In A Divided Congress, Mitch McConnell Is The Secret To Conservatives’ Success

By Jonathan S. Tobin

Friday, May 31, 2019

When Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told a Paducah, Kentucky, audience that if a U.S. Supreme Court vacancy opened up in 2020, “Oh, we’d fill it,” it set off howls of anger from Democrats and their cheering section in the mainstream media.

The statement was, they said, sheer hypocrisy, and gave the lie to McConnell’s claims in 2016 that it would be wrong to confirm a Supreme Court justice in a presidential election year. As they did during the 2016 election campaign when President Barack Obama’s pick, Judge Merrick Garland, languished as McConnell’s GOP Senate majority ignored the nomination, Democrats said Republicans were stealing a Supreme Court seat. They repeated that charge in 2017 when President Trump eventually filled the seat with Justice Neil Gorsuch and then Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

McConnell reacted to the talk about his hypocrisy with the same indifference with which he has treated every complaint from the Democrats as he has masterminded the confirmation of a record number of federal district court and appellate nominees since January 2017.

McConnell Ignores the Noise

Instead, McConnell has ignored the brickbats and concentrated his attention—and the lion’s share of the Senate’s time—on getting conservatives onto federal courts. Earlier this month, the GOP celebrated the confirmation of Trump’s 40th appointee to the federal appellate bench, in addition to even more district court judges. This rate far exceeds that of any other administration in living memory. These judges will serve lifetime appointments and likely have a far greater impact on the way the United States is governed than most members of Congress do.

This not only makes McConnell arguably the most influential Senate majority leader since Lyndon Johnson, but it’s also a tribute to his understanding of the importance of the federal judiciary that far outstrips that of his opponents. Executive power has steadily grown in the last century at the expense of the legislative branch. The administrative state run by presidential appointees runs roughshod over Congress in terms of the power to impose rules and re-interpret laws. That means federal courts have become the only way to check the power of the executive and, consequently, a political battleground of paramount importance.

As such, McConnell, once the man who epitomized the out-of-touch GOP establishment to the party’s grassroots activists and Tea Party insurgents, is now the one person, along with Trump, who is giving the conservative movement victories. Indeed, his single-minded determination to pack the courts with as many conservatives as possible, whether or not it takes rewriting existing Senate rules and transgressing the gentleman’s club ethos that once ruled the upper chamber, has made him the Republicans’ most valuable player on Capitol Hill.

Not that it matters much to him, but McConnell’s willingness to confirm another Supreme Court nominee, should Trump get another chance to fill a vacancy, doesn’t actually contradict the rationale the majority leader gave for his refusal to give Garland a hearing, let alone a vote. There was no modern precedent for a situation in which a president of one party would expect a Senate controlled by the opposition to not only confirm a nominee in an election year but to alter the balance of the Supreme Court. In the past, Democratic leaders like Joe Biden and current Minority Leader Chuck Schumer had warned Republican presidents they would behave much as McConnell did.

Nor could the seat be said to have been “stolen” from Obama, since the Senate always has the right to reject any nominee and Republicans were never going to go along with replacing a conservative icon like Antonin Scalia with a liberal like Garland.

McConnell Went Nuclear in the Best Way Possible

McConnell’s refusal to allow the process to unfold in the normal manner, even if it ended in rejection, was unprecedented. McConnell rightly understood that doing so would make it harder for Hillary Clinton to use the issue during the 2016 campaign than if Garland had gone down to defeat after the sort of brutal hearings (like the ones Gorsuch and Kavanaugh were subjected to) and a dramatic, drawn-out vote.

Had Senate Republicans been led by someone more concerned with preserving the traditionally clubby culture of the Senate and gaining the admiration of the Washington establishment and liberal mainstream media, things might have turned out very differently. Garland might still have been defeated, but a few members of the caucus who wanted to seem bipartisan might have defected and created a liberal majority on the court.

The same is true for McConnell’s willingness to go “nuclear” and end the right to filibuster Supreme Court nominees just as his Democratic predecessor Harry Reid did for lower-court nominations when Obama wanted more of his appointees confirmed. That enabled Gorsuch and Kavanaugh to be confirmed. Indeed, given the stakes involved, had the filibuster remained in place, it’s hard to imagine anyone being confirmed to the court in the foreseeable future, no matter what party is in charge.

McConnell also junked another arcane Senate tradition (albeit one only enforced since the 1950s) in which senators from a judge’s home state had the right to void a nomination by withholding a so-called blue slip. He treated rules about the time needed to debate judicial nominations with the same disdain.

Nobody Likes Mitch, But Mitch Doesn’t Care

The majority leader lacks popular appeal, and his establishment roots have always made him a punching bag for GOP populists. Indeed, he was a target of conservative insurgents in his last re-election race in 2014 and was treated by Steve Bannon and the Breitbart crowd as the right’s public enemy number one for a while, since they unfairly blamed him for Obama’s ability to use his executive power to ram a liberal agenda down the country’s throat.

Yet no other conservative in the last generation has had as much of an impact as McConnell. Without him, Trump would not have been able to confirm even a fraction of the court appointments he made. Nor would he be as certain that the current House Democratic majority’s liberal legislative agenda would not be able to be stopped stone-cold upon arrival in the Senate. Democrats’ claim that he has made the Senate a “legislative graveyard” should remind Republicans of McConnell’s importance as much as the continued griping about Garland.

Old-school Republicans who long for the return to a more genteel era in Washington politics may regret McConnell’s tactics as much as they do Trump’s Twitter account and willingness to troll opponents with intemperate language. But only McConnell’s hardheaded strategic legislative vision has enabled Republican success on Capitol Hill. That’s something that Trump, who was slow to warm to the majority leader, seems to have learned.

They may not love him, but GOP activists should be throwing roses at McConnell every day of the week. The judges he has and will continue to confirm will do more to defend the Constitution and preserve conservative principles than the fiery rhetoric of Tea Party favorites. Democrats’ cries of foul play and hypocrisy should remind McConnell’s right-wing critics that, like him or not, he’s the most valuable politician Republicans have.

Sorry, Alarmists, Climate Chaos Is Not Here

By David Harsanyi

Thursday, May 30, 2019

Climate isn’t the same as weather—unless, of course, weather happens to be politically useful. In that case, weather portends climate apocalypse.

So warns Elizabeth Warren as she surveyed Iowan rainstorms, which she claims, like tornadoes and floods, are more frequent and severe. “Different parts of the country deal with different climate issues,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–Malthusia) cautioned as she too warned of extreme tornadoes. “But ALL of these threats will be increasing in intensity as climate crisis grows and we fail to act appropriately.”

Sen. Jeff Merkley (D–Ore.) recently sent a fundraising email warning Democrats that climate change was causing “growing mega-fires, extremely destructive hurricanes, and horrific flooding” in which “American lives are at stake.”

Even if we pretend that passing a bazillion-dollar authoritarian Green New Deal would do anything to change the climate, there is no real-world evidence that today’s weather is increasingly threatening to human lives. By every quantifiable measure, in fact, we’re much safer despite the cataclysmal framing of every weather-related event.

How many of those taken in by alarmism realize that deaths from extreme weather have dropped somewhere around 99.9 percent since the 1920s? Heat and cold can still be killers, but thanks to increasingly reliable and affordable heating and cooling systems, and other luxuries of the age, the vast majority of Americans will never have to fear the climate in any genuine way.

Since 1980, death caused by all natural disasters and heat and cold is somewhere under 0.5 percent.

It’s true that 2019 has seen a spike in tornadoes, but mostly because 2018 was the first year recorded without a single violent tornado in the United States. Tornadoes killed 10 Americans in 2018, the fewest since we started keeping track of these things in 1875, only four years after the nefarious combustion engine was invented.

There has also been a long-term decline in the cost of tornado damage. In 2018, we experienced near-lows in this regard. The only better years were 2017, 2016, and 2015.

After a few devastating hurricanes around a decade ago, we were similarly warned that it was a prelude to endless storms and ecological disaster. This was followed by nine years without a single major hurricane in the United States. Or, in other words, six fewer hurricanes than we experienced in 1908 alone.

According to the U.S. Natural Hazard Statistics, in fact, 2018 saw below the 30-year average in deaths not only by tornadoes and hurricanes (way under average) but also from heat, flooding, and lighting. We did experience a slight rise in deaths due to cold.

Pointing out these sort of things usually elicits the same reaction: Why do you knuckle-dragging troglodytes hate science? Well, because science’s predictive abilities on most things, but especially climate, have been atrocious. But mostly because science is being used as a cudgel to push leftist policy prescriptions without considering economic tradeoffs, societal reality, or morality.

There are two things in this debate that we can predict with near certitude: First, that modern technology will continue to allow human beings to adapt to organic and anthropogenic changes in the environment. Second, that human beings will never surrender the wealth and safety that technology has afforded and continues to afford them.

People who deny these realities are as clueless as any “denier” of science. That brings me back to Democrats.

There have been a number of stories predicting that 2020 will finally be the year politicians start making climate change an important issue. One can only imagine these reporters started their jobs last week.

It’s true that a number of Democrat presidential hopefuls have taken “no fossil fuel money” pledges—as if they were going to get any of that cash anyway—as they spew carbon into the atmosphere searching for another bad-weather photo-op. Kevin Curtis, the executive director of NRDC Action Fund, told BuzzFeed News that all of this was “really wicked cool.”

The 2018 midterm elections, adds Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, are when “climate change was beginning, for the first time, to play a significant role in a few races across the country.”

A poll conducted by that very same Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that even for the most left-wing voters, climate change—an imminent planetary tragedy that threatens the existence of all humanity and most animal species—ranked third on the list of most important issues. It ranked 17th among all voters, behind things like border security, tax reform, and terrorism.

Maybe one day the electorate will finally buy in. Climate change, though, didn’t even make a blip on exit polls of 2018. That is why Democrats keep ratcheting up the hysteria over every environmental tragedy.

“Climate chaos is here,” declares Merkley, “but it’s not too late to act.” Remember: When disaster is perpetually ten years away, it’s never too late to send Democrats some of your money.

Fix Climate Policy with Economics, Not Lawyers

By Jeremy Carl

Friday, May 31, 2019

Last week BP and Shell both pledged support for the Climate Leadership Council’s (CLC) proposal for a revenue-neutral “carbon fee and dividend” plan, under which extractors of carbon-based fuels would be charged a fee, and all of the money collected would be distributed to the public as a dividend. While conservatives have a wide variety of views on how, or even whether, to address climate policy, this initiative is perhaps the most genuinely bipartisan attempt so far to move forward on a famously contentious issue.

Under the CLC plan, the fee and dividend provisions would be combined with the repeal of a number of Obama-era regulatory policies, including the Clean Power Plan, that try to accomplish similar emissions-reduction goals, but in a less economically efficient manner. Its efficiency-focused approach has drawn the support of a significant number of Republicans, even some who are skeptical of the Left’s broader climate claims.

While I have not been involved with or taken a position on the CLC plan, I was privileged to spend the last decade directing the Task Force on Energy Policy at the Hoover Institution, chaired by two of the CLC plan’s initial co-authors, former U.S. secretary of state George Shultz and Ambassador Thomas Stephenson. I’ve also written extensively about the empirical effects of carbon pricing in my own scholarly work.

Shultz and Stephenson joined a distinguished group of GOP luminaries that includes former secretary of state James Baker, former Treasury secretary Hank Paulson, former Council of Economic Advisers head Martin Feldstein, and former Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan in creating the original CLC plan.

But while some critics have referred to the CLC as a Republican proposal, it was also endorsed by a number of prominent Democrats, including Larry Summers and Steve Chu, who served as Treasury secretary and energy secretary, respectively, under President Obama. It was also a rare proposal that won support from sources as diverse as major environmental NGOs (such as Conservation International) and industrial titans (such as Ford and GM). The plan’s core principles were endorsed by 27 Nobel Prize–winning economists and leading economic policymakers, including every living former chair of the Federal Reserve and 15 former chairs of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers from both parties.

But instead of expressing happiness that some of the biggest oil producers were willing to accept a major concession to help lower emissions under a plan with almost unprecedented bipartisan support, many on the left have complained because the plan also limits climate-change-related litigation. An article in the liberal blog ThinkProgress called this provision the oil companies’ “present to themselves.” According to Daniel Zarillo, an aide to New York mayor Bill de Blasio, it’s a “transparent attempt by fossil fuel companies to avoid the liability for decades of deception and denial about the consequence of burning fossil fuels.” Tom Butt, the mayor of Richmond, Calif., called it a “Trojan Horse proposal that attempts to prevent cities, counties, states, or others from holding fossil fuel companies accountable for climate change-related damages they knowingly caused.”

None of these climate-change lawsuits have succeeded, and there’s no reason to think they will. They all require novel, if not frivolous, legal theories. Even far-left European Union courts have thrown out suits of this type.

Moreover, even if they were successful, most such suits would do little to limit emissions going forward. The lawsuits are based on the idea that oil companies intentionally concealed evidence of severe damages from climate change. Even if these highly contestable claims were true, pursuing them is simply not the most productive approach to actually moving Americans toward a politically durable climate-policy solution.

Further, contrary to the implicit claims of Butt, Zarillo, and others who share their views, there is no significant evidence that oil and gas companies’ public positions on climate science have driven substantial changes in oil and gas consumption. Simply put, we use oil because it allows us to do important things that are very difficult to do without it. The vast majority of climate activists still fly on airplanes, drive gasoline-powered cars, and use plastics and other materials made from petroleum. Pricing carbon could change incentives and promote alternatives, while retrospective lawsuits do nothing to alter present realities.

Furthermore, even if activists somehow managed to bankrupt every major oil company without shifting the fundamental incentives in the energy markets, new investors would simply purchase their assets and restart the cycle. So why is the Left so invested in these lawsuits?

Beyond financial self-interest, they have a deeper ideological motivation: using climate change not just as an environmental-policy issue, but as a way to right all their perceived societal wrongs. Their primary concerns are not creating good public policy but promoting a political theology that I have referred to as “The Church of Environmentalism.”

As Representative Barbara Lee (D., Calif.) said, “addressing climate change is not just an environmental issue, but also an imperative to achieve racial and economic justice.” Last year the Sierra Club’s magazine ran an article endorsing climate-change lawsuits against the oil companies as the first step in “climate change reparations,” which was only “the base minimum required for any accounting of a crime as insidious as the profit-driven alteration of Earth’s atmosphere.” The NRDC has also approvingly called climate lawsuits “reparations,” as have articles in most of the leading left-wing publications, such as The New Republic, The Nation, and Mother Jones. Not to be outdone, the popular socialist magazine Jacobin called for trying oil executives for “crimes against humanity.”

This political theology masquerading as public policy is at work in Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) and Senator Ed Markey’s (D., Mass.) Green New Deal. While conservatives poked fun at some radical environmentalist policies discussed in the draft legislative summary, the actual legislation has surprisingly little to do with the environment at all, stating:

It is the duty of the Federal Government to create a Green New Deal . . . to promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth.

Looking at this broader political context, many on the right are, quite understandably, skeptical of the Left’s motives in pursuing their preferred climate policies. The Green New Deal and climate lawsuits are about punishing the Left’s enemies and funding left-wing social programs, while giving leftists a false sense of moral superiority. If climate change is the existential threat to humanity that the Left says it is, they are going to need to build a bipartisan consensus, not file frivolous lawsuits against energy companies, to address it.

Democrats’ Curious Disdain for Nuclear Power

By Robert Bryce

Thursday, May 30, 2019

Climate change is the No. 1 issue for Democrats, with a recent poll showing 82 percent of Democratic voters listed it as their top priority. To appeal to those voters, contenders for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination routinely call climate change an “existential threat” to the nation and the world. But amid all their rhetoric and promises of massively expensive plans to tackle the problem, these same Democrats — with the notable exception of Senator Cory Booker — steadfastly refuse to utter two critical words: nuclear power.

The Democrats’ disdain for nuclear energy deserves attention, because there is no credible pathway toward large-scale decarbonization that doesn’t include lots of it. That fact was reinforced Tuesday, when the International Energy Agency published a report declaring that without more nuclear energy, global carbon dioxide emissions will surge and “efforts to transition to a cleaner energy system will become drastically harder and more costly.”

How costly? The IEA estimates that “$1.6 trillion in additional investment would be required in the electricity sector in advanced economies from 2018 to 2040” if the use of nuclear energy continued to decline. That, in turn, would mean higher prices, as “electricity supply costs would be close to $80 billion higher per year on average for advanced economies as a whole.”

The report makes it clear that solar and wind energy cannot fill the gap left by the decline of the nuclear sector. Among the reasons cited by the Paris-based agency is land-use conflicts, a problem that is evident in Europe and across the U.S. The IEA says that “resistance to siting wind and, to a lesser extent, solar farms is a major obstacle to scaling up renewables capacity.” To take one example, last month, in Illinois, the Dewitt County Board voted against a wind project that would have covered more than 12,000 acres of land with 67 wind turbines standing nearly 600 feet high. To take another, earlier this month, in Indiana, the Tippecanoe County Commission passed a zoning ordinance that prohibits the installation of industrial-scale wind turbines.

By my count, since 2015, about 230 government entities from Maine to California have moved to reject or restrict wind projects. And an increasing number of rural communities are fighting large solar projects, too. On May 9, the town board of Cambria, N.Y. (population: 6,000), unanimously rejected a proposed 100-megawatt solar project. If built, the $210 million project would have covered about 900 acres with solar panels. Cambria town supervisor Wright Ellis, who has held that position for 27 years, told me, “We don’t want it. We are opposed to it.” Among the reasons Ellis gave me was that the project would result in a “permanent loss of agricultural land” and potentially reduce the value of some 350 nearby homes.

At the same time that an increasing number of rural communities are fighting the encroachment of large-scale renewable projects, the U.S. is facing a wave of nuclear-reactor retirements. Nine reactors in the U.S. are slated to be retired over the next three years, and the IEA estimates that domestic nuclear capacity could shrink by more than half in the next 20 years. The agency points to the many challenges facing the nuclear sector, including increased regulations, low-cost natural gas, and competition from subsidized renewables.

The timing of the IEA report is particularly relevant for New York City, which gets about 25 percent of its electricity from the two reactors at the Indian Point Energy Center in Buchanan, N.Y. Next April, Indian Point’s Unit 2 reactor will be permanently shuttered. In April 2021, its remaining reactor, Unit 3, will likewise be retired. When those reactors close, their output will largely be replaced by three gas-fired power plants, which is no surprise: Whenever nuclear reactors are shuttered, they get replaced by plants that burn natural gas, and that means increased emissions of carbon dioxide.

In 2013, when Michael Bloomberg was mayor, his office issued a report that estimated closing Indian Point and replacing it with gas-fired generation would “increase New York City’s greenhouse gas emissions by approximately 15 percent.” It also said the city “depends on Indian Point for reliability as congested transmission lines limit power imports from more distant locations.” But current mayor — and Democratic presidential hopeful — Bill de Blasio steadfastly refuses to acknowledge Indian Point’s importance, or the potential of nuclear power in general. Last month, de Blasio unveiled his $14 billion NYC Green New Deal plan, which aims to cut New York City’s emissions by 30 percent by 2030. With the looming loss of Indian Point, that 30 percent goal will effectively become 45 percent.

Another Democratic contender, Beto O’Rourke, has dubbed climate change “our greatest threat” and says he will “mobilize $5 trillion” to cut domestic greenhouse-gas emissions to zero by 2050. The word “nuclear” does not appear anywhere on his website, just as it’s absent from nearly every other Democratic presidential candidate’s site. That’s a shame, because the IEA’s report is just the latest in a long line of scientific papers pointing to the need for nuclear energy. In 2014, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change declared that achieving deep cuts in emissions will “require more intensive use” of low-emission technologies “such as renewable energy [and] nuclear energy.”

This is, frankly, one of the biggest and longest-running disconnects in American politics: The leaders of the Democratic party insist that the U.S. must make big cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions because of the threat posed by climate change, but for nearly five decades, they have either ignored or professed outright opposition to nuclear energy. The last time the party’s platform contained a positive statement about nuclear power was way back in 1972.

America’s top Democrats repeatedly tout the need for “clean” energy and massive deployments of wind and solar power, but by denying the role that nuclear energy must play in any successful decarbonization efforts, they are ignoring the scientific consensus. If they truly care about the dangers posed by climate change, they should stand up and tell the truth about the need for nuclear energy. Until that happens, their various plans to address the issue will be impossible to take seriously.

Silicon Valley, America’s De Facto Censor

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Thursday, May 30, 2019

Silicon Valley’s behemoth companies are incapable of steering through the cross-pressures pushing them to censor more. These pressures come from social activists working on them through threatened boycotts, it comes from activists among their own employees and on their boards. These pressures come from centrist and liberal-leaning governments, which increasingly blame social media companies for their electoral failures. And surely these pressures also come from corporations who want to buy advertising on these massive platforms.

Several stories from the last week highlight the sheer variety of these pressures. The health-and-exercise movement Crossfit has recently seen one of its diet-discussion groups suppressed on Facebook. And the group subsequently urged the withdrawal of its members from the platform in stark terms, effectively alleging that Facebook is part of a larger corruptive force in social life:

Facebook is acting in the service of food and beverage industry interests by deleting the accounts of communities that have identified the corrupted nutritional science responsible for unchecked global chronic disease. In this, it follows the practices of Wikipedia and other private platforms that host public content but retain the ability to remove or silence — without the opportunity for real debate or appeal — information and perspectives outside a narrow scope of belief or thought.

Last week YouTube also took down a new documentary, Borderless, produced by right-wing activist Lauren Southern. The documentary features interviews with human traffickers, and undercover recordings of workers for non-governmental organizations who are assisting migrants. Southern is one of the many “alt-light”-style YouTube stars who have emerged there. YouTube’s decision to take down her video is renewing an argument on the right that access to digital platforms should be a right. This argument is being made vociferously in the renewed Human Events, by Will Chamberlain:

Southern has over 700,000 subscribers on YouTube. Those subscribers belong to her, not the company. She should be able to count on those subscribers seeing a film that violated none of the YouTube terms of service. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine that Southern would have embarked on this project had she not assumed she could show the end product to her audience.

Southern didn’t simply rely on her platform to justify all the time and energy spent making Borderless; she relied on YouTube’s previous commitments to content neutrality to justify building up her platform in the first place. And yet YouTube is utterly flippant about deleting her content.

It’s not just a matter of being careless over its own commitments, of course. YouTubers could make an argument that not only the near-monopoly position of YouTube in social video but the fact that digital platforms like it were, because of their viewpoint neutrality, privileged over traditional media companies in the law, has allowed it to capture and profit so much of the public square, and so government has a compelling democratic interest in guaranteeing greater freedom of expression on these platforms.

Finally, Canada seems to be giving Silicon Valley a warning ahead of its upcoming elections. The current government, under Justin Trudeau, announced that it had come to “an agreement” with Microsoft and Facebook to “boost security.” It also happens to be the case that the government is currently underwater in the polls.

Canada’s government claims that bad actors, including Russia, could try to interfere with their election. Though this is something that is rumored or feared in all big elections. You may recall that ahead of the last presidential election in France, there were wild reports of Russian interference on behalf of populist nationalists; Russia had hacked Emmanuel Macron’s email. News reports flew out with the heavy implication that one would be carrying out the Russian interest to vote for the nationalist Marine Le Pen’s National Front. Oddly, the defense against election hacking took on an international character. America’s National Security Agency announced that indeed it had evidence that the Russians had hacked France’s democracy. Months later it was admitted that there was no evidence to suggest that Russia had hacked Emmanuel Macron’s email. In other words, by suggesting falsely, that foreign actors were interfering in French elections, security agencies had in reality tarred domestic political enemies as dupes and patsies.

Nevertheless, Canada is being quite plain that it expects to see action from Silicon Valley, or else. Democratic Institutions Minister Karina Gould has emphasized that Internet and social-media companies that don’t freely make their platforms acceptable to her government will face regulation. “The Wild West online era cannot continue — inaction is not an option,” said Gould. “Disinformation must not stand.”

Liberal governments (and journalists who act as their hype men) were not at all troubled by the way Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign abused the privacy settings on Facebook. They celebrated it. Sash Issenberg gushed in Technology Review that by using the power of social-media companies, “Obama’s campaign began the election year confident it knew the name of every one of the 69,456,897 Americans whose votes had put him in the White House.” But when Cambridge Analytica studied a much smaller data trove on behalf of conservative and populist causes, it became a major problem for democracy.

Let’s stipulate right from the start that Silicon Valley is making up the rules as it goes along. And it is terrible at the job of censorship and political management. It responds to one set of panicked demands in Germany, then another in America. It goes from one publicity crisis manufactured by the mainstream press to another. And we know which direction those cut. The left-winger who was arrested ahead of a plan to bomb Trump Tower bragged on Instagram about donating money to Hamas, an organization deemed terrorist by most Western governments. Facebook, the parent company, did nothing to restrain his behavior. But the weirdos of the online Right — even the fringes — get banned for doing acts of journalism.

Google banned advertising in the run-up to Ireland’s national referendum on abortion rights last year for fear of “meddling,” a claim that it did not substantiate. The campaign looking to introduce legal abortion welcomed the ban, because it plainly helped them. Facebook also censored an ad, by the conservative Iona Institute, that featured a computer-generated image of an intact fetus. It had to reverse that decision later.

The problem goes beyond the large social networks. Banks, credit-card companies, payment processors, fundraising sites, Internet-hosting sites, and registrars have all been pressured to apply some political tests against users. Looked at from a certain angle, left-wing activist groups have asked that tools and tactics developed by the military and private companies to combat the rise of ISIS and al-Qaeda be deployed against conservatives on the home front.

But let’s take it a step further and posit that Silicon Valley’s executives and their boards further lack the intellectual wherewithal to come up with, in their terms of service, privacy and expression guidelines that they would be willing to defend during a controversy. What then?

The traditional libertarian answer is to throw up one’s hands and say that private companies can do as they wish. Consumers and readers and Internet users will tire of these ever-changing rules, and surely these social-media giants will go into decline like others before them. For some of these companies, that does seem like one possible fate.

Another traditional conservative response is to see size as the problem. Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms have swallowed expression that had been previously spread over a decentralized Internet, and with power, they have become more corrupt, and make for easy targets for activism. One only has to convince a few handfuls of people in order to create wide-reaching change in this model.

But I’m not so sure that the urge to censor will die as competitors move into the social-media space, or if the Internet trends back toward a more decentralized network of individually maintained websites. Activists aren’t going to stop with social-media networks, or nibbling at the soft right-wing fringe of discourse. The U.S. Postal Service has a duty to carry National Review or Jacobin to any address. Have conservatives thought hard enough about the duties imposed on Silicon Valley, on Internet-service providers, or on payment processors?

The above suggests that no, we haven’t. And we better think fast.

Why Europe’s Shocking Right Turn Is An Opportunity For The United States

By Sumantra Maitra

Tuesday, May 28, 2019

“The one system that absolutely does not work and never will is ersatz democracy,” Tucker Carlson writes in his book, “Ship of Fools,” adding that, “If you tell people they’re in charge, but then act as if they’re not, you’ll infuriate them. It’s too dishonest. They’ll go crazy. Oligarchies posing as democracies will always be overthrown in the end. You can vote all you want, but voting is a charade. Your leaders don’t care what you think. Shut up and obey.”

For a while, analysts on both sides of the Atlantic after 2016 would have given anyone the idea that everything that had happened was a dream, and a rotten one at that: an aberration, a short deviation from the inevitable progressive arc of history. Brexit was treated as simpleton Brits making a mistake. Donald Trump as president was considered even worse. And most Americans had no idea what was brewing in Europe, after German Chancellor Angela Merkel disastrously carried on her country’s tradition of deciding finance, military, and demographic issues for Europe and inviting a backlash.

Well, what a backlash it has been. The latest round of European elections was a total meltdown for the managerial and technocratic center-left and center-right parties. It is hard to put in words how broken the European landscape is, but to put it simply, the center no longer exists.

In Poland, the battleground of the future direction of Europe, the national conservatives won the majority, and the hardcore nationalists also get representation in the European Parliament for the first time. The center-right liberal conservative coalition barely managed to survive, and the social liberal and the left parties are wiped off the electoral map.

In Italy, another battleground nation, Matteo Salvini’s La Lega netted an overwhelming majority. Italy had been the worst-affected by German financial strangling and mass migration from Africa. Salvini tweeted that he led the number one party in Italy, and behind him was a recognizable and highly symbolic red cap with Make America Great Again and a statue of Jesus.

In Hungary, Victor Orban won an absolute majority while vowing to stop mass migration. And in France, Emmanuel Macron’s centrist liberals got an absolute belting, in an electoral map that looked eerily like Hillary Clinton’s 2016 journey, with the cities and urban areas voting for his En Marche Party and the rest of the country going to Euro-sceptic Marine Le Pen.

Meanwhile, in the original Brexit Land, the new Brexit Party walloped the craven Conservatives and Labour both, becoming the single largest U.K. party to be represented to the European Parliament. A country in which commentators regularly remind us that everything will change if there’s another referendum showed it remains stubbornly Eurosceptic and willing to leave the EU. Almost all of England other than London and Wales voted for Leave parties, and only Scotland voted for Remain, by a thin majority.

Boris Johnson, the front-runner for the next Conservative leadership, said his party is on notice after the disastrous premiership of Theresa May for the last three years, arguably the worst in the history of the post-war United Kingdom. And in parts of Scandinavia and Germany, the hard left coalesced behind the Green parties, thereby finally shattering the carefully crafted illusion that the Greens are any different than the Cold War-era Euro-Marxists, who instead of promoting violent revolution believed in undermining society from within. This is except the Danish left, which stayed to the Social Democrats, but only after the Social Democrats moved right on stopping migration.

Interestingly, the analysis has been predictable from the liberal commentators. Wherever liberals and Greens won, they gained a victory for “the people and true democracy,” and wherever there is any shade of right, they proclaim a win for the “fascists.”

In reality, however, the only simple answer is that Europe is permanently broken. Since anyone to the right of Antonio Gramsci is considered “far-right” by the mainstream commentators, it is difficult for them to explain, without the help of any racism or xenophobia narrative, what just happened in Europe. In reality, however, patterns emerged.

For example, the right parties that won in the United Kingdom, France, Netherlands, etc. are not xenophobic, as portrayed in the media. They are not even socially conservative, much less “borderline fascist.” In the United Kingdom, both the Brexit Party led by Nigel Farage and the Conservatives want to get out of the EU not because they want to isolate into a little Britain, but because they want to trade freely with the rest of the Anglosphere without EU control and to side more freely with the United States on defense issues, instead of being forced to be a part of the EU Army.

Likewise, in both France and the Netherlands, the right-wing parties are not socially conservative at all. In fact, they want to restrict mass migration from Africa and the Middle East because they want to safeguard the liberal society, LGBT rights, and the separation of church and state from groups of people considered extremely socially unorthodox.

Contrast that with the right parties in Hungary, Italy, and Poland, all of which want to transform the EU from within and, in their own words, preserve the “Christian civilization” and Judeo-Christian values of Europe. The stringent issues in these countries included the increasingly hard-left LGBT and transgender movement.

The Polish, Hungarian, and Italian right are also distinctly socially conservative and in some cases anti-free market, instead focusing on heavy subsidies for the elderly and promoting pro-natalist policies for new mothers. In the common liberal siege mentality, all these people are considered “far right” when in reality the only common theme tying these parties is their opposition to a European empire under German hegemony, and their support for national sovereignty.

As I wrote earlier, the biggest folly was to ever believe that Europe can be united without force, and the European Union, while turning into an empire, faces an existential challenge from sovereigntist and conservative forces from within. The latest election proves that national-conservatism is here to stay, and that the conservative parties that refuse to acknowledge this simple reality will be obliterated.

In fact, the desire for Westphalian nation-state sovereignty never left us. How to channel that new energy to a more constructive force across the continent, instead of pockets of sporadic resistance, remains to be seen.

However, this is the moment for the American government to channel these forces and shape Europe towards a more pro-American direction. The conservative forces within the continent are desperate for leadership against Berlin and Brussels. Washington DC should urgently take note.

Political Correctness Blinds Us To The Causes Of Anti-Semitism

By David Harsanyi

Wednesday, May 29, 2019

“Speak up, now, when you glimpse evidence of anti-Semitism, particularly within your own ranks, or risk enabling the spread of this deadly virus,” advises a New York Times editorial that fails to mention the words “Ihan Omar,” “Rashida Tlaib,” “Women’s March,” “Black Congressional Caucus,” or anything about the Democratic Party’s complicity in enabling these people and groups, for that matter.

To be fair, as far as New York Times editorials go, this isn’t the worst. It does, however, engage in the ugly leftist habit of blaming Jews for engendering hatred against themselves while downplaying inconvenient facts about anti-Semitism in Europe.

Earlier this year, the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs pointed out that nearly 90 percent of European Jews have suffered some form of anti-Semitic threat, insult, or assault. Of those polled, 30 percent identified the perpetrator as “someone with an extremist Muslim view,” 21 percent as someone with left-wing political views, and 13 percent as someone with right-wing politics.

Even the Times, which insinuates that the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe can largely be blamed on neo-fascists, was compelled to note that a European Union survey from 2018 found that 41 percent of German Jews who had experienced anti-Semitic harassment over the past five years believed the most serious incidents were perpetrated by “someone with a Muslim extremist view.”

“Whatever the reasons for the discrepancy,” the Times writes, brushing off its own advice about enabling hate, “the message from the German government is that anti-Semitism is not largely an imported problem, as far-right groups often maintain — as justification also for their Islamophobia.” The German government’s message to Jews, if we can be forgiven for a bit of skepticism, isn’t terribly convincing.

For one thing, if some wily “far-right” group is condemning anti-Semitism by pointing out some indisputable facts about Muslim immigration, it’s probably a good bet that the group isn’t as radical as the Times might have us believe. “Islamophobia,” after all, is often used to chill speech critical of a certain political and religious philosophy that has an important place in the left’s panorama of victimhood.

For another thing, The New York Times editorial board probably hasn’t been following the news. A number of German officials have already accused the police of obscuring the number of “Muslim extremists and anti-Zionists” who have engaged in anti-Jewish behavior. As Felix Klein, the commissioner tasked with combating anti-Semitism, has conceded, “the subjective perception of the threat posed by Muslim antisemitism is greater than is expressed in the criminal statistics.” There is plenty of evidence to support this opinion.

Not all refugees from Islamic nations are anti-Semites, and only fraction are violent. That doesn’t change the fact that Muslims make up only 5.7 percent of the German population, yet are responsible for somewhere between 30 to 50 percent of anti-Jewish hate crimes—and a larger percent of violent incidents. Even if we accept the low-end number, the uptick in anti-Semitic incidents over the past five years isn’t exactly difficult to track down.

In Germany, police now must guard every synagogue, Jewish school, and daycare center. This is not a tenable situation for any community in any free nation. It was only this weekend that Klein noted he would “no longer recommend Jews wear a kippa at every time and place.”

The context of Klein’s comment, it should be noted, was the upcoming, and increasingly popular, al-Quds day in Berlin—an annual “anti-Zionist” event rife with old-school Jew hatred that was created by the ayatollah of Iran in 1979, advocating for the destruction of Israel and the liberation of Jerusalem from the Jews.

The Times does concede that “radical Islam” is a problem in Europe. But a recent German intelligence study on general Muslim attitudes towards Jews found that hatred is imported and widespread. Turkey, a nation with many immigrants now in Germany, is one of the least anti-Semitic countries, and even there Jews were at “nearly 70 percent” unfavorability. An Anti-Defamation League poll found that 93 percent of Palestinians hold, not anti-Israeli views, but anti-Jewish beliefs.

A Pew poll found that in Jordan 99 percent have an unfavorable view towards Jews, and the same in Lebanon. In Egypt, it’s 98 percent. And so on. Even in Muslim-majority Indonesia, where there has never been more than a couple of thousand of Jews living at one time, 76 percent have an unfavorable view.

Perhaps perceptions regarding Jews will change once Muslim immigrants become acclimated to Western life. Or perhaps “anti-Zionism” will be normalized in Europe. Whatever the case, it’s absurd to believe that millions of new immigrants haven’t transported those views. Then again, the Times adds, maybe Jews shouldn’t be wearing their yarmulkes in public.

“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,” the editorial agues, “has not helped matters by finding common cause with nationalist leaders like the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban or President Trump so long as they do not support a Palestinian state.” How has this not helped?

Netanyahu has, of course, found common cause with a number of leaders who support a two-state solution, including George W. Bush. So the notion that the Israeli-American alliance is predicated on opposing the creation of a Palestinian state is absurd. The Palestinian state isn’t a reality because leadership in those territories embrace terrorism and make outlandish demands that would end the state of Israel.

One wonders, though, if the New York Times editorial writer sees any incongruity in demanding Israelis sit down with group of people who are virulently anti-Semitic and illiberal while wagging their finger at Israelis for being friendly with Hungary, a nation that protects its Jews and fights for Israel in the European Parliament.

Orban’s Hungary is far from perfect—although also far from the fascistic place his antagonists would have you believe. Yet its 100,000 Jews didn’t report a single physical attack against them in the past two years. It seems Jews are enjoying something of a renaissance in that country.

As Evelyn Gordon at Commentary noted not long ago, American Jews might believe that “rightist governments enable anti-Semitism” in Europe, but polls show that Jews feel safer, sometimes by a 20-point margin, in places like Poland, Hungary, and Romania—which, maybe not coincidentally, also have low numbers of Muslim immigrants—than they do in countries like France and Germany, where anti-Jewish violence is spiking.

According to the Times, though, Israel’s leaders also perpetuate anti-Semitism when they find common cause with the president of United States, who has angered anti-Semites worldwide by taking positions once widely supported by a majority of American Jews, like moving the American embassy to the capital of Jerusalem and pulling the United States out of the disastrous Iranian nuclear deal.

It’s gotten to the point where the left regularly lumps the elected leader of the Jewish state in with white supremacists because he’s shown more deference to Donald Trump than to Hamas, Fatah, or Iran. If Israel engenders anti-Semitism, a sentiment that supposedly has absolutely nothing to do with Israel, it’s only because people are predisposed to hating Jews.

Then again, maybe the Times doesn’t understand that it’s not Israel’s or America’s job to placate anti-Semitic thugs in Germany. One of the reasons Israel exists, actually, is so Jews would never again have to worry about such things.

‘Not Exonerated’ Is Not a Standard Any Free Country Should Accept

I’m sorry to be a broken record on this, but this line from Robert Mueller infuriates me:

“If we had had confidence that the president had clearly not committed a crime we would have said so.” Mueller

— David M. Drucker (@DavidMDrucker) May 29, 2019

That’s not how it works in America. Investigators are supposed to look for evidence that a crime was committed, and, if they don’t find enough to contend that a crime was a committed, they are supposed to say “We didn’t find enough to contend that a crime was committed.” They are not supposed to look for evidence that a crime was not committed and then say, “We couldn’t find evidence of innocence.”

I understand that Mueller was in an odd position. I understand, too, that this wasn’t a criminal trial. But I don’t think those norms are rendered any less important by those facts. By asking the executive to investigate itself, it was guaranteed — yes, guaranteed — that we’d have a fight over “obstruction of justice.” For the architect of that investigation to keep saying “We aren’t exonerating our target” is extraordinary. Innocence is the default position in this country. If a person doesn’t have enough evidence that someone committed a crime to contend that a crime was committed, he is obliged to presume his innocence. “Not exonerated” is not a standard in our system, and it shouldn’t be one in our culture, either.

John Bolton Was Right to Meet with Taiwan

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, May 28, 2019

National Security Adviser John Bolton has caused a furor in Beijing by meeting with his counterpart from Taiwan, leading an entire generation of young Americans to ask: “Where?”

Taiwan once loomed large in the American consciousness, and the American Right was particularly solicitous of its well-being. In the political vocabulary of the time, the Republic of China — Taiwan — was a tiny outpost of freedom menaced by Red China — the so-called People’s Republic.

Taiwan is still a thriving republic. China is still a single-party police state, grown perhaps a slightly paler shade of red. But American politics has changed and, to some extent, moved on.

Bolton, a movement conservative of Cold War vintage, apparently has not moved on. Good for Bolton.

The existence of Taiwan as an independent nation is a fact. It is no more a breakaway province of the People’s Republic of China than Massachusetts is a rebellious British colony. Its 24 million people constitute the largest nation to be excluded from the United Nations and from full American diplomatic recognition, and its economy of more than $600 billion is the largest of any country to be marginalized by the global economic and diplomatic communities. The Holy See is one of a tiny handful of sovereign states recognizing Taiwan.

Taiwan, too, once was a single-party police state, but it evolved out of that sorry state of affairs — and then some: The Freedom House index currently ranks Taiwan as a more free country than the United States. It is robustly democratic, forward-looking, and ambitious.

All of which gets up the nose of Beijing. “The one-China principle is the political basis for China–U.S. relations,” Chinese foreign-ministry spokesman Lu Kang said after the Bolton meeting. “We are firmly against the U.S. engaging in any official contact with Taiwan in whatever form and under whatever pretext.” As CNN put it, Beijing “ordered the Trump administration to cease diplomatic engagements with the island.” Ordered. One wonders how President Trump will take that.

The United States has followed a policy of engagement with China going on 50 years now, since Richard Nixon’s famous visit in 1972. This is the correct policy: The state governed from Beijing, like the one governed from Taipei, is a fact, and one that cannot be ignored. The United States and China maintain a close and cooperative economic relationship — some call it symbiotic. Many in the Trump administration believe that relationship is too close. The president himself believes that the American trade relationship with China disadvantages the U.S. economy (he is mistaken about that), while others make a moral case against dealing with China as though it were Sweden or Canada rather than a totalitarian state that operates gulags and harvests the organs of political dissidents.

Engagement with China is predicated largely on American self-interest — as it should be — and to the extent that idealism enters into it at all it is in the belief that such improvements as have been enjoyed by the Chinese people have been enabled by their country’s economic progress, and that it is easier for the government of a thriving and confident nation to liberalize than it is for a hungry and desperate one.

The advocates of engagement have the better case, and they always have, even though progress has been slow and halting. That the Chinese government as represented by Lu believes itself entitled to bark orders at the United States indicates that there still is far to go.

We should be frank, open-handed, and generous in our relations with Beijing — for our own good, for the good of the Chinese people, and for the good of the world. But the spirit of generosity is distinct from the spirit of acquiescence, and the United States is not obliged to defer to Beijing in the matter of Taiwan or in any other matter, especially those involving American relations with the free and self-governing peoples of the world.

Beijing should not overplay its hand. The U.S.–Chinese economic relationship is very important to the United States, but it is fundamental to China, which still has a GDP per capita of less than $9,000 a year, placing it in the company of Kazakhstan and Cuba. American consumers and manufacturers have alternatives to China, but Chinese exporters have no plausible alternative to the American market. The United States is very concerned about the nuclear misadventures of North Korea, but Kim Jong-un is in China’s backyard, not ours. China worries about the possibility of a rearmed and assertive Japan, while some Americans would welcome that development. Beijing should consider these facts before it blusters its way into trouble of a kind it has not known for a generation.

The United States, for its part, would do well to rediscover the cause of Taiwan — carefully, prudently, and in a way that is not more provocative than necessary, inevitably provocative though it would be. As Beijing slowly chokes out Hong Kong — that other beacon of freedom in the Chinese orbit — we should be clear-eyed about what “One China” would mean in practice.

Assange, Greenwald, and Journalism

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, May 28, 2019

In re: the Julian Assange case, Glenn Greenwald makes an important point, that as a First Amendment question, it does not matter whether Assange is a journalist.

Press freedoms belong to everyone, not to a select, privileged group of citizens called “journalists.” Empowering prosecutors to decide who does or doesn’t deserve press protections would restrict “freedom of the press” to a small, cloistered priesthood of privileged citizens designated by the government as “journalists.” The First Amendment was written to avoid precisely that danger.

That is well said, and the reminder is both urgent and necessary at this particular moment in our history. Greenwald continues:

Most critically, the U.S. government has now issued a legal document that formally declares that collaborating with government sources to receive and publish classified documents is no longer regarded by the Justice Department as journalism protected by the First Amendment but rather as the felony of espionage . . . .

And there is the problem. If the First Amendment does not create a set of privileges for a caste known as “journalists,” then journalists can be prosecuted for violating the law — including the laws governing the dissemination of classified information — in the same way any ordinary citizen would be.

The dissemination of classified documents is illegal in many circumstances. It is, under what seems to me the plain meaning of the law, precisely the felony of espionage in at least some cases. To decline to prosecute those crimes in the interest of enabling journalism is to create exactly the kind of professional caste privilege that Greenwald rightly warns against. We cannot simultaneously hold that the problem is “empowering prosecutors to decide who does or doesn’t deserve press protections” and then try to solve that problem by empowering prosecutors to decide who does or doesn’t deserve press protections.

I am not a lawyer and do not pretend to speak authoritatively about the Assange case, but the language of the federal criminal code appears — to my great surprise — clear enough about this matter.

And that is the fundamental issue: The government has too broad and sweeping power when it comes to classifying information, it uses that power too eagerly and too thoughtlessly — and too arrogantly, and too corruptly — for that power to be fully compatible with a free and open society. The solution to bad laws is to repeal or reform the law, not to construct a supplementary social theory to support its selective application.

In keeping with Greenwald’s concerns, writing a journalism carveout into the statute would be a disastrous undertaking, because it would amount to licensing journalists, which would radically reconfigure the First Amendment and our understanding of free speech in an unacceptable way. That is one significant problem with “campaign finance” laws that subject political speech to legislative discipline and then pretend to make an exemption for news media.

The more reasonable approach — which is naturally the more difficult one — would be to acknowledge that the government has a legitimate interest in keeping certain secrets but to narrow its discretion and scope in making those decisions. One important reform would be to eliminate the executive’s effective monopoly on declassification decisions, moving some of that authority into the House of Representatives or the Senate.

And then, if the New York Times receives a classified document through a criminal act or comes into possession of a document the publication of which would be a criminal act, it can make an editorial decision about whether the importance of the story justifies an act of civil disobedience and, if it comes to it, dare the government to prosecute it. Many Americans have sat in jail cells for honorable causes.

If we accept the proposition that the government has a legitimate interest in keeping secrets and in using the law to further that end — and there are some radical libertarians who reject that — and we also accept that the First Amendment applies in the same way to all citizens, then it follows that there will be prosecutions for violating that law, and that acting as a journalist does not provide immunity from such prosecution.

Kamala Harris’s Misguided Plan to Close the Gender-Pay Gap

By Ryan Bourne

Tuesday, May 28, 2019

California senator Kamala Harris has unveiled a new plan to close the gender-pay gap.

Under Harris’s proposal, companies with 100 or more employees would have to report pay differentials between men and women, controlling for “differences in job titles, experience, and performance.” If they could not show that men and women were paid the same after factoring these controls in, they would be fined 1 percent of profits for every 1 percent gap in pay.

This “solution,” at one level, is curious. The statistic on which widely reported claims of a “gender pay gap” are based — that full-time female workers are paid only about 80 percent of what full-time male workers make — doesn’t account for job types, experience, or performance. In that sense, Harris’s legislation recognizes that such metrics are meaningless or, at least, too crude. But that means there’s also no reason to think that beefing up “equal pay for equal work” legislation by putting the presumption of compliance onto employers will close the headline rate everyone discusses.

In short, Harris’s plan does not really target the “gender pay gap” at all. It attempts to further stamp out gender pay discrimination by “policing at the elbow.” That aim will have fewer opponents. Yet the truth is, more factors than she accounts for determine wages. Her legislation would create significant compliance costs and avoidance strategies, lead to potential surpluses and shortages of workers, and could even hurt women who currently enjoy flexible working arrangements.

To see why, consider the Game of Thrones cast. Playing each character really constitutes a different “job.” The company producing the show could easily argue it has no pay gap at all then, in a literal sense, even before collecting any information. Yet suppose there were two extras running from Drogon in King’s Landing in that penultimate episode — one male and one female — with the same role, number of lines, screen time, and measurable prior experience. There still might be good reasons why they could command different pay rates.

The man, for example, may be of a certain height or look that is in high supply among the pool of prospective extras. The woman might perfectly reflect the needs of the show but have a lucrative offer to appear in another show, requiring higher payment to attract her. Quite simply, beyond “job titles, experience, and performance,” supply and demand and other factors determine pay in actual markets. Not accounting for them risks finding discrimination where it doesn’t actually exist.

Indeed, it doesn’t make sense to think that work is of “equal value” because you’ve controlled for observed performance factors. It’s a mistake that harkens back to Karl Marx’s labor theory of value. Skills, experience, and performance do help determine wages, which is why controlling for them lowers statistical “gender pay gaps.” But supply and demand matter too. If there are hundreds of applications for one post and none for another, then paying the same amount for the two jobs makes little sense.

Take workers who stock shelves in supermarkets and their warehouses. Shelf-stackers in both locations ostensibly do “the same job.” If a supermarket chain gave them the same job title, and all other experience and performance were equal, this legislation would mandate that workers in both locations be paid the same. Yet it is plausible that working in a warehouse may simply be less pleasant than working in a supermarket, if the warehouse is colder or in a more isolated area or those who work there have less agreeable hours. If men have a greater willingness to accept these unpleasant conditions in return for the “compensating differential” of higher pay, this again would show up as a pay gap, with the company being liable for fines under Harris’s legislation. Yet paying both sets of workers the same could create severe shortages of warehouse workers, or surpluses of supermarket employees.

To avoid such fines or outcomes, businesses would likely revise job titles to ensure that people were labeled uniquely. That could lead to hierarchical disputes within companies and presumably to legal challenges, but it would be a solution. The alternative is to face the prospect of running complex regressions and aggregation calculations to determine whether, on net, men and women are equally paid. That would require the intrusive collection of data on employees’ work history or a more rigorous evaluation of employee performance, either of which itself might have undesirable consequences for workers.

Performance is particularly subjective. Earlier this year the members of the U.S. women’s soccer team filed a gender-discrimination lawsuit against the United States Soccer Federation, claiming they were paid less than the male team despite more success. But “performance” in this industry is relative to other competitors, and the male World Cups are undoubtedly more lucrative, because they attract vastly more spectators.

These missed factors and calculation problems notwithstanding, Harris’s plan could also have unintended consequences for working women. In the U.K., large organizations (greater than 250 employees) are already required to report median and mean hourly gender pay gaps. The energy- and gas-supply company Npower, for example, reported a median gender pay gap of 18 percent for 2018. Yet it explained that this was owing in part to a range of benefits and flexibility measures that the company offers to employees in return for salary sacrifice, including child-care vouchers and flexible working arrangements designed specifically for working mothers. Under Harris’s proposal, this would make the company liable for fines, even though the compensation arrangements are something women actually chose.

Harris’s plan, then, is well-intentioned. But it simply ignores that the labor market is a market and that as such it is bound up with subjective valuations, free choices, and the vicissitudes of supply and demand. With such an array of factors determining wages, it’s incredibly difficult to use top-down statistical approaches to root out genuine gender discrimination. Putting the onus on employers in this way risks a combination of “false positives” and firms seeking ways to avoid fines and could well hurt working women.

Britain after the EU Elections

By Madeleine Kearns

Tuesday, May 28, 2019

This weekend saw the highest voter turnout in European Parliament elections since 1994 and, in Britain, tectonic shifts in party politics.

The center-right European People’s Party (EPP) and the center-left Socialists and Democrats (S&D) lost control of the EU’s assembly for the first time, going from 401 seats (54%) to a projected 325 seats (43%). As predicted, populists and right-wing parties did well, though their victories were more thinly spread than in 2014. In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally came first with Emmanuel Macron’s La Republique en Marche in close second. Right-wing parties also won in Poland (Law and Justice), Hungary (Civic Alliance), and Italy (Lega).

Interestingly, across the continent, green parties increased their number of European seats from 52 to 67. Greens did well in the UK, Ireland, and Finland, and surprisingly came second in Germany. Some commentators are calling this trend the “Thunberg effect,” after the 16-year-old Swedish climate-change activist Greta Thunberg, as it appears to have been fueled by a high turnout of young voters whose main priority is climate change.

The domestic fallout of the elections was especially significant in Britain, where the two main political parties — Conservative and Labour — suffered humiliating defeats and are now struggling to redefine themselves.

The European elections were a national embarrassment in the U.K., precisely because Britons voted to leave the bloc in June 2016 and were supposed to have done so by March 29, 2019. The failure to pull off a timely Brexit was most likely on the minds of many as they went grudgingly to the ballot box. It helps explain why Nigel Farage’s Brexit party, which is only six weeks old, won 31.6 percent of the vote, and why the Lib Dems, back from the political wilderness, came in second with 20.3 percent. Labour came third. The Tories came fifth.

This was a protest vote for many fed up with the two main parties, clearly. What is remarkable is just how many. In the aftermath of the results, the outgoing prime minister, Theresa May, said they’d showed “the importance of finding a Brexit deal,” while Jeremy Corbyn promised that he was “listening carefully.”

In order to survive, however, the Conservatives need to abandon platitudes and compete with the Farage by becoming the Brexit party. Likewise, Labour must abandon its strategic ambiguity and back Remain. Long-term, Farage has the opposite problem: He must adopt a manifesto covering a range of issues (not just Europe) if the Brexit party is to be taken seriously in the next general election.

All these changes have already begun in earnest. In the aftermath of the EU election, Tom Watson, deputy leader of the Labour party, has stated that a “change of direction” is urgently needed. Emily Thornberry, Labour’s shadow foreign secretary, stated that going into the EU elections an explicit pro-Remain strategy was a “mistake.” And John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor of the exchequer, endorsed a second Brexit referendum.

Conservative MPs, meanwhile, are busy in the race to succeed Theresa May, and have recognized that in order to be taken seriously, they must be prepared to walk away from Europe without a deal. Esther McVey, the former work and pensions secretary, told Sky News that while she would like the EU to come back and reopen the negotiations, she is not going to “waste time” waiting for that to happen and would “prepare” for an abrupt exit come October. Before the election, this position was viewed as extreme, reserved only for the likes of Boris Johnson. Now it is mainstream.

From the EU perspective, a no-deal Brexit has never looked likelier. Will this be enough to make Brussels reopen negotiations? If so, it will need to do so soon. After the next summit on June 20, the EU has a long summer and doesn’t meet again until October 17.

As for the British electorate, one (risibly) skewed way of reading the complex mesh of election data is to interpret the votes for Brexit party and UKIP as comprising the entirety of support for Leave, while votes for Labour and all other parties comprise the entirety of support for Remain. Conveniently for those who want to stop Brexit altogether, under this view 53 percent of the British public currently favors Remain and 46 percent favors Leave.

Of course, this does not account for the Labour constituencies (for example, in the North of England) which voted Leave, and which will likely bleed more votes to the Brexit party now that Labour is positioning itself as explicitly anti-Brexit. Nor does it account for those Conservative Remain voters who continue to want to avoid a no-deal Brexit at all costs — and who will, given the increasing likelihood of that threat, perhaps begin to vote Lib Dem.

Whatever happens going forward, this weekend’s results show that Brexit will continue to be the defining factor in British politics for the foreseeable future.

The Age of Irresponsibility

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, May 22, 2019

This week, Nevada’s legislature became the latest to approve the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact—a measure that would, in theory, render the state’s voters irrelevant in a presidential election if a majority of the Union’s member states were to disagree with them. If it went into effect, the pact would delegate a signatory state’s Electoral College votes to the presidential candidate who amasses the most popular votes nationwide. Of course, this pact isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.

The compact is only supposed to take effect when the number of member states constitutes an Electoral College majority—270 votes. Even if Nevada’s governor signs the bill, the pact is still 75 votes short. But the stakes associated with signing on to this compact go lower still. Unless ratified by Congress, interstate compacts are explicitly unconstitutional. The Supreme Court ratified this principle as recently as 1978, and with more deference to federal authority than the Court is likely to show today. Tampering with the Electoral College is fraught. Eliminating it entirely and establishing the one and only federal election would require a constitutional amendment, and sacrificing the states’ plenary power to choose electors that represent their citizens in favor of non-state residents invites any number of lawsuits from the candidates and voting groups it disenfranchises.

More troublingly, though, is the principle this compact sacrifices. The Tenth Amendment—guaranteeing arguably the most unloved liberty enshrined in the Bill of Rights—delegates to the states their reserved powers, which James Madison noted were “numerous and indefinite” whereas the delegated powers to the federal government were “few and defined.” The states in the national popular vote compact are essentially delegating their sovereignty to anyone willing to take it.

This is part of a disturbing trend. Downstream from a general decline in a culture of personal responsibility in America, there appears to be an emerging culture of institutional irresponsibility.

The compact’s states are only following Congress’s lead. As Yuval Levin wrote for Commentary last year, Congress appears in a weakened state because it’s members no longer covet the powers delegated to them by the Constitution. In every major recent dispute with the executive branch of substance—from Barack Obama’s usurpation of the authority to legalize non-citizen residents to Trump’s assumption of the power to regulate firearm accessories out of existence—the legislature has deferred to the courts.

The problem has only grown worse in the intervening months. Donald Trump’s alleged usurpation of legislative authority is often derided by his critics as the stuff of autocrats, but he’s only taking advantage of the powers delegated to his office by Congress.

Trump’s border wall is currently being constructed by the U.S. military according to what the president insists is his authority under the National Emergencies Act. The use of funds in ways that are not explicitly authorized in congressional appropriations resulted in a protest vote from Congress—one that included 12 dissenting Republican senators—but didn’t attract a majority large enough to override a presidential veto.

When Trump wants to avoid a bruising confirmation fight and subvert the Senate’s power to provide advice and consent on appointments to federal posts, he cites the Federal Vacancies Reform Act to justify his reliance on acting Cabinet officials and department heads.

When the president wants to raise tariffs on key American allies and trading partners under the guise of national security, he invokes the authority granted him by the Trade Expansion Act. Congress has relied on a sense of presidential propriety to impose limits on the scope of this authority, but that has proven insufficient to stay this president’s hand.

If the president decides to make good on his campaign-trail promise to forcefully deport thousands of illegal immigrants outside the standard legal channels, his aides insist that he will cite presidential authority in the statutes that constitute the Insurrection Act.

Lawmakers moan and wail, rending garments over the president’s assumption of their legislative prerogatives. But they dare not act lest they be held accountable for that action.

Even what the Democrats currently describe as a “constitutional crisis” regarding the president’s efforts to obstruct congressional oversight and ignore their subpoenas is, in reality, a crisis only of legislative lethargy. As Adam J. White astutely argued, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler’s arguments for why former White House Counsel Don McGahn should be compelled to testify before his committee are predicated on a misunderstanding of where the executive branch ends and the legislative branch beings. Lawmakers have confused their political authority to oversee the executive with the prosecutorial powers vested in Article II.

Even amid the exercises of all this executive authority, the president prefers to portray himself as a victim. Television programmers and social media executives plot to silence him and his supporters. Unfair coverage in the political press places a ceiling on his support in the polls. Trump’s own justice department is engaged in a conspiracy to overturn the 2016 election results. It may seem imprudent for an executive to seek reelection not on his own accomplishments but a lack thereof as a result of the forces arrayed against him. But then again, the themes “obstruction,” “exploitation,” and “extremism” served Barack Obama’s reelection efforts just fine.

In fact, all these sacrifices of power are justified by perfectly rational political considerations. The voters want to sacrifice their sovereignty to the collective. Lawmakers derive more authority today from infamy than efficacy. House Democrats would rather outsource the role of making the case against Trump’s overreach in 2020 to the party’s presidential nominee than assume that duty for themselves. In the aggregate, this amounts to a crisis of authority, although perhaps one the Founders failed to anticipate: authority that no one seems to want.

The Gaza Conundrum

By Jonathan Schanzer

Monday, May 27, 2019

On May 14, 2018, at the exact moment that Israel was celebrating the opening of the new U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, I sat across the desk from a senior Israeli official in Tel Aviv. He was in a foul mood. He looked as if he hadn’t slept much. He rubbed his eyes, scratched his stubble, and blurted suddenly, “Gaza is a problem from hell.”

Amid all the embassy fanfare, Israeli officials were beginning to realize the Gaza border protests that had erupted on March 30, celebrated on social media as the “Great March of Return,” would not soon end. And the Israelis were finding them increasingly difficult to handle.

Israel is equipped to fight a wide range of wars, but not against the so-called weapons of the weak. Gazans were sending flaming balloons across the border into Israeli territory. The terrorist group Hamas, according to an Israeli military spokesman, was paying children to skip school and rush the border. Militants then fired at Israel from behind these human shields. Unable to disperse the crowd with tear gas or other crowd-control methods, the Israel Defense Force (IDF) began to open fire.

My interlocutor let out a heavy sigh. “We don’t have creative solutions for this right now,” he said.

It’s one year later. The weekly Gaza protests have continued, with casualties and chaos mounting. Every few months a conflagration erupts. The most recent one saw Palestinian terror groups firing more than 700 rockets into Israel. Four Israelis were murdered. The Israeli response was predictably tough but measured, including the destruction of terrorist hideouts and even some targeted assassinations.

Within days, a cease-fire was reached. But it won’t last. It can’t. Every Gaza escalation brings Israel back to the same place, setting the stage yet again for more conflict. The frustration in Israel is palpable. As one Jerusalem bureaucrat told me on the eve of last month’s elections, “What good is having the strongest military in the region if we can’t get rid of an annoyance like Hamas?”

Israelis of all political persuasions now say it’s time for change. But they are likely to learn that there aren’t good alternatives to what is widely viewed as an unsustainable status quo. A major Gaza offensive could backfire and hasten a conflict with Iran. It could trigger poisonous partisan debates in Washington. It could even force Israel to do something it wants to avoid at all costs: re-occupy Gaza.

As it turns out, the problem from hell has rungs.

For Israel, Gaza has been a consistent challenge, but never quite a strategic threat, since the 1948–1949 War of Independence. Back then, it was Egyptian-backed fedayeen carrying out attacks in Israel. Gaza was later the scene of pitched battles in the 1967 Six-Day War. There was a time after the Israeli conquest of the territory when Israelis could enter Gaza and engage in commerce. But in December 1987 that came to a halt; Gaza was where the first intifada erupted.

Hamas has been firing mortars and rockets into Israel from Gaza since the breakdown of the peace process in 2001. Israel made the problem inadvertently worse when it vacated the Gaza Strip in 2005; disengagement ended Israeli occupation but granted Hamas more operational freedom. That problem became acute in 2007 when the group wrested control of Gaza from the Palestinian Authority in a brutal civil war. Hamas soon began to import more weapons and develop new capabilities. Israel and Hamas have engaged in significant conflict a half dozen times since then, with many other minor skirmishes. While Hamas has developed commando tunnels and other capabilities, rockets remain the group’s weapon of choice.

For Israel, necessity bred invention. In 2011, the Israelis rolled out one of the most remarkable military accomplishments of the 21st century: Iron Dome. The system makes crucial split-second decisions. It either shoots short-range rockets out of the sky when they hurtle toward population centers, or it allows rockets destined to hit unpopulated areas to simply remain on course. The success rate for these combined functions is somewhere between 85 and 90 percent.

Even as Hamas attacks have dramatically increased in volume, Iron Dome has protected Israel’s citizens. IDF brass rightly notes that the system grants officials time and space to make rational decisions about war. And those decisions, given the low casualty numbers, have often meant that Israel could respond in a limited and proportional fashion. In fact, the Israelis have never sought a larger conflict because they see Hamas as a tactical threat, not an existential one. Hamas simply doesn’t rank high enough on the list of threats to justify the kind of war that would be required. This has allowed Hamas to live to fight another day, time and again.

Some argue that Israel now has a false sense of security about the dangers of Gaza rockets. It’s not false. Israel has largely inoculated itself from the rocket threat, along with every other security challenge Hamas has thrown at them, for that matter.

In truth, Hamas has the false sense of security. The group has undeniably tried to overwhelm Iron Dome, but it has failed repeatedly. Hostilities have thus settled into a predictable pattern. Hamas now fires deadly projectiles into civilian areas without the consequences of significant deaths or retaliation.

After last weekend, however, the naturally cautious Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is finding it more difficult to show restraint. The public fears that Israel has lost deterrence. If it truly had deterrence, it would have been clear to Israel’s foes in Gaza that deploying Iron Dome just once would unleash a torrential response. Instead, Israel has repeatedly absorbed blows and responded in a measured fashion. It’s possible that Israel did so this time to ensure calm during the forthcoming Eurovision song contest and Israeli Independence Day. Yet there is always a reason for the IDF not to escalate. And Israelis are growing restless.

With the Israeli public now stirring, the IDF is warily eyeing the major conflict it has forestalled for a dozen years: a vicious battle against a well-trained and well-armed non-state actor. It is also warily eyeing Iran.

Gaza is widely recognized as Palestinian territory. But it’s also Iranian. It was Iran that helped Hamas conquer Gaza in 2007. It was Iran that continued to keep “Hamastan” solvent until the rupture between the Shiite regime in Tehran and the Sunni Hamas over Syrian policy in 2012. Iranian funding since has been restored, but it has not returned to its previous levels, primarily due to crippling U.S. sanctions on the regime in Tehran. But ties today are once again strong.

The missile barrage in May was almost certainly precipitated by Iran.  It began with a sniper attack by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), a terrorist faction heavily influenced by Iran. Senior Israeli officials believe that the attack was likely ordered by Iran to disrupt Egyptian cease-fire mediation between Hamas and Israel.

Should Israel elect to eject Hamas from the Gaza Strip, an Iranian response would loom large. The Israelis should expect Hamas to fight fiercely, to empty its arsenal, and to get help from Iranian advisers and Iranian proxies like PIJ and Harakat al-Sabirin. Iran will not surrender this territory without a fight.

There is also a scenario in which Iran deploys its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, to preserve Iran’s interests. Hezbollah has an estimated 150,000 rockets in its arsenal, including a growing number of precision-guided munitions (PGM). Should Iran choose to activate Hezbollah amid a Gaza war, a two-front conflict would make the May barrage look like a minor nuisance. 

While threats mount, time may be running out on the political cover Israel needs for the Gaza war it doesn’t want but may need to wage nonetheless. Israeli leaders are working under the assumption that President Donald Trump alone (or more specifically, his administration) would give the IDF the green light to fight the long overdue war against Hamas, or even against Iran and its other proxies.

For the Israelis, placing their trust in Trump means taking two risks. The first is that they may owe a great debt that Trump could demand in the form of peace-process concessions. However, from the little we know of Trump’s “Deal of the Century,” Jared Kushner and Jason Greenblatt are not likely to squeeze the Israelis terribly hard, if at all.

The second risk, the far greater danger, is that Israel would allow itself to become a political football.

It’s not hard to understand how this could happen. The Obama administration gave the Israelis headaches like the Iran nuclear deal, support for the Muslim Brotherhood during the Arab Spring, and its abstention in the matter of an anti-Israel resolution at the United Nations. This president, by contrast, has offered unyielding support in key areas, including self-defense, the U.S. Embassy move, recognition of sovereignty in the Golan Heights, and more. Meanwhile, a vociferous gaggle of progressives in the House of Representatives is voicing anti-Israel sentiments in an unprecedented fashion. And while pro-Israel centrist Democrats have not wavered, they are warning Trump not to indulge Netanyahu’s more incendiary policy possibilities, like annexing parts of the West Bank. Republicans have exploited these fissures, with Trump leading the call for Jewish voters to end their longstanding support for Democrats and join the GOP.

If it came down to conflict, pro-Israel Democrats and Republicans alike would rally their support. They understand the gravity, even the necessity, of a war in Gaza. But critics would cast Israel as the aggressor, and one that was in league with Trump to boot. The next conflict could thus easily be cast as a politically binary one, where American politicians framed their views on Israeli security as either a pro-Trump or anti-Trump position.

The dozens of former and current Israeli officials I’ve talked to over the past three years all believe that bipartisanship has been Israel’s single greatest asset in Washington over the years. Yet they don’t truly understand the way hyper-partisanship has overtaken Washington. They do not grasp how the debates surrounding Donald Trump, fair or not, have divided our nation. Nor do they appreciate how Netanyahu’s close ties with Trump can be wielded by both sides in ways that would hurt Israel at an urgent time of need.

Let us say that Israel was able to navigate the morass of American politics, gain bipartisan support for a war in Gaza, and then successfully dislodge Hamas. Israel would then have to grapple with another big issue: what comes next.

The IDF’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) currently facilitates the entry of thousands of truckloads of goods to enter the Gaza Strip every day, even as a military blockade remains in place to block dual-use materials and sophisticated weaponry from the Gaza Strip. In other words, Israel has two policies. One is to isolate Hamas, and the other is to allow services to be rendered to the Gazan people.

Israel, for the sake of calm, has even engaged with the Turks and the Qataris, despite both countries’ avowed anti-Zionism and support for Hamas. It has permitted them to provide funds and other assistance to the coastal enclave. Gaza’s suffering continues, however, because Hamas continues to divert funds for commando tunnels, rockets, and other tools of war. And under Hamas rule, there is not much political space to challenge these policies. Anti-Israel sentiment is the only permissible form of protest. This has only served to further radicalize a population that has for years been fed a steady diet of hate.

The Israelis since 2007, along with the Egyptians since 2013, have endeavored to reshape the political landscape in Gaza. This is the first and best choice from Israel’s perspective. But so far, they have failed. The viable alternatives to Hamas are the sclerotic Palestinian Authority, radical Salafi groups, and Iran-backed PIJ. There could be others, such as the supporters of Mohammed Dahlan, the former Gaza strongman who went into exile in the UAE after the Hamas military takeover in 2007. But we know little about Dahlan’s ability to organize politically, or whether Gaza would reject his transplanted leadership after so many years away, like an artificial heart.

The obvious alternative to all of this is re-occupation. This would be deeply unpopular in Israel. It’s unthinkable to many. Of course, the Israelis controlled Gaza from 1967 until 2005. The Israelis never coordinated their departure with Palestinian counterparts, and it looked as if they were pulling out under fire from Hamas rockets and other attacks. This perception contributed in part to the Hamas electoral victory in 2006. That election led to the political standoff that gave way to the civil war in which Hamas overtook the Gaza Strip in 2007.

Fourteen years after the Gaza withdrawal, the rockets are still falling. Twelve years after Hamas took power, the group remains entrenched. Eight years after the deployment of Iron Dome, the Israelis are arguably safer, but they are back where they’ve always been: on the Gaza border, mulling their next move.