-9/11 America, with all the angst and paranoia that goes along with them. This profoundly abnormal period in our history is their normal, the only world they have ever known. For them, there is no return to normalcy and no possibility of it. “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” These young Americans were not around to hear all those fine speeches about how turning away from our national ethos of liberty and citizenship, turning toward fear and hatred and turning against each other, would mean, in the inescapable phrase of the time, that “the terrorists have won.”

Haven’t they?

AOC’s Ludicrous Taxi Bailout

By Kyle Smith

Saturday, September 28, 2019

For generations, New Yorkers have been paying a cartel surcharge for taxis. A conspiracy of New York City government and business has carefully limited the number of taxi “medallions,” without which it is illegal to operate a taxi that picks up pedestrians hailing drivers on the street. Owners of taxi medallions, naturally, are generous donors to the politicians who restrict their numbers. The artificial scarcity designed to push up prices is simply yet another way powerful special interests and politicians collude to cheat ordinary New Yorkers in order to line their own pockets. When the medallion system was first created, in 1937, only 13,585 of them were authorized. Today, with the population up by more than a million and the demand for cabs up massively, that number stands at . . . 13,587.

For 70-plus years, anyone who bought a taxi medallion was making a bet that the supply of taxi services would remain artificially restricted. Then came Uber. The rise of e-taxi services flooded the marketplace with competitors for yellow-cab drivers and the value of the medallions plummeted. Medallions once worth something like $1.3 million are now selling for less than $250,000. So Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is saying the owners of medallions need to be bailed out.  She actually used that language.

Drivers, many of them immigrants, were piled on w/ million-dollar loans on incomes of $~20k/year. It’s led to a suicide crisis.

They need to be bailed out & those responsible need to answer for it. https://twitter.com/brianmrosenthal/status/1177652287344463872 …

So New Yorkers who were forced to pay extra for taxis to benefit medallion owners who bought off politicians are now being asked to cover the medallion owners’ losses now that their bets have turned sour.

AOC has been bringing this matter up in congressional hearings, as though this is somehow a federal issue. According to the New York Post, “taxi driver advocates aren’t seeking a bailout, but city-funded debt forgiveness, according to New York Taxi Workers Alliance executive director, Bhairavi Desai, who testified at Thursday’s hearing.” Oh, that’s totally different then.

If AOC or anyone else can demonstrate that any loan was made unlawfully, she should point the way to prosecuting whatever entities broke the law. Calling loans “predatory” won’t cut it. New Yorkers who have been ripped off by the taxi industry all these years bear no responsibility for making it whole now that its scheme to overcharge the public has collapsed.

1619 and All That

By John Podhoretz

Saturday, September 28, 2019

Michelle Obama made a remarkable journey during her years on the national stage. Upon her debut in 2008, she declared that “for the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country.” Her husband then having been president for more than seven years, she appeared before America as its greatest patriot at the 2016 Democratic convention. “Don’t let anyone ever tell you that this country isn’t great,” she said, “that somehow we need to make it great again. Because this right now is the greatest country on earth!”

I wonder if she would say this now, three years later. I suspect she would not. After all, her belief in the country’s greatness was clearly conditional—it had depended upon her spouse’s ascension. And it deepened with the likelihood that her husband’s chosen successor would be chosen as well by the American people, to cement his legacy and continue us on the path to a future she could be proud of.

Since Hillary Clinton was not so chosen, it is likely that the pride Michelle Obama felt in “the greatest country on earth” has receded. Thus it is with many of those who greeted the rise of Barack Obama with frenzied excitement in 2008. Remember: He was going to make the oceans recede and the wars end. His people, in other words, were going to be tired of all the winning. Well, by the time eight years of winning were through, Obama’s party had lost the House, the Senate, the White House—and would after that lose the Iran deal and the Obamacare mandate, the two signature policies of his administration.

Yes, patriotism was at a high-water mark in August 2016. “America is great,” Hillary Clinton said at that same convention, “because America is good.” Barack Obama himself: “The America I know is full of courage, and optimism, and ingenuity. The America I know is decent and generous.”

That was then; this is now. The America the liberal elite sees now in 2019 has been a monstrosity from the beginning—from before the beginning, in fact. Wilfred McClay takes up this act of historical revisionism in his cover article this month. The New York Times’ “1619 Project” exploring American history cunningly dates itself not only to the forced arrival on these shores of indentured Africans but to the year before the arrival of the Mayflower. Why is this cunning? Because it begins the American narrative in slavery rather than in the quest for freedom—the pilgrims having set sail in 1620 so that they could practice their faith without persecution.

So the American experiment is not a story about freedom but a story about unfreedom. It is not about a quest for justice but about making excuses for injustice. It is not about good things. It is about bad things. It is not even about the struggle between the good and the bad. It is about original sin without redemption. We were evil before we began.

That’s the highfalutin take. The more prosaic take is that America is not about the story of Barack Obama but about the story of Donald Trump. That is what the 1619 Project is all about; it is an excuse to hate America because you don’t like the political turn it’s taken.

Love of country is something akin to the love for another person Shakespeare diagnosed negatively: “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.” You don’t love America only when the election comes out your way. If that’s your view, it only means you didn’t really love America in the first place.

Whither Anti-Communism?

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Friday, September 27, 2019

The Berlin Wall fell when I was just in primary school. Later in life, as I was beginning to develop my convictions about life and politics, I was taught that the West had faced down this threat to history, that institutions such as the Catholic Church and major Western business interests had brought down the dreadful and wicked Communists in the name of political, religious, and economic freedom.

At the time, it stood to reason that the Western religious and business establishments had played such a big part in winning the Cold War. The Soviet Union tried to crush and humiliate Christian institutions wherever it went; indeed, many radicals became Communists precisely because of Communism’s inherent and fanatical anti-clericalism. Free enterprise was suppressed under the Communist regimes of the 20th century.

The hostility of the Catholic Church and western titans of industry to Communism could be taken for granted then. But it can’t be anymore — not in the era of President Xi Jinping.

I was reminded of this just today, when PBS’s revival of Firing Line released a preview of host Margaret Hoover’s interview with Michael Bloomberg, the Wall Street tycoon and former mayor of New York who has repeatedly flirted with running for president over the past decade. Hoover was talking to Bloomberg about China’s record on pollution, and she pointed out that its growth and coal-burning were, by Bloomberg’s standards, a threat to the global environment so great that it could not be overcome by any carbon-reduction strategy the United States might adopt.

https://twitter.com/FiringLineShow/status/1177397448320458753

 “So, the United States currently accounts for about 15 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions. China accounts for roughly 30 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions. How do we — even if we get to net-zero [emissions], how do you get China, India, and the other countries to be good partners?” Hoover asks.

“China is doing a lot,” Bloomberg responds. “Yes, they’re still building a bunch of coal-fired power plants. . . . But they are now moving [coal-burning] plants away from the cities. The Communist party wants to stay in power in China, and they listen to the public. When the public says, ‘I can’t breathe the air’ — Xi Jinping is not a dictator. He has to satisfy his constituents or he’s not going to survive.”

“Xi Jinping is not a dictator?” a clearly stunned Hoover asks.

“No, he has a constituency to answer to,” Bloomberg replies.

This is true as far as it goes: Xi Jinping still needs to please those in the inner sanctum of the Chinese Communist Party. But when Hoover goes on to express her incredulity at the idea that “the Chinese government is responsive,” Bloomberg cuts her off with great conviction. “Of course they are!” he says, adding, in total ignorance of history and political theory, “No government survives without the will of the majority of its people. He has to deliver services!”

Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve heard it here first: Tyranny does not — and, in fact, cannot — exist!

I don’t mean to pick on Bloomberg, however bad he’s made himself look here. What concerns me is that the attitude he expressed to Hoover has come to predominate among the American business elite. Tim Cook is happy to announce retaliatory measures against U.S. states that are on the wrong side of the culture war. But you won’t hear a peep about the anti-suicide nets that Apple’s Chinese contractor Foxxconn installed to deal with the public-relations problem of iPhone-assembly workers throwing themselves to their deaths. Nor about concentration camps for Muslims in Jinjiang province, or the ructions in Hong Kong. In an article on the trade war, James McGregor, the chairman of the greater China region for the consultancy APCO Worldwide, was quoted admitting the awful truth: “For many American tech companies, Xi Jinping is more important than Donald Trump, because China is often their largest and fastest-growing market.”

The Church might even be even worse in this respect. “Right now, those who are best implementing the social doctrine of the Church are the Chinese,” Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, the chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, said last year as the Vatican was buttering up the Chinese ahead of a historic deal meant to solve long-standing conflicts between the Church and the Chinese Communist Party. Like Bloomberg, Sorondo burbled credulously about a fictive regime that does not exist, praising China’s “positive national conscience.” “You do not have shantytowns, you do not have drugs, young people do not take drugs,” in China, he said. Even better, “the economy does not dominate politics, as happens in the United States, something Americans themselves would say.”

Last year’s deal aimed to unify China’s underground Catholic Church with the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association (CPCA), the Communist Party body meant to regulate Catholicism in the country. The Vatican secretary of state, who oversaw its negotiation, has had to admit in retrospect that it is “not a good agreement.” But it was the only agreement they could get. The day after it was signed, Xi humiliated the Vatican by having the bishops of the CPCA sign a statement affirming their “independence” from Rome, and their determination to pursue the “sinicization” of their religion. Prelates who remained underground, like Bishop Peter Shao Zhumin, were rounded up and detained.

This, whether any outsiders care to admit it in public or not, is just what the Chinese Communist Party does: It co-opts the businesses and religious institutions that it can, and swallows those that it can’t whole. That the West’s anti-Communist coalition now seems quite a bit smaller than it once was is a sign of the Chinese regime’s success.

Joe Biden vs. the Democratic Economy Truthers

By John Hirschauer

Friday, September 27, 2019

Joe Biden had a revealing exchange with a reporter at a campaign stop in Iowa last week, one that put the ideological divide between him and his fellow Democratic primary candidates into stark relief. The reporter asked Biden — who by this point in the interview was visibly exhausted — why Iowans should vote for him or, indeed, any other Democratic candidate with the statewide unemployment rate at well below 3 percent under the Trump administration. As the Obama legacy’s apparent heir, the former vice president replied that Trump had inherited a recovering economy from Obama. “They were employed before [Trump] got elected,” he said, “He’s not the reason for that employment rate being down.”

The former claim isn’t strictly true — the unemployment rate in Iowa was 3.4 percent when Trump first took office, and at last count was down to 2.5 percent — but the local reporter, if she knew that, did not point it out. Instead, she responded by asking why, even if Biden’s claims were true, “people [should] want to make a change” at all. After (parsimoniously) insisting that it is “up to [Iowans] to decide,” she pressed Biden yet again: “Make your case.” Biden, running out of steam, dejectedly insisted “I’m not going to.”

Putting aside the bizarre spectacle of a presidential candidate who refuses to make a case for himself, and the related and much-remarked-upon specter of Biden’s declining public lucidity, it’s worth examining the significant rift between Biden and the other leading Democratic candidates that this episode suggested.

If the other Democratic frontrunners — Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders in particular — had been asked about the putative economic successes of the Trump administration, they would have followed a predictable script in keeping with their past remarks, attacking the premise of the question. They would have dismissed the numbers out of hand, invoking stagnant wage growth and rising inequality as evidence that the traditional indicators used to measure the health of the domestic economy — GDP, unemployment rate, and, to a lesser extent, inflation — are insufficient. They would have argued that those indicators fail to capture the brutality of a system that works for “the rich and powerful,” don’t consider the costs of health care, and, centrally, fail to account for the distribution of the spoils of growth. Any assertion to the contrary — that declining unemployment numbers and improved growth indicators portend a generally healthy economy — is a sign, to a certain type of Democrat, that you don’t understand what the “real economy” looks like.

Here, for example, is Sanders on Twitter:

Despite what President Trump says, it is not “a hot economy” when 43% of households can't afford to pay for housing, food, child care, health care, transportation and a cell phone without going into debt. That is not a hot economy. #SOTU

Here’s Warren on MSNBC:

There was a time when saying, ‘Hey the unemployment rate has gone down,’ that [was] a great thing. But you know, when people are working at minimum-wage jobs that won’t support them or they’re working two, three, or four jobs to try to pay the rent and keep food on the table, then simply saying ‘The unemployment rate figures have gone down’ just doesn’t get you there.

And here’s Cory Booker on CNN:

I love that Trump is taking credit for a recovery that started under Obama, but the substance [is] this: Who is this economy going to work for? And we had a tax plan that was all about giving the wealthiest people more, more of a break. My vision for this country is that we will target things like a massive increase in the Earned Income Tax Credit to actual workers. We’ve got to make sure that this is a shared recovery, because right now, it definitely is not.

It’s almost too obvious to note that this basic narrative — that the economy is not what it seems, that the official figures on growth and jobs are, at best, oblique indicators of economic reality — has percolated through the organs of progressive thought for some time and has recently become a central feature of Democratic politics. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez famously insisted that the only reason the unemployment rate was so low was “because everyone has two jobs,” which, of course, betrayed a complete misunderstanding of how the rate is actually measured. With similar distaste for the established metrics of economic success, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer floated a proposal to require the Bureau of Economic Analysis to track the distribution of income growth coincident with its work tracking gross levels of economic growth. “This legislation,” said the press release, “seeks to cut to the heart of the matter and present a clear and accurate picture of who the economy is really working for.”

Both amount to the less-intelligent version of the picture painted by the Economic Policy Institute and similar groups, which contend that wage growth for the ordinary worker has stagnated since about 1973, with productivity well outpacing the expected returns to the labor force. Of course, if you measure productivity differently, you’ll get different results. But whatever their merits, these paradigmatic critiques of the economy — which, of course, have a long history — have filtered down from, inter alia, the blogosphere, Thom Hartmann’s radio show, and the progressive think-tank world to the mainstream of the Democratic conversation and the vernacular of all its presidential front-runners.

Well, almost all its presidential front-runners. There is still Joe Biden, who, by lapse or intent, seems not to be running a campaign built for the economically dark world his fellow partisans describe. The proposed policy reforms outlined on his website are, much like his public rhetoric, more narrow than systemic, more cautious than bold, more practical than idealistic. They are not the platform of someone who thinks the economy and the country are in dire straits. That almost all of his presidential rivals seem to think those things makes for a primary campaign between two starkly different visions of where the country is and where it should go. The outcome will tell us precisely which vision the Democratic base subscribes to.

Don’t Listen to Greta Thunberg

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, September 24, 2019

Greta Thunberg needs to get a grip.

The celebrity teen climate activist addressed the United Nations and excoriated the assembled worthies: “You all come to us young people for hope. How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.”

Someone may have stolen her childhood, but the guilty parties can’t be found at Turtle Bay. A 16-year-old from Sweden, Thunberg thundered, “I should be back at school on the other side of the ocean,” which would have been easy enough to achieve, beginning with not taking two weeks to sail across the Atlantic last month in a jet-travel-eschewing publicity stunt.

Greta Thunberg is the leading edge of a youth movement against climate change — including a global “climate strike” last week — that is being promoted and celebrated by adults who find it useful for their own purposes.

Kids are powerful pawns. The catchphrase “for the children” has a seductive political appeal, while kids offer their adult supporters a handy two-step. The same people who say, “The world must heed this 16-year-old girl” will turn around and say to anyone who pushes back, “How dare you criticize a 16-year-old girl?” (I can feel the tweets filling up my mentions right now.)

There’s a reason that we don’t look to teenagers for guidance on fraught issues of public policy. With very rare exceptions — think, say, the philosopher John Stuart Mill, who was a child prodigy — kids have nothing interesting to say to us. They just repeat back what they’ve been told by adults, with less nuance and maturity.

Much of the climate advocacy of young people boils down to the plaint that all parents know well: “I want it, and I want it now.” As one headline on a National Geographic story put it, “Kids’ world climate strikes demand that warming stop, fast.”

Behind the foot-stomping is the idea that a long-running global phenomenon could be quickly stopped, if only adults cared as much as the kids did. This fails to account for such recalcitrant factors as costs and complexity, but when do children ever think of those? (And who can blame them? They’re children.)

Instead, the youthful climate activists claim they’ve been sold out by their elders. Greta Thunberg put it with her usual accusatory starkness at the U.N.: “You are failing us, but young people are starting to understand your betrayal.”

This is laughable. By no global measure of social and economic well-being have we failed kids. According to HumanProgress.org, the global poverty rate fell from 28 percent in 1999 to 11 percent in 2013. Life expectancy increased from 63.2 years to 71.9 years from 1981 to 2015. The completion rate for primary school increased from 80 percent in 1981 to 90 percent in 2015. The same benign trends hold for hunger, child labor, literacy, and so on.

If climate change proves a significant challenge, today’s youth will have more resources and technology to grapple with it than any other generation in the history of mankind.

Of course, the adults they listen to don’t tell them any of this. Instead, they feed the kids a diet of apocalyptic warnings that children repeat back as if they were urgent insights. One speaker at the youth climate rally in Washington, D.C., last week said that we have just 18 months — yes, only until the beginning of 2021 — to forestall irreversible environmental harms.

According to National Geographic, “more than a few teens who began as fervent activists have dropped out, citing depression, anxiety, and other fears that the world’s leaders will not act in time to prevent their lives — and the lives of their children — from being irretrievably altered by climate change.”

This is nuts, and it’s the adult enablers who are ultimately responsible. As for the kids, they’ll be all right. One day, they will grow up, even in a warming world.

Prince Don

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, September 27, 2019

‘L’etat, c’est moi,” the Sun King is supposed to have said, “I am the state.” Louis XIV was one of the architects of modern dictatorship, and President Donald Trump likes more about his style than merely his taste in armchairs. President Trump, in a fashion unbecoming the chief administrative officer of a republic — which is all he is — habitually confuses himself and the state.

One example among many: President Trump, asked whether his trade war might hurt his standing among U.S. farmers, who are paying the price for it, answered: “They can’t be too upset, because I gave them $12 billion, and I gave them $16 billion this year.”

Wait, now — who did what again? The president, of course, did not give anybody $12 billion, or twelve cents. The subsidies paid out to farmers to offset the damage from President Trump’s ill-advised trade war — “great, and easy to win!” if you’ll recall — are not personal largesse. This is not a mere figure of speech, the linguistic tic of an ordinary megalomaniac. It is how Donald Trump sees the presidency and how he sees the world.

Which is a big part of why he is in the trouble he is in.

A president with a proper conception of the job might very well have leaned on Kyiv to step up its investigations into corruption implicating American political figures such as Joe Biden, and it would have been entirely proper for him to do so. Political corruption is a major federal law-enforcement priority, and when such priorities are entangled with diplomacy, it is appropriate for the president to give those priorities a push in his dealings with other heads of government.

But because Trump cannot distinguish between himself and the office which he holds — or, in many cases, between himself and the country he serves — he approaches these questions in a defective way. He frames the issue as a personal favor, and he gets his personal lawyer involved in it. Rather than being careful to distinguish between his own political interests and the national interest in rooting out corruption, Trump sees them as part of a single unified phenomenon.

This entails real danger. Those who inflict the presidential Twitter feed upon themselves know that Trump has for a long time complained about an entirely imaginary category of offense, “presidential harassment,” as though interfering with his interests were a kind of crime. On Thursday, he went so far as to suggest that the whistleblower behind his current torments should be killed as a traitor or a spy. “You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart with spies and treason, right?” he said. “We used to handle it a little differently than we do now.”

(Trump’s critics, most recently Republican primary challenger William Weld and radio journalist Krys Boyd, have made similarly irresponsible use of the word “treason,” a specific offense defined in federal law and carrying the death penalty. This is unforgivable stupidity on Weld’s part and journalistic incompetence on Boyd’s part, and both of them should be ashamed.)

The example of the Roman republic, which often was on the minds of our Founding Fathers, illustrates just how dangerous that line of thinking can become. When the chief executive is the state, when the treasury is his gift for the giving, and when opposition to him is treason, then you no longer have a republic at all. It is always worth remembering that the Latin word from which the English title “emperor” comes means “commander in chief,” a term that increasingly shapes how we view the presidency — a shift away from republican norms for which conservatives bear some responsibility.

Virtue Inc. was a very big business in the 1990s, and the basic conservative case against Clinton and Clintonism was: Character matters. But the role of character is almost always misunderstood. It begins with a preference for having men of integrity serving in positions of power, but it does not end there. Character is functional in a democratic republic — it is an eminently practical concern. One of the problems with having a man such as Donald Trump serving in the presidency is that in cases of moral ambiguity, it is impossible to extend to him the benefit of the doubt. There is no doubt at all about what manner of man he is.

To the extent that conservative media apologists for Trump have been sincere about anything other than the pursuit of market share, their case for Trump has been one of pragmatism. “He fights!” they said. “He gets things done!” If that were true, there would be a “big, beautiful wall” stretching from Texas to California.

Trump’s character is in fact a practical liability, one that has seriously impeded his ability to pursue his agenda. His egoism, laziness, arrogance, and above all his habitual dishonesty are crippling. That is why he has been most effective on ordinary Republican priorities such as taxes and judges, those areas in which he can deputize such old swamp-dwelling dinosaurs as Mitch McConnell and the ladies and gentlemen of the Federalist Society to actually get things done. Left to his own devices, he’s an ordinary Twitter troll and conspiracy nut with very little in the way of direction or a coherent policy agenda.

He isn’t Richard the Lionheart, he’s Prince John, the phony king.

And so that leaves at least one conservative simultaneously believing four things that are difficult to keep under the same hat:

1) I am glad that Hillary Rodham Clinton is not the president;

2) Based on what we know right now, I do not want to see Donald Trump impeached and removed from office;

3) I do not want to see Elizabeth Warren being sworn in as president in January 2021;

4) Donald Trump cannot be gone soon enough.

Once Again, Progressive Anti-Christian Bigotry Carries a Steep Legal Cost

By David French

Friday, September 27, 2019

Last summer, in the days after the Supreme Court decided Masterpiece Cakeshop on the narrow grounds that Colorado had violated Jack Phillips’s religious-liberty rights by specifically disparaging his religious beliefs, a bit of a skirmish broke out among conservative lawyers. How important was the ruling? Did it have any lasting precedential effect?

For those who don’t recall, the Supreme Court ruled for Phillips in large part because a commissioner of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission called Phillips’s claim that he enjoyed a religious-freedom right not to be forced to design a custom cake for a gay wedding a “despicable piece of rhetoric.” The commissioner also denigrated religious-liberty arguments as being used to justify slavery and the Holocaust.

While all agreed that it would have been preferable had the court simply ruled that creative professionals could not be required to produce art that conflicted with their sincerely held beliefs, the question was whether Justice Anthony Kennedy’s strong condemnation of anti-religious bigotry would resonate beyond the specific facts of the case. For example, what would happen if, in a different case, state officials called faithful Christians who seek to protect the religious freedom of Catholic adoption agencies “hate-mongers”?

In the United States District Court for the Western District of Michigan, it turns out that such rhetoric has cost the state a crucial court ruling, granted a Catholic adoption agency a vital victory, and demonstrated — once again — that anti-religious bigotry can (and should) carry substantial legal costs.

The case is called Buck v. Gordon. My friends at Becket represent St. Vincent Catholic Charities, a former foster child, and the adoptive parents of five special-needs kids. The facts are relatively complicated, but here’s the short version: St. Vincent upholds Catholic teaching by referring same-sex and unmarried families who seek foster and adoption recommendations and endorsements to agencies that have no objection to providing those services. There is no evidence that St. Vincent has prevented any legally qualified family from adopting or fostering a child. In fact, same-sex couples “certified through different agencies” have been able to adopt children in St. Vincent’s care.

In 2015 the state of Michigan passed a statute specifically designed to protect the religious liberty of private, religious adoption agencies. In 2018, however, Dana Nessel, a Democratic attorney general, took office. During her campaign, she declared that she would not defend the 2015 law in court, stating that its “only purpose” was “discriminatory animus.” She also described proponents of the law as “hate-mongers,” and the court noted that she believed proponents of the law “disliked gay people more than they cared about the constitution.”

Then, in 2019, the attorney general reached a legal settlement in pending litigation with the ACLU that essentially gutted the Michigan law, implementing a definitive requirement that religious agencies provide recommendations and endorsement to same-sex couples and banning referrals. The plaintiffs sued, seeking to enjoin the relevant terms of the settlement, and yesterday Judge Robert Jonker (a Bush appointee) granted their motion for a preliminary injunction.

His reasoning was simple. There was ample evidence from the record that the state of Michigan reversed its policy protecting religious freedom because it was motivated by hostility to the plaintiffs’ faith. Because Michigan’s targeted St. Vincent’s faith, its 2019 settlement agreement couldn’t be truly considered a “neutral” law of “general applicability” that would grant the state a high degree of deference in enforcement.

Instead, the state’s targeting led to strict scrutiny. Here’s Judge Jonker:

Defendant Nessel made St. Vincent’s belief and practice a campaign issue by calling it hate. She made the 2015 statute a campaign issue by contending that the only purpose of the statute is discriminatory animus. After Defendant Nessel took office, the State pivoted 180 degrees. . . . The State also threatened to terminate its contracts with St. Vincent. The Summary Statement’s conclusion – that if an agency accepts even one MDHHS child referral for case management or adoption services, the agency forfeits completely the right to refer new parental applicants to other agencies based on its sincerely held religious beliefs – is at odds with the language of the contracts, with the 2015 law, and with established State practice. Moreover, it actually undermines the State’s stated goals of preventing discriminatory conduct and maximizing available placements for children.

The last point is key. As stated above, there was no evidence that St. Vincent prevented any qualified couple from adopting. In fact, if the state forced St. Vincent’s to choose between upholding the teachings of its faith or maintaining its contractual relationship with the state, then it risked shrinking the available foster or adoption options in the state of Michigan. The state demonstrated that it was more interested in taking punitive action against people of faith than it was in maintaining broader access to foster and adoption services for its most vulnerable citizens.

The judge rightly called the state’s actions a “targeted attack on a sincerely held religious belief.” Once again, Masterpiece Cakeshop pays religious-liberty dividends. Once again, a court declares — in no uncertain terms — that in the conflict between private faith and public bigotry, religious liberty will prevail.

What’s Behind the Democrats’ Impeachment Gambit?

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, September 26, 2019

I suppose it is no secret that I never thought Donald Trump should have been elected president of these United States in the first place. He’s dim, dishonest, and doddering, both intellectually and morally unfit for the office.

But: He was elected.

And, contrary to the endless litany of Democratic complaints, he was legitimately elected. You may not like the way we elect presidents through the Electoral College — I do; if anything, I think the Founders erred on the side of making the presidency excessively democratic in character, with the disastrous results we see before us today — but the Electoral College was not invented in 2016, and it was not created to frustrate the ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Some Russians posted some bulls**t on Facebook. The votes were what they were.

There are a few different ways to react to that. The thing that a normal political party in a normal country with a functioning political culture would do would be to crawl under the porch for a couple of days to recuperate, admit that your candidate was terrible and ran a terrible race with terrible advisers, and start looking around for somebody to do better next time. You might even — if you were smart and in possession of a reasonable degree of intellectual honesty — ask yourselves what it was about that other guy that some voters liked so much.

That’s one thing you could do. Or you could come over and sit on my front porch and hear more than you probably really wanted to hear about the inevitable decadence of mass democracy, which may shine for a moment but “soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself.” And we would laugh a little at all the diehards on my street with their “Beto for Senate” signs up in their yards, still, after all this time.

That’s another thing you could do. Or you could insist that the 2016 election was illegitimate, not because of any real procedural questions but because of its outcome. And that, more or less, is what Democrats did. It is worth keeping in mind that the effort to impeach Donald Trump began before he was even sworn in, with Senator Elizabeth Warren et al. beginning to lay the legal groundwork in December of 2016.

Since that time, there have been demands to impeach Trump over this or that real or imagined offense every few weeks. This is Red Queen politics: sentence first, trial later. The Democrats have a solution in mind — impeachment — and have been searching since Election Day 2016 for a problem to which to apply it.

This week’s renewed enthusiasm for impeachment would be a great deal more persuasive if it were not No. 6,782 in a series. Democrats want to impeach Trump for leaning on the Ukrainians about the Biden’s family’s shady dealings — and they are shady — with that corrupt regime and its sycophants. Before that, they wanted to impeach Trump because favor-seekers book rooms in hotels with his name on them. Before that, they wanted to impeach him because of his Twitter habits. Etc.

The cynic in me guesses that the Ukrainian gambit serves a dual purpose: First: It provides a pretext for a pre-election impeachment inquiry against the incumbent president — which, given the current composition of the Senate, is unlikely to end in action before the election, or after that, either, unless there is a Democratic majority seated in the Senate. Second: The likely collateral damage to Joe Biden probably is not entirely unwelcome in some Democratic circles — he already is sliding vis-à-vis Senator Warren, and to many Democrats he already has the look of a likely loser should he be the nominee. If somebody has to be put on an ice floe, it’s going to be Joe Biden.

There are many problems with this approach, one of which is this: Americans in possession of even a modest political memory must recall that not only did Democrats insist that the 2016 election was illegitimate, they also insisted that the last election that brought a Republican to the White House was illegitimate. There was talk of impeaching George W. Bush, too — talk that was endorsed by, among others, Donald Trump, who was a donor to Mrs. Clinton’s campaigns before he became her tormentor. For the Democrats, there is only one kind of legitimate presidential election: one where they win.

Democrats did not decide to try to impeach Trump in September 2019 because he apparently saw Peter Schweizer on Fox News (the president name-checks Schweizer, the author of Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends, along with Fox News host Laura Ingraham, in his tweeted apologia) and then brought up the Bidens with the Ukrainians. Nor is it necessarily improper for the administration to be investigating a potential political rival: The Trump campaign itself was the subject of an investigation conducted under the Obama administration. And there was nothing obviously improper about that, either.

No, the Democrats had long ago decided to try to impeach Trump, and they decided to do so in December 2016 — because he won. There’s no point pretending otherwise.

The Democrats have a funny habit when it comes to elections: When they win, they act like they’ll never lose again, and when they lose, they act like they’ll never win again. And their strategies reflect that. The cynical politicization of the judicial confirmation process seemed like a good idea to them back when Ronald Reagan was riding high and Robert Bork looked like an easy target, but when Republicans one-upped them in the matter of Merrick Garland, they cried foul. Making impeachment inquiries an ordinary part of daily partisan politics may look smart to congressional Democrats right now, and to Democratic presidential aspirants.

But there will come a time when it doesn’t.

Elizabeth Warren Is Wrong about Payday Lenders

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, September 26, 2019

Last week, I had an interesting conversation with a man who used to work in automotive lending. Do you know who the car-finance guys really miss? “Saab,” he said. “The Saab customer was the best.” The people who bought Saabs turned out to be as sensible and practical as the people who designed them — good credit, appropriate incomes, sensible down payments. “It wasn’t like Porsche or Land Rover,” he said. “Nobody bought a Saab because it fulfilled some fantasy.” But fantasy moves a lot of cars, too. I used to know a guy who owned a used-car dealership, one of those buy here, pay here, your job is your credit! places that cater to the low end of the market. Not the Saab buyer. One afternoon, he sold a flashy 280ZX to an obvious no-money scrub. But he wasn’t worried. “I’ve already sold that car nine times,” he told his friends, “and when this guy misses his payment, I’ll repo it and sell it again.”

Saab is long gone, but there are still Saab types out there. A lot of them, in fact, and lenders love doing business with them — not only automotive lenders but other kinds of consumer lenders, mortgage lenders, credit-card companies, commercial banks, etc. People with banged-up credit, negligible savings, lower incomes, etc. may present more tempting investments on paper, because they pay higher interest rates and more fees, but you have to do a lot of work to collect that extra revenue, and that work costs money — which is, of course, why it’s only the Saab guys who get to borrow on Saab-guy terms. But not everybody is a Saab guy, and the alternative for the scrubs isn’t some magical regulatory solution that empowers them to borrow on Saab-guy terms — the alternative is little or no access to credit at all.

Elizabeth Warren has the soul of a Saab guy — and a constituency of Saab guys who think they know what’s best for the scrubs.

Senator Warren has made a crusade of interfering with the business of payday lending, a high-risk, high-interest portion of the consumer-credit game in which borrowers with few or no alternatives take out unsecured short-term loans intended to tide them over until the next payday. Typically, a payday loan has a repayment period of a couple of weeks. (The term “payday loan” is a figure of speech, with repayment rarely actually connected to paydays.) The fees may be modest in absolute terms, say $13 on a $100 loan paid back in two weeks, but that $13 two-week fee ends up looking absurdly usurious when expressed as an annualized rate of several thousand percent. It’s especially bad if you assume compounding debt, i.e., that the borrower will go back and borrow again on the same terms every two weeks to cover the principal and accumulated interest. When you read about a payday loan with an APR of 34,125 percent or something approximately that outrageous, that’s what you are reading about.

It looks like a terrible arrangement, until you ask the always-relevant question: Compared with what?

People do not turn to payday lenders because they temporarily misplaced their American Express Platinum cards. Borrowers turn to payday lenders because those are, as the borrowers calculate, their best alternative — maybe their best bad alternative, but their best alternative nonetheless. All that silly talk about “predatory” lenders is little more than rhetorical cover for the patronizing insistence that poor people are too stupid or dysfunctional to make their own financial decisions. (And maybe they are; if that’s your argument, say so.) But first take reality into account: As the payday lenders themselves are eager to point out, their allegedly usurious interest rates compare pretty favorably with the plausible alternatives: bank-overdraft fees, or late fees and penalties on credit-card debt, utility bills, and housing payments. The real-world near competitors to payday lending — pawn shops and car-title loans — do not have a great deal to recommend them, and in many cases they are worse for borrowers than payday loans are. And because so many low-income and bad-credit borrowers already have bad debt in collection, gentler and more orthodox alternatives — lines of credit through a bank or credit union, short-term lending in the guise of “overdraft protection” — often are off the table. So unless you have something worth selling or borrowing money against, the choice ends up being a payday loan or informal borrowing from friends and family. (That the latter option apparently is unavailable to so many people speaks to a broad and significant failing in American civil society.) Or risking eviction or having the lights turned off. Or not being able to provide something immediately needful to your children.

Being poor sucks, and no regulation is going to change that.

Senator Warren’s immediate target is the likely repeal of a 2017 rule from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the regulatory love child of her and the Obama administration, that requires payday lenders to perform much of the same loan underwriting that a bank would when extending consumer credit: verifying employment and income, analyzing the borrower’s existing obligations and assets, and then lending exclusively to those who meet a certain standard described as “ability to repay.” (Willingness to repay is a big part of the lending equation in the real world, but never mind that for now.) The problem is that borrowers who can satisfy ordinary bank-underwriting standards can just go to banks, and those who go to payday lenders do so because they can’t — and also because the bank-lending process is more invasive, time-consuming, and, in many cases, humiliating, especially for the tens of millions of Americans who have no bank account and rarely if ever set foot in a bank. In fact, the Pew Charitable Trusts — not remarkably friendly to payday lending — found in a survey that many borrowers turned to payday lending particularly to avoid those things. (And many of them ended up turning to more conventional lending to pay off their payday loans.)

In a slavishly cheerleading piece on Senator Warren’s campaign, Emily Stewart of Vox accurately described the senator’s fundamental agenda: empowering a “cadre of energetic, ideologically committed regulators.” (That Vox apparently believes “ideologically committed regulators” are to be preferred to regulators whose commitment is to the law rather than to ideology says a great deal about the state of the progressive mind circa 2019.) But ideology does not trump math. Of course, the government can lean on lenders to make more credit available on easier terms to scrub borrowers. That’s a big part of what created the subprime-mortgage meltdown, and what is likely to produce the next one. The same thinking helped create that $1 trillion–plus in student-loan debt and encouraged tuition inflation at the same time. Risk comes with a price, and somebody is going to pay it — either the borrower, or someone else, or everybody else.

In the short term, the question is whether our laws will be made by our lawmakers in Congress or whether they will be cooked up by Senator Warren’s “cadre of energetic, ideologically committed regulators,” which is what the CFPB was designed to be, and is. If the federal government wants to preempt the states in the matter of regulating payday lending (which already is prohibited outright or severely limited in many states), then it should at least go through the motions of passing a law. And then the people’s elected representatives can bear whatever political price there is to pay for cutting poor people off from the credit that, defective though it may be, is what they have.

But in the long term, we are going to have to answer the question of just how patronizing we intend to be toward people with low incomes and modest means. If we allow the market to produce credit products for them, then we can be quite confident that the market will charge them relatively high prices, reflecting the relatively high risk of lending to people without much in the way of money or good credit. We could enact proactive measures such as forced-savings programs that would tax the earnings of the poor and then make these funds available on an emergency basis subject to the approval of their masters. We could distribute maps to the nearest food pantries and homeless shelters on the theory that would-be payday borrowers are better off relying on philanthropy than on credit.

Or we could have some more vague politicians’ talk about the “rigged economy,” as though people could be shriven of responsibility for their own financial condition by the ministrations of senators and presidents. That’s what we’ll get from Senator Warren, and from other patronizing, self-appointed tribunes of the plebs.

Of course, there are a lot of broke-ass suburbanites driving around in Land Rovers they cannot really afford. It is not only the poor who make bad financial decisions. (I could produce a conspectus of my own.) But the poor always have less room for error, and for their errors, as for most things, they pay a proportionally higher price. Simply cutting the poor off from credit is one way to keep them from going more deeply into debt, but that will produce consequences nobody will much like, the poor themselves least of all. If the payday lenders are regulated out of existence, Senator Warren et al. will find someone else to blame, a new scapegoat. They’ll probably end up creating one, in fact, without ever intending to or quite understanding that they have.

St. Greta Spreads the Climate Gospel

By Gerard Baker

Friday, September 20, 2019

It’s been noted before that the cause of addressing climate change has become something like the modern world’s version of a secular religion. In much of Europe especially, but in sections of American

society too, a kind of climate theology has replaced traditional Christianity as the ultimate source of authority over human behavior, comprising both an all-embracing teleology of our existence and a

prescriptive moral code.

The High Church of Environmentalism has acquired many of the characteristics of its ecclesiastical predecessor. An apocalyptic eschatology warns that we will all be consumed by fire if we don’t

follow the ordained rules. The notion that it is our sinful nature that has brought us to mortal peril—from the Original Sin of a carbon- unleashing industrial revolution to daily transgressions with plastic

bottles and long-haul flights—is as central to its message as it was to the Catholic Church’s. But repentance is near. A gospel of redemption emphasizes that salvation lies in reducing our carbon footprint, with reusable shopping bags and bike-sharing. The secular authorities preach the virtues of abstinence. Meatless Fridays are no longer just for Lenten observance.

Now its proponents will scoff, of course, and say there’s a critical difference: The climate imperative is science-based, the opposite of religion. Its bishops are Nobel-winners; its biblical texts are peer-

reviewed papers. But most people who express strong adherence to the climate change gospel know and understand as much about the science of carbon emissions or the greenhouse effect as the average

medieval villager understood about the Creation or transubstantiation.

In the iconography of traditional religion, children have often played a central role. The revelation of universal truth to an innocent child is an inspiring story that is very effective in both offering role models

and propagating the faith. There’s a reason the European faithful used to venerate St. Therese of Lisieux, St. Bernadette of Lourdes, the children of Fatima in Portugal: The testimony of a guileless child is a

powerful weapon against skepticism.

Enter the Swedish 16-year-old Greta Thunberg, now come amongst us in New York for Climate Week. Her story is compelling: It recalls that of St. Bernadette, exposed to the truth as a child and animated with a passionate mission to share it with the rest of humanity. As with child saints of the conventional type, Ms. Thunberg has overcome and indeed channeled personal challenges (she calls her autism a “superpower” rather than a disability) and has proved a remarkable inspiration to fellow teenagers throughout the world.

Like the children of Fatima, she has a simple message that, if followed, promises to save the world from catastrophe. And now we have the near miraculous spectacle of her sailing across the Atlantic without

emitting a molecule of carbon dioxide. Well, almost: It seems that perhaps there was some climate-altering emission involved after all. But it was a brilliant stunt. She could not have made a bigger impact if she’d walked across.

None of this is to denigrate Ms. Thunberg. She’s clearly a sincere and talented young woman who has dedicated herself to what she believes to be the highest moral cause. Agree or disagree with “climate crisis” rhetoric and some of the methods deployed in its name, but one can’t help being impressed by her diligence in pursuit of duty and principle in an age with so many less wholesome activities for teenagers.

Still, there is something about this near-religious fervor among the climate change activists—a growing fanaticism—that recalls some of the more troubling traits of extreme religious cults. Its status now as almost universally accepted doctrine risks precluding necessary debates about practicalities and policies. If human extinction is really only decades away, as some activists claim, the implications are millenarian.

The case for man-made climate change is highly compelling, but the more apocalyptic the rhetoric, the less likely it is that good decisions will be made. Talk of extinction forces us to ignore the balance

between economic growth and both the causes of and potential remedies for climate peril. There is an often ignored virtuous irony in our planet’s destructive progress. While carbon-heavy growth is damaging the planet, it is also producing the technological prowess to address the damage.

Take China alone. In the last 40 years its economy has grown at an average rate of almost 10% a year, pouring incalculable numbers of carbon molecules into the atmosphere. But the scientific and

technological innovations that growth enabled have resulted in the invention there of some of the most important advances in tackling climate change.

Rather than simply bewailing the costs of growth, Old Testament-style, we should be mindful of its redemptive benefits too. Surely we can all say amen to that.