I hope that the developments of the last few days are putting to rest this nauseatingly ridiculous notion that conservatives who can't and never could stand Trump or the cult that surrounds him should "work with" Joe Biden. He's not some moderate foil to his party's leftist tilt. He's prominently part of it.
Consider what happened earlier today. The Senate confirmed one of his least qualified, most rabidly radical nominees, Xavier Becerra, to head Health and Human Services.
He's a disaster coming out of the gate:
Becerra is an awful selection, considerably worse than Tanden. As I noted here, Becerra has no experience working at HHS, no medical background, and has never been chief executive of a state or any entity other than an attorney general’s shop.
How Becerra can be considered qualified to run HHS is beyond me. It may also be beyond Sen. Collins. She has noted his lack of relevant credentials.
Becerra is also terrible on policy. Becerra is a progressive activist whose experience in health and human services consists mainly in bullying nuns. As Rich Lowry reminds us, Becerra “went out of his way to target an exemption [from the Obamacare mandate] for the Little Sisters of the Poor.” His lawsuit against them “is still caught up in the courts even after it got rebuked by the U.S. Supreme Court last year.”
Becerra. . .chose to pursue this litigation even though it is completely meritless; even though it would, if successful, punish nuns who simply want to carry out their calling to care for the indigent elderly; and even though only ideological zealots intolerant of moral views different from their own can take any pleasure in its continuation.
What a guy. And what a “moderate” Biden is for nominating him.
The Little Sisters of the Poor litigation isn’t the only manifestation of Becerra’s extremism and bullying. The editors of National Review cite others:
In 2017, Becerra filed felony charges against the pro-life activists and citizen-journalists who had gone undercover to expose Planned Parenthood’s gruesome practice of selling the body parts of aborted babies to biotech companies. Becerra had not gone after animal-rights activists for similar investigative tactics. In response to Becerra’s actions, one writer at the left-wing magazine Mother Jones called the Planned Parenthood videos “a legitimate investigation, and no level of government should be in the business of chilling it.” Becerra was rebuked by the liberal editorial page of the Los Angeles Times for his “disturbing overreach.”
In 2018, Becerra and the State of California were smacked down by the U.S. Supreme Court in the case NIFLA v. Becerra over a state law forcing pro-life pregnancy centers to advertise abortion.
In 2019, Becerra aggressively opposed the merger of two religiously affiliated hospital chains in California because the resulting consolidated chain could reduce access to both abortion and gender-reassignment surgeries.
In 2020, Becerra was rebuked for his zealous defense of a California law requiring abortion coverage in insurance plans offered by churches. The Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services ruled that California’s abortion mandate violated a federal law known as the Weldon amendment, which prohibits federal funding of states and localities that force health providers and insurers to participate in or cover abortion. Becerra refused to comply.
Between Becerra’s lack of relevant experience and his pro-abortion extremism, it may be possible to pick up 51 “no” votes on his nomination.
Let’s hope so. I agree with Yuval Levin:
Even in normal times, when maybe there could be some kind of excuse for treating such an important job as a sop to the radical activist wing of the president’s party, Becerra would be an especially inflammatory choice. And these are not normal times.
We are still in the midst of a global pandemic, and the secretary of HHS should be more experienced with the department and its work and with the issues involved, and should not be a figure who will enflame the kinds of fears that will undermine the trust of large swaths of the country in the government’s actions, guidance, and priorities.
And Vanita Gupta is not far behind:
Ordinarily, senators should defer to the president on executive-branch appointments. But Justice Department nominee Vanita Gupta is too radical to merit such deference.
Gupta, nominated by President Biden to be associate attorney general, is a radical on criminal justice and race. She has been an avid participant in the morally corrupt mutual back-scratching known as third-party settlements. She has made vicious partisan comments that give ample reason to believe she will politicize the Justice Department.
The third-ranking official at the DOJ has vast operational power behind the scenes, whereas his or her two superiors serve more as the public face of the administration.
Gupta began her legal career with direct funding from the left-wing Soros Foundation. For most of her career, she has demonstrated animus against police and evinces a conviction that this nation’s institutions, law enforcement and otherwise, are inherently racist. She advocates a huge role for the Department of Justice in interfering with local policing. She is asking for confirmation despite recent comments of a notably objectionable nature, despite having demanded rejection of judicial nominee Ryan Bounds for (mildly) “insensitive” comments he made against “multiculturalism” when he was a university student a full quarter of a century ago.
By the standard she applied to Bounds, Gupta clearly fails the test of reasonable nonpartisanship.
As the associate attorney general, Gupta would advise on matters relating to law enforcement and would oversee the Community Oriented Policing Services. Yet her antipathy toward criminal justicelives loudly within her. She supports an almost complete gutting of the 1994 federal “crime bill” that played a large role in reducing street crime. She has repeatedly said that almost all police departments are guilty of “institutional racism [that] has infected [them] at every level and stage of the game,” and she advocates significant reductions in police funding and the forced closure of numerous jails and prisons.
Gupta wants almost all bail requirements eliminated. She would abolish almost all mandatory minimum prison sentences, even for repeat offenders, and set a maximum criminal sentence, except in extremely rare circumstances, of 20 years.
If the only objections to Gupta involved her stances on criminal justice, one might yet defer to the president’s privilege of appointing people who share his policy preferences, even if they significantly contradict his own long record on those issues. Senators, perhaps, could give her the benefit of the doubt even on rather radical positions in just one area.
Yet Gupta is radical, truly radical, on racial issues. Just last summer, she testified to Congress that “structural racism is a feature of every American institution” and that every single American is guilty of “implicit bias,” especially regarding race. Indeed, she was so proud of making these accusations that she boasted about them in a series of tweets. Yet, piling evasion on top of her racial obsessions, she repeatedly equivocated last week when asked probing questions about these views by Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas.
Gupta combines the worst sort of radical racial views with an antipathy toward law enforcement in a particularly objectionable way. In 2005, while already a major player in civil rights law, she wrote a law review article — a serious piece by a professional, not some off-the-cuff statement from a college kid — in which she argued for a widespread adoption of “critical race lawyering.” She described this overtly race-focused approach like this:
“Critical race theory, as an analytical tool, helps us understand that underneath the insidious veneer of such code words and mottos as ‘the rule of law,’ ‘colorblindness,’ 'equal justice for all,’ and ‘equal protection,’ the law is contingent upon the social and political realities of inequality and racial power.”“The very systems” in place in this new millennium, she wrote, are responsible for “maintaining the subordination of people of color.”
This wasn’t in 1955, mind you, before Congress passed two civil rights acts. This wasn’t in 1974, when cities across the country broke out in major discord over forced busing. This was in modern-day America, after protections against racism and redress for racist actions had long been enshrined in law.
Attempts to quell unease about this bill include the arguments that it can't affect school curricula, that it preserves religious freedom, that it's irrelevant to abortion, that it upholds Title IX, that it won't affect parental rights, that the SCOTUS Bostock v. Clayton County decision necessitates this law, that doctors won't be forced to perform sex-change surgery or prescribe hormones to achieve that. It's all lies.
Only some 70 to 80 percent of the blame for these grotesque disfigurings of Western civilization can be placed on Biden and the Democrats, though. Republicans insisted on sticking with a loudmouth narcissist whose sloppily arrived-at worldview and word-salad-and-insult means of expressing it left no room for anyone with a serious understanding of the magnitude of what progressives are doing to our culture and nation to gain political traction.
Alas, we have to proceed from where we are. Conservatism has little official power at present. It may be that things have to get even more bizarre and evil before there's a general recognition that we're headed toward an unforgiving precipice.
It amazes me that the logically ridiculous notion that Becerra was trying to force celibate "nuns" to get abortions is so often repeated. On the one hand, as nonsense goes it is laugh-out-loud hilarity. But it also serves as a lesson on the difficulty of stemming misinformation when claims such as this are not given any follow-through thought, even by those who by education and reputation should know better. Cheers.
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