President-elect Donald Trump is threatening to turn the Constitution’s appointment process for Cabinet officers on its head. If what I’m hearing through the conservative legal grapevine is correct, he might resort to a cockamamie scheme that would require House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) to play a critical role. Johnson can and should immediately put an end to this scheme.
Yes, the president's power to make recess appointments is provided for in the Constitution, but Hamilton regarded it as “nothing more than a supplement” to the “general mode of appointing officers of the United States” and is to used “in cases to which the general method was inadequate.”
Here's what seems to be getting cooked up:
It appears that the Trump team is working on a scheme to allow Trump to recess-appoint his Cabinet officers. This scheme would exploit an obscure and never-before-used provision of the Constitution (part of Article II, Section 3) stating that “in Case of Disagreement” between the houses of Congress, “with Respect to the Time of Adjournment,” the president “may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper.”
Under this scheme, it appears that the House would adopt a concurrent resolution that provided for the adjournment of both the House and the Senate. If the Senate didn’t adopt the resolution, Trump would purport to adjourn both houses for at least 10 days (and perhaps much longer). He would then use the resulting intrasession recess to appoint Gaetz and other Cabinet nominees.
Ten years ago, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia labeled the president’s recess-appointment power an “anachronism” because “modern forms of communication and transportation” make the Senate always available to consider nominations. Along with three of his colleagues, Scalia also argued that the president’s power to make recess appointments is limited to intersession recesses and does not apply to the intrasession recess that the Trump scheme would concoct. The justice, who died in 2016, would be aghast at the notion that a president could create an intrasession recess for the purpose of bypassing the Senate approval process for nominations.
Whelan conclude with what is obvious to anyone with a working moral compass: that Speaker Johnson must make clear that flimsily justified recesses ain't happening.
It's pretty clear that the VSG intends to surround himself with a covey of yes-people as quickly as possible so the machinery is in place for any further damage to Mr. Madison's document he feels he needs to do.
There is an excellent account of the Wall Street Journal's sit-down with Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito in yesterday's edition.
LITD could go for a whole lot of justices in his mold.
This is actually the third time this year the Journal has focused on his role on the bench:
“I marvel at all the nonsense that has been written about me in the last year,” Justice Samuel Alito says during an early July interview at the Journal’s New York offices. In the face of a political onslaught, he observes, “the traditional idea about how judges and justices should behave is they should be mute” and leave it to others, especially “the organized bar,” to defend them. “But that’s just not happening. And so at a certain point I’ve said to myself, nobody else is going to do this, so I have to defend myself.”
He does so with a candor that is refreshing and can be startling. He spoke with us on the record for four hours in two wide-ranging sessions, the first in April in his chambers at the court. In the interim, he wrote an op-ed for these pages responding in detail to a hit piece from ProPublica, a self-styled “independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism with moral force.” Many of the court’s critics claim to want more “transparency.” Their hostile reactions to our April interview and his June op-ed suggest—no surprise—that they’re really after ideologically congenial rulings, not to mention conformist press coverage.
Even among his fellow originalists / textualists, he has a distinct approach:
Justice Alito, 73, was appointed in early 2006 and is now the second most senior associate justice. He has emerged as an important voice on the court with a distinctive interpretive method that is rooted in originalism and textualism—adherence to the text, respectively, of the Constitution and statutes—but in some ways more pragmatic than that of Justice Clarence Thomas or Neil Gorsuch.
“There are very serious differences” in how the six conservative justices approach cases, Justice Alito says. The simplest difference involves respect for precedent: Justice Thomas “gives less weight to stare decisis than a lot of other justices.” It is, “in its way, a virtue of his jurisprudence,” Justice Alito says. “He sticks to his guns.”
That’s why Justice Thomas writes many lone concurrences. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), he argued that “in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents,” including those involving same-sex marriage, contraception and consensual sodomy. Justice Alito’s majority opinion carefully distinguished those issues from abortion. Justice Thomas often disregards precedents with which he disagrees and follows his own route to the majority’s destination—to cite a recurring example, by relying on the 14th Amendment’s Privileges or Immunities Clause rather than the Due Process Clause. The disadvantage of this approach, Justice Alito says, “is that you drop out of the conversation, and . . . lose your ability to help to shape what comes next in the application of that rule.”
Of Gorsuch, he says that he's "definitely not a consequentialist." He says Chief Justice Roberts "puts a high premium on consensus."
But the exhilarating parts of what he had to say for me were his discussions of how he came about his own opinions.
Another prime example is National Pork Producers Council v. Ross, which upheld a California law banning the sale of meat from pigs that are “confined in a cruel manner”—almost all of which is produced in other states. The council argued that the law violated the Dormant Commerce Clause, a doctrine that limits states’ authority to enact policies that burden interstate commerce.
Justice Alito, who agreed with that view, says “it’s no secret that Justice Thomas and Justice Gorsuch don’t think that there is such a thing as the Dormant Commerce Clause.” Justices Barrett, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan signed on to parts of Justice Gorsuch’s opinion, providing a majority that let the law stand.
“I have not joined Justice Thomas, Justice [Antonin] Scalia, Justice Gorsuch in saying we should get rid of the Dormant Commerce Clause,” Justice Alito says. “I’ve written this in the Tennessee wine case—that the Constitution surely was meant to contain some principle that prevents the balkanization of the economy. That was one of the main reasons for calling the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.”
He refers to his 7-2 ruling in Tennessee Wine and Spirits Retailers Assn. v. Thomas (2019). In dissent, Justices Gorsuch and Thomas cited the 21st Amendment, which repealed Prohibition and gave states broad authority to regulate alcohol. Justice Alito’s majority opinion treated that provision “as one part of a unified constitutional scheme,” within which the lawmakers who ratified the 21st Amendment understood that “the Commerce Clause did not permit the States to impose protectionist measures clothed as police-power regulations.”
And then he states the thunderous truth about abortion and same-sex marriage:
That demonstrates a central feature of Justice Alito’s jurisprudence: its emphasis on historical context. “I think history often tells us what the Constitution means,” he says, “or at least it can tell us what the Constitution doesn’t mean.” His dissent in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) is a case in point. “It’s perfectly clear that nobody in 1868 thought that the 14th Amendment was going to protect the right to same-sex marriage,” he says. Before this century, “no society—even those that did not have a moral objection to same-sex conduct, like ancient Greece—had recognized same-sex marriage.” The first country to legalize it was the Netherlands, effective in 2001.
The same attention to history informs Justice Alito’s textualism. “I reject the idea that a statute should be interpreted simply by looking up the words in the dictionary and applying that mechanically,” he says. Justice Gorsuch did something like that in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), in which the court held that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits employment discrimination “because of . . . sex,” covers “sexual orientation and gender identity.”
Justice Gorsuch reasoned that because sex is essential to the definition of both categories, such discrimination is “because of” sex. But in 1964 homosexuality was subject to widespread disapprobation, and gender identity “hardly existed as a concept, even among professionals in the field,” as Justice Alito says. “When it’s very clear that the author of the text . . . cannot have meant something, then I don’t think we should adopt that interpretation, even if a purely semantic interpretation of the statute would lead you to a different result.”
Justice Alito’s respect for precedent has limits: “Some decisions—and I think thatRoe andCasey fell in this category—are so egregiously wrong, so clearly wrong, that’s a very strong factor in support of overruling.” Those are the 1973 and 1992 abortion cases thatDobbsoverturned, with Justice Alito writing for a majority of five. Chief Justice Roberts provided a sixth vote to uphold Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban but urged “a more measured course” that would narrow the precedents while deferring the question of whether to overturn them altogether.
This is a serious person. He understands that the document by which he and his colleagues are supposed to assess the legality of anything that comes before them has to be consulted on its own terms. It is the most visionary undertaking by human beings establishing a country anywhere, at any time in history. If we go playing fast and loose with so much as a word of it, all bets are off and we're in uncharted territory.
Justice Alito doesn't want that, and neither does LITD.
The attention paid to the debt ceiling crisis in the Obama era may have been a product of a simpler political time, when a near-existential threat to the nation was an anomaly, not another Thursday. Donald Trump was a reality TV show host, social media was still a novelty and a congressman yelling “you lie” at the president seemed like a really big deal.
“We all have shorter attention spans and crisis fatigue,” said Dan Pfeiffer, who was a top communications official in the Obama White House during those earlier fights.
Like Marvel Studios struggling to keep audiences engaged after they’ve seen the universe saved from the brink of destruction 32 times, a partisan congressional fight just doesn’t have the same draw, however grave the stakes.
“Because default was avoided the last two times, there seems to be an assumption from a lot of people and the markets that it will be avoided again,” Pfeiffer said. “That is a deeply naive view in my opinion.”
The corrosion of norms and the lack of seriousness in Washington could unleash an economic disaster. This would follow on the heels of the January 6, 2021, insurrection and all that surrounded it – the first time in American history that a president tried to use his office to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after losing an election.
Foreign leaders and global investors would look at the US and see a damning portrait. In this broken system, many elected officials do not respect the results of a presidential election and permit policy and ideological differences to stand in the way of honoring the government’s financial obligations. Investors would think harder about allocating capital to US entities, and America’s role as a beacon of liberal values – including free markets – would be severely undermined.
To whom would the world then turn? There is no obvious candidate. But the absence of a better alternative is a thin reed for national greatness and global economic and political leadership. Sooner or later, it will be gone.
The cyclical nature of these looming debt crises stems from the early twentieth century collective consensus that we needed to reconsider the nature and scope of the American federal government. The wave of fin de siecle progressive thinkers - Richard T. Ely, Thorstein Veblen, John Dewey, Herbert Croly, Woodrow Wilson - posited that, with the onset of urbanization, industrialization, and an even population spread across the continent, American life had become too complex for the Constitution to adequately address it.
Closely following on their heels was the wave of muckraking journalists and socially focused novelists who pointed up the upheaval wrought by these changes.
And then came FDR's brain trust, particularly Rexford Tugwell and Frances Perkins.
But few were the voices that cautioned hesitation about using government, the entity with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, as the means by which we'd adjust. So once the leviathan began to grow, there was no stopping it.:
I think the story of President Madison's last veto is instructive on several levels, including moral. Hang in there with this account. It looks like it's headed for a dismaying ending, but all turns out well:
In 1796, Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to James Madison, in part questioning whether Congress’s enumerated constitutional authority to “establish Post Offices and post Roads” empowered the legislature to “make the roads, or only select from those already made, those on which there shall be a post” (emphasis in original). Weighing the constitutionality, efficiency, and economic wisdom of the two options, Jefferson chose the latter, preferring to keep Congress out of the business of “cutting down mountains & bridging . . . rivers.” Madison, however, would apparently struggle with the question of the federal government’s authority to build roads, culminating in one of the most dramatic (and inspiring) final acts in presidential history.
Almost twenty years after receiving Jefferson’s letter, President Madison had his eye on “internal improvements,” or infrastructure. In the aftermath of the War of 1812 and in the last years of his presidency, Madison felt compelled to introduce a more efficient system of roads for trade, transport, and communication, and he believed the federal government was suited for the task.
In his 1815 State of the Union address, Madison highlighted “the great importance of establishing throughout our country the roads and canals which can best be executed under the national authority.” Madison touted the many advantages he perceived in such a system—economic, utilitarian, patriotic, and artistic—before reiterating that while states had their own local roads and quaint canals, the federal government was the best choice for “systematically completing so inestimable a work” on a national scale. But did Congress have the authority to establish such a system? Somehow, the father of the Constitution seemed unconcerned, as “any defect of constitutional authority which may be encountered can be supplied in a mode which the Constitution itself has providently pointed out.” In other words, if it’s illegal, we’ll make it legal.
In his final State of the Union address, Madison doubled down on his desires for a national infrastructure package, calling on Congress “to effectuate a comprehensive system of roads and canals.” As to the constitutionality of his plan, Madison again charged Congress to get the job done by hook or by crook, emphasizing “the expediency of exercising their existing powers, and, where necessary, of resorting to the prescribed mode of enlarging them.”
Inspired by Madison’s remarks, young Congressman John C. Calhoun introduced the Bonus Bill of 1817, a provision designed to earmark certain revenue for “a permanent fund for internal improvement” in order to “bind the Republic together with a perfect system of roads and canals.” Such a bill seemed a perfect fit for what the president had requested only a few weeks earlier, and Speaker of the House Henry Clay joined Calhoun to push the legislation forward in the waning days of Madison’s term. Amid concerns of federalism, Congress even shored up the Bonus Bill with two amendments designed to place more power in the hands of the states than previously intended. The bill passed by the narrowest of margins in the House and fared only slightly better in the Senate, but it landed on James Madison’s desk in the final week of his administration, seemingly in the nick of time.
When Representative Calhoun and other Republican congressmen visited President Madison on his penultimate day in office to say goodbye, however, Madison privately told Calhoun that he had had a change of heart and would be vetoing the Bonus Bill. A dumbstruck Calhoun informed Speaker Clay, who wrote Madison and begged him to at least leave the bill for his successor, James Monroe. But Madison would not.
In his veto message to the House of Representatives, penned on his final day in office as his last official act as president, James Madison returned to familiar form:
“The legislative powers vested in Congress are specified and enumerated in the eighth section of the first article of the Constitution, and it does not appear that the power proposed to be exercised by the bill is among the enumerated powers, or that it falls by any just interpretation within the power to make laws necessary and proper for carrying into execution those or other powers vested by the Constitution in the Government of the United States.”
Vetoing the exact measures he had called for, Madison explained that he could not find “a power to construct roads and canals, and to improve the navigation of water courses” in the Commerce Clause, and he especially rejected appeals to the Preamble’s mission “to provide for the common defense and general welfare” as justification for such congressional power, as this interpretation would give Congress “a general power of legislation” and render “the special and careful enumeration of powers” in the Constitution “nugatory and improper.”
As he concluded, Madison echoed the policy views he had expressed in his 1815 pronouncement by first noting that he was “not unaware of the great importance of roads and canals and the improved navigation of water courses.” But Madison was able to separate that enduring political view from his legal view that “such a power is not expressly given by the Constitution, and . . . no adequate landmarks would be left by the constructive extension of the powers of Congress as proposed in the bill,” so he had “no option but to withhold [his] signature from it.”
He remembered what he was really about as a statesman. Just in time to stave off the leviathan for a century.
We've been asking things of government way beyond what Madison envisioned its function to be.
That's led to a collective cognitive dissonance that increasingly affects all areas of our lives.
Is it too late to shake the assumptions we've been amassing for decades?
I'm gonna leave this with that question, which ought to be the primary conversation among us as engaged citizens.
A handful of prominent Republicans . . were pressed to weigh in on Sunday programs.
Rep.-elect Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., said "Well, obviously, I don’t support that" in an interview on CNN’s "State of the Union."
"The Constitution is set for a reason, to protect the rights of every American. And so I certainly don’t endorse that language or that sentiment. I think the question for everyone is how we move forward," Lawler said, adding that he thinks Americans are “tired of discussing the grievances of prior elections” and that Trump would be “well-advised to focus on the future, if he is going to run for president again.”
Marc Short, former Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, lamented that Trump’s remarks have become a “consistent trend,” pointing out that the former president had demanded that Pence put the Constitution aside to overturn the election results after he lost reelection to Joe Biden.
"The president’s remarks, the company he’s keeping, I think is way beyond the fold,” Short said during an appearance on NBC News’ “Meet the Press.”
Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, similarly dismissed Trump’s call for the termination of the Constitution in an interview on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” He said, “It’s certainly not consistent with the oath we all take."
But Turner sidestepped when asked whether the frontrunner for the GOP nomination in the 2024 election should make such a statement. While he said he “vehemently disagrees” with the former president’s statement, Turner did not directly answer the question, even after host Margaret Brennan pressed repeatedly.
“There is a political process that has to go forward before anyone is a frontrunner or anybody is even a candidate for the party,” Turner said. “And I believe, answering your question, that people certainly are going to take into consideration a statement like this as they evaluate a candidate.”
Rep. David Joyce, R-Ohio, also appeared reluctant to condemn Trump’s remarks during an appearance on ABC News’ “This Week.”
Joyce said he was unaware of what the former president posted and that “people were not interested in looking backwards” when asked to respond to Trump’s statement.
Pressed on whether he can support a candidate in 2024 who wants to suspend the Constitution, Joyce said that he will choose “whoever the Republican nominee is” because he expects Trump to have many challengers in 2024. He also said the former president lacks the authority to carry out his “fantasy” of suspending the Constitution.
The big dawgs are so far mum:
As of Sunday morning, Republican leaders, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., as well as the Republican National Committee had not publicly commented on Trump’s post. NBC News reached out to spokespeople for McConnell, McCarthy and the RNC for comment Saturday but did not receive any response.
This is why I no longer consider myself a Republican. No one in the leadership echelons is willing to speak the entire truth of the matter. In fact, they are all hedging their bets, doing what they can not to jeopardize their political options, given the current still-the-case claim the Very Stable Genius has on the GOP.
I am an American in my Principles and wish we would let them alone to govern or misgovern themselves as they think proper.”
With these politically incorrect words, written in a letter to Baron William Mure of Caldwell during the turmoil of 1775, the Scotsman David Hume (1711-1776) forever became an honorary American citizen. And by his influence, he became an uninvited but welcomed delegate to the American Constitutional Convention.
Hume’s good friend and executor of his literary estate, Adam Smith wrote about political leadership in a time of “turbulence and “disorder.” It is a brief passage and one quite applicable to Americans in the early twenty-first century. Smith tells us in the mid-eighteenth century there are two types of political leaders in any society: one is a person of the “system” while the other is a person of the “public spirit.” The man of the “system”:
holds out some plausible plan of [social] reformation which, [he] pretends, will not only remove the inconveniences and relieve the distresses immediately complained of, but will prevent, in all time coming, any return of the like inconveniences and distresses. . . . The system man is intoxicated with the imaginary beauty of this ideal system, of which they have no experience, but which has been represented to them in all the most dazzling colors in which the eloquence of their leaders could paint it.
Contrarily, the man of the “public spirit”:
will accommodate, as well as he can, his public arrangements to the confirmed habits and prejudices of his people; and will remedy as well as he can, the inconveniences which may flow from the want of those regulations which the people are averse to submit to.
These descriptions are not just the chronologically bound musings of an eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher but observations that can be applicable to twenty-first–century American political society. Smith describes American “intoxicated idealistic” activists who want to “immediately” eradicate, eviscerate, and expunge anything that offends their sensibilities. We live in an age “drunk” with political power.
David Hume was a “public spirit” man through and through, and wrote reflectively, systematically, and widely to this end. He left a body of substantial work that effectively combats the age of dictatorial rationalism from a secular vantage point. Hume’s writings provided political guidance, social security, and economic direction for America’s Founding Fathers as they created a constitution (with all its flaws) for a new and more just Republic. Hume’s ideas, which were so influential to the colonials can still provide guardrails for contemporary American political discourse. David Hume’s influence in the shaping of American political society from its very beginning codification will be shown and his benefit for contemporary American society to preserve our union will become evident.
In eighteenth-century America, Hume’s seminal works were read by college students and young leaders throughout the colonies. The colonials wrote in Humean phraseology, presumably to those who also understood Hume’s thought. Hume’s notions of experience and skepticism, the uniformity of human nature, commerce, culture, factions, interests, customs, social institutions, and most importantly, the “science of politics,” were avidly studied, absorbed, and promulgated by the leading colonial minds. As Jeffry Morrison put it, “the ideas and language of Hume were in the colonial air.”
Hume’s political writings fit the pragmatic temper of the new Americans. From every state at the Constitutional Convention his ideas found purchase in the delegates’ debates, letters, and essays. What the Founding Fathers found attractive in Hume was his Scottish common sense, and his freedom from political and religious mysticism and convictions. Hume’s powerful practical intellect grounded in experience resulted in political compromise, the art of the experience. It is no paradox that Americans have always continued to have faith in their religion but skepticism in their politics. That is, we Americans expect our religion to be metaphysical, but we expect our politicians to be very physical. Thus, there is a sense in which Hume’s religious “mitigated skepticism” has its political application in the American civil experience.
As diesel fuel prices rise across the country, the Department of Homeland Security is fielding requests for Jones Act waivers. While the government should approve these waivers, it seems likely that it will pursue a more permanent solution — to repeal the law altogether.
Otherwise known as the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, the Jones Act requires that any cargo carried between domestic ports must be transported on American-manufactured ships flying the American flag and manned by a mostly American crew. Initially aimed at protecting the U.S. shipping industry from foreign competition, the act artificially limits the supply of cargo ships, making it more costly to transport refined diesel fuel across the country. When energy shortages arise, governors often apply for waivers to get fuel delivered to their states from domestic refineries without having to wait for American ships to become available. Such waivers would not be necessary if the law were permanently revoked. Thankfully, there are strong indications that the Jones Act is facing a final repeal.
Although the law is not without its die-hard defenders:
Jones Act lobbyists have knives out to defend their pet policy. In 2020, the Marine Transportation System National Advisory Committee, an organization that includes cargo ship owners and builders, sent an email to a government agency recommending that “all past and present members of the Cato and Mercatus Institutes” be charged with treason. Their crime? Advocating the repeal of the Jones Act. Such extreme defensive measures show how vulnerable Jones Act supporters feel — clearly, proponents of the act sense that the political tide is turning against them.
It’s about time, too. The only reason it has lasted this long is that the benefits of the Jones Act are highly concentrated within small groups such as ship owners, ship manufacturers, crew members, and the unions that represent them. These groups have a huge incentive to lobby the government to keep it. And because they work closely with each other, they’re also easy to organize into groups such as the Marine Transportation System National Advisory Committee. Meanwhile, the marginal cost to everyone else has been negligible enough that it hasn’t been worth the time and effort it would take to lobby against the act — until now.
Pence doesn’t say. Instead, he focuses on the challenges to the electoral vote count in Congress, which he would preside over on Jan. 6. Pence writes that he “welcomed” Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., co-sponsoring objections from House Republicans “because it meant we would have a substantive debate,” adding, “Without a senator’s support, I would have been required to dismiss House objections without debate, something I didn’t want to do.”
You see, Pence tries to have his cake and eat it, too. He says he supported “debate” around the “concerns” about the election — but doesn’t actually address the substance of those concerns or the purpose of the debate. Hawley may have avoided endorsing any of the conspiracies Trump was spreading directly, but he also had to know that Trump was the source of the vast majority of the concerns in question. It was all an exercise in self-promotion, not an attempt to clarify the record, and Pence should know that.
This is gonna leave a mark:
. . . let’s not even touch on the conversation with Trump that Pence recounts at the end of the op-ed, except to say that I haven’t read an epilogue that self-indulgent since the seventh “Harry Potter” book.
Ian Bogost's piece at The Atlanticentitled "We're Witnessing the End of Social Media" is garnering a lot of buzz right now, and it is worthy of discussion. He applauds the recent misfortunes of Twitter and Facebook, saying that they have mutated the way human beings are designed to interact and form communities:
t’s over. Facebook is in decline, Twitter in chaos. Mark Zuckerberg’s empire has lost hundreds of billions of dollars in value and laid off 11,000 people, with its ad business in peril and its metaverse fantasy in irons. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has caused advertisers to pull spending and power users to shun the platform (or at least to tweet a lot about doing so). It’s never felt more plausible that the age of social media might end—and soon.
Now that we’ve washed up on this unexpected shore, we can look back at the shipwreck that left us here with fresh eyes. Perhaps we can find some relief: Social media was never a natural way to work, play, and socialize, though it did become second nature. The practice evolved via a weird mutation, one so subtle that it was difficult to spot happening in the moment.
The shift began 20 years ago or so, when networked computers became sufficiently ubiquitous that people began using them to build and manage relationships. Social networking had its problems—collecting friends instead of, well, being friendly with them, for example—but they were modest compared with what followed. Slowly and without fanfare, around the end of the aughts, social media took its place. The change was almost invisible, but it had enormous consequences. Instead of facilitating the modest use of existing connections—largely for offline life (to organize a birthday party, say)—social software turned those connections into a latent broadcast channel. All at once, billions of people saw themselves as celebrities, pundits, and tastemakers.
A global broadcast network where anyone can say anything to anyone else as often as possible, and where such people have come to think they deserve such a capacity, or even that withholding it amounts to censorship or suppression—that’s just a terrible idea from the outset. And it’s a terrible idea that is entirely and completely bound up with the concept of social media itself: systems erected and used exclusively to deliver an endless stream of content.
But now, perhaps, it can also end. The possible downfall of Facebook and Twitter (and others) is an opportunity—not to shift to some equivalent platform, but to embrace their ruination, something previously unthinkable.
At the Washington Free Beacon, Aaron Sibarium alerts us to a particularly insidious bank-loan concept: looking at how borrowers measure up in terms of diversity practices when deciding whether to lend them money:
Amid an uptick in race-conscious hiring programs throughout corporate America, many prominent businesses are now writing racial and gender quotas into their credit agreements with banks, tying the cost of borrowing to the companies’ workforce diversity, a Washington Free Beacon analysis found.
Over the past two years, each of those companies has secured a lending agreement, known as a credit facility, that links the interest rate charged by banks to the company’s internal diversity targets, creating a financial incentive to meet them. If the business achieves its targets, it won’t have to pay as much interest on the loans it takes out; if it falls short, it is required to pay more.
Under the terms of BlackRock’s $4.4 billion credit facility, for example, Wells Fargo will lower the firm’s interest rate by 0.05 percent if it hits two benchmarks—a 30 percent increase in the share of black and Hispanic employees by 2024, and a 3 percent increase in the share of female executives each year—or hike the rate by the same amount if it misses both.
The agreements, which typically involve multiple banks, are effectively credit cards for businesses: Rather than make a onetime loan, lenders extend a continuous line of credit that companies can dip into at will, either to cover operating costs or as a rainy day fund for emergencies. That means changes in a facility’s interest rate—even modest ones like BlackRock’s 0.05 percent diversity adjustment—can have an appreciable effect on a business’s bottom line.
Companies have advertised these agreements as proof of their progressive bona fides. Trimble CEO Rob Painter, for example, said the company’s credit facility—which conditions interest rates on the percentage of female employees—illustrates Trimble’s "commitment" to "gender diversity in the workplace." In press releases announcing their own credit facilities, executives at BlackRock, Prudential, and Definity say the agreements demonstrate their commitment to "accountability."
But critics see something far more sinister: a form of blatant discrimination that will harm consumers, credit markets, and the rule of law.
"If a bank penalized a company's credit rating because it had too many women or was too racially diverse, we would be appalled," said one senior government regulator, who managed a nine-figure credit facility as a lawyer in private practice. "This is the exact same thing, except the penalized target is white men."
Who originated DEI? Why DEI and not another set of laudable values? Does “equity” refer to opportunity or result? How do those of mixed race fit in diversity assessments? Is the goal of racial representation proportionate to that of the population, the history of marginalization, or something else? DEI terms are defined so obtusely that they can refer to a spectrum of policiesfrom mere platitudes to radical agendas including litmus tests and racial quotas.
The older I get, the more reluctant I am to lend any writer or thinker with whom I'm currently resonating my full enthusiasm. I've been burned too many times. But Andrew T. Walker, who teaches Christian ethics at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, is currently addressing things that need broader discussion. In his latest piece for World, entitled "Why Is America Coming Apart?", he takes dead aim at what is really going on:
What would have been revolutionary in 2008, like “gay marriage,” seems almost “traditional” to many Americans in 2022, by the sheer force of its cultural normalization in America. Drag Queens dancing in front of children is as recreational as baseball in some parts of the country, or so it seems. Mainstream medical guilds now suggest that confused children and teens mutilate their bodies to tranquilize the mind. Public schools when I grew up might have been secular, but they weren’t morally insane or propagandizing students in cultural self-hatred like I routinely hear about now. Major media outlets are entirely compromised by a groveling deference to wokism and identity politics. The left once called for abortion to be “safe, legal, and rare,” but the move to de-stigmatize abortion and gloat about it has moved the needle in a ghoulish direction.
The surrealism of our simmering unrest is explainable, I think, in the near total collapse of Christianity as America’s underlying public ethic. At least for the moment, put away questions about Christian Nationalism. What I’m observing is the final stripping away over the last few years of the last thin layer of Christian veneer. No secularist will say this out loud, of course. Because that would mean restoring virtues that figures like former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy believe are incompatible with liberty. Such virtues can only be grounded in a transcendent account of the universe.
At Medium, Drew Shepherd looks at how a Christian might address the charge of hypocrisy:
. . . if we stick to the notion that Christianity should be dismissed because its followers act contrarily to their claims, we must first go to the source to see what those claims actually are.
Because if you’re looking for biblical evidence that says Christians never do wrong, you’re out of luck:
For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do — this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.
So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. (Rom. 7:18–21 NIV)
These verses describe the apostle Paul’s struggle with sin in his life. And if the man who wrote a large chunk of the New Testament admitted he was a “hypocrite”, it’s no surprise that other Christians face the same problem.
Ecclesiastes also presented this truth in the Old Testament:
Indeed, there is not a righteous man on earth who continually does good and who never sins. (Eccles. 7:20 NASB)
And the apostle John followed with the same idea:
If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. (1 John 1:8 NIV)
No matter how clean some Christians appear or how outspoken they are, they will always contend with a form of evil in their life.
So since this problem is common among all Christians — even the ones who should know better — you’d think God would be angry at us all the time. At least that’s how most people think of God: as a harsh, unforgiving, ban-you-to-hell-because-of-what-you-did-in-second-grade Person. But these next verses from the book of Psalms paint a different picture:
Just as a father has compassion on his children, So the LORD has compassion on those who fear Him. For He Himself knows our frame; He is mindful that we are but dust. (Psalm 103:13–14 NASB)
God knows everything about our fragile makeup and the condition of our nature — He has compassion on us because of it.
He knows the Christian life involves doing the unnatural. And He knows we would never succeed without His help.
And my latest at Precipice is about how it's time for me to realize I'm no longer a fledgling Christian and that I can and need to engage the world with the assurance of someone whose been at this faith-walk thing a while.
There. That ought to keep you out of mischief this weekend.
