National Review Online
Friday, March 31, 2017
The demise of the American Health Care Act, House speaker Paul Ryan and the White House’s ill-fated effort to reform Obamacare, has prompted a cascade of finger-pointing as Republicans try to assign blame for their recent embarrassment. The White House and much of the Republican establishment have settled on a familiar scapegoat: the famously stubborn 30 or so members of the House Freedom Caucus. On Thursday morning, President Trump tweeted: “The Freedom Caucus will hurt the entire Republican agenda if they don’t get on the team, & fast. We must fight them, & Dems, in 2018!”
We have been not infrequent critics of the Freedom Caucus, who often seem oblivious to Ronald Reagan’s observation that “my 80 percent friend is not my 20 percent enemy.” There is no doubt that members of the caucus can be frustrating and prone to an unrealistic tactical maximalism.
Yet in this latest episode, the Freedom Caucus was mostly in the right (and it wasn’t just them — members from all corners of the House GOP found it impossible to back the bill). The American Health Care Act was a kludge of a health-care policy. Described as a way to simultaneously repeal key elements of the Affordable Care Act and replace them with market-oriented reforms, the bill in its final form managed to do little of either. Freedom Caucus members were particularly concerned about the willingness of House leaders to leave the vast majority of Obamacare’s regulations on the books — after Republicans spent seven years promising that the party would “repeal and replace Obamacare.” Even the rationale that the AHCA would be better than nothing was hard to justify; it probably would have further destabilized the individual market, while millions fewer would have been insured.
No wonder that strong-arming on behalf of the bill didn’t work. According to news reports, in the final hours, the White House sent adviser Steve Bannon to tell obstinate Freedom Caucus members that they “have no choice” but to vote for the bill. It’s hard to imagine a less effective pitch to a group that has long accused Republican leaders of trying to coerce conservatives into falling in line against their principles.
In any case, the now-or-never rhetoric around the bill has now been exposed as a convenient exaggeration. The House is exploring whether it can revive the repeal-and-replace effort, as it should. Some members of the Freedom Caucus are demanding an immediate, straight-up repeal of the Affordable Care Act, or at least of its taxes and spending, which is unrealistic. But for all their reputed rigidity, most of the Freedom Caucus had accepted the inclusion in the Ryan bill of tax credits for people without access to Medicare, Medicaid, or employer-provided insurance — a policy that they had previously tended to oppose.
That the president has decided to declare war, at least rhetorically, on this bloc of his own party’s congressional majority is a reminder of one of the other key elements of the AHCA collapse: For all of the praise heaped on the president’s negotiating acumen, he has yet to demonstrate it in his dealings with Congress. Trump’s tweet has all the hallmarks of ineffectually blowing off steam, since it’s hard to imagine the president and his supporters following through with the organizing and funding it would take to try to take out conservative members representing deep-red districts. If Trump wants to win over the Freedom Caucus — and all the other members — who opposed the health-care legislation, the first step should be obvious, if more difficult and less satisfying than popping off on Twitter: Get them a better bill.
Friday, March 31, 2017
A Path to Legal Status but Not Citizenship
By Ashley Nunes
Friday, March 31, 2017
Immigration reform is an issue that Washington can’t seem to address. Few disagree on beefing up security at the nation’s borders. But politicians part ways when discussing how to handle the country’s 11 million undocumented workers, who have either overstayed their visas or entered without permission. The resulting gridlock has left them in limbo for decades.
For the Left, the solution is to create a path to citizenship. Many arguments are made to support it. Undocumented workers pay their taxes, though in many cases because it may help them gain legal status. And undocumented workers have been here a long time without ever having had a legal right to establish permanent residence, but set that fact aside for the moment. The weakest rationale for granting them a path to citizenship is this: that they have toiled hard on American soil, contributing to the national economy. They have, but they have done so by violating the nation’s immigration laws. The end doesn’t justify the means.
So what’s the solution?
Government could get tough on those who hire undocumented workers. Stiffer penalties would mean fewer job prospects for the job seekers. And studies show there there is a net outflow of workers when available jobs are scarce. But businesses want migrant labor, and immigration enforcement has long been overlooked to make sure they get it. Many rightly note that parked on America’s doorstep is a sign that reads “Keep Out” on one side and, on the other, “Help Wanted.”
This hypocrisy has augmented the problem of mixed-status families: cases in which some family members — most notably, children — have the legal right to be here while others do not. Nearly 5 million American kids have at least one undocumented parent. Confronting that reality means accepting that forced deportations, long touted as a solution, are socially unviable. They are also fiscally irresponsible. One estimate pegs the cost of deporting 11 million people at over $400 billion.
A more pragmatic solution would be to offer a path to legalization that stops short of citizenship. That would meet the humanitarian imperative to keep families together. But it would also hold those who have violated immigration laws accountable for their actions. This would apply only to undocumented workers who were of legal age when they entered the United States; those who were not of legal age should be given a citizenship path identical to the one that is available to legal immigrants.
Except for those who were born on American soil, citizenship is not a right. It’s a privilege. A path short of citizenship sends a powerful message to America’s legal-immigrant community, whose members have worked tirelessly to follow existing immigration guidelines. There is a rule of law, and citizenship is granted to those who follow it.
A path short of citizenship would assuage Republican concerns that immigration reform would hurt the GOP. Many undocumented workers hail from Latin America, and Latinos have long favored Democrats over Republicans. Some Republicans worry that granting these workers a path to citizenship would tip the future balance of political power. That may sound petty, and it is. But it is also a political reality.
Withholding citizenship, the Left will argue, creates a working class who will never truly feel that America is their home. Citizenship, they maintain, holds the key to becoming a “full and open member of American society.” Yet a significant number of legal immigrants who can naturalize don’t. They have pursued an education, own homes, and have forged links in American society. Not being citizens hasn’t stopped them from claiming their piece of the American dream. Why would it be any different for undocumented workers?
The fact that not all legal immigrants claim American citizenship challenges another liberal argument: that citizenship increases wages. Many advocates of a path to citizenship tout studies that show that when immigrants naturalize, earnings increase — by as much as 25 percent, according to one account. If that were true, wouldn’t all eligible immigrants line up for American passports? Wage increases, after all, would be a powerful a powerful incentive.
The reality is that evidence linking citizenship to wage increases is weak. Researchers often mix legal noncitizens with undocumented workers when looking at earnings — an approach that skews results in favor of the liberal position. More important, many studies don’t control for occupational choice. The salaries of physicians who are American citizens will always be higher than those of secretaries who are legal noncitizens. Nationality has little to do with it. Choice of profession does.
Citizenship can improve wages by offering access to jobs previously off limits. These include high-paying public- and private-sector positions that require security clearances. But they also require advanced education and skills training. As a whole, undocumented workers, nearly half of whom haven’t graduated high school, are ill equipped for such employment. And suggestions that immigrants tend to pursue higher education as a consequence of enjoying citizenship are not backed up by hard data.
One thing is certain. The needs of America’s changing economy cannot be met by laws that haven’t been touched in 25 years. Overhauling the nation’s immigration system requires a dose of pragmatism. And the current occupant of the White House, as unconventional as he may seem, might just be the one to deliver.
Friday, March 31, 2017
Immigration reform is an issue that Washington can’t seem to address. Few disagree on beefing up security at the nation’s borders. But politicians part ways when discussing how to handle the country’s 11 million undocumented workers, who have either overstayed their visas or entered without permission. The resulting gridlock has left them in limbo for decades.
For the Left, the solution is to create a path to citizenship. Many arguments are made to support it. Undocumented workers pay their taxes, though in many cases because it may help them gain legal status. And undocumented workers have been here a long time without ever having had a legal right to establish permanent residence, but set that fact aside for the moment. The weakest rationale for granting them a path to citizenship is this: that they have toiled hard on American soil, contributing to the national economy. They have, but they have done so by violating the nation’s immigration laws. The end doesn’t justify the means.
So what’s the solution?
Government could get tough on those who hire undocumented workers. Stiffer penalties would mean fewer job prospects for the job seekers. And studies show there there is a net outflow of workers when available jobs are scarce. But businesses want migrant labor, and immigration enforcement has long been overlooked to make sure they get it. Many rightly note that parked on America’s doorstep is a sign that reads “Keep Out” on one side and, on the other, “Help Wanted.”
This hypocrisy has augmented the problem of mixed-status families: cases in which some family members — most notably, children — have the legal right to be here while others do not. Nearly 5 million American kids have at least one undocumented parent. Confronting that reality means accepting that forced deportations, long touted as a solution, are socially unviable. They are also fiscally irresponsible. One estimate pegs the cost of deporting 11 million people at over $400 billion.
A more pragmatic solution would be to offer a path to legalization that stops short of citizenship. That would meet the humanitarian imperative to keep families together. But it would also hold those who have violated immigration laws accountable for their actions. This would apply only to undocumented workers who were of legal age when they entered the United States; those who were not of legal age should be given a citizenship path identical to the one that is available to legal immigrants.
Except for those who were born on American soil, citizenship is not a right. It’s a privilege. A path short of citizenship sends a powerful message to America’s legal-immigrant community, whose members have worked tirelessly to follow existing immigration guidelines. There is a rule of law, and citizenship is granted to those who follow it.
A path short of citizenship would assuage Republican concerns that immigration reform would hurt the GOP. Many undocumented workers hail from Latin America, and Latinos have long favored Democrats over Republicans. Some Republicans worry that granting these workers a path to citizenship would tip the future balance of political power. That may sound petty, and it is. But it is also a political reality.
Withholding citizenship, the Left will argue, creates a working class who will never truly feel that America is their home. Citizenship, they maintain, holds the key to becoming a “full and open member of American society.” Yet a significant number of legal immigrants who can naturalize don’t. They have pursued an education, own homes, and have forged links in American society. Not being citizens hasn’t stopped them from claiming their piece of the American dream. Why would it be any different for undocumented workers?
The fact that not all legal immigrants claim American citizenship challenges another liberal argument: that citizenship increases wages. Many advocates of a path to citizenship tout studies that show that when immigrants naturalize, earnings increase — by as much as 25 percent, according to one account. If that were true, wouldn’t all eligible immigrants line up for American passports? Wage increases, after all, would be a powerful a powerful incentive.
The reality is that evidence linking citizenship to wage increases is weak. Researchers often mix legal noncitizens with undocumented workers when looking at earnings — an approach that skews results in favor of the liberal position. More important, many studies don’t control for occupational choice. The salaries of physicians who are American citizens will always be higher than those of secretaries who are legal noncitizens. Nationality has little to do with it. Choice of profession does.
Citizenship can improve wages by offering access to jobs previously off limits. These include high-paying public- and private-sector positions that require security clearances. But they also require advanced education and skills training. As a whole, undocumented workers, nearly half of whom haven’t graduated high school, are ill equipped for such employment. And suggestions that immigrants tend to pursue higher education as a consequence of enjoying citizenship are not backed up by hard data.
One thing is certain. The needs of America’s changing economy cannot be met by laws that haven’t been touched in 25 years. Overhauling the nation’s immigration system requires a dose of pragmatism. And the current occupant of the White House, as unconventional as he may seem, might just be the one to deliver.
Michael Mann Embarrasses Himself before Congress
By Julie Kelly
Thursday, March 30, 2017
In his testimony to the House Science Committee on Wednesday, Michael Mann, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, told the story of Trofim Lysenko, a plant scientist who worked for Stalinist Russia:
The gist of Mann’s anecdote was that scientists who challenge the ruling government’s diktat on any given scientific issue are demonized and punished while innocent bystanders suffer. In the here and now, this would seemingly apply to the minority of scientists brave enough to question the reigning dogma of climate science. After all, these are the folks who have been threatened by top law-enforcement officials, personally and professionally attacked by their peers, and even driven out of their academic positions due to the harassment.
But astonishingly, Mann was not talking about those scientists: He was talking about himself. In his alternative universe, he and other climate scientists are the martyrs, oppressed and silenced by the Politburo. Never mind that Mann — a tenured professor at one of the country’s top public universities — opened his testimony by reciting a prodigious list of awards he has won, books he has authored, scientific organizations he leads. He is celebrated by the media and environmental groups around the world, and yet in front of Congress he talked like a guy on his way to the Gulag. It takes a special blend of hubris, juvenility, and dishonesty to portray yourself as a victim when you are really the bully.
It was quite a spectacle. Mann was joined on the panel by Judith Curry, John Christy, and Roger Pielke, Jr. — three scientists who have actually endured the kind of political witch-hunts Mann referred to. Rather than present data or debate the science, Mann mostly engaged in the sophistry that has gradually undermined the credibility of climate science. He repeatedly referred to a bogus “97 percent consensus” about man-made climate change, and accused the Heartland Institute of being a “climate-change denying, Koch brothers–funded outlet.” He engaged in one ad hominem attack after another against his fellow panelists and the committee’s chairman, Representative Lamar Smith. He questioned whether Smith really understood the scientific method and read a nasty quote about Smith from a smear piece in Science magazine
Mann’s rhetoric became so inflamed that he was finally upbraided by Representative Dana Rohrabacher. “From the get go, we have heard personal attack after personal attack coming from those claiming to represent the mainstream of science,” Rohrabacher said to Mann. “Call people ‘deniers’ all you want, use any kind of name you want . . . when we talk about Mr. Lysenko, that’s the kind of thing they did to the scientists in Russia. Try to call people names and beat them into submission, that’s a Stalinist tactic.”
Mann’s name-calling prompted Representative Darin LaHood (R., Ill.) to bring up his defamation lawsuit against National Review. After getting confirmation from Curry and Pielke that they had been subjected to attacks by Mann — Pielke said he couldn’t “keep up with all of Dr. Mann’s epithets” — LaHood called Mann on his hypocrisy: “You mention in your opening statement about staying away from that and yet we have a suit that’s been filed based on those exact same things. There’s a real disconnect between a defamation suit that does the exact same thing you’re engaged in that in this public forum.”
Turns out Mann appears to be a bit of a denier himself. Under questioning, Mann denied being involved with the Climate Accountability Institute even though he is featured on its website as a board member. CAI is one of the groups pushing a scorched-earth approach to climate deniers, urging lawmakers to employ the RICO statute against fossil-fuel corporations. When asked directly if he was either affiliated or associated with CAI, Mann answered “no.”
I talked to Pielke after the hearing. He was clearly frustrated about the status of the science he loves. “If these are the leading voices of climate science, they can have it,” he told me. “The field is so politicized that it’s almost impossible to break through. Now we are being compared to murderers and Stalinists. If their favored policies are so fragile in light of legitimate critique, they might want to rethink their policies.”
Mann was obviously trolling the committee and humoring his base during the hearing; he didn’t even pretend to take it seriously. (He later tweeted that — on a dare — he had referenced the movie The Princess Bride during his testimony.) That is certainly his prerogative. But you would think the day after President Trump decimated the Obama administration’s climate-change agenda by rolling back the Clean Power Plan, a leading climate scientist would at least try to make a compelling case against such sweeping action. But Mann put his own ego ahead of science. Not everyone was amused.
“Dr. Mann’s hypocrisy was on full public display,” Smith told me via e-mail. “Members of the scientific community should be free from such ad hominem attacks. Those who engage in name-calling seldom have the facts on their side.” If Mann’s behavior is representative of the seriousness of “mainstream” climate scientists, we should all reconsider the credibility of his message.
Thursday, March 30, 2017
In his testimony to the House Science Committee on Wednesday, Michael Mann, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, told the story of Trofim Lysenko, a plant scientist who worked for Stalinist Russia:
Lysenko was a Russian agronomist and it became Leninist doctrine to impose his views about heredity, which were crackpot theories, completely at odds with the world’s scientists. Under Stalin, scientists were being jailed if they disagreed with his theories about agriculture. And Russian agriculture actually suffered, scientists were jailed, many died in their jail cells and potentially millions of people suffered from the disastrous agriculture policies that followed from that.
The gist of Mann’s anecdote was that scientists who challenge the ruling government’s diktat on any given scientific issue are demonized and punished while innocent bystanders suffer. In the here and now, this would seemingly apply to the minority of scientists brave enough to question the reigning dogma of climate science. After all, these are the folks who have been threatened by top law-enforcement officials, personally and professionally attacked by their peers, and even driven out of their academic positions due to the harassment.
But astonishingly, Mann was not talking about those scientists: He was talking about himself. In his alternative universe, he and other climate scientists are the martyrs, oppressed and silenced by the Politburo. Never mind that Mann — a tenured professor at one of the country’s top public universities — opened his testimony by reciting a prodigious list of awards he has won, books he has authored, scientific organizations he leads. He is celebrated by the media and environmental groups around the world, and yet in front of Congress he talked like a guy on his way to the Gulag. It takes a special blend of hubris, juvenility, and dishonesty to portray yourself as a victim when you are really the bully.
It was quite a spectacle. Mann was joined on the panel by Judith Curry, John Christy, and Roger Pielke, Jr. — three scientists who have actually endured the kind of political witch-hunts Mann referred to. Rather than present data or debate the science, Mann mostly engaged in the sophistry that has gradually undermined the credibility of climate science. He repeatedly referred to a bogus “97 percent consensus” about man-made climate change, and accused the Heartland Institute of being a “climate-change denying, Koch brothers–funded outlet.” He engaged in one ad hominem attack after another against his fellow panelists and the committee’s chairman, Representative Lamar Smith. He questioned whether Smith really understood the scientific method and read a nasty quote about Smith from a smear piece in Science magazine
Mann’s rhetoric became so inflamed that he was finally upbraided by Representative Dana Rohrabacher. “From the get go, we have heard personal attack after personal attack coming from those claiming to represent the mainstream of science,” Rohrabacher said to Mann. “Call people ‘deniers’ all you want, use any kind of name you want . . . when we talk about Mr. Lysenko, that’s the kind of thing they did to the scientists in Russia. Try to call people names and beat them into submission, that’s a Stalinist tactic.”
Mann’s name-calling prompted Representative Darin LaHood (R., Ill.) to bring up his defamation lawsuit against National Review. After getting confirmation from Curry and Pielke that they had been subjected to attacks by Mann — Pielke said he couldn’t “keep up with all of Dr. Mann’s epithets” — LaHood called Mann on his hypocrisy: “You mention in your opening statement about staying away from that and yet we have a suit that’s been filed based on those exact same things. There’s a real disconnect between a defamation suit that does the exact same thing you’re engaged in that in this public forum.”
Turns out Mann appears to be a bit of a denier himself. Under questioning, Mann denied being involved with the Climate Accountability Institute even though he is featured on its website as a board member. CAI is one of the groups pushing a scorched-earth approach to climate deniers, urging lawmakers to employ the RICO statute against fossil-fuel corporations. When asked directly if he was either affiliated or associated with CAI, Mann answered “no.”
I talked to Pielke after the hearing. He was clearly frustrated about the status of the science he loves. “If these are the leading voices of climate science, they can have it,” he told me. “The field is so politicized that it’s almost impossible to break through. Now we are being compared to murderers and Stalinists. If their favored policies are so fragile in light of legitimate critique, they might want to rethink their policies.”
Mann was obviously trolling the committee and humoring his base during the hearing; he didn’t even pretend to take it seriously. (He later tweeted that — on a dare — he had referenced the movie The Princess Bride during his testimony.) That is certainly his prerogative. But you would think the day after President Trump decimated the Obama administration’s climate-change agenda by rolling back the Clean Power Plan, a leading climate scientist would at least try to make a compelling case against such sweeping action. But Mann put his own ego ahead of science. Not everyone was amused.
“Dr. Mann’s hypocrisy was on full public display,” Smith told me via e-mail. “Members of the scientific community should be free from such ad hominem attacks. Those who engage in name-calling seldom have the facts on their side.” If Mann’s behavior is representative of the seriousness of “mainstream” climate scientists, we should all reconsider the credibility of his message.
The Crisis of Trumpism
By Rich Lowry
Friday, March 31, 2017
Trumpism is in crisis.
This isn’t a function of poll numbers, or any melodrama of the past months, but something more fundamental: No officeholder in Washington seems to understand President Donald Trump’s populism or have a cogent theory of how to effect it in practice, including the president himself.
House speaker Paul Ryan isn’t a populist and doesn’t want to be a populist. He has spent his adult life committed to a traditional limited-government agenda. He crafted his own platform during the campaign, the so-called Better Way agenda, to differentiate congressional Republicans from Trump.
Trump, for his part, has lacked the knowledge, focus, or interest to translate his populism into legislative form. He deferred to others on legislative priorities and strategies at the outset of his administration, and his abiding passion in the health-care debate was, by all accounts, simply getting to a signing ceremony.
In light of all this, the product of the Ryan-Trump partnership was a health-care bill bizarrely at odds with a national election Republicans had just won on the strength of working-class voters. Under the GOP replacement, fewer people would have had coverage, and workers farther down the income scale would have been particularly hard hit. Neither of these facts seemed to exercise the White House, at least not enough to try to do anything to fix them.
Maybe Ryan doesn’t “get” the new political reality created by Trump’s victory, as the president’s boosters like to say. But what excuse does the president himself have for evidently not getting it, either?
A President Trump acting more in keeping with his free-floating reflex to take care of people, as expressed in speeches and interviews, would have pushed the health bill to the left. But Trump so far hasn’t followed the logic of his own politics in dealing with Congress.
His path not taken would have been to give an inaugural address with less carnage and more kumbayah. Immediately invite Chuck Schumer to the White House and tell him, “Chuck, you’re not leaving this building until we agree on an infrastructure package.” Take the resulting big-spending proposal and dare the GOP leadership to defy him. Pass it with a bipartisan coalition.
Now that the initial health-care bill has gone down, there’s loose talk from the White House of wooing Democrats, but a lot has transpired the past few months that makes this much harder. Most importantly, the left-wing “resistance” to Trump is fully activated and prepared to exact punishment on any quislings.
And Trump’s style of politics is not well-suited to bipartisanship. Democrats tend to be fond of Republicans like John Kasich and Jon Huntsman, who are determinedly inoffensive and loath to touch hot-button issues. Trump is neither. He could propose a $2 trillion infrastructure bill funded by forced requisitions from Wall Street bankers and Democrats would probably say, “Hell, no.”
In any case, the White House is moving on to tax reform. This, too, may end up running in well-worn GOP ruts. Trump executed a hostile takeover of a Republican party that was obsessed with the 1980s and cutting marginal tax rates. Now, the Republican Plan B is revisiting the tax reform of 1986 with ample cuts in marginal tax rates.
If things continue to go badly over this first year, it’s easy to see Trump turning to the New York Democrats in his White House. This would entail less emphasis on trade, immigration, and fights with the mainstream media, and more emphasis on a nonideological economic boosterism. The loose antecedent for this scenario is Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who swept into office in California as a drain-the-swamp reformer after winning a populist crusade, and then recalibrated to accommodate the system after suffering politically damaging setbacks.
The range of possible outcomes of the Trump presidency is still wide. Unexpectedly, one of them is that his most die-hard populist supporters will eventually be able to say that Trumpism, like socialism, hasn’t failed, it’s just never been tried.
Friday, March 31, 2017
Trumpism is in crisis.
This isn’t a function of poll numbers, or any melodrama of the past months, but something more fundamental: No officeholder in Washington seems to understand President Donald Trump’s populism or have a cogent theory of how to effect it in practice, including the president himself.
House speaker Paul Ryan isn’t a populist and doesn’t want to be a populist. He has spent his adult life committed to a traditional limited-government agenda. He crafted his own platform during the campaign, the so-called Better Way agenda, to differentiate congressional Republicans from Trump.
Trump, for his part, has lacked the knowledge, focus, or interest to translate his populism into legislative form. He deferred to others on legislative priorities and strategies at the outset of his administration, and his abiding passion in the health-care debate was, by all accounts, simply getting to a signing ceremony.
In light of all this, the product of the Ryan-Trump partnership was a health-care bill bizarrely at odds with a national election Republicans had just won on the strength of working-class voters. Under the GOP replacement, fewer people would have had coverage, and workers farther down the income scale would have been particularly hard hit. Neither of these facts seemed to exercise the White House, at least not enough to try to do anything to fix them.
Maybe Ryan doesn’t “get” the new political reality created by Trump’s victory, as the president’s boosters like to say. But what excuse does the president himself have for evidently not getting it, either?
A President Trump acting more in keeping with his free-floating reflex to take care of people, as expressed in speeches and interviews, would have pushed the health bill to the left. But Trump so far hasn’t followed the logic of his own politics in dealing with Congress.
His path not taken would have been to give an inaugural address with less carnage and more kumbayah. Immediately invite Chuck Schumer to the White House and tell him, “Chuck, you’re not leaving this building until we agree on an infrastructure package.” Take the resulting big-spending proposal and dare the GOP leadership to defy him. Pass it with a bipartisan coalition.
Now that the initial health-care bill has gone down, there’s loose talk from the White House of wooing Democrats, but a lot has transpired the past few months that makes this much harder. Most importantly, the left-wing “resistance” to Trump is fully activated and prepared to exact punishment on any quislings.
And Trump’s style of politics is not well-suited to bipartisanship. Democrats tend to be fond of Republicans like John Kasich and Jon Huntsman, who are determinedly inoffensive and loath to touch hot-button issues. Trump is neither. He could propose a $2 trillion infrastructure bill funded by forced requisitions from Wall Street bankers and Democrats would probably say, “Hell, no.”
In any case, the White House is moving on to tax reform. This, too, may end up running in well-worn GOP ruts. Trump executed a hostile takeover of a Republican party that was obsessed with the 1980s and cutting marginal tax rates. Now, the Republican Plan B is revisiting the tax reform of 1986 with ample cuts in marginal tax rates.
If things continue to go badly over this first year, it’s easy to see Trump turning to the New York Democrats in his White House. This would entail less emphasis on trade, immigration, and fights with the mainstream media, and more emphasis on a nonideological economic boosterism. The loose antecedent for this scenario is Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who swept into office in California as a drain-the-swamp reformer after winning a populist crusade, and then recalibrated to accommodate the system after suffering politically damaging setbacks.
The range of possible outcomes of the Trump presidency is still wide. Unexpectedly, one of them is that his most die-hard populist supporters will eventually be able to say that Trumpism, like socialism, hasn’t failed, it’s just never been tried.
Thursday, March 30, 2017
Bad Medicine on ‘Carried Interest’
By Kevin D. Williamson
Thursday, March 30, 2017
President Donald Trump, the great negotiator who couldn’t persuade Republicans to vote for a Republican health-care plan, has suggested that he’ll be teaming up with the Democrats to develop an alternative. On the matter of entitlement reform, he has promised to out-Schumer Chuck Schumer. One is interesting, two is coincidence, and three is a trend, which brings us to the very large tax increase President Trump is proposing — one that many Democrats, notably Hillary Rodham Clinton, have long supported.
The “carried-interest loophole” is a misunderstood and often misrepresented feature of U.S. tax law. To begin with, it isn’t a loophole at all: It is an intentionally designed feature of the tax code functioning as intended — it may be good or it may be bad, but it is the way it is for a reason, and it did not get that way by accident. Further, it does not have much to do with Wall Street hedge funds, despite the constant insistence from President Trump that it does.
Here are the basics: In our tax system, the term “long-term capital gains” generally means income from an investment held for at least one year and one day. The day-traders and algorithm-based high-frequency traders do not enjoy the tax advantage conferred upon those realizing long-term capital gains, which are taxed at a lower rate (maxing out at 23.8 percent) than are other forms of income (top tax rate 43.4 percent). This is of interest to investors on various timelines: If you are saving for your retirement, then a 20 percent tax discount on the accumulated gains of a 35-year investment plan is very important. If you are an entrepreneur who has put 40 years of his life into building a business, then the question of whether you are going to pay 23.8 percent in taxes when you sell it or 43.4 percent means a great deal. It is also very important if you are in the private-equity business, which is mostly what the current fuss is all about.
Unlike hedge funds, private-equity firms typically make long-term investments. Private-equity firms are not typically engaged in the business of trading and betting on the markets, but are genuine investors: They are private in that they help companies raise money without accessing the public financial markets, and they take equity in firms or in projects as their main form of payment. Sometimes they work with troubled companies that need to restructure and require financing to get that done; sometimes they work with very successful small companies to help them become large ones. That is what Mitt Romney did at Bain Capital, helping to launch nationwide chains such as Staples.
David’s Bridal is a pretty good example of how this works: It started as a single boutique, was built into a small and successful chain of local stores, and then was rolled out as a national chain with the assistance of private investors who had been involved in similar projects. The company changed owners a few times and had its ups and downs, and it was later acquired by the private-equity firm Clayton, Dubilier & Rice. That’s how a little shop in Fort Lauderdale ends up becoming a billion-dollar company that employs 12,500 people and makes a lot of investors — large and small — a lot of money. None of the key players in that story took a salary to get the work done. They invested their labor, their expertise, and their capital.
Typically, a private-equity firm is organized as a partnership in which the general partner (the firm itself) is compensated with a share (typically 20 percent) of any profits that might — the key word here is “might” — be generated by an investment. In addition to the general partner, there are limited partners, who put up the money.
And that leads us to one of the criticisms of the “carried interest” tax treatment of private-equity income: Often, the firms themselves do not have any real money at risk, the immediate financial risk being borne by the limited partners who put up the money. But that is not an argument for raising the tax rate on private-equity income — it is an argument against “sweat equity,” which is the lifeblood of entrepreneurship large and small. If you open a dry-cleaner business and your rich uncle invests $20,000 in the project to get you started, the profit you realize 20 years later when you sell your successful chain of cleaners is treated as a long-term capital gain for tax purposes, in spite of the fact that you didn’t have any of your own money at risk. You didn’t invest money: You invested time, work, knowledge, and innovation, and you bore the opportunity costs for all the other things you might have done with your time and labor. You are every bit as much of an investor as is a guy who buys 20 shares of GM and parks them in his retirement account for 20 years. More of one, some might say.
Private equity does not work on the underpants-gnomes business plan. The steps between making an investment and realizing a profit are many and complex and difficult. And not every deal works out in the end. Sometimes, they — this may shock you — lose money. Often, the private-equity industry as a whole does not perform as well as the S&P 500. It is a risky business.
And that is one of the reasons that it enjoys tax advantages. You might make a perfectly good argument that this is a poor rationale, that politicians in Washington are not competent authorities to say whether there is too little risk-taking and entrepreneurship in our economy, too much, or (even more implausible) that we’re at the Goldilocks just-right level. You might make an excellent argument — a persuasive one — that having government use the tax code to encourage people and institutions to pursue one kind of income (capital gains) instead of another kind of income (salaries, bonuses, health-insurance benefits) is poor policy. But that isn’t really an argument against the carried-interest treatment for private-equity income, either: It’s an argument for a flat tax, or at least an argument for taxing all sources of income the same way. Though I am sympathetic to the case for giving the guy who worked his ass off building a new business a break on his taxes vs. the rate paid by the middle manager who always just took a salary and never took any risk, that may be entirely sentimental.
But we are not talking about that. Nobody in Washington wants to face that particular angry mob of IRA investors with torches and pitchforks. What we are talking about is singling out a particular class of businessmen for punitive tax treatment because we resent how much money some of them make, and because what they do seems like voodoo to people who do not understand it.
As a matter of policy, changing the tax treatment of private-equity income would not raise a great deal of tax revenue relative to federal spending and liabilities, and it probably would not have as much of a flattening effect as our class warriors hope. For one thing, if we convert those investment managers’ income to salaries and bonuses, then the firms that employ them are going to deduct those salaries and bonuses as ordinary business expenses, which they would be entitled to do. For another, investors will respond to economic incentives. The people who run these kinds of businesses are pretty clever about moving money around. The gentlemen in Congress are not going to outsmart them.
The broader discussion about taxes and fairness and — odious phrase — “social justice” is a waste of time. Taxes are not an instrument of justice: They are an instrument of revenue. The federal government requires x dollars to do the things we demand of it, and the only end of tax policy should be raising those dollars in a way that causes as little economic disruption as possible and invades our privacy as little as possible. At the moment, our model is lots of disruption and maximal invasion of privacy — and all of it handled by the incompetent, corrupt, politicized agents of the Internal Revenue Service.
Those are the tax-code problems we should be addressing. Instead, we are addressing some unhappy Americans’ envy and resentment. That isn’t tax policy — it’s psychotherapy.
And it’s bad medicine.
Thursday, March 30, 2017
President Donald Trump, the great negotiator who couldn’t persuade Republicans to vote for a Republican health-care plan, has suggested that he’ll be teaming up with the Democrats to develop an alternative. On the matter of entitlement reform, he has promised to out-Schumer Chuck Schumer. One is interesting, two is coincidence, and three is a trend, which brings us to the very large tax increase President Trump is proposing — one that many Democrats, notably Hillary Rodham Clinton, have long supported.
The “carried-interest loophole” is a misunderstood and often misrepresented feature of U.S. tax law. To begin with, it isn’t a loophole at all: It is an intentionally designed feature of the tax code functioning as intended — it may be good or it may be bad, but it is the way it is for a reason, and it did not get that way by accident. Further, it does not have much to do with Wall Street hedge funds, despite the constant insistence from President Trump that it does.
Here are the basics: In our tax system, the term “long-term capital gains” generally means income from an investment held for at least one year and one day. The day-traders and algorithm-based high-frequency traders do not enjoy the tax advantage conferred upon those realizing long-term capital gains, which are taxed at a lower rate (maxing out at 23.8 percent) than are other forms of income (top tax rate 43.4 percent). This is of interest to investors on various timelines: If you are saving for your retirement, then a 20 percent tax discount on the accumulated gains of a 35-year investment plan is very important. If you are an entrepreneur who has put 40 years of his life into building a business, then the question of whether you are going to pay 23.8 percent in taxes when you sell it or 43.4 percent means a great deal. It is also very important if you are in the private-equity business, which is mostly what the current fuss is all about.
Unlike hedge funds, private-equity firms typically make long-term investments. Private-equity firms are not typically engaged in the business of trading and betting on the markets, but are genuine investors: They are private in that they help companies raise money without accessing the public financial markets, and they take equity in firms or in projects as their main form of payment. Sometimes they work with troubled companies that need to restructure and require financing to get that done; sometimes they work with very successful small companies to help them become large ones. That is what Mitt Romney did at Bain Capital, helping to launch nationwide chains such as Staples.
David’s Bridal is a pretty good example of how this works: It started as a single boutique, was built into a small and successful chain of local stores, and then was rolled out as a national chain with the assistance of private investors who had been involved in similar projects. The company changed owners a few times and had its ups and downs, and it was later acquired by the private-equity firm Clayton, Dubilier & Rice. That’s how a little shop in Fort Lauderdale ends up becoming a billion-dollar company that employs 12,500 people and makes a lot of investors — large and small — a lot of money. None of the key players in that story took a salary to get the work done. They invested their labor, their expertise, and their capital.
Typically, a private-equity firm is organized as a partnership in which the general partner (the firm itself) is compensated with a share (typically 20 percent) of any profits that might — the key word here is “might” — be generated by an investment. In addition to the general partner, there are limited partners, who put up the money.
And that leads us to one of the criticisms of the “carried interest” tax treatment of private-equity income: Often, the firms themselves do not have any real money at risk, the immediate financial risk being borne by the limited partners who put up the money. But that is not an argument for raising the tax rate on private-equity income — it is an argument against “sweat equity,” which is the lifeblood of entrepreneurship large and small. If you open a dry-cleaner business and your rich uncle invests $20,000 in the project to get you started, the profit you realize 20 years later when you sell your successful chain of cleaners is treated as a long-term capital gain for tax purposes, in spite of the fact that you didn’t have any of your own money at risk. You didn’t invest money: You invested time, work, knowledge, and innovation, and you bore the opportunity costs for all the other things you might have done with your time and labor. You are every bit as much of an investor as is a guy who buys 20 shares of GM and parks them in his retirement account for 20 years. More of one, some might say.
Private equity does not work on the underpants-gnomes business plan. The steps between making an investment and realizing a profit are many and complex and difficult. And not every deal works out in the end. Sometimes, they — this may shock you — lose money. Often, the private-equity industry as a whole does not perform as well as the S&P 500. It is a risky business.
And that is one of the reasons that it enjoys tax advantages. You might make a perfectly good argument that this is a poor rationale, that politicians in Washington are not competent authorities to say whether there is too little risk-taking and entrepreneurship in our economy, too much, or (even more implausible) that we’re at the Goldilocks just-right level. You might make an excellent argument — a persuasive one — that having government use the tax code to encourage people and institutions to pursue one kind of income (capital gains) instead of another kind of income (salaries, bonuses, health-insurance benefits) is poor policy. But that isn’t really an argument against the carried-interest treatment for private-equity income, either: It’s an argument for a flat tax, or at least an argument for taxing all sources of income the same way. Though I am sympathetic to the case for giving the guy who worked his ass off building a new business a break on his taxes vs. the rate paid by the middle manager who always just took a salary and never took any risk, that may be entirely sentimental.
But we are not talking about that. Nobody in Washington wants to face that particular angry mob of IRA investors with torches and pitchforks. What we are talking about is singling out a particular class of businessmen for punitive tax treatment because we resent how much money some of them make, and because what they do seems like voodoo to people who do not understand it.
As a matter of policy, changing the tax treatment of private-equity income would not raise a great deal of tax revenue relative to federal spending and liabilities, and it probably would not have as much of a flattening effect as our class warriors hope. For one thing, if we convert those investment managers’ income to salaries and bonuses, then the firms that employ them are going to deduct those salaries and bonuses as ordinary business expenses, which they would be entitled to do. For another, investors will respond to economic incentives. The people who run these kinds of businesses are pretty clever about moving money around. The gentlemen in Congress are not going to outsmart them.
The broader discussion about taxes and fairness and — odious phrase — “social justice” is a waste of time. Taxes are not an instrument of justice: They are an instrument of revenue. The federal government requires x dollars to do the things we demand of it, and the only end of tax policy should be raising those dollars in a way that causes as little economic disruption as possible and invades our privacy as little as possible. At the moment, our model is lots of disruption and maximal invasion of privacy — and all of it handled by the incompetent, corrupt, politicized agents of the Internal Revenue Service.
Those are the tax-code problems we should be addressing. Instead, we are addressing some unhappy Americans’ envy and resentment. That isn’t tax policy — it’s psychotherapy.
And it’s bad medicine.
How Not To Think About Vladimir Putin
By John Daniel Davidson
Wednesday, March 29, 2017
On Sunday, tens of thousands of Russians poured into the streets of Moscow to protest corruption and the government of President Vladimir Putin. In response, the Russian police arrested nearly a thousand people, including opposition leader Aleksei Navalny.
The Moscow protest was one of more than 90 rallies that took place Sunday across the country, from Vladivostok in Siberia to Kaliningrad in the Baltics. Police cracked down on those demonstrations, too, all of which the government deemed illegal. They were the largest coordinated anti-Kremlin protests since the massive pro-democracy demonstrations of 2011-12 following national elections protesters claim were tainted by fraud.
The protests and police crackdown are a reminder of what the Putin regime really is, and why it’s dangerous for conservatives to delude themselves into thinking Putin is anything more than a drearily familiar twentieth-century-style autocrat and gangster. But that’s exactly what a growing number of conservatives are doing. It’s no secret the alt-right lionizes Putin as a defender of traditional values and ethnic nationalism. Nor is it a secret that President Trump finds much to admire in the Russian leader.
But it’s not just Trump or the alt-right. For a growing number of Christians concerned about the erosion of traditional values and issues like abortion and same-sex marriage, Putin’s cultural conservatism has a certain appeal as a bulwark against the moral relativism of progressivism. Christian leaders like Franklin Graham have praised Putin for “protecting traditional Christianity,” while Pat Buchanan has said Putin is America’s ally against ISIS.
No, Putin Is Not Atatürk
This benign view of Putin has begun to creep into mainstream conservatism, not just because of Russia’s supposed defense of traditional marriage and family values, but because of Putin’s seeming commitment to national sovereignty—an issue that resonates with Republican voters. Back in December, a poll conducted by the Economist and YouGov found 37 percent of Republicans held a favorable view of Putin, up from 24 percent in September 2016 and just 10 percent in July 2014.
Now, eminent conservative writers like The Weekly Standard’s Christopher Caldwell have taken up the cause of explaining Putin’s appeal to fellow conservatives. In a recent speech published by Hillsdale College’s Imprimis, Caldwell—a writer and thinker of great talent and subtlety, and usually of excellent judgment—argues that by traditional standards, Putin is not, in fact, a common kleptocrat and murderer but a great leader who has saved his country from ruin. Putin, writes, Caldwell,
With all due respect to Caldwell, this is wishful thinking that borders on the delusional. For one thing, Putin didn’t “discipline” Russia’s plutocrats and billionaires, he co-opted them. A raft of books have examined how Putin and his erstwhile KGB associates, together with Russian crime syndicates, orchestrated a massive looting of their country’s wealth and secured a new regime in Moscow.
One such book, Karen Dawisha’s Putin’s Kleptocracy (2014), ties many previous works together to chronicle in detail how this effort began long before Putin came to power in 2000. In her introduction, Dawisha writes that, “from the beginning Putin and his circle sought to create an authoritarian regime ruled by a close-knit cabal…who used democracy for decoration rather than direction.”
Caldwell claims Putin inherited a kleptocracy from Boris Yeltsin after democracy failed to take root in deeply corrupt post-Soviet Russia. In fact, Putin helped orchestrate the failure of democracy in Russia in the 1990s, in part by doing what Caldwell accuses Yeltsin’s former communist cronies of doing: turning state assets and cash into private fortunes. Thanks to Putin and a determined group of revanchist KGB officers intent on reinstituting Soviet-style control, in collusion with organized crime, Russian democracy never really had a chance.
Moscow Doesn’t Care What The Russian People Think
All of this is well-trod ground, and no one familiar with post-Soviet Russian history should dispute it. What Caldwell and other conservatives, like Hugh Hewitt, often point to in their assessments of Putin is how well he has served his country’s “national interests.” From the invasion and annexation of Crimea to Russia’s purported intervention against ISIS in Syria’s civil war, Putin has put Russia’s national interests first, they say, and done so in the face of global opposition.
That’s one way to look at it. But what Putin and his fellow oligarchs consider Russia’s national interests are probably not what ordinary Russians think they are. For all its military might, Russia is a very poor country with huge demographic problems. A year ago, nearly 20 million Russians (13.4 percent of the population) were reportedly living in poverty, on less than $139 a month. Last year saw a spike in labor protests, mostly related to unpaid wages. Some 82 percent of Russians say they can feel the effects of their country’s economic decline, up from 61 percent in 2014.
In this context, do ordinary Russians think that propping up the Assad regime in Syria, or preventing Ukraine from joining NATO, or meddling in other countries’ elections, are core national interests? Probably not, although we’ll never know because Putin’s Russia, like any run-of-the-mill autocratic regime, isn’t all that interested in what ordinary people think.
That gets to the heart of the problem. Caldwell says Putin has become “a symbol of national sovereignty in its battle with globalism.” But national sovereignty doesn’t mean much if the government doesn’t derive its powers from the consent of the governed. Conservatives, who are supposed to care about things like free speech and civil rights, shouldn’t need the spectacle of mass protests and police brutality to remind them that the Russian people are not sovereign in Putin’s empire.
That they do need such a reminder should tell us more about the state of our political discourse than it does about Russia’s.
Wednesday, March 29, 2017
On Sunday, tens of thousands of Russians poured into the streets of Moscow to protest corruption and the government of President Vladimir Putin. In response, the Russian police arrested nearly a thousand people, including opposition leader Aleksei Navalny.
The Moscow protest was one of more than 90 rallies that took place Sunday across the country, from Vladivostok in Siberia to Kaliningrad in the Baltics. Police cracked down on those demonstrations, too, all of which the government deemed illegal. They were the largest coordinated anti-Kremlin protests since the massive pro-democracy demonstrations of 2011-12 following national elections protesters claim were tainted by fraud.
The protests and police crackdown are a reminder of what the Putin regime really is, and why it’s dangerous for conservatives to delude themselves into thinking Putin is anything more than a drearily familiar twentieth-century-style autocrat and gangster. But that’s exactly what a growing number of conservatives are doing. It’s no secret the alt-right lionizes Putin as a defender of traditional values and ethnic nationalism. Nor is it a secret that President Trump finds much to admire in the Russian leader.
But it’s not just Trump or the alt-right. For a growing number of Christians concerned about the erosion of traditional values and issues like abortion and same-sex marriage, Putin’s cultural conservatism has a certain appeal as a bulwark against the moral relativism of progressivism. Christian leaders like Franklin Graham have praised Putin for “protecting traditional Christianity,” while Pat Buchanan has said Putin is America’s ally against ISIS.
No, Putin Is Not Atatürk
This benign view of Putin has begun to creep into mainstream conservatism, not just because of Russia’s supposed defense of traditional marriage and family values, but because of Putin’s seeming commitment to national sovereignty—an issue that resonates with Republican voters. Back in December, a poll conducted by the Economist and YouGov found 37 percent of Republicans held a favorable view of Putin, up from 24 percent in September 2016 and just 10 percent in July 2014.
Now, eminent conservative writers like The Weekly Standard’s Christopher Caldwell have taken up the cause of explaining Putin’s appeal to fellow conservatives. In a recent speech published by Hillsdale College’s Imprimis, Caldwell—a writer and thinker of great talent and subtlety, and usually of excellent judgment—argues that by traditional standards, Putin is not, in fact, a common kleptocrat and murderer but a great leader who has saved his country from ruin. Putin, writes, Caldwell,
did what Kemal Atatürk had done in Turkey in the 1920s. Out of a crumbling empire, he rescued a nation-state, and gave it coherence and purpose. He disciplined his country’s plutocrats. He restored its military strength. And he refused, with ever blunter rhetoric, to accept for Russia a subservient role in an American-run world system drawn up by foreign politicians and business leaders. His voters credit him with having saved his country.
With all due respect to Caldwell, this is wishful thinking that borders on the delusional. For one thing, Putin didn’t “discipline” Russia’s plutocrats and billionaires, he co-opted them. A raft of books have examined how Putin and his erstwhile KGB associates, together with Russian crime syndicates, orchestrated a massive looting of their country’s wealth and secured a new regime in Moscow.
One such book, Karen Dawisha’s Putin’s Kleptocracy (2014), ties many previous works together to chronicle in detail how this effort began long before Putin came to power in 2000. In her introduction, Dawisha writes that, “from the beginning Putin and his circle sought to create an authoritarian regime ruled by a close-knit cabal…who used democracy for decoration rather than direction.”
Caldwell claims Putin inherited a kleptocracy from Boris Yeltsin after democracy failed to take root in deeply corrupt post-Soviet Russia. In fact, Putin helped orchestrate the failure of democracy in Russia in the 1990s, in part by doing what Caldwell accuses Yeltsin’s former communist cronies of doing: turning state assets and cash into private fortunes. Thanks to Putin and a determined group of revanchist KGB officers intent on reinstituting Soviet-style control, in collusion with organized crime, Russian democracy never really had a chance.
Moscow Doesn’t Care What The Russian People Think
All of this is well-trod ground, and no one familiar with post-Soviet Russian history should dispute it. What Caldwell and other conservatives, like Hugh Hewitt, often point to in their assessments of Putin is how well he has served his country’s “national interests.” From the invasion and annexation of Crimea to Russia’s purported intervention against ISIS in Syria’s civil war, Putin has put Russia’s national interests first, they say, and done so in the face of global opposition.
That’s one way to look at it. But what Putin and his fellow oligarchs consider Russia’s national interests are probably not what ordinary Russians think they are. For all its military might, Russia is a very poor country with huge demographic problems. A year ago, nearly 20 million Russians (13.4 percent of the population) were reportedly living in poverty, on less than $139 a month. Last year saw a spike in labor protests, mostly related to unpaid wages. Some 82 percent of Russians say they can feel the effects of their country’s economic decline, up from 61 percent in 2014.
In this context, do ordinary Russians think that propping up the Assad regime in Syria, or preventing Ukraine from joining NATO, or meddling in other countries’ elections, are core national interests? Probably not, although we’ll never know because Putin’s Russia, like any run-of-the-mill autocratic regime, isn’t all that interested in what ordinary people think.
That gets to the heart of the problem. Caldwell says Putin has become “a symbol of national sovereignty in its battle with globalism.” But national sovereignty doesn’t mean much if the government doesn’t derive its powers from the consent of the governed. Conservatives, who are supposed to care about things like free speech and civil rights, shouldn’t need the spectacle of mass protests and police brutality to remind them that the Russian people are not sovereign in Putin’s empire.
That they do need such a reminder should tell us more about the state of our political discourse than it does about Russia’s.
California’s Moral Atrocity
By Ian Tuttle
Thursday, March 30, 2017
In a parade of horrors exposed by the Center for Medical Progress, one episode stands out. In the seventh video released by undercover journalists David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt, former StemExpress technician Holly O’Donnell describes an experience at Planned Parenthood Mar Monte’s Alameda Clinic in San Jose, Calif.:
O’Donnell is then told to “harvest” the child’s brain: “[She] gave me the scissors and told me that I had to cut down the middle of the face.” O’Donnell did as asked.
It’s not often that someone confesses to murder on camera, but that is what O’Donnell did, assuming her account was accurate. The California Penal Code defines murder as the “unlawful killing of a human being, or a fetus, with malice aforethought.” Not only did Planned Parenthood refuse to render care to a born-alive infant, as required by California law; it acted affirmatively to cause the child’s death.
Yet this revelation occasioned no interest. Major newspapers ignored it. Mainstream websites overlooked it. Nothing appeared on the nightly news. These were, apparently, not the crimes anyone was looking for.
Now, California attorney general Xavier Becerra has filed 15 felony charges against Daleiden and Merritt, the journalists who exposed the brutality and profiteering of Planned Parenthood and its affiliates, on the grounds that ostensibly business-related conversations among strangers held in restaurants and at conferences were in fact “confidential,” and so recording them without every participant’s consent violated California eavesdropping laws. You can read all about this news at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN.
Becerra, a Democrat, recently decamped from the U.S. House to replace Kamala Harris, now California’s junior senator, as state attorney general. (Last spring, Harris’s investigators raided Daleiden’s apartment, seizing a laptop and multiple hard drives.) Both have 100 percent legislative ratings from prominent pro-abortion groups. Both have received financial support from Planned Parenthood. At the time she ordered the raid, Harris was helping Planned Parenthood’s chief legal counsel draft legislation to restrict reporting on “health-care providers.”
There is much that ought to be said about California’s transparently partisan abuse of the state’s prosecutorial power. (In recent years, undercover videos have prompted California’s Justice Department to investigate claims of animal cruelty on chicken farms. This, as opposed to homicide at abortion clinics, is enough to prompt the curiosity of California’s law-enforcement officials.) There is much, too, that ought to be said about the hypocrisy of the media types who are suddenly silent about this unconcealed assault on reporters’ freedoms, after spending the days since Donald Trump’s election propounding the importance of a vigorous press. (“Like firefighters who run into a fire, journalists run toward a story,” MSNBC’s Katy Tur boasted last month.)
But what links media hypocrisy with partisan hypocrisy, and what is at the heart of this shameful affair, is conscience twisted beyond recognition. The Center for Medical Progress revealed Planned Parenthood’s trade in fetal parts and its winking attitude toward the law. But it also revealed the sheer moral rot that consumes the abortion industry from top to bottom. Hidden from everyday view are those who, over appetizers and wine, talk about “crushing” babies to death, or joke about how an abortionist worth her salt will “hit the gym” because it requires “biceps” to dismember a baby! And there are others, such as Becerra and Harris, who may not handle the scissors, but who agree that snuffing out the life of a child on a table should be celebrated, and that those who would expose those activities should be locked up. This is the barbarism of “progressive” consensus.
On Wednesday morning, undeterred by the California Department of Justice, the Center for Medical Progress released a new video, in which an undercover Daleiden discusses abortion procedures with Dr. DeShawn Taylor, former medical director of Planned Parenthood Arizona, and the founder of her own abortion clinic in Phoenix. Taylor notes: “In Arizona, if the fetus comes out with any signs of life, we’re supposed to transport it. To the hospital.” Asked if there is any standard procedure for “verifying life,” she replies: “Well, the thing is, I mean the key is, you need to pay attention to who’s in the room, right?”
There is a famous line in Solzhenitsyn: “Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.” The lie has come into the world, but not through David Daleiden.
Thursday, March 30, 2017
In a parade of horrors exposed by the Center for Medical Progress, one episode stands out. In the seventh video released by undercover journalists David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt, former StemExpress technician Holly O’Donnell describes an experience at Planned Parenthood Mar Monte’s Alameda Clinic in San Jose, Calif.:
“I want you to see something kinda cool. This is kinda neat,” [says O’Donnell’s coworker]. So I’m over here, and . . . the moment I see it, I’m just flabbergasted. This is the most gestated fetus and the closest thing to a baby I’ve seen. And she is, like, “Okay, I want to show you something.” So she has one of her instruments, and she just taps the heart, and it starts beating. And I’m sitting here, and I’m looking at this fetus, and its heart is beating, and I don’t know what to think.
O’Donnell is then told to “harvest” the child’s brain: “[She] gave me the scissors and told me that I had to cut down the middle of the face.” O’Donnell did as asked.
It’s not often that someone confesses to murder on camera, but that is what O’Donnell did, assuming her account was accurate. The California Penal Code defines murder as the “unlawful killing of a human being, or a fetus, with malice aforethought.” Not only did Planned Parenthood refuse to render care to a born-alive infant, as required by California law; it acted affirmatively to cause the child’s death.
Yet this revelation occasioned no interest. Major newspapers ignored it. Mainstream websites overlooked it. Nothing appeared on the nightly news. These were, apparently, not the crimes anyone was looking for.
Now, California attorney general Xavier Becerra has filed 15 felony charges against Daleiden and Merritt, the journalists who exposed the brutality and profiteering of Planned Parenthood and its affiliates, on the grounds that ostensibly business-related conversations among strangers held in restaurants and at conferences were in fact “confidential,” and so recording them without every participant’s consent violated California eavesdropping laws. You can read all about this news at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN.
Becerra, a Democrat, recently decamped from the U.S. House to replace Kamala Harris, now California’s junior senator, as state attorney general. (Last spring, Harris’s investigators raided Daleiden’s apartment, seizing a laptop and multiple hard drives.) Both have 100 percent legislative ratings from prominent pro-abortion groups. Both have received financial support from Planned Parenthood. At the time she ordered the raid, Harris was helping Planned Parenthood’s chief legal counsel draft legislation to restrict reporting on “health-care providers.”
There is much that ought to be said about California’s transparently partisan abuse of the state’s prosecutorial power. (In recent years, undercover videos have prompted California’s Justice Department to investigate claims of animal cruelty on chicken farms. This, as opposed to homicide at abortion clinics, is enough to prompt the curiosity of California’s law-enforcement officials.) There is much, too, that ought to be said about the hypocrisy of the media types who are suddenly silent about this unconcealed assault on reporters’ freedoms, after spending the days since Donald Trump’s election propounding the importance of a vigorous press. (“Like firefighters who run into a fire, journalists run toward a story,” MSNBC’s Katy Tur boasted last month.)
But what links media hypocrisy with partisan hypocrisy, and what is at the heart of this shameful affair, is conscience twisted beyond recognition. The Center for Medical Progress revealed Planned Parenthood’s trade in fetal parts and its winking attitude toward the law. But it also revealed the sheer moral rot that consumes the abortion industry from top to bottom. Hidden from everyday view are those who, over appetizers and wine, talk about “crushing” babies to death, or joke about how an abortionist worth her salt will “hit the gym” because it requires “biceps” to dismember a baby! And there are others, such as Becerra and Harris, who may not handle the scissors, but who agree that snuffing out the life of a child on a table should be celebrated, and that those who would expose those activities should be locked up. This is the barbarism of “progressive” consensus.
On Wednesday morning, undeterred by the California Department of Justice, the Center for Medical Progress released a new video, in which an undercover Daleiden discusses abortion procedures with Dr. DeShawn Taylor, former medical director of Planned Parenthood Arizona, and the founder of her own abortion clinic in Phoenix. Taylor notes: “In Arizona, if the fetus comes out with any signs of life, we’re supposed to transport it. To the hospital.” Asked if there is any standard procedure for “verifying life,” she replies: “Well, the thing is, I mean the key is, you need to pay attention to who’s in the room, right?”
There is a famous line in Solzhenitsyn: “Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.” The lie has come into the world, but not through David Daleiden.
Conservatives for Chappelle
By Michael Taube
Thursday, March 30, 2017
The world of comedy has long been dominated by liberal entertainers. With a few exceptions, including Bob Hope, Jack Benny, Sheryl Underwood, Jamie Farr, Jeff Foxworthy, Dennis Miller, Joan Rivers, and Jackie Mason, most of the funny men and women on stage just aren’t on our side.
This doesn’t mean the political Right can’t appreciate left-leaning comedians who push the envelope and challenge societal norms. In particular, Dave Chappelle’s unique brand of comedy has his share of conservative fans — including me.
Chappelle, who is in the midst of a career comeback with a three-part special on Netflix, is a comedic genius. The 43-year-old’s stage presence, laser-sharp focus on current issues, outside-the-box thinking on race relations, and strong support for free speech make for a lethal combination. He doesn’t believe the political Left necessarily has all the answers, either.
This has been evident during his time on the comedy-club circuit, as well as various TV cameos (Home Improvement, The Larry Sanders Show) and movie roles (Robin Hood: Men in Tights, The Nutty Professor).
Yet it was his groundbreaking sketch-comedy series, Chappelle’s Show (2003–06), on Comedy Central, that really opened the eyes of many to the immense talent of this great performer.
Some of his memorable sketches included: “Frontline,” starring Clayton Bigsby, the blind black white-supremacist; “Charlie Murphy’s True Hollywood Stories,” which involved a pick-up game of basketball against Prince and the wild evenings of singer Rick James; “The Niggar Family,” about a white household living in an Ozzie and Harriet-type community with an eyebrow-raising last name; and the ever-lovin’ crack addict, Tyrone Biggums.
I’ve never laughed harder in my life than I did at some of his comedy routines. I still watch the DVD box set of his show, which he abruptly walked away from (along with a $50 million deal) and went to South Africa after reports of burnout, frustration, and loss of creative control. The episodes never grow old.
Sure, Chappelle’s comedy is politically edgy at times. He’s expressed some concerns about Republicans and conservatives. He never cared for George W. Bush, and he created a “Black Bush” character to juxtapose what White America and Black America could potentially get away with.
At the same time, he’s not a knee-jerk liberal. Far from it.
During a comedy set last year, Chappelle mentioned that he found the language contained on then–GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump’s leaked 2005 Access Hollywood video to be “gross.” At the same time, “the way I got to hear it was even more gross. You know that came directly from Hillary.” When he begrudgingly admitted that he voted for Clinton, he reportedly didn’t “feel good” about it and said, “She’s not right and we all know she’s not right.”
This initially caused some conservatives to speculate that Chappelle’s views about Trump had changed. He quickly put this theory to rest on TMZ just before the presidential election, stating “Jesus Christ, I’m not a Trump supporter.” (That being said, he did wish the president well after his victory and said he was “going to give him a chance.”)
The Daily Beast’s Amy Zimmerman wrote in a November 8 piece, “In the year of the political renegade, Chappelle is a fittingly loose cannon.” It was a predictable left-wing response to a celebrity who admitted that he wasn’t on Team Democrat with every ounce of his being. Heaven forbid he should be allowed to hold a contrarian opinion to the vast majority of the celebrity mob, right?
He even got lambasted after two Netflix specials, The Age of Spin: Live at the Hollywood Palladium and Deep in the Heart of Texas: Live at Austin City Limits, were released on March 21. The gay community was displeased that he made jokes about them, and the trans community took offense to this remark about Caitlyn Jenner: “Whenever I see one of them T’s [i.e. transsexuals] on the street, I’m like ‘I don’t mind them but man I miss Bruce.’”
To the comedian’s credit, he did warn his audience to “man the f*ck up or you’re not going to make it through this show.”
If anything, Chappelle’s personal mission in comedy is to seek the truth, even if it hurts. He refuses to be constrained by political correctness and hurt feelings. Rather, he wants his audience to think, consider, debate, discuss, argue, and react to the world we live in. There are many sides to a particular story, and each one needs to be investigated intelligently, forcefully — and above all, humorously.
That’s something many conservatives support, and should always support in a liberal democratic society — even if it took a liberal comedian to remind us of this fact.
Thursday, March 30, 2017
The world of comedy has long been dominated by liberal entertainers. With a few exceptions, including Bob Hope, Jack Benny, Sheryl Underwood, Jamie Farr, Jeff Foxworthy, Dennis Miller, Joan Rivers, and Jackie Mason, most of the funny men and women on stage just aren’t on our side.
This doesn’t mean the political Right can’t appreciate left-leaning comedians who push the envelope and challenge societal norms. In particular, Dave Chappelle’s unique brand of comedy has his share of conservative fans — including me.
Chappelle, who is in the midst of a career comeback with a three-part special on Netflix, is a comedic genius. The 43-year-old’s stage presence, laser-sharp focus on current issues, outside-the-box thinking on race relations, and strong support for free speech make for a lethal combination. He doesn’t believe the political Left necessarily has all the answers, either.
This has been evident during his time on the comedy-club circuit, as well as various TV cameos (Home Improvement, The Larry Sanders Show) and movie roles (Robin Hood: Men in Tights, The Nutty Professor).
Yet it was his groundbreaking sketch-comedy series, Chappelle’s Show (2003–06), on Comedy Central, that really opened the eyes of many to the immense talent of this great performer.
Some of his memorable sketches included: “Frontline,” starring Clayton Bigsby, the blind black white-supremacist; “Charlie Murphy’s True Hollywood Stories,” which involved a pick-up game of basketball against Prince and the wild evenings of singer Rick James; “The Niggar Family,” about a white household living in an Ozzie and Harriet-type community with an eyebrow-raising last name; and the ever-lovin’ crack addict, Tyrone Biggums.
I’ve never laughed harder in my life than I did at some of his comedy routines. I still watch the DVD box set of his show, which he abruptly walked away from (along with a $50 million deal) and went to South Africa after reports of burnout, frustration, and loss of creative control. The episodes never grow old.
Sure, Chappelle’s comedy is politically edgy at times. He’s expressed some concerns about Republicans and conservatives. He never cared for George W. Bush, and he created a “Black Bush” character to juxtapose what White America and Black America could potentially get away with.
At the same time, he’s not a knee-jerk liberal. Far from it.
During a comedy set last year, Chappelle mentioned that he found the language contained on then–GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump’s leaked 2005 Access Hollywood video to be “gross.” At the same time, “the way I got to hear it was even more gross. You know that came directly from Hillary.” When he begrudgingly admitted that he voted for Clinton, he reportedly didn’t “feel good” about it and said, “She’s not right and we all know she’s not right.”
This initially caused some conservatives to speculate that Chappelle’s views about Trump had changed. He quickly put this theory to rest on TMZ just before the presidential election, stating “Jesus Christ, I’m not a Trump supporter.” (That being said, he did wish the president well after his victory and said he was “going to give him a chance.”)
The Daily Beast’s Amy Zimmerman wrote in a November 8 piece, “In the year of the political renegade, Chappelle is a fittingly loose cannon.” It was a predictable left-wing response to a celebrity who admitted that he wasn’t on Team Democrat with every ounce of his being. Heaven forbid he should be allowed to hold a contrarian opinion to the vast majority of the celebrity mob, right?
He even got lambasted after two Netflix specials, The Age of Spin: Live at the Hollywood Palladium and Deep in the Heart of Texas: Live at Austin City Limits, were released on March 21. The gay community was displeased that he made jokes about them, and the trans community took offense to this remark about Caitlyn Jenner: “Whenever I see one of them T’s [i.e. transsexuals] on the street, I’m like ‘I don’t mind them but man I miss Bruce.’”
To the comedian’s credit, he did warn his audience to “man the f*ck up or you’re not going to make it through this show.”
If anything, Chappelle’s personal mission in comedy is to seek the truth, even if it hurts. He refuses to be constrained by political correctness and hurt feelings. Rather, he wants his audience to think, consider, debate, discuss, argue, and react to the world we live in. There are many sides to a particular story, and each one needs to be investigated intelligently, forcefully — and above all, humorously.
That’s something many conservatives support, and should always support in a liberal democratic society — even if it took a liberal comedian to remind us of this fact.
Wednesday, March 29, 2017
Religious Trumpians Suffer from Stockholm Syndrome
By Ben Shapiro
Wednesday, March 29, 2017
One of the great lies of the last election cycle didn’t come from Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. It came from conservatives.
Specifically, the lie came from conservatives who suggested that after Trump was elected — after the Hildebeast had been defeated! — they would go back to holding Trump accountable, pushing for better public policy. Everything had to be put on hold to stop the Democrats from taking power, every heresy tolerated. But once Trump took the White House, conservatives could return to their political philosophy.
Nope.
It now appears that the cognitive dissonance associated with Trump support has morphed into full-blown Stockholm syndrome, with conservatives now waiving principle not to defeat Hillary Clinton, but to back Trump down the line. Many conservatives now say that Trump’s American Health Care Act was the best available bad option. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and President Trump had presented a crap sandwich, to be sure, but it was the best available crap sandwich. Never mind its 17 percent public-approval rating. Never mind its accelerated death spiral. Never mind its new entitlement, its maintenance of key Obamacare regulations, or its increased premiums for the next few years.
Trump wanted it; thus it was good; thus it had to be passed. It was The Best We Were Going To Do™.
Except that it wasn’t. It wasn’t the legislative process that required a bill cramdown on the president’s own party within a three-week period. It wasn’t the legislative process that offered an ultimatum to conservatives to embrace the suck. It wasn’t the legislative process that demanded conservatives sign on to all the policies they opposed when Obama promulgated them. It was Trump. And because Ryan thought that his best option involved parlaying with Trump rather than going through the rough business of policymaking, he negotiated with himself to create a one-off bill, hoping that Trump would bring the anti-establishment conservatives and that he’d bring the establishment Republicans.
It failed, in part because of Trump’s artificial deadline, in part because Trump would never have pushed a truly conservative piece of legislation that did away with preexisting-conditions regulations, and in part because Ryan decided to go along with Trump’s program in order to push through his long-awaited structural changes to Medicaid. And then, to top it off, Trump deployed famed subtle touch Steve Bannon to scream at Republicans about how they had to get their minds right or they’d spend the night in the box.
The bill was bad, and it deserved to go down in flames. The strategy was worse. Barack Obama spent 13 months hammering out Obamacare. Trump spent 17 days. But who gets blamed? The conservatives who actually took their promises about repealing Obamacare seriously. The gaddumed fools thought that it mattered whether they actually got rid of Obamacare. All they had to know was that many conservatives only cared about propping up Trump.
And so too many conservatives turned on the Freedom Caucus, which saved Republicans from passing an odious piece of legislation that would have crippled Republicans for years. They argued that Republicans had to go along with Trumpcare, because it was the “lesser of two evils.” They followed Trump’s lead, as Trump outrageously blamed the Freedom Caucus for preserving Planned Parenthood funding and Obamacare. The more to the left Trump moves, the more incompetently he governs, the more unpopular he becomes, the more his election defenders feel the need to defend him beyond the election.
There’s been a lot of talk about Never Trumpers dumping on Trump in order to prove they were right during the election cycle. There’s some truth to that — figures such as Evan McMullin seem dedicated to the proposition that everything Trump touches turns to hot garbage. But that case is overstated. Most of those who didn’t vote for Trump or Hillary have praised Trump fulsomely for conservative actions such as the nomination of Judge Gorsuch, his approach to cutting regulation, and most of his cabinet appointments.
There’s been far less talk about ardent Trump defenders who are now shifting their arguments about Trump’s supposed brilliance because they wish to avoid the non-brilliant reality of his presidency.
Remember when Trump would be a great president because he was a great negotiator? That old chestnut has been discarded in favor of “Trump got played by that Machiavellian Snidely Ryan.”
Remember when Trump would know how to work with Congress, because he wasn’t tied down to ideology? That’s been tossed out the window in favor of screaming about conservative obstructionism.
Remember when Trump would be the most conservative president ever, and this whole populist shtick would merely be a cover for a Mike Pence policy? That’s gone, and Trump’s now going to be the greatest aisle-reacher in history.
Remember when Trump would know how to fix D.C., because only he knew how corrupt it was? Now we hear that Trump didn’t understand the extent of the problem in D.C.
Remember when Trump’s toughness would mean that nobody would cross him? That argument now reads, “Trump’s so tough, he knew when to walk away.”
In other words, many conservatives have become religious Trumpians. There is nothing Trump can do to lose their love and respect. If he turns to the left, they’ll blame conservatives for failing to kowtow to leftist policy. If he gets nothing done, they’ll blame everybody else on earth for failing to support Trump properly. The god must be appeased.
And so the soul-sucking of many conservatives continues apace. This doesn’t mean that Trump won’t give conservatives some wins — he most assuredly will. And those wins deserve celebration. But the question remains: When Trump crosses conservatives, will their allegiance remain with them, or with the philosophy they supposedly sought to uphold in electing him to avoid Hillary Clinton?
Wednesday, March 29, 2017
One of the great lies of the last election cycle didn’t come from Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. It came from conservatives.
Specifically, the lie came from conservatives who suggested that after Trump was elected — after the Hildebeast had been defeated! — they would go back to holding Trump accountable, pushing for better public policy. Everything had to be put on hold to stop the Democrats from taking power, every heresy tolerated. But once Trump took the White House, conservatives could return to their political philosophy.
Nope.
It now appears that the cognitive dissonance associated with Trump support has morphed into full-blown Stockholm syndrome, with conservatives now waiving principle not to defeat Hillary Clinton, but to back Trump down the line. Many conservatives now say that Trump’s American Health Care Act was the best available bad option. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and President Trump had presented a crap sandwich, to be sure, but it was the best available crap sandwich. Never mind its 17 percent public-approval rating. Never mind its accelerated death spiral. Never mind its new entitlement, its maintenance of key Obamacare regulations, or its increased premiums for the next few years.
Trump wanted it; thus it was good; thus it had to be passed. It was The Best We Were Going To Do™.
Except that it wasn’t. It wasn’t the legislative process that required a bill cramdown on the president’s own party within a three-week period. It wasn’t the legislative process that offered an ultimatum to conservatives to embrace the suck. It wasn’t the legislative process that demanded conservatives sign on to all the policies they opposed when Obama promulgated them. It was Trump. And because Ryan thought that his best option involved parlaying with Trump rather than going through the rough business of policymaking, he negotiated with himself to create a one-off bill, hoping that Trump would bring the anti-establishment conservatives and that he’d bring the establishment Republicans.
It failed, in part because of Trump’s artificial deadline, in part because Trump would never have pushed a truly conservative piece of legislation that did away with preexisting-conditions regulations, and in part because Ryan decided to go along with Trump’s program in order to push through his long-awaited structural changes to Medicaid. And then, to top it off, Trump deployed famed subtle touch Steve Bannon to scream at Republicans about how they had to get their minds right or they’d spend the night in the box.
The bill was bad, and it deserved to go down in flames. The strategy was worse. Barack Obama spent 13 months hammering out Obamacare. Trump spent 17 days. But who gets blamed? The conservatives who actually took their promises about repealing Obamacare seriously. The gaddumed fools thought that it mattered whether they actually got rid of Obamacare. All they had to know was that many conservatives only cared about propping up Trump.
And so too many conservatives turned on the Freedom Caucus, which saved Republicans from passing an odious piece of legislation that would have crippled Republicans for years. They argued that Republicans had to go along with Trumpcare, because it was the “lesser of two evils.” They followed Trump’s lead, as Trump outrageously blamed the Freedom Caucus for preserving Planned Parenthood funding and Obamacare. The more to the left Trump moves, the more incompetently he governs, the more unpopular he becomes, the more his election defenders feel the need to defend him beyond the election.
There’s been a lot of talk about Never Trumpers dumping on Trump in order to prove they were right during the election cycle. There’s some truth to that — figures such as Evan McMullin seem dedicated to the proposition that everything Trump touches turns to hot garbage. But that case is overstated. Most of those who didn’t vote for Trump or Hillary have praised Trump fulsomely for conservative actions such as the nomination of Judge Gorsuch, his approach to cutting regulation, and most of his cabinet appointments.
There’s been far less talk about ardent Trump defenders who are now shifting their arguments about Trump’s supposed brilliance because they wish to avoid the non-brilliant reality of his presidency.
Remember when Trump would be a great president because he was a great negotiator? That old chestnut has been discarded in favor of “Trump got played by that Machiavellian Snidely Ryan.”
Remember when Trump would know how to work with Congress, because he wasn’t tied down to ideology? That’s been tossed out the window in favor of screaming about conservative obstructionism.
Remember when Trump would be the most conservative president ever, and this whole populist shtick would merely be a cover for a Mike Pence policy? That’s gone, and Trump’s now going to be the greatest aisle-reacher in history.
Remember when Trump would know how to fix D.C., because only he knew how corrupt it was? Now we hear that Trump didn’t understand the extent of the problem in D.C.
Remember when Trump’s toughness would mean that nobody would cross him? That argument now reads, “Trump’s so tough, he knew when to walk away.”
In other words, many conservatives have become religious Trumpians. There is nothing Trump can do to lose their love and respect. If he turns to the left, they’ll blame conservatives for failing to kowtow to leftist policy. If he gets nothing done, they’ll blame everybody else on earth for failing to support Trump properly. The god must be appeased.
And so the soul-sucking of many conservatives continues apace. This doesn’t mean that Trump won’t give conservatives some wins — he most assuredly will. And those wins deserve celebration. But the question remains: When Trump crosses conservatives, will their allegiance remain with them, or with the philosophy they supposedly sought to uphold in electing him to avoid Hillary Clinton?
Paul Ryan Is a Convenient Scapegoat
By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, March 29, 2017
Paul Ryan did it.
That’s the argument many of the louder voices on the right are shouting. In the story they tell, the speaker of the House is fully responsible for the GOP’s failure to pass an Obamacare repeal-and-replace bill last week. President Trump should walk across a Havana ballroom like Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part II, kiss Ryan on the mouth and say, “I know it was you, Paul. You broke my heart.”
Jeanine Pirro, host of Justice with Judge Jeanine on Fox News and an old friend of Trump’s whose support for his candidacy was about as nuanced as a horse head in your bed, suggested that Trump was beguiled and seduced by Ryan.
“Americans elected the one man they believed could do it. A complete outsider. Someone beholden to no one — but them,” Pirro said straight into the camera on her TV show.
“And Speaker Ryan, you come in, with all your swagger and experience, and you sell him a bill of goods that ends up a complete and total failure. And you allow our president, in his first 100 days, to come out of the box like that?”
“Folks,” she continued, “I want to be clear: This is not on President Trump.” (The “not,” by the way, is all-caps on her website.) “No one expected a businessman to completely understand the nuances, the complicated ins and outs of Washington and its legislative process.”
Translation: Donnie’s a good boy, he just fell in with the wrong crowd.
Over at CNN, Trump loyalist Jeffrey Lord also insisted, “This is Speaker Ryan’s fault.”
Back over at Fox (where I am a contributor), Sean Hannity read from the same hymnal: “Let me be very clear here. This is not President Trump’s failure. The president went above and beyond, did everything in his power to get this bill across the finish line.”
There are three interesting things about this new orthodoxy.
First, that’s not what Trump says. On Saturday morning, Trump placed the blame squarely on the House Freedom Caucus, the 30-odd members of Congress who reportedly kept changing their demands until it was clear they were never going to support the American Health Care Act. Nor is there a single quote from a member of Congress echoing this sentiment, even from the Freedom Caucus. The people in the room understand that Ryan, who clearly made some mistakes, nonetheless acted in good faith to move the president’s agenda.
The Pirro crowd, however, can’t endorse the effort to blame the Freedom Caucus, because it’s the heir of True Conservatism. If Trump found himself in opposition to the group, it must be because he was tricked — by Ryan’s irresistible “swagger.”
The second point: Contrary to what Pirro says, she and the other members of Trump’s amen chorus did expect him to work miracles, or at least they said as much. Indeed, during the campaign, Trump said “it will be so easy” to get rid of Obamacare. Trump and his boosters insisted there was nothing he couldn’t do with his Jedi-like negotiating skills and gift for “winning.”
So the only explanation that can rescue them from the agony of cognitive dissonance is to insist that Trump was betrayed.
That’s why Hannity’s claim that Trump did “everything in his power” to get the bill passed is an accidental admission against interest. It concedes the falsity of the idea that Trump is a modern-day, omni-competent Cincinnatus who will lay down his golf bag to save the republic.
Third: It’s a sign of things to come. Some conservatives opposed Trump in the primaries because they — we — didn’t trust him to uphold conservative principles. The Hannitys and Heritage Foundations insisted these fears were misplaced. And on some issues (Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Cabinet appointments, etc.), they’ve been somewhat vindicated.
But now, because of the Freedom Caucus’s stubbornness, Trump is signaling that he might be happier to work with Democrats than deal with the purity caucus — an alliance that certainly would not lead to conservative policies.
Should that come to pass (a difficult task given the polarization of the parties), there will be more talk of betrayal, but the loyalists will doubtless find a way to blame anyone but Trump.
Wednesday, March 29, 2017
Paul Ryan did it.
That’s the argument many of the louder voices on the right are shouting. In the story they tell, the speaker of the House is fully responsible for the GOP’s failure to pass an Obamacare repeal-and-replace bill last week. President Trump should walk across a Havana ballroom like Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part II, kiss Ryan on the mouth and say, “I know it was you, Paul. You broke my heart.”
Jeanine Pirro, host of Justice with Judge Jeanine on Fox News and an old friend of Trump’s whose support for his candidacy was about as nuanced as a horse head in your bed, suggested that Trump was beguiled and seduced by Ryan.
“Americans elected the one man they believed could do it. A complete outsider. Someone beholden to no one — but them,” Pirro said straight into the camera on her TV show.
“And Speaker Ryan, you come in, with all your swagger and experience, and you sell him a bill of goods that ends up a complete and total failure. And you allow our president, in his first 100 days, to come out of the box like that?”
“Folks,” she continued, “I want to be clear: This is not on President Trump.” (The “not,” by the way, is all-caps on her website.) “No one expected a businessman to completely understand the nuances, the complicated ins and outs of Washington and its legislative process.”
Translation: Donnie’s a good boy, he just fell in with the wrong crowd.
Over at CNN, Trump loyalist Jeffrey Lord also insisted, “This is Speaker Ryan’s fault.”
Back over at Fox (where I am a contributor), Sean Hannity read from the same hymnal: “Let me be very clear here. This is not President Trump’s failure. The president went above and beyond, did everything in his power to get this bill across the finish line.”
There are three interesting things about this new orthodoxy.
First, that’s not what Trump says. On Saturday morning, Trump placed the blame squarely on the House Freedom Caucus, the 30-odd members of Congress who reportedly kept changing their demands until it was clear they were never going to support the American Health Care Act. Nor is there a single quote from a member of Congress echoing this sentiment, even from the Freedom Caucus. The people in the room understand that Ryan, who clearly made some mistakes, nonetheless acted in good faith to move the president’s agenda.
The Pirro crowd, however, can’t endorse the effort to blame the Freedom Caucus, because it’s the heir of True Conservatism. If Trump found himself in opposition to the group, it must be because he was tricked — by Ryan’s irresistible “swagger.”
The second point: Contrary to what Pirro says, she and the other members of Trump’s amen chorus did expect him to work miracles, or at least they said as much. Indeed, during the campaign, Trump said “it will be so easy” to get rid of Obamacare. Trump and his boosters insisted there was nothing he couldn’t do with his Jedi-like negotiating skills and gift for “winning.”
So the only explanation that can rescue them from the agony of cognitive dissonance is to insist that Trump was betrayed.
That’s why Hannity’s claim that Trump did “everything in his power” to get the bill passed is an accidental admission against interest. It concedes the falsity of the idea that Trump is a modern-day, omni-competent Cincinnatus who will lay down his golf bag to save the republic.
Third: It’s a sign of things to come. Some conservatives opposed Trump in the primaries because they — we — didn’t trust him to uphold conservative principles. The Hannitys and Heritage Foundations insisted these fears were misplaced. And on some issues (Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Cabinet appointments, etc.), they’ve been somewhat vindicated.
But now, because of the Freedom Caucus’s stubbornness, Trump is signaling that he might be happier to work with Democrats than deal with the purity caucus — an alliance that certainly would not lead to conservative policies.
Should that come to pass (a difficult task given the polarization of the parties), there will be more talk of betrayal, but the loyalists will doubtless find a way to blame anyone but Trump.
The Democrats v. Gorsuch
National Review Online
Wednesday, March 29, 2017
Judge Neil Gorsuch is a mainstream conservative judge who has earned the respect of liberals in the legal world, and this fact has caused no end of frustration to Democrats who are resolved to block a vote on his nomination to the Supreme Court. Since they do not control the Senate, they could not do what the Republicans did last year and refuse to consider the nomination of a president they oppose. Hearings took place, and Gorsuch acquitted himself well. Democrats are having to invent spurious justifications for their opposition.
They have highlighted, and distorted, three of the judge’s decisions. Cecile Richards, the head of Planned Parenthood, says that Gorsuch “believes that actually bosses should be able to decide whether or not women should be able to get birth-control coverage.” We have no evidence that he believes any such thing. He did not rule that businesses should be able to refrain from providing insurance coverage for forms of birth control to which they object; he ruled that under the religious-freedom law Congress enacted, they can refrain. (He did not rule, either, that the law allows employers to stop their employees from buying whatever coverage they like.)
Senator Al Franken (D., Minn.) says that Gorsuch “sided with” a trucking company that fired an employee who disobeyed a company directive by driving his vehicle to escape freezing conditions. But Gorsuch did not say that the company made the right decision or even that the law should have allowed it to fire the driver; he merely said that the law as it stood did allow it to fire him.
Finally, several senators have excoriated a decision in which Gorsuch ruled against the family of an autistic child who sought help beyond what the local schools were willing to provide. The Democrats claim that a Supreme Court ruling that came down during the hearings repudiated the legal standard Gorsuch applied. They neglect to mention that Gorsuch was applying a precedent of his circuit, as he was bound to do; that the Supreme Court itself mentioned that it had left the law in this area confused, something only it could resolve; and that a liberal Democratic appointee had joined in Gorsuch’s decision.
The theme running through all of these criticisms is that Democrats want Gorsuch to reach results that run counter to the law — a point that Senator Kamala Harris (D., Calif.) put with characteristic artlessness in complaining about Gorsuch’s attention to “legalisms.” These criticisms thus testify to the judge’s fitness for the Supreme Court.
When they are not distorting cases, the Democrats have been unable to mount a coherent case. Thus they say that Judge Gorsuch is simultaneously too deferential to President Trump (because he has failed to denounce the man who nominated him) and not deferential enough (because he has said that executive-branch agencies have too much leeway to apply their own interpretations of the law).
And they have complained, oh have they complained, about the Republicans’ refusal to allow President Obama’s nominee, Judge Merrick Garland, to sit on the Supreme Court. The Constitution gave the Republicans the right not to schedule hearings for Garland. It gives the Democrats the right to complain about it, and even to filibuster Gorsuch’s nomination in response. It also gives the Senate Republicans the power to end filibusters of Supreme Court nominees. Gorsuch is a good enough nominee, and the cause of getting judges committed to the rule of law is sufficiently important, that Republicans should exercise that power should it prove necessary.
Wednesday, March 29, 2017
Judge Neil Gorsuch is a mainstream conservative judge who has earned the respect of liberals in the legal world, and this fact has caused no end of frustration to Democrats who are resolved to block a vote on his nomination to the Supreme Court. Since they do not control the Senate, they could not do what the Republicans did last year and refuse to consider the nomination of a president they oppose. Hearings took place, and Gorsuch acquitted himself well. Democrats are having to invent spurious justifications for their opposition.
They have highlighted, and distorted, three of the judge’s decisions. Cecile Richards, the head of Planned Parenthood, says that Gorsuch “believes that actually bosses should be able to decide whether or not women should be able to get birth-control coverage.” We have no evidence that he believes any such thing. He did not rule that businesses should be able to refrain from providing insurance coverage for forms of birth control to which they object; he ruled that under the religious-freedom law Congress enacted, they can refrain. (He did not rule, either, that the law allows employers to stop their employees from buying whatever coverage they like.)
Senator Al Franken (D., Minn.) says that Gorsuch “sided with” a trucking company that fired an employee who disobeyed a company directive by driving his vehicle to escape freezing conditions. But Gorsuch did not say that the company made the right decision or even that the law should have allowed it to fire the driver; he merely said that the law as it stood did allow it to fire him.
Finally, several senators have excoriated a decision in which Gorsuch ruled against the family of an autistic child who sought help beyond what the local schools were willing to provide. The Democrats claim that a Supreme Court ruling that came down during the hearings repudiated the legal standard Gorsuch applied. They neglect to mention that Gorsuch was applying a precedent of his circuit, as he was bound to do; that the Supreme Court itself mentioned that it had left the law in this area confused, something only it could resolve; and that a liberal Democratic appointee had joined in Gorsuch’s decision.
The theme running through all of these criticisms is that Democrats want Gorsuch to reach results that run counter to the law — a point that Senator Kamala Harris (D., Calif.) put with characteristic artlessness in complaining about Gorsuch’s attention to “legalisms.” These criticisms thus testify to the judge’s fitness for the Supreme Court.
When they are not distorting cases, the Democrats have been unable to mount a coherent case. Thus they say that Judge Gorsuch is simultaneously too deferential to President Trump (because he has failed to denounce the man who nominated him) and not deferential enough (because he has said that executive-branch agencies have too much leeway to apply their own interpretations of the law).
And they have complained, oh have they complained, about the Republicans’ refusal to allow President Obama’s nominee, Judge Merrick Garland, to sit on the Supreme Court. The Constitution gave the Republicans the right not to schedule hearings for Garland. It gives the Democrats the right to complain about it, and even to filibuster Gorsuch’s nomination in response. It also gives the Senate Republicans the power to end filibusters of Supreme Court nominees. Gorsuch is a good enough nominee, and the cause of getting judges committed to the rule of law is sufficiently important, that Republicans should exercise that power should it prove necessary.
Tuesday, March 28, 2017
Like Ike
By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, March 28, 2017
Today marks the anniversary of the death of Dwight
Eisenhower on March 28, 1969. He was born in the 19th century and was one of
the indispensable figures of the 20th. There were more consequential men in his
generation, “consequential” being a word that is morally neutral: Adolf Hitler
was born one year before him, Mao Zedong three years after.
We generally remember public figures on their birthdays
rather than on the anniversaries of their deaths, with an exception for those
who died in assassinations or other dramatic fashions. But there is something
to be learned from Eisenhower’s death, a subject to which he gave some real
consideration before the moment was forced to its crisis. He had been, during
his military career, “General of the Army,” an extraordinary and temporary rank
that, before its revival by Congress in 1944, had last been conferred upon
Ulysses Grant, William T. Sherman, and (an honorary designation just before his
death) Philip Sheridan. The only man ever to outrank Eisenhower while living
was General of the Armies John Pershing, George Washington having been promoted
to that rank only posthumously.
General Grant had saved the country before becoming its
president; General Eisenhower, who was deeply competitive, one-upped Grant and
saved the world. (Before that, he had spent 16 years as a major without being
promoted.) “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can,” Eisenhower
later said, “only as one who has seen its brutality, its stupidity.” But in
Eisenhower’s army, high promotions were earned on the battlefield, and he must
have secretly welcomed the opportunity for advancement. He was, like General
Washington, conscious of his reputation.
And what a reputation it was. It is difficult for
Americans living in 2017 to imagine a sitting American president, much less a
retired one, being the most highly regarded man in the world. But Richard Nixon
did not exaggerate in his eulogy of his predecessor: “Some men are considered
great because they lead great armies or they lead powerful nations. For eight
years now, Dwight Eisenhower has neither commanded an army nor led a nation;
and yet he remained through his final days the world’s most admired and
respected man, truly the first citizen of the world.”
Eisenhower hadn’t quite made like Cincinnatus, but he did
retire to his farm in Pennsylvania, though he spent much of his time in sunny
Palm Desert, Calif., where he golfed by day and played bridge by night. He did
not go out of his way to inject himself into public life. Part of that
certainly had to do with the rise of the conservative movement, which
understood itself as opposed to Eisenhower-style Republicanism —“Our principles
are round, and Eisenhower is square,” declared young William F. Buckley Jr. —
and whose members did not share the world’s awe of Eisenhower. Like Ronald
Reagan, Eisenhower had made his peace with much of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s
welfare state, leading Barry Goldwater to dismiss his program as “a dime-store
New Deal.”
But Eisenhower had a great deal on his agenda: He wanted
to balance the budget and end the Korean War. He integrated the military, which
Harry Truman had promised and failed to do. He also desegregated the District
of Columbia and the federal government, and used federal funding as leverage to
force desegregation elsewhere. He fought for and signed the Civil Rights Acts
of 1957 and 1960. When the Democrats in Arkansas refused to comply with Brown, Eisenhower sent in the 101st
Airborne. He established NASA and DARPA and signed the National Defense
Education Act into law. He oversaw the revision of the Atomic Energy Act to
allow for the development of civilian nuclear power. He smacked down Joseph
McCarthy and, when his advisers unveiled a crackpot scheme to use nuclear
weapons to save the French position at Dien Bien Phu, he replied: “You boys
must be crazy.” He sent U.S. troops into Lebanon to stop a Soviet-backed
revolt. He convinced Congress to pass the Formosa Resolution, obliging the
United States to defend Taiwan against Communist China. He forced the
withdrawal of foreign forces from Egypt during the Suez crisis. He saw to the
elevation of West Germany as a full NATO member, a critical turning point in
European affairs. He helped Mohammad Mosaddegh into an early retirement. He
welcomed two new states into the Union.
The remarkable thing is that, while all that was going
on, Eisenhower managed to convince the nation that there were no crises and
nothing to worry about, that he was spending much of his time playing golf. The
nation was happy to believe him.
He had waited a long time for his talents and abilities
to be appreciated, but upon his election he was intent on serving only a single
term. He served two, and perhaps these visual aids will shed some light on how
he came to that decision:
But even though he was very much conscious of his place
in the world and its history — and was not exactly immune to the temptations of
vanity, or to temptation, period — he set an example, tragically abandoned, of
conducting a presidential career with humility. Knowing that he would lie in
state after his death, he made detailed plans for the event: He was laid out in
the $80 government-issue wooden coffin that was the final resting place of
thousands of ordinary soldiers, wearing an army field jacket. A soldier, David
Ralph, sang “The Old Rugged Cross” at his funeral, which ended with a tape
recording of “America the Beautiful.”
He governed in complicated times. Those who take to heart
only his warnings about the “military-industrial complex” should bear in mind
that he oversaw a military budget that was, in real GDP terms, three times
larger than it is today. He sometimes called himself a “progressive
conservative,” meaning that, unlike the conservatives of his time, he saw no
pressing need to dismantle the welfare state — which at the time (again, in
real GDP terms) was barely a quarter of the size it is today. Time has a funny
way with things: The conservative movement rejected Eisenhower in the 1950s,
but which libertarian, national-security conservative, or traditionalist in
2017 would be unhappy if today’s Republicans cut 75 percent of the welfare
state, tripled military spending, cut taxes modestly, and balanced the budget
in the process — while working under a president with an excellent record on the
most pressing domestic issue of his time?
It is not 1957 anymore, and a return to Eisenhower-era
policies would be neither wise nor popular. But a return to modesty, prudence,
and genuine responsibility? That is something to which we ought to aspire. The
great events of Eisenhower’s day went from Great War to Depression to Holocaust
to Cold War, a ghastly progression, but Eisenhower remained famous for his
sunny disposition and his winning smile — which was, of course, partly genuine
and partly camouflage that protected others from the burdens he bore. The
United States does not need a Dwight Eisenhower holiday to go along with the
days set aside for men such as Washington and Lincoln. What the United States
does need is 365 days in the year on which we insist that the men with whom we
entrust the nation’s business endeavor to live up to the example set by men who
did so much more with so much less in incomparably harder times — that they, to
the extent that they have it in them, be like Ike.
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