The World Trump Created

By Jack Butler

Friday, July 02, 2021

 

Wellington, Ohio — It’s a common trope in literature, and probably to some extent a feature of our own lives, that journeys end where they began, either literally or metaphorically. So it’s tempting to see former president Donald Trump’s return to northeastern Ohio this past Saturday for his first campaign-style rally since leaving office as a kind of bookend to the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. There, just short of five years ago, Trump formally secured his status as the standard-bearer for the Republican Party. It certainly has been a journey since then.

 

But this literary lens would skew the situation. Not just because the small town of Wellington, home to the Lorain County fairgrounds, which hosted this rally, is 45 minutes southwest of Cleveland, and quite different from the Lake Erie metropolis. More important, whatever these two Trump visits to Ohio bookend, what I understood as an attendee of this rally is that he has no intention of ending his political journey anytime soon. And his myriad supporters will remain by his side, self-affirming conspiracy theories and all.

 

The people who came to this “Save America” rally were happy to be here, and helped it resemble an event in the middle of campaign season rather than an event against pro-Trump-impeachment Republican Anthony Gonzales, who represents a nearby House district and is up in 2022. There were signs of this enthusiasm before I even got to the fairgrounds. Rural landscapes and small towns throughout the state remain dotted with Trump paraphernalia. As I got closer, traffic patterns were being redirected to accommodate the massive influx of Trump fans to Wellington (2010 Census population: 4,800, surely doubled, at least, by day’s end). Cars in the fairground’s grass parking lot displayed license plates from not just Ohio but also Indiana, Missouri, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, New York, and Alabama — and those were just the ones I saw. Awakened by the return of their champion, they had come from far and wide.

 

In certain respects, both the things I saw and the people I talked to gave off every indication of this being an ordinary, if highly charged, political event. Jane Timken and Mike Gibbons, two candidates vying for the Republican Senate nomination in the state, both had large presences; the former had volunteers standing outside the fairground gates handing out flyers for her campaign; the latter, a large charter bus with info booths set up nearby. There was plenty of anti-Biden sentiment in the air, more or less of the sort one would expect from anywhere in conservatism these days. Biden is “like a puppet. He’s being used. I almost feel sorry for him but our country’s too important,” Diane, from Medina, Ohio, told me. “This guy’s running our country into the ground,” is how Gina, from Lima, Ohio, put it. “He’s an embarrassment.”

 

It wasn’t simply in their general antagonism toward Joe Biden that this crowd displayed a certain normalcy. They were the sort of people you can watch quiet down and turn toward the singer as, from far off, the national anthem is heard, then dutifully remove their hats and hold their hands over their hearts. Who bow their heads to a distant prayer. Who break into chants of “USA!” when they intend to express approval.

 

But there was another side to this rally, and some of its attendees. It was noticeable before I got to the fairgrounds themselves, as I saw cars festooned with slogans and stickers proclaiming the owners as QAnon believers, and saw people walking around with InfoWars T-shirts. (I even saw one shirt that read “Trump/JFK Jr. 2024,” an allusion to a more-obscure provision of the QAnon catechism that posits that the deceased son of JFK is actually alive, and possibly Q himself). Those, to be fair, were the rarer and more out-there indications of a conspiratorial frame of mind.

 

Far more common was evidence of a simple belief: The election was stolen. “Not my president” was not exactly an unusual refrain from Resistance liberals during the Trump presidency. But many at this rally seem to have taken this to the next level, wearing shirts that read “Trump won,” and affirming this belief in conversation. “He won, okay?” said Ken, from Florida, who claimed to have been to upwards of 900 Trump rallies. “You can quote me. He won. He won in November.” Ken was hardly alone. “Our election was stolen,” said Becky, from New York. “You do the math,” Gina said. “It’s not adding up.” Many rally attendees cited the rally itself as evidence that Biden, whose campaign had a deliberately light footprint, could not possibly have won the election.

 

Such a belief lends itself to a pretty out-there conclusion. You may recall the to-do a few weeks ago over whether Trump honestly believed that he would be reinstated to the presidency in a few months. He has never spoken publicly on the matter. But it’s something many of the attendees I spoke to at this rally accepted as gospel. “I think this is the beginning of his comeback period and I hope to God it’s sooner than later,” Diane told me. Likewise, Becky affirmed for me, “I want Trump before 2024.” And Gina, after Trump’s speech, told me that she was “waiting for him to say, ‘I’m coming back.’”

 

Some people I spoke to only hoped to be able to vote for Trump again in 2024. But others sounded notes of despair, of conspiracy theory, of bizarre calls to action. Then there were the blatant contradictions in narrative: I found one woman saying that she would have gone to the January 6 Capitol rally if she’d been closer, and a man talking to her who said that the whole thing was an FBI setup. They both seemed to agree with each other.

 

Who created this world? The answer is obvious: Trump himself. The speakers at the rally who preceded him veered back and forth between the world of conventional politics and this new world Trump has created in his refusal to accept his loss. You had, on the one hand, typical features of a campaign rally. Local Republican officials urging on-the-ground action. Mike Carey, a Republican running for a nearby House seat in an August special election, assuring us that he’s not a politician, he’s a businessman. Ohio congressman Jim Jordan throwing out anti-Biden red meat, much of it fit for my consumption. But it was hard to keep these two worlds apart. Jordan, at one point, proclaimed, “That’s why you’re all here. ‘Cause you want [Trump] to run again in 2024.” Nearby in the packed crowd, I heard a voice scream out: “We want him now!”

 

One can only conclude that this worldview is the more encouraged one, when you have people like Douglas G. Frank, a Mike Lindell associate, giving a PowerPoint presentation purporting to explain, in precise detail, how the election was stolen, using graphs and everything. (Most people in the audience seemed to be numb to it, as I was, even if they agreed with its conclusion.) Or people like Max Miller, a Trump White House aide running against Anthony Gonzales who gave off strong Madison Cawthorn vibes, saying that “in 2024 we’re gonna get [Trump] elected for the third time.” Or people like Marjorie Taylor Greene. The already infamous Georgia congresswoman asked the crowd, “Who’s your president?” and hearing its Trump-affirming response, she explained, “He should be president right now, but the dirty rotten Democrats stole the election.”

 

But these were all warm-up acts to the Trump show, which is still ongoing. When Miller was announced, there were some discontented voices from the crowd, who were waiting for Trump, not for him. And after Miller, the crowd waited for nearly an hour past Trump’s scheduled speaking time of 7 p.m. before the man actually appeared, to raucous applause. But there was a logistical frustration for attendees even once he started speaking: Many couldn’t see him. From my vantage point, he was blocked by a teleprompter stand, and I was relatively close to the stage. Others weren’t so lucky. Large screens nearby had transmitted the images of other speakers to those not as close but, for some reason, did not display when Trump began. At one point, the crowd’s discontent, manifested in a cry of “We can’t see you,” was loud and sustained enough to stop Trump himself from speaking; this logistical failure was eventually corrected.

 

Even Trump’s remarks, when eventually delivered, reflected the rally’s division between the conventional and the abnormal. Much of what Trump said was essentially standard criticism of Biden’s tenure in office so far, albeit delivered in his unique style: a crisis on the border, critical race theory in schools, American deference returning to the global stage. All true, all objectionable. There was even a reprise of some of Trump’s greatest hits that wouldn’t have been out of place at any prior rally: complaining about the media; reading “The Snake,” a poem that some people around me recited with him; dancing to “YMCA” when his remarks ended, as he did during the 2020 campaign.

 

But Trump’s heart clearly was not in the conventional. It was in maintaining the conspiracy theories about his 2020 election loss — his “so-called” loss, as he put it — that have become the essential part of his brand since November 3, 2020. He called the election “the crime of the century.” He asserted that the real numbers would show “we won in a landslide.” He expressed hope in the various actual and proposed “audits” of the results. He claimed that he wasn’t the one undermining democracy but rather the one “trying to save it.” And, tantalizingly, to his fans in attendance, he teased that “we won the election twice, and it’s possible we’ll have to win it a third time.”

 

He claims that he has no choice but to fixate on this, that in looking back on 2020 with anger, he’s thinking about the future:

 

You have to look back. We won the election in 2020. Who the hell knows what’s gonna be in 2024. We won’t even have a country left. We’re not gonna have a country left. And if we don’t figure it out, we’re not gonna be in a position to win in 2022 or 2024.

 

Again, in this, the attendees of the rally were in lockstep. Sharing Trump’s sense, before his speech, of how bad things had gotten, Becky put little hope in the utility of future elections if things weren’t fixed immediately. Of the 2022 midterms, she said, “When we have rigged elections, those don’t mean a darn thing.” Gina went even further: “What’s gonna be left in 2024? Biden’s running us into the ground.”

 

Despite our differences, I could at least understand many of those I met in the crowd. I shared many of their concerns about the country, and many of their criticisms of Biden. They were polite, ordinary, decent people I could see myself interacting with in the course of life in this place, my home state. Whatever delusions they have fallen into, it is impossible for me to judge them.

 

Trump, however, is another story. In response to losing an election he could have won, he decided not to accept any blame. Instead, he casts himself as protagonist against “sinister forces” and castigates the country’s institutions, forcing his supporters to choose between him and everything else.

 

In their enthusiasm, fomented by Trump himself, many of the rally-goers here have chosen him. To this day, he claims to love them, and they him. But his affection for this crowd would seem one of instrumentality. I wish that Trump’s supporters could see this, and behold how Trump has failed them, how more tact, restraint, or decency on his part could have made him a standard-bearer truly worthy of their support — and possibly still president. It saddens me that they have so lost faith in the political system that they must place all hope with him. Their faith is unconditional. Witness, however, how Trump has treated loyalists who transgressed even slightly; his faith in his supporters is very conditional. But unless or until they change their minds, my sense is that Trump’s political journey is not ending. Rather, it is beginning a new stage. Where it all ends is anyone’s guess.

 

It probably won’t be Ohio.

Colorado’s ‘Governor Unemployment’

By Ben Murrey

Friday, July 2, 2021

 

A new Colorado law has recently caught the attention of national media. As businesses create more remote jobs than ever before, the “Equal Pay for Equal Work Act” has persuaded many of them to exclude Colorado residents from those opportunities.

 

That’s certainly a blow for a state that has gone from the nation’s lowest unemployment rate to one of the highest in a few short years, but the national media are missing the real story on the ground in the Centennial State.

 

The new law is only one in a long list of recent policies wreaking havoc on Colorado’s economy under the leadership of the state’s Democratic governor, Jared Polis.

 

Wage-Discrimination Law Hurts Colorado Workers

 

The Wall Street Journal first brought the remote-work story to national headlines with an alarming lead: “Big companies are hiring for remote positions that can be performed in any state across the U.S. except one: Colorado.”

 

To blame is a 2019 state law signed by Governor Polis just a few months after the start of his tenure. The legislation, which went into effect at the beginning of this year, requires employers “to disclose the hourly or salary compensation or a range of hourly or salary compensation for all job postings,” according to a legislative staff summary of the bill.

 

If companies fail to comply, they are subject to a penalty ranging from $500 to $10,000 per violation.

 

In response, many companies are including a caveat on postings for remote jobs, such as one from Johnson & Johnson: “Work location is flexible if approved by the Company except that position may not be performed remotely from Colorado.”

 

Even PETA, a longtime darling of the Left, has refused to hassle with the Democrat-backed wage-discrimination law, according to records from coloradoexcluded.com. At least two postings from the organization have excluded Colorado applicants.

 

As with progressive policies, good intentions are proving damaging to the very people they’re intended to help.

 

In a 2019 Op-Ed published before the bill passed, Joni Inman, executive director of the Colorado Women’s Alliance, prophetically observed, “This bill hurts women. It eliminates opportunity rather than promoting it.”

 

Rather than helping women in the workforce, the law is disqualifying them from certain jobs entirely — along with everyone else in the state.

 

National media outlets astutely spotted the threat to Colorado workers in the so-called “Equal Pay” law, but in truth, they’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg. Under the surface is an ominous mass of policies poised to sink the state if our governor doesn’t change course.

 

A Barrage of Anti-Jobs Policies

 

The wage-discrimination law, among other job-destroying policies, is quickly earning Colorado’s first-term governor the nickname “Governor Unemployment” among critics in the state, and for good reason.

 

In 2017, the Centennial State boasted the lowest unemployment rate in the nation. Since Polis took office in January 2019, the state has adopted a series of new policies that have driven Colorado’s unemployment rate to a dismal 37th place.

 

Here are just a few.

 

Oil and Gas Regulations

 

A 2019 law to overhaul the state’s long-standing regulatory regime for the energy industry has already eliminated nearly 8,000 jobs, according to reporting from late last year. It transformed the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission from a regulatory body to an anti-fossil-fuel activist organization.

 

A Colorado Open Records Act request uncovered emails from employees at the agency, which referred to the state’s oil companies as “Snake Oil Inc.,” “Bad Oil and Gas” and “Acme Company.”

 

Backed by Governor Polis, the law passed through the Democrat-controlled General Assembly after voters rejected a nearly identical ballot measure the year before.

 

Minimum Wage

 

Just a few months before the state lost its rank of lowest unemployment in the nation, a minimum-wage amendment to the Colorado constitution went into effect. It’s now $12.32 per hour, the sixth highest in the nation. Polis followed that up with a 2019 law allowing local governments to raise their minimum wages above the new state minimum.

 

Countless reports and anecdotes point to a rising minimum wage causing business closures, job losses, and reduced hours for employees.

 

The owner of Chef Zorba’s Authentic Greek Cuisine, Karen Lukanic, told “The Faces of $15” that she was forced to stay open less and cut work hours for staff after Denver further raised the minimum wage for wait staff. That’s despite servers already generating “$100 in tips on any given day, and it’s frequently double that,” according to Lukanic. Her workers are only a few of the victims of Polis’s minimum-wage increase.

 

Rising Payroll Taxes

 

Last year, voters approved Proposition 118, now the most generous paid family and medical leave law in the nation. The law will likely reduce wages and serve as a deterrent to businesses considering opening in or relocating to Colorado.

 

According to analysis by the nonpartisan Common Sense Institute, “Total premiums to be paid by employers could total over $1.34 billion . . . an effective increase of the corporate income tax of 204%.” Economic modeling from the institute shows that personal income taxes for a worker earning $50,000 a year could rise between 8 and 18 percent because of the law.

 

While voters adopted the measure through the ballot, Polis declined to use his influential platform and popularity as governor to oppose the measure. His political allies forcefully backed it.

 

Attack on Agriculture

 

On the last day of the 2021 session, the legislature passed the Farmworker Bill of Rights, which would impose burdensome new wage and labor laws on the agricultural industry. The law will likely hurt the very workers it aims to help.

 

A spokesperson for the Colorado Farm Bureau explained, “Operating on razor-thin margins and weather timelines, farmers would be forced to cut back on workers’ hours, hiring more employees who work fewer hours to get the job done on time.”

 

Agriculture is a seasonal industry. Workers depend on long hours for part of the year to generate the income they need to support their families. For this reason, the industry has traditionally enjoyed exemptions from federal and state overtime regulations. The legislation repealed that important exemption at the state level, which will force agriculture businesses to cut the work hours laborers want and need.

 

In addition, global commodity prices dictate what the industry can fetch for its goods, leaving little margin for agriculture businesses to adjust to the new cost burdens.

 

Polis is expected to sign the bill.

 

Oversized Unemployment Benefits          

 

Last month, Colorado’s GOP congressmen sent a joint letter to Governor Polis urging him to end the $300 per week in extra unemployment benefits currently offered by the federal government. The letter explained that the added benefits are “incentivizing workers to stay home” and contributing to higher levels of unemployment.

 

A survey conducted by the Colorado Restaurant Association from April 23 through May 7 reveals that “more than 90 percent of Colorado restaurants are currently having trouble hiring staff,” and “65 percent of operators believe the primary hiring obstacle is workers preferring to remain on unemployment benefits.”

 

Similarly, a survey by the Colorado Chamber of Commerce found that “37 percent [of surveyed businesses] say that their company is currently experiencing difficulty hiring employees due to unemployment benefits exceeding wages.”

 

Responding to the congressional delegation’s letter, Polis adamantly refused to end the disincentive to work, arguing that paying people more not to work than to work has and will continue to “stimulate the economy and bring struggling businesses back from the brink.” Instead, he has offered those collecting unemployment up to $1,600 in taxpayer money as an incentive to fill open positions.

 

A majority of governors across the nation have announced an early termination of the bonus unemployment benefits.

 

Tax-and-Fee Frenzy

 

In addition to new laws and regulations discouraging hiring, Polis’s tenure — and this legislative session in particular — has brought a glut of new taxes and fees on businesses and residents without the voter approval required under the state’s constitution.

 

This year, the legislature passed 45 revenue-raising bills that together will generate upwards of $600 million in new taxes and fees annually.

 

Polis supported an infrastructure bill in the style of the Green New Deal that will generate nearly $4 billion in new taxes over the next decade. The legislature evaded the constitution’s requirement for voter approval of new taxes by labeling the taxes as “fees.”

 

The so-called “Tax Fairness for Coloradans” package will increase taxes by a combined total of $372 million in fiscal year 2022-23, by the legislature’s estimates. The package decouples state tax law from federal provisions, which provide tax benefits to businesses. It mirrors a bill from last year that removed at the state level certain tax benefits passed by Congress under the CARES Act to help struggling businesses weather the effects of the pandemic.

 

The bills take some of the new revenues extracted from job creators and use the money to extend tax credits to illegal immigrants.

 

On the campaign trail in 2018, Polis promised to eliminate tax loopholes and reduce taxes for all. Last year, he signed an income-tax bill into law that increased state revenues by eliminating certain tax deductions. He then supported an income-tax reduction, which citizens approved in the November election, offsetting the increases. This year, however, he seems to have forgotten his promise. He has already signed SB21-260 and HB21-1311, eliminating tax deductions and increasing taxes by hundreds of millions of dollars annually, but has yet to propose offsetting tax cuts.

 

Colorado’s Declining Economic Climate

 

This year’s “Rich States, Poor States” report by the American Legislative Exchange Council ranked Colorado as the second most economically attractive state in the nation for the decade spanning from 2009 to 2019. Due to unfavorable public-policy changes, however, the report forecasts the state will fall 18 places relative to other states in the coming years.

 

This does not bode well for Coloradans in the workforce or for those seeking gainful employment.

 

From February through April, the state’s unemployment rate stayed stagnant at 6.4 percent despite the economy adding 25,000 new jobs. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data doesn’t explain this paradox, but it appears that the unemployed were not filling the jobs the economy created. That’s likely thanks in large part to enhanced unemployment benefits, which Polis has refused to end. The most recent May jobs report from the BLS showed slight improvement over April, with the rate falling to 6.2 percent, still well above the national average of 5.8 percent. Relative to other states, however, Colorado’s position remained unchanged.

 

While the whole country has suffered from the effects of the global pandemic, Colorado has fallen behind relative to many other states, suggesting that more than just the virus is to blame.

 

Lesson Learned … Hopefully

 

It’s clear that Colorado’s unemployment problems go far beyond employers excluding Coloradans from remote job opportunities.

 

But what is the lesson from all this?

 

In the words of President Obama, “Elections have consequences.” Coloradans elected a governor whose policies have encouraged unemployment. They are now realizing the consequences.

Republicans Should Abandon the Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal

By Rich Lowry

Friday, July 2, 2021

 

So far, the bipartisan infrastructure deal is going through the normal life cycle of such proposals — alive, dead, revived, uncertain.

 

For Republicans, the best answer should be dead.

 

They have nothing to gain by blessing a portion of President Joe Biden’s spending plans, when an ungodly amount of money is going to go out the door regardless of whether they vote for a chunk of it or not.

 

The conventional wisdom is that the Senate has to prove that it can work, and the test of its functioning is how much of Biden’s spending Republicans endorse.

 

This is a distorted view of the Senate’s role, which shouldn’t be to get on board a historic spending spree for which Biden won no mandate and which isn’t justified by conditions in the country (it’s not true, for instance, that the nation’s infrastructure is crumbling).

 

Besides, if bipartisan spending is the test, the Senate just a few weeks ago passed a $200 billion China competition bill by a 68-32 vote. It used to be that $200 billion constituted a lot of money, but now it doesn’t rate, not when there’s $6 trillion on the table.

 

The infrastructure deal lurched from gloriously alive to dead when Biden explicitly linked its passage to the simultaneous passage of a reconciliation bill with the rest of the Democratic Party’s spending priorities in it.

 

Then, it revived again when Biden walked this back and promised a dual track for the two bills.

 

The fierce Republican insistence on these two tracks doesn’t make much sense and amounts to asking Democrats to allow a decent interval before going ahead with the rest of their spending — Democrats are going to try to pass a reconciliation whether the bipartisan deal passes or not.

 

In other words, at the end of the day, there’s only one track.

 

The calculation of Republicans supporting the deal is that a significant bipartisan package can take some of the heat off Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema in their resistance to eliminating the filibuster.

 

A deal that passes and is signed into law will certainly be a feather in their caps, but it’s hard to believe they’d change their minds on the filibuster if the deal fell apart.

 

They are both so extensively and adamantly on the record in favor of the filibuster that a climb-down would be politically embarrassing and perilous.

 

Republicans supporting the deal also think that it will make passing the subsequent reconciliation bill harder. First, the parts of infrastructure that have the widest support — roads and bridges — will be in the deal and not in the reconciliation bill. Second, the unwelcome tax increases excluded from the bipartisan deal will be in the reconciliation bill.

 

This isn’t a crazy calculation, although it’s not clearly correct either. The higher the top-line number is for the reconciliation bill, the harder it will be to pass. By allowing Democrats to cleave off some spending into a bipartisan deal, the overall number for the reconciliation bill gets smaller. In other words, the bipartisan deal could make the partisan reconciliation easier, rather than harder, to pass.

 

It’s not as though Biden is fiscally prudent on all other fronts except in this one area which he considers a particularly important national investment with unmistakable returns. No, he’s universally profligate. His reckless spending on all fronts (except defense) makes it more imperative for Republicans to stake out a position in four-square opposition.

 

The bipartisan deal is hardly exemplary legislation, by the way. It resorts to all the usual Beltway gimmicks to create the pretense that it’s paid for, when it’s basically as irresponsible as the rest of the Biden spending.

 

Bipartisanship has its uses, but so does partisanship. Joe Biden wants to be known for his FDR- and LBJ-like government spending, believing that it is the key to political success and to an enduring legacy. Fine. Let him and his party own it.

A Good Day for Free Speech and Free Elections

National Review Online

Thursday, July 01, 2021

 

Legal constitutionalists and political conservatives have had reason to be disappointed at times with the Roberts Court, but today is not one of those days. The Court concluded its 2020-21 term with a pair of 6-3 rulings written by George W. Bush’s appointees (Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito) and joined by all six Republican appointees to the Court. Both reached the right conclusions. Both will advance the progress of the law toward a vibrant space for democracy, by protecting free speech and free and fair elections.

 

Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta arose from the California attorney general’s office, mainly under Kamala Harris and Xavier Becerra, trampling the First Amendment rights of nonprofit advocacy groups to the privacy of their donors. It was not a coincidence that California launched that initiative at the height of the Tea Party movement. Its draconian scope applied not only to California charities but to any nonprofit that solicited donations in the state — even Chinese dissident groups. In an age of cancel culture and ever-increasing digital surveillance, the Court found, the risks of harassment and reprisals “are heightened in the 21st century and seem to grow with each passing year, as anyone with access to a computer can compile a wealth of information about anyone else, including such sensitive details as a person’s home address or the school attended by his children.”

 

The cause of donor rights brought together possibly the broadest coalition of interest groups on the same side of an issue in the Court’s history. Even the Biden administration’s brief admitted that Harris and Becerra had disregarded the importance of protecting the privacy of donors by maintaining donor lists on a system the trial court found to be “an open door for hackers.” Given the record of Harris and Becerra, Roberts wrote, their office’s “assurances of confidentiality are not worth much.” The Court also found “a dramatic mismatch” between the California AG’s claimed interest in fighting charitable fraud and its methods, with “not a single, concrete instance” in which collecting this information advanced its law-enforcement purpose. AFPF v. Bonta may be a loss for the likes of Kamala Harris and Xavier Becerra, but it is a victory for the free-speech and association rights of people and groups spanning the entirety of the political spectrum. It is also a shot across the bow against the Democrats’ “For the People Act,” which similarly invades the privacy of donors.

 

Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee upheld two Arizona laws that are common across many states: a ban on counting provisional ballots if they are cast in person in the wrong precinct, and a ban on “ballot harvesting,” preventing activist groups from collecting and handling another person’s completed mail-in ballot. Both types of rules are regularly decried as “voter suppression” by hysterical Democrats. The Court properly found that Arizona had a legitimate interest both in assigning voters to precincts and in protecting the sanctity of the secret ballot from the threat of voter intimidation or fraud presented by third parties handling ballots.

 

The Court rightly rejected efforts to cast the Arizona legislature’s careful work as driven by racial discrimination simply because one state legislator who brought ballot harvesting to the legislature’s attention had also engaged in wild conspiracy theories. Alito shut down future efforts to apply such theories: “legislators who vote to adopt a bill are not the agents of the bill’s sponsor or proponents. Under our form of government, legislators have a duty to exercise their judgment and to represent their constituents. It is insulting to suggest that they are mere dupes or tools.”

 

Democrats routinely file suits under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act against any change in election law passed by Republican legislatures. Alito’s opinion, the Court’s first applying Section 2 to challenges to voting procedures, emphasized that the statutory language passed when the statute was last amended in 1982 focuses on whether state laws have the overall result of restricting the access of racial minorities to voting — it does not prohibit every single rule that makes voting marginally less convenient. “The core” of Section 2, Alito wrote, “is the requirement that voting be ‘equally open.’ The statute’s reference to equal ‘opportunity’ may stretch that concept to some degree to include consideration of a person’s ability to use the means that are equally open. But equal openness remains the touchstone.”

 

The Court provided five “guideposts” that will help courts decide cases and dispose of flimsy ones: courts should have a sense of proportion about “the size of the burden imposed. . . . Mere inconvenience cannot be enough”; courts should ask how far “a voting rule departs from what was standard practice” when the statute was written in 1982; small disparities in the impact of laws on minority-group voting are less likely to violate Section 2, especially where the voter-suppression theory relies on differences “with respect to employment, wealth, and education”; courts “must consider the opportunities provided by a State’s entire system of voting” rather than individual provisions; and courts should also consider “the strength of the state interests served,” specifically including the powerful state interest in preventing fraud. “It should go without saying,” Alito added, “that a State may take action to prevent election fraud without waiting for it to occur and be detected within its own borders.”

 

The Court’s renewed focus on the language of the law passed by Congress, and its guidance in how to apply it in practice, is welcome. The doors of the federal courthouse should always remain open to protect all Americans — and black Americans in particular, given the nation’s painful history — from laws that result in real discrimination in who is able to vote. But federal law was never intended to put every state in the Union in a permanent straitjacket to the point where even temporary emergency voting rules adopted to manage a once-in-a-century pandemic can never be revisited. Brnovich is bad news for junk lawsuits such as the Justice Department’s suit against Georgia. But it is good news for letting the people’s representatives protect free, fair, open, and orderly elections. Trust in democracy requires nothing less.

 

With a series of high-stakes cases on the docket for next term on hot-button issues, we can only say of the Roberts Court after reading today’s opinions: a good start.

The Magic President

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, July 01, 2021

 

Joe Biden is in Surfside, Fla. But why?

 

The fact that this question will be received in most quarters as facetious if not outrageous is one more little data point illustrating the metamorphosis of the American president from chief magistrate to chief priest.

 

There was a time — and it wasn’t even all that long ago — when presidents weren’t expected to make ritual pilgrimages to scenes of suffering.

 

As John Dickerson recounts in his very readable The Hardest Job in the World, a series of tropical storms pounded the United States in 1955, doing more damage than had been inflicted during any hurricane season on record. Dwight Eisenhower was on vacation in Gettysburg and did not interrupt his family retreat. There was no public outcry or criticism — this was utterly normal. Vice President Richard Nixon joked that Washington staffers used President Eisenhower’s absence to catch up on their sleep. “He has the ungodly habit of getting up early,” Nixon said. The storms kept up: In 1957, Hurricane Audrey killed more than 600 people in Louisiana’s Cameron Parish. President Eisenhower was again nowhere to be seen. He did not visit Louisiana, did not make a heartfelt public speech, did not rush to put together a federal response. No one thought this was remarkable on his part.

 

Things were much the same for John Kennedy when Hurricane Carla struck Texas in 1961. He did not tour that scene or the scene of a catastrophic East Coast storm a few months later. He did not parachute in and perform five acts of sympathy theater.

 

“Neither Kennedy nor Eisenhower was callous,” Dickerson writes. “Ike believed, like most did at the time, that local governments, civil defense forces, and the Red Cross were supposed to stack the sandbags and distribute food packets and blankets after a storm hit. The federal government’s job was to rebuild structures. Eisenhower believed that if the federal government preempted the local duty to care for neighbors, it would jeopardize the core American value of Americans giving back to their communities.”

 

The man who really changed that was Lyndon Johnson, who simultaneously was a genuine idealist and a grotesque political opportunist. Johnson was an FDR man through and through, and he admired his legendary predecessor’s ability to forge an emotional bond with the American people through symbolic displays of presidential goodwill. Expanding on that strategy, Johnson, over the objections of his own emergency advisers, visited New Orleans after a hurricane drowned 75 people there, convinced by the powerful Louisiana senator Russell Long that his arrival on the scene would be the American answer to a Roman triumph — which it was. It was an unqualified public-relations coup, and the major newspapers, as Dickerson reports, “portrayed Johnson in action-hero terms.”

 

Johnson repeated the performance in subsequent disasters, and President Nixon continued the new tradition. Johnson’s gambit, as Dickerson puts it, produced a “merger between the duties of the office and the requirements of politics that gave birth to the presidential first-responder obligation.” President George W. Bush, who in spite of his cowboy pretensions was connected to a much more reserved New England cultural current, paid a high political price for failing to follow Johnson’s example after Hurricane Katrina. The lesson lost on President Bush was that Johnson had not been greeted merely as an executive but as a savior. Calling to mind both New Testament stories and medieval superstitions about the healing power of the touch of a king, Americans had reached out for physical contact with the president and gone into ecstasies upon achieving it. Whatever that nonsense was about, it wasn’t about federal emergency-relief funds.

 

The belief in the magical healing powers of the president can be seen dramatically illustrated in the myth of Ronald Reagan’s response to AIDS — the legend that insists, falsely, that he would not so much as speak the word in public. That is a fiction, and it obscures the more relevant fact that the Reagan administration took aggressive steps to combat the epidemic, streamlining FDA procedures to make experimental drugs more readily available to patients and appointing intelligent deputies to take the lead on the issue. (Among these was Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, an “unsung hero” in the fight against AIDS, as the Washington Post put it decades later.) President Reagan and his administration took important substantive action and very likely saved many thousands of lives by doing so.

 

But President Reagan, in spite of his career as an actor, was not much on sympathy theater. And so the Magic President was nowhere to be seen in the early days of the AIDS crisis. Instead, the heroine of that period was that other magical figure of the 1980s, Princess Diana, who contributed nothing of substance to the AIDS response but made a point of physically laying hands on AIDS patients and of being photographed doing so, thereby performing one of the traditional magical duties associated with royalty. Those who were surprised by the impromptu shrines and mass hysteria occasioned by Princess Diana’s death had not comprehended the cultic character of her public career.

 

It is not entirely clear what practical purpose Joe Biden has in visiting Surfside. As a lightly informed political careerist who seems to believe that the infamous Tuskegee study had as its subjects the Tuskegee Airmen, President Biden is not the first first responder a thinking person would hope for. I would be shocked if he knew basic relevant things such as where building codes actually come from, or if he had anything meaningful to contribute to the rescue work. Such presidential visits often are framed as an executive effort to press the relevant bureaucracies into action, a folk belief that has very little basis in reality: If it actually were the case that our agencies could be counted on to react with appropriate commitment and urgency only under personal presidential direction, then we would in some real sense have a failed state. We don’t, yet, and for that we should be grateful.

 

But President Biden is in Florida neither to find facts nor to direct rescue efforts. He is there in his magical capacity. Dickerson writes that the president fills many roles in American life, among them “first responder” and “chief priest.” I would only quibble that, in the current configuration of the presidency, those are one role rather than two.

The Absurdly Misleading Attacks on Anti-CRT Rules

By Rich Lowry

Thursday, July 01, 2021

 

History itself, nay, our very democracy, is under attack.

 

The assailant? State legislatures that have passed laws intended to keep critical race theory and associated “anti-racist” ideologies out of the public schools.

 

The Yale professor Timothy Snyder, a scholar of totalitarianism and 20th-century atrocities, has written a piece for The New York Times Magazine titled “The War on History Is a War on Democracy.”

 

At The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum published a piece with the headline “Democracies Don’t Try to Make Everyone Agree.”

 

Applebaum summarizes what she thinks is the crux of the anti-CRT push in schools: “Schoolchildren should not be taught the history of racism in America; they should not learn about slavery; they should not be allowed to think about the long-term consequences. That, apparently, is now the consensus in a segment of the Republican Party.”

 

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this line of attack on anti-CRT bills is either woefully misinformed or willfully dishonest. It doesn’t interact at all with the intention or the text of the anti-CRT provisions. In sum, it is a hysterical smear.

 

Applebaum doesn’t even try to provide an example of the alleged campaign to erase slavery and racism from the nation’s curricula, even though there’s already been a lot of anti-CRT movement in the states.

 

But, hey, evidently, being a fierce proponent of open debate and historical accuracy frees one from the obligation of trying to understand the people you are criticizing or of providing actual evidence for your charges against them.

 

Snyder goes even further. He explains at length Russian efforts to minimize the Stalin-era famine in Ukraine and to squelch discussion of it — a gross offense against historical memory. This campaign is formalized in “memory laws” that forbid speaking the truth and protect “the feelings of the powerful” rather than “the facts about the vulnerable.”

 

“This spring,” Snyder intones, “memory laws arrived in America.”

 

Then he recites the supposed parade of horribles. He says the new anti-CRT rule adopted by Florida’s state school board seeks, like Russia’s 2014 memory law, “to silence a history of suffering” and “to forbid education about racism.”

 

Either Snyder doesn’t know what he’s talking about because he hasn’t taken the time to understand the state of play in Florida or he’s being deliberately deceptive.

 

The rule adopted by the Florida board says, in a passage that Snyder conveniently doesn’t quote, “Instruction on the required topics must be factual and objective, and may not suppress or distort significant historical events, such as the Holocaust, slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the civil rights movement and the contributions of women, African American and Hispanic people to our country.”

 

This is like Vladimir Putin’s handiwork?

 

The rule, as Snyder does note, bans the use of materials from the 1619 Project and forbids the teaching of “the theory that racism is not merely the product of prejudice, but that racism is embedded in American society and its legal systems in order to uphold the supremacy of white persons.”

 

In this, Florida is prohibiting the teaching of controversial and divisive perspectives that, at the very least, aren’t necessary to give a student a full, rounded, and accurate picture of U.S. history.

 

Snyder says this means that “since Jim Crow is systemic racism, having to do with American society and law, the subject would seem to be banned in Florida schools.”

 

This is utter nonsense. First, the sentence prior to the one about systematic racism, quoted above, says that slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the civil-rights movement can’t be suppressed or distorted.

 

How is that consistent with a ban on the teaching of Jim Crow?

 

Indeed, it is written in Florida statute that students are to be taught “the history of African Americans, including the history of African peoples before the political conflicts that led to the development of slavery, the passage to America, the enslavement experience, abolition, and the contributions of African Americans to society. Instructional materials shall include the contributions of African Americans to American society.”

 

The rule adopted by the Florida board of education in no way supplants the statute but adds further guidance for teachers in how to implement it.

 

You wouldn’t know that from Snyder’s article, which is huffy about truth and accuracy without displaying any commitment to them.

 

He also heaps scorn on a Texas anti-CRT law but doesn’t bother to quote from or paraphrase the extensive, extremely wide-ranging list of people, events, and ideas that it says students should understand.

 

The list includes:

 

(7) the history of white supremacy, including but not limited to the institution of slavery, the eugenics movement, and the Ku Klux Klan, and the ways in which it is morally wrong;

 

(8) the history and importance of the civil rights movement, including the following documents:

 

(A) Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and “I Have a Dream” speech;

 

(B) the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 (42 U.S.C. Section 2000a et seq.);

 

(C) the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education;

(D) the Emancipation Proclamation;

 

(E) the Universal Declaration of Human Rights;

 

(F) the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution

 

Again, this is the equivalent of a Putin memory law?

 

In addition, the Texas act says that if a teacher delves into a contemporary topic, he should “explore the topic from diverse and contending perspectives without giving deference to any one perspective.”

 

It forbids requiring school employees to participate in training that “presents any form of race or sex stereotyping or blame on the basis of race or sex.”

 

And it forbids courses including, among others, these concepts:

 

(i) one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex;

 

(ii) an individual, by virtue of the individual’s race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously;

 

(iii) an individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because of the individual’s race

 

What exactly is Snyder’s objection here? Does he really want race and sex stereotyping in the schools? Courses that teach that one race is superior to another?

 

He jabs Texas for forbidding courses that require understanding the 1619 Project. “Teachers succeed,” he snarks, “if students do not understand something.” But the act refers to understanding Fredrick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., Susan B. Anthony, Cesar Chavez, and Dolores Huerta, among many others. Presumably, if teachers were to impart anything close to all this knowledge, the kids will be alright if they aren’t taught Nikole Hannah-Jones.

 

Other states that have acted against CRT have adopted similar language against discriminatory content. Idaho, for instance, says that schools shouldn’t force students to affirm

 

(i) That any sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin is inherently superior or inferior;

 

(ii) That individuals should be adversely treated on the basis of their sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin; or

 

(iii) That individuals, by virtue of sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin, are inherently responsible for actions committed in the past by other members of the same sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin.

 

It is reasonable to object to the drafting of some of these laws as vague and overly broad, but it’s hard to see how any fair-minded person could object to the goal of preventing children from being taught — in the public schools! — that one race is superior to another or that people should be discriminated against on the basis of their race.

 

Here we are, though, with prominent writers lodging their deep objections, without any grounding in the reality of what’s happening in the states. Indeed, one has to guess that you are as likely to get an accurate picture of Stalin’s crimes in today’s Russia as you are a factual portrayal of the anti-CRT provisions and their consequences in Snyder’s tendentious, highly misleading essay.

Atheists against Atheism

By Cameron Hilditch

Thursday, July 1, 2021

 

This interesting article written by Jonathon Van Maren for Mercatornet chronicles the evolving thought of certain atheist thinkers on the question of Christianity and Western civilisation. The historians Niall Ferguson and Tom Holland and the author and journalist Douglas Murray are the main focus of the piece, and all three men appear to have come to the conclusion that our modern liberal order rests on a foundation of pre-modern moral and social premises that were supplied almost exclusively by Christianity.

 

This position, which Ferguson, Holland, and Murray all take to one extent or another, is fascinating not only for its honesty but for its decadence (in the historical, rather than material, sense). None of the three men believe in Jesus Christ in the traditional religious sense, but they all believe in belief in Jesus Christ, or at least in the proposition that our civilization is being unmoored and unmade by the recession of widespread Christian faith. Ferguson is quoted by Van Maren as saying,

 

I know I can’t achieve religious faith . . . but I do think we should go to church. We don’t have, I don’t think, an evolved ethical system. I don’t buy the idea that evolution alone gets us to be moral. It can modify behaviour, but there’s just too much evidence that in the raw, when the constraints of civilisation fall away, we behave in the most savage way to one another. I’m a big believer that with the inherited wisdom of a two-millennia old religion, we’ve got a pretty good framework to work with.

 

Murray describes himself as “an uncomfortable agnostic who recognises the virtues and the values the Christian faith has brought” and Holland has written an entire book of history the subtitle of which is “How Christianity Made The Modern World.”

 

It’s not a coincidence that many of our intellectuals (for this trend holds true for more than these three, as Van Maren notes) are beginning to write about Christianity’s normative influence on our moral intuitions at this time. A fish can live its entire life under water without sensing how water contributes to its well-being. But when the fish is pulled up out of it by the hook, it knows water for the first time by its absence. Christianity is receding at a fast enough rate in our society for sensitive observers to see the cruciform silhouette of our way of life against the horizon of its absence.

 

Friedrich Nietzsche saw this tide receding as long ago as the late 19th century and celebrated it, proto-fascist that he was. As the theologian David Bentley Hart writes:

 

Because [Nietzsche] was conscious of the historical contingency of all cultural values, he never deluded himself that humanity could do away with Christian faith while simply retaining Christian morality in some diluted form, such as liberal social conscience or innate human sympathy. . . . Nietzsche was a prophetic figure precisely because he, almost alone among Christianity’s enemies, understood the implications of Christianity’s withdrawal from the culture it had haunted for so many centuries. He understood that the effort to cast off Christian faith while retaining the best and most beloved elements of Christian morality was doomed to defeat, and that even our cherished “Enlightenment” virtues may in the end prove to have been only parasitic upon inherited, but fading, cultural predilections, and so prove also to be destined for oblivion. 

 

It seems as if a lot of our writers and intellectuals are having this same Nietzschean epiphany, but thankfully they’re greeting it with a morally sane, post-Auschwitz level of dread. Can the civilizational drift they’ve put heir finger on be arrested, or are we already being inducted into the new moral order of a post-Christian West?