C.A.A. on Vacation

The C.A.A. will be on vacation this upcoming week. There may be sporadic posts, but regular posts will resume on Saturday, May 6th.

Which Side Are You On?

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, April 28, 2023

 

Is $20,000 a lot of money to you? 

 

It isn’t a lot to the Port of Los Angeles, which handles something on the order of $300 billion in cargo a year. It isn’t a lot to the union bosses who run the place, their coffers being generously topped off with mandatory dues. 

 

But it is a lot of money to at least one of the port’s customers. 

 

In April, an undeclared strike shut down the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. The union says workers didn’t show up because they were paying rapt attention to a union-leadership vote and then ditched work for Easter. Yeah. As trade journal American Shipper put it, “Labor action at West Coast ports does not have a history of being explicitly confirmed; rather, it takes the form of passive-aggressive behavior that escalates with increasingly implausible deniability.”

 

The labor disruption was particularly hard on agricultural exporters, whose product cannot just sit indefinitely. In one case, a farm exporter had a small fleet of trucks turned away from the port, with the cost of rerouting the goods adding up to some $20,000—enough to turn what would have been a profitable international sale into a money-losing deal. “This highly damaging experience is being repeated for thousands of containers,” Peter Friedmann, executive director of the Agriculture Transportation Coalition, told American Shipper.

 

The trouble at the ports is bad news for California’s economy, though it is not entirely unwelcome news for competing ports that are winning new business because of California’s troubles. The Port of Los Angeles was until recently the nation’s busiest port, but last December it was surpassed by the Port of New York and New Jersey, because shippers have been rerouting cargo to New York, New Orleans, Savannah, and other East Coast and Gulf Coast destinations. Some 20,000 dockworkers have been working without a contract since the summer. 

 

The Biden administration is not about to undertake labor reforms that would weaken unions’ stranglehold over the Port of Los Angeles. President Joe Biden did make a big show out of signing an “infrastructure” bill that was mostly a climate-change bill. But our ports face real infrastructure challenges: roads and bridges that need fixing, waterways that need dredging, and more. You’d think an infrastructure bill would have taken care of much of that. 

 

You’d be wrong. 

 

As the American Association of Port Authorities shows, much of the reporting on the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act has “overrepresented the amount of funding in this bill for ports.” Out of the $1.2 trillion package, only $6.6 billion (spread out over five years) was put into port-specific programs—that’s one-half of 1 percent, and it is, for comparison, less money than the federal government plans to spend reimbursing local school districts for Wi-Fi routers. Worse, much of the money made available to ports won’t go to helping move cargo through them more efficiently but instead on tangential environmental priorities such as reducing truck emissions. That is a worthy goal, but consider the fact that only 9 percent of the roads connecting U.S. ports to other transportation modes—an essential part of getting cargo from ships to its destination—are in “good” or “very good” condition, meaning that 91 percent of that pavement isn’t in good shape. Some of it is in very bad shape. Poorly maintained roads slow down cargo and are hard on trucks, and they also contribute to traffic congestion—which adds to air pollution. 

 

Enormous sums of money meant for port infrastructure are being diverted into things like wind power and electric vehicles. In Jacksonville, Florida, the federal priority is “transitioning the port and local maritime industry to zero-emission technologies,” according to the Maritime Administration. What that practically means is replacing diesel forklifts and tractors with battery-powered ones and building charging stations. In Massachusetts, the priority is the Salem Wind Port Project, putting millions into creating a “marshaling area for offshore wind energy projects.” Go down the list of where money is actually going, and you’ll see endless examples of this. Rather than micromanaging what model of forklift is being used at any given port, the federal government should be prioritizing its actual responsibilities, including maintaining the federal highways and waterways under its authority. 

 

Transportation is one big piece of the infrastructure challenge for the U.S. economy. The other is energy. Unlike transportation, which relies on government-owned roads and government-administered waterways, energy infrastructure is mostly privately owned. But that hasn’t saved it from the same kinds of problems that are hobbling transportation improvements. 

 

Environmental groups have categorically opposed almost every piece of energy infrastructure oriented toward anything other than wind or solar for decades, and the Biden administration has in its time done much to oblige, most dramatically by killing the Keystone XL pipeline. Even as the administration broke with environmental activists on the Willow project (a CoconoPhillips-led oil-drilling effort in Alaska) it has taken a giveth-and-taketh-away attitude toward oil and gas, building an administrative “firewall” against future oil leases in Alaska. 

 

The administration loves infrastructure, as long as it isn’t something genuinely useful, like a pipeline. 

 

About those pipelines: Few Americans appreciate just how vulnerable our fuel distribution network is. In 2017, Dallas drivers got an unwelcome taste of the 1970s when local gas stations went dry and long lines formed at others thanks to a storm hundreds of miles away that shut down the Colonial pipeline, cutting Dallas drivers off from the Houston-area refineries that make their gasoline. Somewhere, the ghost of J. R. Ewing was having a good laugh. In 2021, there were shortages of gasoline and jet fuel on the East Coast when hackers attacked the same pipeline system. And it isn’t just fuel: In December, tens of thousands of people in North Carolina were left without electricity after a couple of men with rifles attacked a power substation—and the fact that subsequent attacks in the Pacific Northwest did not produce similar results was more a matter of good luck than good preparation. 

 

The energy sector isn’t waiting on federal infrastructure subsidies to make big investments—firms across that industry are ready to spend their own money on necessary work that will have the welcome effect of creating a lot of new job opportunities for American workers. But they can’t—either the government stops them outright, as with Biden and Keystone XL, or endless activist-led lawsuits and reviews make projects economically unviable. 

 

That’s why Westinghouse is building a new nuclear power plant in Poland instead of Texas, Florida, or California. The Biden administration spent months complaining about high gasoline prices, but U.S. refining capacity has been dropping in recent years while refineries are booming in Asia and the Middle East. U.S. producers could be doing a lot more to help our European allies replace Russian natural gas—doing well while doing good—but U.S. gas liquefaction facilities are already operating at or near capacity. While there is a lot of investment happening there right now, that new capacity won’t come fully online for some time, and, when it does, it will rely on those troubled ports to get where it is going. Expanding U.S. exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) will require big investments in port infrastructure—and the environmentalists who so often have the Biden administration’s ear bitterly oppose these. 

 

And that’s the Biden administration’s double-bind: The country needs a great deal of real investment in energy and transportation, two critical areas that can be mutually reinforcing but that also impose their vulnerabilities on one another. On the other side, we have union bosses willing to hold key transit hubs hostage and utopian environmentalists who believe that the economy can be run on happy thoughts and good intentions—two interest groups whose economic interests may not always match up exactly but who share a political vehicle.  

 

Our progressive friends are not wrong to insist that environmental and labor interests be taken into account—intelligent policymaking involves tradeoffs and balancing legitimate interests. They are wrong to give union bosses and green ideologues veto power over energy and infrastructure, which is what they in effect purport to do. The question should not be whether we are going to build pipelines to ensure that Americans have reliable supplies of gasoline or whether we are going to encourage the development of LNG-export facilities at our ports—the question should be how to go about doing these things in an environmentally responsible way. The most puritanical environmentalists insist that there is no environmentally responsible way to do this—their position is one of ultimatum, spurning compromise. Rather than deal with political reality, the Biden administration blithely pretends that electric-vehicle charging stations are in some meaningful way investments in the ports at the heart of our still-fragile supply chains—and, because Joe Biden offers the freshest political thinking of the 1930s, his administration is utterly disinclined to do anything about the labor disruptions besetting West Coast ports. 

 

A soybean exporter losing $20,000 because of an undeclared strike may not seem like a big deal to you, but businesses—and economies—are built one transaction at a time. 

 

At some point, the administration is going to have to answer the question from the old coal-miners’ song: “Which side are you on?”  

Trump’s Embrace of January 6 Is Unnecessary and Dumb

By Noah Rothman

Friday, April 28, 2023

 

Running a campaign for national office compels candidates to expose themselves to a national audience, and that can be a fraught prospect. Even the most capable advance teams can’t shield their campaign’s principal from every pitfall on the trail or guard them against exposure to this country’s varied and diverse voters, some of whom will be kooks. But a prudent campaigner can minimize the risk of reputational damage that might arise from an awkward photo-op or ill-considered remark. Donald Trump is not that kind of campaigner.

 

On Thursday, Trump strolled into a New Hampshire diner to bask in the admiration of his supporters and press the flesh. There, he was confronted by one of his more adoring fans — Micki Larson-Olson, whose red-white-and-blue-streaked hair, USA-themed peaked military cap, and flashy Trump-branded fare conveyed her enthusiasm for the cause. “She’s a Jan. 6er,” one of the restaurant’s patrons called out. Trump did not recoil from this revelation. He was drawn to it.

 

“Where is she?” Trump asked. He sought her out and, absent any solicitation, told her to “hang in there.” Trump later pulled Larson-Olson, who was among the hundreds arrested and convicted for their participation in the January 6 riots, toward him for a photo.

 

A competent political professional should have responded to Larson-Olson’s overtures by smiling and backing away slowly. Instead, Trump embraced her, praised her commitment, and heaped scorn on the authorities tasked with enforcing America’s laws. He even went so far as to autograph Larson-Olson’s backpack, which she said she wore as she trespassed inside the Capitol complex on what she later told reporters was “the most patriotic day of my life.”

 

“Patriots, I hear the woman,” Trump said of his supporter, who informed him that her misdemeanor conviction resulted in her imprisonment for 161 days. “It’s terrible,” he continued, “what they’re saying is so sad, what they’ve done to January 6.”

 

This unnecessary display practically obliged the press to perform a deep dive into Larson-Olson’s background, and that’s exactly what they did.

 

The Dispatch reporter Andrew Egger identified Larson-Olson, a regular Trump-rally attendee, as the person who identified herself to him as “Q Patriot.” She went on to regale him with tales about how “they used murdered and experimented-with children to create” the Covid vaccines and provided previously unknown details about Pope Francis’s clinical contributions to Operation Warp Speed.

 

Larson-Olson held nothing back in comments she provided NBC News. “The punishment for treason is death, per the Constitution,” she said, adding that the Republicans who certified the votes of the 2020 election “deserve death.” The Trump superfan hoped she would secure “a front seat” to witness “Mike Pence being executed.”

 

It should go without saying that the president’s conduct is not just morally obtuse but irredeemably stupid. Voters do not like what happened on January 6. They are not keen to see anything like that day’s events happen again, and they’re sending every possible signal to the political class that they will punish office seekers who fail to provide the requisite assurances. In a post-election survey, FiveThirtyEight found that the 2022 midterm electorate ranked “political extremism” just below inflation as their second-biggest concern heading into the voting booth. That outlook among the electorate helps to explain why the majority of Donald Trump’s hand-picked candidates for open races up and down the ballot performed so dismally last November. It wasn’t abortion. It wasn’t their economic prescriptions. It wasn’t foreign policy. It was those candidates’ evasiveness about who actually won the 2020 election — a coy nod to the beliefs that animated the rioters who sacked the Capitol Building.

 

Donald Trump can’t let 2020 go. Nor will members of the press — not while the former president continues to provide them with a news hook that allows them to keep January 6 fresh in the public’s minds. There’s a reason why Joe Biden’s first reelection campaign video begins with images of the January 6 mob.

 

Revising the history of January 6 in pursuit of Donald Trump’s redemption has been great for Donald Trump. It’s also been good for Democrats and their allies in the press. It’s even benefited some conservative media outlets, for whom staking out a contrarian approach to whatever the prevailing media narrative happens to be is a lucrative enterprise. But for Republican voters who want to see the GOP retake legislative chambers to advance their political objectives, the martyrology around the January 6 rioters has been a disaster.

 

It’s never been clear to me what Republicans get from their perpetual relitigation of the 2020 race and its attendant consequences. Whatever it is, it isn’t “winning.”

Ron DeSantis’s Conservatism

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, April 27, 2023

 

‘Fighting for freedom is not always easy,” Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida argued in his second inaugural address, “because the threats to freedom are more complex and more widespread than they have been in the past.” Among the threats to freedom that DeSantis went on to identify were “entrenched bureaucrats in D.C., jet-setters in Davos, and corporations wielding public power.”

 

At almost any point in the modern history of the GOP, one would have expected a conservative politician to publicly name entrenched bureaucrats and Davos-bound jet-setters as their foes. But “corporations wielding public power”? That one is a touch unusual. What does it mean in practice? And does it present a problem for limited-government types who are considering backing DeSantis for president?

 

As governor, DeSantis has taken three major actions that might best be described as pushing back against “corporations wielding public power.” He has moved to rescind Walt Disney World’s 1960s-era “special district.” He has forbidden businesses that operate in Florida to confirm that their customers are vaccinated. And he has signed the “Stop W.O.K.E. Act,” which, inter alia, limits what employers may say during workplace training sessions that deal with race, sex, national origin, and other innate characteristics. These moves — especially DeSantis’s fight with Disney — have yielded some criticism from the right. Asa Hutchinson, the governor of Arkansas, proposed that DeSantis had used “the heavy hand of government to punish a business,” which is “not what a conservative is about,” while Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, went one step further. “I don’t think Ron DeSantis is a conservative,” Christie told Semafor. “As a conservative, the job of government is, in the main, to stay out of the business of business.”

 

Have DeSantis’s most controversial actions been “in the main”? That is the question. Personally, I would say: No, Maybe, and Yes.

 

First, the No. When defending his feud with Disney, DeSantis is adamant that, rather than undermining the working of the free market, he is in fact protecting it. Until he spearheaded his change, DeSantis insists, Disney

 

was enjoying unprecedented privileges and subsidies. They controlled their own government in central Florida. They were exempt from laws that virtually everybody else has to follow. That’s not free enterprise, but it’s certainly even worse when a company takes all those privileges that have been bestowed over many, many decades and uses that to wage war on state policies regarding families and children. 

 

Which is half-right, but which is ultimately unconvincing. Disney did, indeed, enjoy a set of privileges that have not been made available to, say, Universal Studios or Sea World. It did, indeed, enjoy “unprecedented” powers therein. And, in a vacuum, there is nothing much wrong with the State of Florida’s having decided to rescind a special arrangement that was contrived in 1967. If, as a policy matter, that system was not working for the government, it could have been altered in the same way as any other law, scheme, or initiative. But that is not what happened — and, if we’re being honest, we all know it. What happened, as DeSantis himself implies, is that Disney decided to “wage war on state policies regarding families and children,” and, in retaliation, DeSantis decided to take away its special district. Can he do this legally? Yes, he can. Did he do it in a neutral manner, as a result of a consistent fealty to free-market principles? He did not — and for that he deserves to be roundly criticized.

 

Now for the Maybe. Taken in context, Florida’s regulation of businesses during the Covid pandemic is a little more complicated. In a perfect world, governments at both the federal and state levels would leave most health-and-safety questions to private enterprise. But, during the worst outbreak of disease in a century, the United States was far from that perfect world. Covid brought with it all manner of emergency rules, and, irrespective of what the governor of Florida did or did not do, there were going to be emergency rules governing businesses during Covid. Policy merits aside, there is nothing intrinsically more “interventionist” about a rule that prohibits businesses from checking their customers’ vaccination status (as 20 states did) than there is about a rule that mandates that businesses check their customers’ vaccination status (as many cities and states did for indoor facilities, and as the federal government did for travel). One can certainly argue that Florida’s approach should have been to leave the question completely up to private enterprise — or, for that matter, that the laws that the state legislature passed should have contained exceptions for unusual businesses such as cruise lines. But, either way, the circumstances in which this decision was taken were unique. Outside of the pandemic, DeSantis has not shown a great desire to interfere with the health-and-safety rules that govern businesses in the state, and what steps he has taken have not been applicable to everyday life but are preparation for the next emergency. Is that ideal? No. Is it forgivable? It is.

 

And then there’s the Stop W.O.K.E. Act, on which, as a Yes, I find myself starkly at odds with the views of many of my fellow classical liberals and free-speech activists. Per the Association of Corporate Counsel, the provisions of the Stop W.O.K.E. Act that apply to employers create “legal restrictions and prohibitions on what public and private employers can say or promote in workplace trainings tied to race, color, sex, and/or national origin” and “have potentially significant implications for employers wishing to cover topics like structural racism, white/male privilege and unconscious bias in workplace anti-discrimination and diversity and inclusion trainings.” Critics of the law charge that there are significant First Amendment problems associated with these effects. But, if so, I can detect no comprehensible reason why the line would be here as opposed to across any other part of our current archipelago of employment law.

 

If, courtesy of the protections of the First Amendment, workplaces in America were hotbeds of free speech and free association, I could buy the idea that the Stop W.O.K.E. Act represented an infringement. But they’re not. The National Labor Relations Board is empowered to punish employers for a wide range of statements against unionization — to the point where, until it was told otherwise by a federal appeals court, the NLRB concluded that it could even sanction jokes about that topic. The concept of the “hostile work environment” has become so elastic that governments at all levels now superintend all manner of corporate speech. “Diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives are ascendant — encouraged, in many cases, by incentives in the law. Can it really be that the original public meaning of the First Amendment permits the precise exceptions to its rules that progressives happen to like but bars elected conservatives from taking the principles of nondiscrimination to their logical conclusion? Am I supposed to believe that the Constitution prohibits corporate trainers from making generalizations about minorities or women but not from making them about white people or men? Must I conclude that the Bill of Rights is applicable when the intention is to limit discussion of immutable characteristics but inapplicable when the aim is to discourage unionization? I think not. It is possible — probable, even — that the Stop W.O.K.E. Act will continue to be enjoined in the courts. But I will not blame Governor DeSantis for that. If we are to have overbearing laws governing our workplaces — and I would rather that we did not — they should not run in only one direction. At present, the choice facing conservatives is not whether to interfere in this realm or to stay away, but whether to fight to change the status quo or cede an already crowded field to its existing tenants.

 

As for the rest? Well, as governor, DeSantis has largely been the solid fiscal conservative that he promised to be. In part, this is because Florida has constitutionalized many of the limited-government principles that have made the state so attractive, and thereby taken the issue out of the hands of its incumbent politicians — not only does Florida prohibit taxes on income, capital gains, stocks, bonds, and more, but it requires a supermajority in both houses to raise any statewide taxes or fees. And, in part, this is because DeSantis is a pretty mainstream Republican in his approach toward taxing and spending. Last year, DeSantis signed a billion-dollar sales-tax cut, vetoed $3.1 billion from his own party’s budget proposal, and ended up presiding over a record $21.8 billion surplus. This year, he has proposed another $2 billion in tax cuts. And, while Florida has proven to be a magnet for businesses during his tenure, this has been the product of its generally seductive business environment rather than of cushy ad hoc deals that were designed to attract — read: bribe — particular businesses. According to the Cato Institute’s “Freedom in the 50 States” index, Florida is presently the freest state in both the “Fiscal” and “Economic” categories. As the scores from previous years show, Ron DeSantis did not create that environment. But he did improve upon it.

 

Which is to say that Chris Christie is wrong when he denies that Ron DeSantis is a conservative. Ron DeSantis is, without doubt, a conservative. What remains to be seen is whether, as a presidential candidate, DeSantis will stick to the instincts that have guided him throughout most of his career, or will be seduced by the desire to please his fans and stick it to his opponents that has led him into the interminable quagmire that is his fight with the Walt Disney Company. Being human, politicians will always make mistakes, and they will sometimes provide exceptions to their own rules. Bigger problems tend to arise when, piling up in number, those exceptions become the rule. As it stands, Governor DeSantis’s record on the free market is solid. The jury’s out as to whether it will remain so.

The Underestimated Kevin McCarthy

By Matthew Continetti

Saturday, April 29, 2023

 

Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) wasn’t going to let the moment go unnoticed. It was April 26, and the House of Representatives had just passed, by a vote of 217 to 215, the Limit, Save, Grow Act of 2023. The bill would raise the debt ceiling, return discretionary spending to fiscal year 2022 levels, repeal much of last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, speed up infrastructure permitting, cancel President Joe Biden’s student-loan amnesty, and apply work requirements to Medicaid and food stamps. The legislation is dead on arrival in the Democratic-controlled Senate. Yet plenty of Washingtonians doubted that it would ever leave the House.

 

McCarthy had beaten expectations. Again. And he wanted to let the world know it. “Every question you continue to raise,” he told the media, “you guys have been wrong. You’ve underestimated us.”

 

Many people have. Conventional wisdom is set against McCarthy, who presides over a 222–213 Republican majority and can afford to lose only four votes on a given bill or resolution. His bid for speaker appeared doomed right up until the moment that he won the office on the 15th ballot. Press coverage focuses almost entirely on divisions within the GOP conference, leading to a sense of surprise in the Beltway whenever the House comes together to rescind funding for additional IRS agents, incentivize oil and gas exploration and production, repeal onerous environmental and financial regulations, broaden parental rights in education, and hike the debt limit.

 

Meanwhile, the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party is off to a strong and bipartisan start. Representative Jim Jordan’s (R., Ohio) Judiciary Committee won its fight with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. Representative James Comer’s (R., Ky.) Oversight Committee is building its case against Biden family influence peddling. Compared with past Congresses, the legislative and investigative processes under McCarthy may be slow and unpredictable. But they are working.

 

Indeed, on two occasions Speaker McCarthy has outplayed Biden and the Democrats. In February, the House voted 250–173 to overturn D.C.’s incorrigible criminal-justice reform. The next month, the resolution passed the Senate and Biden signed it into law. Also in February, the House voted 229–197 to end the national Covid emergency. And again, the next month, the resolution passed the Senate and Biden signed it into law. House Democrats were outraged that Biden ultimately sided with these House Republican initiatives. But the politics were on McCarthy’s side. And the same was the case last year, when then-minority leader McCarthy forced an end to the military’s Covid vaccine mandate.

 

The Limit, Save, Grow Act may not become law, but it holds symbolic value for the speaker. For months, McCarthy has wanted to enter negotiations with Biden on raising the debt ceiling. The president has refused. McCarthy wants to follow the precedent of earlier GOP Houses and leverage a debt-ceiling raise for spending cuts and budget reforms. Biden doesn’t want to play that game. The standoff persists. Default on U.S. government obligations draws near.

 

McCarthy understands that his negotiating position will improve if House Republicans appear to be doing what they can to avoid default. He wants Biden, not his conference, to look obdurate and uninterested in the potential economic fallout. Two weeks ago, McCarthy traveled to the New York Stock Exchange and pledged that the House would vote on a bill that raised the debt limit while reducing spending. It did. By demonstrating unity and seriousness of purpose, House Republicans have put the ball in Biden’s court. And congressional Democrats from swing districts and battleground states — who are given to low-level political anxiety on the best of days — will tell the White House that talks with McCarthy may well be in order.

 

The situation could have been much worse for Republicans. If the Limit, Save, Grow Act had failed, then the GOP would have been in disarray, McCarthy would have looked hapless, Biden would have been able to tell Democrats that his strategy is working, and pressure would build on Senate leaders Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) to figure out a compromise. McCarthy avoided that scenario. How? By following the method that won him the speakership.

 

Call it “concede to lead.” To become speaker, McCarthy gave the House Freedom Caucus enormous influence over committees, floor activity, and the legislative calendar. By drawing the Freedom Caucus into the inner circle — and by giving its members seats on the prestigious Rules Committee — McCarthy turned outsiders into insiders. His conservative outreach delivered results when outside groups normally opposed to GOP leadership, such as Heritage Action and the Center for Renewing America, came onboard the Limit, Save, Grow Act.

 

Similarly, when Republican members from corn states demanded that ethanol subsidies remain untouched in the debt-ceiling bill, McCarthy agreed with them. And when conservatives wanted more stringent work requirements, he said yes again. McCarthy knows that the bill won’t become law. There’s little cost in such concessions. He’s willing to accommodate practically everyone, so long as it helps him attain his desired end. In January, his goal was becoming speaker. This week, it was passing Limit, Save, Grow. McCarthy is practicing a Republican form of diversity, equity, and inclusion that encompasses the moderates in the New York delegation, conservatives from Texas, and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.).

 

Success is far from assured. The Limit, Save, Grow Act is an opening gambit, not part of the endgame. No number of concessions may be enough to persuade 218 Republicans to back a deal this summer that lifts the debt ceiling for a few budget victories but not much else. Some in the GOP may want to see just how much a default would really hurt.

 

Right now, though, Speaker McCarthy can enjoy another win. Don’t underestimate him again.

Biden’s Journalist Cheat Sheet: The New Collusion Scandal

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, April 27, 2023

 

If you’re like the 70 percent of Americans who don’t want to see Joe Biden run for president again, 79 percent of whom cite to some degree his advanced age as the reason for their trepidation, the president is eager to allay your concerns.

 

“What do you say to them?” one reporter asked. “What do you say to those Americans who are watching and aren’t convinced?” To this, Biden replied mechanically. He redirected reporters’ attention away from the polling on voters’ discomfort with the president’s empirical decrepitude to his job-approval numbers, which Biden defended as middling and, therefore, unremarkable compared with past presidents. “Number two,” Biden replied, glancing down at the lectern, “when the same polling asked whether they think what kind of job I’ve done, it gets overwhelmingly positive results.”

 

“With regard to age, I can’t even say I guess how old I am,” Biden added extemporaneously. “It doesn’t — it doesn’t register with me.” He concluded: “I feel good.”

 

It was a practiced response, which makes sense considering the White House press shop probably had plenty of time to practice a response to this reporter’s inquiry.

 

Enterprising reporters armed with telescopic lenses attending that press conference captured the stack of cards the president was holding at the time, one of which featured the name and image of the reporter slated to ask “question #1.” Moreover, that card included the contents of the question that was to be posed to the senescent president.

 

This revelation led some political observers to wonder whether the White House had been soliciting reporters’ questions ahead of time to prepare the president’s response, which, of course, they had. Indeed, this presidency has been soliciting reporters’ questions from its outset.

 

Just two weeks after Biden’s inauguration, the Daily Beast’s Maxwell Tani revealed one such solicitation, which occurred during “an informal White House Correspondents Association Zoom call.” At the time, however, reporters bristled at the request. One unnamed reporter spoke for all those who one of Tani’s sources said were “pissed off” by the implication that media would collude with the White House they were covering: “The press can’t really do its job in the briefing room if the White House is picking and choosing the questions they want,” the unnamed reporter objected. “That’s not really a free press at all.”

 

Apparently, the Fourth Estate has managed to overcome the objections to this practice when the lessons learned during the Trump administration were still fresh in its members’ minds. As Tani observed, Trump-era White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders “was known to have asked certain news outlets about their questions in advance” of high-profile pressers — overtures that were summarily rejected.

 

Tani also cited Obama-era deputy White House press secretary Eric Schultz, who insisted that the Biden administration’s conduct was all part of their attempts at “restoring normalcy.” White House communications professionals often seek out a general sense of what their likely questioners are working on, he said, and pre-select which reporters will be called on and which won’t.

 

That assertion contrasts with the indignation directed at Donald Trump for what the New York Times described in 2017 as filtering out “tough questions” during press conferences.

 

Amid the scandal engulfing Trump’s first national-security adviser, Michael Flynn, Trump was accused of steering “formal questions to two conservative-leaning news organizations,” which avoided the controversy of the day in favor of “general queries about trade and immigration” — the ostensible subjects of his press conference alongside Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau. “The lack of questions about that or Mr. Flynn drew protests from journalists, both inside and outside the East Room,” the Times noted. Indeed, the Times’ write-up of the event appeared to share their indignation over the president’s effort to use reporters as a shield in order “to avoid scrutiny on a major running story.”

 

How would the Times describe Biden’s successful effort to draft journalists into the effort to dispel voters’ concerns about the doddering president? We can’t say. The paper of record avoided making a note of the White House’s apparent solicitation of reporters’ questions in its Wednesday dispatch from the Rose Garden. Reporter Katie Rogers gave a workmanlike account of the president’s defense of his capabilities, providing context only by citing Trump’s meandering review of Biden’s performance — thereby establishing the contrast Biden himself drew with his predecessor to justify his pursuit of a second term.

 

This episode puts into stark relief the aggravation journalists have displayed toward Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who has come under fire for elevating local reporters and niche venues over mainstream reporters and legacy media outlets. Indeed, the unstated but discernible subtext in coverage of DeSantis’s media strategy is the fear that his conduct is rapidly emerging as best practice, particularly for office seekers on the right. Maybe DeSantis won’t be answering the questions that preoccupy newsrooms in the Acela corridor, but at least he won’t be cribbing off a cheat sheet.

McCarthy Puts Debt-Ceiling Ball in Biden’s Court

National Review Online

Thursday, April 27, 2023

 

President Biden has repeatedly challenged Republicans to show him a fiscal plan on the debt ceiling. Now, they have one.

 

House Republicans’ bill would raise the debt ceiling for one year or until the debt hits $32.9 trillion, whichever happens first. In exchange for that, the GOP wants a series of policy changes that are desirable.

 

Spending would be capped at fiscal year 2022 levels. In Washington-speak, this will be decried as a draconian cut, because holding spending steady means it won’t go up as planned. Keeping spending the same as it was last year is hardly a radical move, and pales in comparison to the initial idea to balance the budget in ten years.

 

The bill repeals some of Democrats’ worst policies, such as most of the $80 billion windfall for the IRS and the illegal and unconstitutional student-loan “forgiveness” plan. It repeals some of Democrats’ green-energy subsidies, and it reforms the permitting process to make it easier to build new energy infrastructure.

 

It puts new work requirements on able-bodied adults who have no dependents and receive Medicaid or SNAP benefits. It also claws back unspent funds from pandemic programs. Democrats should be fine with that because, by Biden’s own admission and now affirmed by congressional resolution, the pandemic is over.

 

All told, these are welcome changes. President Biden has already decried them as the extreme rantings of “MAGA Republicans,” but this bill is run-of-the-mill fiscal conservatism, not unlike something that would have come out of any Republican-controlled House at any point in the past few decades.

 

One shortcoming is in the nature of the cuts. The majority of the spending cuts are unspecified, which means Congress is pinky-promising to abide by the fiscal year 2022 spending cap in future legislation. In the past, Congress has blown through those limits in similar deficit-reduction bills when the temptation to spend is too high (which it pretty much always is). The most egregious example was the cuts extracted from the last major debt-ceiling battle in 2011.

 

A handful of Midwestern Republicans nearly killed any chance of the bill’s passing when they saw ethanol subsidies were on the chopping block. Ethanol subsidies should be on the chopping block, but in an effort to get to yes, House leadership scaled back the cuts. Though horse-trading of this kind is not bad per se, it hurts the credibility of fiscal conservatives at a time when their message is sorely needed.

 

Ideally, Congress would also address the long-term drivers of the national debt, Medicare and Social Security. But reforming these programs would require a long and arduous process involving serious policy work. There is a good argument that a polarizing debt-ceiling standoff, with a short deadline for action, isn’t a viable forum for such reforms.

 

Biden has said he will not negotiate with Republicans on the debt limit and will only sign a bill that raises the limit with no conditions. That’s preposterous and ahistorical. One purpose of the debt-limit mechanism, which is unique to the U.S., is to force Congress and the president to reconsider spending at fixed intervals. All eight of the largest deficit-reduction laws passed since 1985 have been attached to debt-limit increases, and both Democrats and Republicans have used the debt ceiling as an opportunity to cut spending. It’s Biden who would be irresponsible were he to blow off Republicans’ proposals.

 

Biden can no longer argue in good faith that Republicans don’t have a plan for the debt limit. They do. Now it’s on Biden and Democrats in Congress to negotiate with the party that controls the House of Representatives. In divided government, no one gets everything he wants, but both sides should agree on this: Default is not an option. The debt-limit deadline is approaching quickly. Don’t expect a deal until the eleventh hour, but there must be a deal.

Everything Is the Culture War Now

By Jim Geraghty

Thursday, April 27, 2023

 

Yesterday, NBC News unveiled a new poll with a lot of questions focusing on social issues, and not all that surprisingly, it found “stark partisan differences on major cultural issues — racism, accepting LGBTQ people, the term ‘woke,’ and even the fundamental goals of American society.” The good folks at NBC were kind enough to have me on their panel discussing these topics.

 

One of the things that stands out about this poll, and makes it really intriguing but also disputable, is that it often gave respondents two options and asked which is most important, and aimed to dissuade them from saying, “both” by not listing that as an option. For example, the surveyors asked, “Which should be a more important goal for our society these days — promoting greater respect for traditional social and moral values, or encouraging greater tolerance of people with different lifestyles and backgrounds?” “Both” was only recorded if that was volunteered as an answer, 5 percent volunteered that answer, and another 3 percent said, “not sure.”

 

How do you think 1,000 American adults would answer when asked that question? Take a guess.

 

This month, 50 percent of Americans said, “promoting greater respect for traditional social and moral values” is more important, and 42 percent said, “encouraging greater tolerance of people with different lifestyles and backgrounds” is more important. Those numbers are barely changed from 2013, smack in the middle of the Obama years.

 

Wait, there’s more. When you break down the respondents by race, “traditional values” was picked by 51 percent of whites, 48 percent of blacks, and 51 percent of Hispanics. “Tolerance for different lifestyles” was selected by 40 percent of whites, 47 percent of blacks, and 44 percent of Hispanics. Whatever racial divisions America has, those three demographics see this choice roughly the same way.

 

You would think a poll result like this would encourage conservatives. But I suspect this poll result will be largely ignored because it doesn’t fit the narrative either for progressives who want to hear about culture-war triumphs, or folks on the right who on some level actually enjoy hearing about how decadent and depraved American society has become. Year by year, the loudest voices on the right have adopted a dystopian “this country is going to hell in a handbasket” vision; hearing that half the country wants to promote greater respect for traditional social and moral values might actually stir hope, confidence, optimism, and even unity, and lordy, we can’t have that, now can we?

 

As you would probably suspect, 74 percent of self-identified Republicans said “promoting greater respect for traditional social and moral values” is more important, while 67 percent of self-identified Democrats said “encouraging greater tolerance of people with different lifestyles and backgrounds” is more important. Independents split, with 49 percent picking traditional values and 41 percent siding with greater tolerance. (I wonder how many cultural traditionalists stopped defining themselves as Republicans during the Trump era.)

 

Now, as our panel discussed yesterday, a lot of these terms are subjective. How do you define “traditional social and moral values”? Which “different lifestyles and backgrounds” do you have in mind? You could easily envision a churchgoing Baptist African American who usually votes Democrat or a devout Catholic Latina mom who want to prioritize both. Also note that back in 2020, another NBC poll found 47 percent of those who described themselves as “LGBTQ” also described themselves as “moderately or highly religious. Those who were older, Black or lived in the South were the most likely to be religious.”

 

NBC’s most recent survey asked, “Is America racist?” “Not sure” was only counted if it was volunteered as an answer, but there was no “yes in some ways, no in other ways” option. Among all adults, 59 percent agreed America is racist; 53 percent of whites agreed, 69 percent of Latinos agreed, and 79 percent of black adults agreed. (I would note that the poll report refers to this demographic as “African-American,” but the article on NBCNews.com refers to them as “Blacks.”)

 

The survey asked respondents if they or a family member, friend, or coworker are transgender; 28 percent said yes and 72 percent said no. (This is likely to shock a lot of people in the Acela corridor.) Among those who know someone who is transgender, 67 percent agree with the statement, “We have not gone far enough in ending discrimination against transgender people.”

 

This is a poll designed to push people off the fence into one camp or another, and to see what they believe when the more neutral, consensus, or socially approved answers are taken off the table. It’s not the same as a push poll; it’s more of an examination of where people lean when the easy answers are removed.

 

It is also worth noting that Americans likely have some contradictory beliefs. Seventy percent of American adults agreed with the statement, “Our country needs to do more to increase social justice.” At the same time, 64 percent agreed with the statement, “Our country needs to reduce political correctness and cancel culture.” Sixty-one percent of respondents agreed that they “want our country to become more tolerant and accepting of the L-G-B-T-Q community.” But in the same survey, 59 percent agreed that “we have gone too far promoting L-G-B-T-Q lifestyles in our culture.” Maybe they’re just tired of rainbow decorations in store windows every June.

 

One of the things I noted is that, so far in 2023, the nascent Republican presidential primary is being fought almost entirely on social or “culture war” issues. Sure, candidates have all kinds of policy proposals, but it’s the culture-war stuff that gets the crowds jazzed: What kind of gender-change procedures should be legal for those under age 18, if any; whether schools should inform parents about the pronouns their child prefers; whether those born men should compete in women’s sports; whether the Disney Corporation is attempting to indoctrinate the young fans of its pop-culture offerings; what’s being taught in schools and so-called “book banning” (requiring books in school libraries to be age-appropriate is not a ban); even the Dylan Mulvaney promotion by Bud Light.

 

The verdict of this cycle is painfully clear: Arguments about economics and foreign policy do not get the blood pumping. In fact, the best way to get people talking about economics or foreign policy is to wrap them up in aspects of the culture war — “Woke Inc.,” ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) investing, contending that the U.S. military “has now gone woke at the top levels, by trying to indoctrinate everyone down to the lowest ranking patriot,” as former president Trump put it.

 

At one of Trump’s recent rallies, Ted Nugent declared Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky a “homosexual weirdo.” Since the beginning of the war, some opponents of U.S. aid to Ukraine such as Donald Trump Jr. have showcased a 2014 video of Zelensky, once Ukraine’s most popular comedian, dancing in a parody of the Ukrainian band Kazaky, a male dance-pop act that often dances in leather and high heels. (You can find the video Zelensky was parodying here.)

 

This is akin to the U.S. electing Dana Carvey as president, and opponents contending he’s a crossdresser because of Church Lady sketches, or electing Weird Al Yankovic as president, and contending he’s a crossdresser because he dressed up as Lady Gaga for a parody video.

 

It’s a free country, and you can prioritize what you wish. But I would note that just because people don’t want to pay attention to non-culture-war issues doesn’t mean they go away.

 

During China’s 20th Party Congress last October, President Xi Jinping emphasized Beijing’s commitment to artificial-intelligence development and “intelligent warfare” — a reference to AI-enabled military systems. (Hey, we’re coming up on four years since something experimental from a Chinese government-run laboratory got loose and killed millions of people.) China is building sophisticated cyberweapons to “seize control” of enemy satellites, rendering them useless for data signals or surveillance during wartime, according to that Discord leak. Pro-Russian hackers are making an ongoing cyberattack to take down air-traffic-control systems all across Europe. And the Pentagon admits that U.S. hypersonic weapons are not as advanced as those already developed by China.

 

In that war game on Capitol Hill conducted last week, the U.S. ran out of long-range missiles quickly, and “Beijing’s missiles and rockets cascade[d] down on Taiwan and on U.S. forces as far away as Japan and Guam. Initial casualties include[d] hundreds, possibly thousands, of U.S. troops. Taiwan’s and China’s losses [were] even higher.” The U.S. economy tanked, and most of America’s allies chose to stay on the sidelines.

 

God forbid some scenario like that comes to pass. But if one does, people will ask if we spent too much time thinking about a culture war and not enough time thinking about the potential risk of an actual war.

Vivek Is Right about Blacks and Guns

By Rich Lowry

Thursday, April 27, 2023

 

The exchange between Don Lemon and Vivek Ramaswamy on CNN last week won’t exactly go down in cable TV history, but it is a footnote insofar as it reportedly played a role in the ouster of Lemon from the network.

 

The former prime-time anchor’s behavior was another display of ill temper and arrogance, when morning TV demands at least faux cheerfulness and modesty.

 

But the exchange, occasioned by a remark made by Ramaswamy in a speech to the NRA convention about the racist motivation of early gun-control laws, was more telling for what it displayed about Lemon’s ignorance — and about the broader ignorance of his side, which has been loudly claiming that Lemon was fired for being right.

 

As in any such cable fight, there was cross talk, imprecision, and jumping from one topic to another, and Ramaswamy overstated his case in certain respects. There’s no doubt, though, that he is correct in his main contention and that Lemon (and by extension, his defenders) really has no idea what he’s talking about.

 

Everyone should know the history here, but by Lemon’s own logic — that, as a black man, he has unique, unassailable insights into civil rights — it’s especially egregious that he doesn’t know it.

 

In his NRA speech, Ramaswamy said that the first gun-control laws dated to 1865 and that they were part and parcel of a campaign to deny blacks their rights.

 

To be fair, Lemon might have been distracted by the bitchy exchange he was having with the producers talking in his ear, but he reacted to this claim with indignant incomprehension.

 

What Ramaswamy said was simply a matter of history, as Clarence Thomas explained in his concurring opinion in the gun-rights case McDonald v. Chicago and as Charlie Cooke and Robert VerBruggen have written at National Review (I draw on all three in what follows).

 

Ramaswamy could have taken it further back than 1865. In his opinion, Thomas noted how in the wake of slave rebellions in the 1820s, “many legislatures amended their laws prohibiting slaves from carrying firearms to apply the prohibition to free blacks as well.”

 

It’d be hard to be more explicit than Tennessee, which in 1834 made it clear that only “the free white men of this State,” and no longer “the freemen of this State,” enjoyed the “right to keep and to bear arms.”

 

The end of the Civil War brought a new urgency in the South to keep blacks from bearing arms. The gun-control laws were clearly discriminatory, targeting blacks alone, while white militias took it upon themselves to disarm blacks.

 

A group of black citizens of South Carolina petitioned Congress: “We ask that, inasmuch as the Constitution of the United States explicitly declares that the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed . . . that the late efforts of the Legislature of this State to pass an act to deprive us [of] arms be forbidden, as a plain violation of the Constitution.”

 

These laws were an impetus for post-war federal civil-rights measures. In 1866, the Freedmen’s Bureau Act stipulated that “the constitutional right to bear arms, shall be secured to and enjoyed by all the citizens . . . without respect to race or color, or previous condition of slavery.”

 

Everyone knew, pro and con, that the Civil Rights Act of 1866 included the right to keep and bear arms in its protections. Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois remarked that former slave states had passed laws “depriving persons of Afri­can descent of privileges which are essential to freemen.” That included prohibiting blacks from “having fire-arms.” The purpose of the bill, he added, was “to destroy all these discriminations.”

 

When such measures were ignored in the South, Congress went further with the passage of the 14th Amendment. After its adoption, southern states became less open about their objectives, but those objectives remained the same.

 

Black activists and writers certainly understood the stakes. Ida B. Wells wrote in 1892:

 

The only times an Afro-American who was assaulted got away has been when he had a gun and used it in self-defense. The lesson this teaches, and which every Afro-American should ponder well, is that a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.

 

Wells believed that “when the white man who is always the aggressor knows he runs as great risk of biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does, he will have greater respect for Afro-American life.”

 

As Charlie Cooke notes, in 1850, Frederick Douglass had this advice for runaway slaves trying to escape the men hunting them down: They should have “a good revolver, a steady hand, and a determination to shoot down any man attempting to kidnap” them and return them to bondage.

 

Chief Justice Roger B. Taney certainly understood the stakes, as well, from the other side of the ledger. In his infamous decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, part of his argument against granting citizenship to blacks was that they’d be able “to keep and carry arms wherever they went.”

 

There’s a literature out there devoted to this element of the struggle for civil rights, which Cooke draws from for his essay, including Securing Civil Rights: Freedmen, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Right to Bear Arms; Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms; and This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible.

 

The author of that last book, Charles E. Cobb, an activist with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, told an NPR interviewer: “I lived with families in the South. There was never a family I stayed with that didn’t have a gun. I know, from personal experience and the experiences of others, that guns kept people alive.”

 

Now, it’s obviously not the case that blacks got guns and the civil-rights revolution was instantly complete. But it is true that the rights of blacks weren’t fully recognized until they, too, had Second Amendment rights. Gun ownership is a powerful means of protecting oneself, one’s property, and one’s rights.

 

The late Otis McDonald, the plaintiff in the McDonald case, deeply felt the truth of this. As the Chicago Tribune wrote after his death:

 

The tall, elderly, soft-spoken man insisted he needed a gun to shield his family from gangs and drug dealers that terrorized his Morgan Park neighborhood. He felt the Constitution gave him that right.

 

“His love for family drove him,” said his nephew Fred Jones. “He loved the Second Amendment but he was more concerned about protecting his family, and the Second Amendment was the avenue to help him do that.”

 

But he was also driven by a force much deeper. Mr. McDonald felt strongly that he had a duty to stand up for the rights that had been taken away from African-Americans during slavery. As he and his wife, Laura, sat in the Supreme Court gallery listening to oral arguments in the lawsuit, it reaffirmed what he felt was his calling.

 

In an interview with the Tribune after winning the suit, Mr. McDonald said the journey had been a lesson in history. He had come to understand more about his ancestors and the “slave codes” enacted in Southern states during the Civil War that prohibited slaves from owning guns. After slavery was abolished, states adopted “black codes” that kept guns out of the hands of freed blacks.

 

“There was a wrong done a long time ago that dates back to slavery time,” he said in the interview. “I could feel the spirit of those people running through me as I sat in the Supreme Court.”

 

The history and logic here shouldn’t be hard to understand, even if that logic doesn’t compute for anyone on the left, as Don Lemon demonstrated in his last big argument on CNN.

Why Isn’t Joe Biden a Threat to Democracy?

By Rich Lowry

Wednesday, April 26, 2023

 

Joe Biden’s video announcing his reelection bid makes much of his supposed defense of democracy.

 

If it weren’t for that, it strongly implies, he’d be happy to decamp to Rehoboth Beach to a contented retirement rather than stay on the job until age 86, guarding against threats to the republic.

 

There is no doubt that Donald Trump’s conduct after the election was a disgrace, his attempt to get Mike Pence to distort the counting of the electoral votes was a grotesque dereliction of his duty (among others on that day), and, if he’d gotten his way, he would have dragged the country into an unprecedented constitutional crisis, even if he was very unlikely to succeed in his ultimate objective of overturning the election result.

 

That all of this is a matter of record is a large part of the reason that Biden would have to be heavily favored in a rematch against Trump, although nothing is guaranteed.

 

Trump’s failings don’t excuse Biden’s lapses, though. One would think posing as a defender of our system would force Biden to be more fastidious about his own relationship to our institutions and norms, but that doesn’t seem to have occurred to him.

 

It bears noting, by the way, that Biden’s suggestion in the video that Republicans are bent on taking away people’s right to vote is a rank lie. This poisonous talking point should have died with the results of the 2022 election in Georgia, which served as a stark rebuttal of the claims from Stacey Abrams and the rest of her party that the Georgia election law was a Jim Crow (or, Jim Eagle) exercise in disenfranchisement.

 

Is it too much to ask some of the self-appointed information cops to whistle Biden for basing a pillar of his reelection message on a provable piece of disinformation? Why, yes, it is.

 

More fundamentally, Joe Biden has shown himself to be a determined enemy of the rule of law and constitutional constraints on the power of the executive branch.

 

This, too, is almost never noted in the press but is one of the most consequential aspects of his presidency.

 

Put aside the big kahuna, the student-debt forgiveness, which has no plausible basis in law, and the ongoing treatment of immigration law as a mere suggestion. Just consider the acts that have been in the news the last couple of weeks: the frank defiance of the Comstock Act prohibition on sending abortion-inducing substances through the mail; the rewriting of Title IX on the fly to include gender identity and to impose new nationwide rules on schools regarding males in women’s sports; and the distortion of the rules to make illegal immigrants covered under DACA — itself the product of an edict with no basis in the law about a decade ago — eligible for Obamacare.

 

All of this alone would be a pretty good record of lawlessness. None of it rates, but it should.

 

First, in a nation of laws, denying, ignoring, or defying the law is simply wrong, period, full stop.

 

Second, by further untethering the executive from lawful bounds, Biden is doing his part to reverse one of the foremost achievements of Anglo-America. Through a couple of centuries of political struggle, bloodshed, constitutional thought, and trial and error, we neutered the monarchy in England and created a chief executive in America embedded in a constitutional system designed to keep the position in check.

 

Third, in a two-party system, any action is going to create a reaction. The more Biden governs by willful edict and pretextual legal reasoning, the more incentive it creates for a Republican to do the same.

 

Fourth, ends-justifies-the-means reasoning, which undergirds all these acts, is inherently dangerous and can take you to unexpected places. (One reason that Trump couldn’t get his way after the 2020 election is that numerous Republican officials put the rules over their partisan interests and preferences.)

 

Fifth, government by administrative edict is itself a form of indirect disenfranchisement by taking power away from senators and representatives who were elected from a dizzying array of states and districts to sit in Congress and actually write the nation’s laws.

 

Finally, there is no substitute for presidents and other elected officials who take their constitutional oaths seriously. We have grown used to the courts as the sole arbiter of constitutional matters and the backstop against lawlessness. But they don’t always fulfill this function — bad judging and procedural questions such as standing take a hand (and the Biden administration has, in some instances, gamed the system to try to keep the courts from checking it). If the political actors are faithful to our system, the responsibility for preserving it doesn’t fall entirely on the courts.

 

Now, clearly the attitude of the Biden administration and the press is that a little bit of lawlessness in behalf of a good cause isn’t so bad. And so long as Biden isn’t trying to undermine an election result (although his side did that in 2017) or gin up a mob outside Congress, what’s the harm? But our democracy depends on more than simply holding a vote every four years. Lots of countries have votes; fewer have a system that balances and distributes power so you have elected officials beholden to a system bigger and more important than they are, rather than autocrats.

 

The republic would be safer with Biden enjoying Rehoboth Beach.