Biden cabinet picks - initial thoughts

 I don't have anything like exhaustive familiarity with the backgrounds and positions of most of these people, but after doing some research, I tend to concur with the view I'm seeing from a spectrum of folks that they look like what one would expect for Biden Cabinet picks. It's clear he and his team of advisors are being driven to a considerable degree by diversity. That's what a Democrat administration in 2020 / 2021 is going to prioritize. Most of them seem to be serious people with impressive credentials. From what I can tell, they're not wild-eyed radicals.

Anthony Blinken comes across as earnest. He says he's going to put humility among the foremost values driving his work if he's confirmed as secretary of state. I get the sense he wants to see the US be a consensus-builder and facilitator on the world stage, which is fine as far as it goes - in fact, a refreshing change from the bull-in-a-china-shop "American First" stance of the era now concluding.  Let's see how it's fleshed out in such matters as alliances and shoring up a sense of the West as a crucial player among the world's spheres of influence. There's also the unsettling matter of the Biden administration serving notice that the global climate is going to be a top priority. More about that later.

Janet Yellen is a Keynesian and I think she tends to look at economic matters through a largely macro lens, but from what I can tell she's regarded as pretty level-headed. She ought to make an interesting treasury secretary. Hey, Elizabeth Warren didn't get the gig, which brings a sigh of relief.

Alejandro Mayorkas has an impressive resume. He has some experience in dealing with cyber-crime. I can't find much that would indicate where he stands on terrorism or the military machinations of America's enemies, which are key areas of focus for a Homeland Security secretary. 

Linda Thomas-Greenfield likewise doesn't have the kind of trail of demonstrations of outspokenness on the kinds of matters that come before either the UN Security Council of General Assembly. Will she be a dig-in-your-heels-and-demand-Western-principles-get-defended firebrand like Jeane Kirkpatrick, John Bolton and Nikki Haley? I wouldn't bet on it. I think she's more of a bureaucrat who will fit well with Blinken's style. 

Avril Haines, the DNI Director-designate, is an interesting figure. In 1992, she dropped out of a doctoral program at Johns Hopkins to join her husband in purchasing a Baltimore bar that had been seized in a drug raid. They turned it into a cafe-bookstore, which held, among other things, erotica reading nights. She later went back to academia and got a Georgetown law degree. In 2018, she ardently supported Trump's pick of Gina Haspel to be CIA director, praising her credentials forthrightly.

And then there's John Kerry, who is going to be climate czar. I guess in a Dem cabinet, you have to have one hardcore leftist. Stop rolling your eyes. We all remember his leadership of Vietnam Veterans Against the War and the way he lied about he US committing atrocities in a congressional hearing. He went to Nicaragua as a first-term Senator in the 1980s and met with Daniel Ortega to tell him that not all elements of the US government were on the same page with that awful Ronald Reagan. He's called Israel an apartheid state. As Secretary of State, he and Wendy Sherman allowed themselves to be humiliated and yelled at by Iranian foreign minister Zarif during the interminable negotiations that led to that shameful piece of appeasement with one of the West's most threatening enemies, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. And, of course, he thinks the global climate is in some kind of trouble that requires humankind to urgently put the brakes on its advancement, and that is the area that is going to be his portfolio on this cabinet. 

So there are no real surprises here. Much to follow and observe with an open mind, and some things to oppose right off the bat. 

One thing we can say for sure is that it will be a whole different ballgame from what we've seen under the Very Stable Genius.

Sunday roundup

Open Doors USA president David Curry, writing at USA Today, takes American churches to task for not addressing persecution of Christians in lands such as Nigeria, Sri Lanka, India and China with requisite urgency.

The ABC affiliate in Austin oh-so-objectively reports on a nine-year-old-drag queen without saying a thing about how somebody really evil allowed this to happen.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune presents fresh evidence indicating that Ilhan Omar's marital track record is quite shaky. Looks like she arranged things to skirt immigration laws.

LITD likes this. Really, really, likes it:

Some upstate New York county clerks are taking a stand against the state’s controversial new lawgranting driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants.

Clerks in Erie, Rensselaer, Niagara and Allegany counties have said they won’t be handing out the licenses, despite the legislation signed Monday by Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

Of all these items in today's roundup, your must-read is "The Madcap Caution of Donald Trump" by Rich Lowry at National Review:

Subtract Trump’s taste for nonstop controversy and rhetorical brinkmanship, and you’re left with an incrementalist center-right government that has pursued an expansionary fiscal policy and avoided foreign war, for a period of peace and prosperity that — in any other universe — would be at the core of a stay-the-course reelection message.

For a while, the Obama doctrine was, “Don’t do stupid stuff.” The Trump team has built out the doctrine to “Privately consider and sometimes openly threaten stupid stuff, but at the end of the day, don’t do it (usually).”

An example that has come along since Lowry penned his piece: the Very Stable Genius did a sudden about face on the ICE roundup of illegal aliens who had been turned down for asylum-seeker status.  Giving Congress two weeks to act, or then, by golly, he will authorize the roundup! Actually, a valid point can be made here - namely, that the legislative branch has, in this case and generally, been shirking the large role it's Constitutionally supposed to play in crafting policy, preferring instead to grandstand. However, in both this case and the Iranian non-response to the drone downing, the VSG has displayed a tin ear for momentum.

It's this kind of stuff - today's edition

There's obviously nothing becoming, let alone productive, about Nancy Pelosi's call for someone in Trump's inner circle to stage an intervention, but count on the most embarrassing president in history to confirm the basis of her lambasting.

Pelosi went first, with demure shrugs and practiced sass. Then, as a tornado warning blared across Washington, Trump followed with a derisive nickname — something he had declined to give her, up to now.

“She’s a mess,” Trump told reporters at an afternoon news conference in which he lined up White House staff to testify to his calmness the day before when he walked out after three minutes at a meeting with Pelosi and Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer.

“Crazy Nancy. ... I watched Nancy and she was all crazy yesterday.”

As for himself, he declared, “I’m an extremely stable genius.”

People of little depth are also generally people of little imagination, as evidenced by the increasing mediocrity of the nicknames he confers.

I read this and thought, I don't even have to speculate that the spin will commence pretty much instantly. And sure enough, the next item I read was a post about it by the once-singularly-incisive-and-now-routinely-dismaying (she not only digs Trump, but Kurt Schlichter and Paul Joseph Watson as well) Bookworm.

How's this for lame and flimsy?

Yes, I know it’s tacky when he talks about “Crazy Nancy Pelosi” or “Dumb as a Rock” Rex Tillerson, but we are living in tacky times, with a political party now devoting its entire energy and political capital to destroying a president. Dems have no other goals than to thwart Trump. Abnormal times seem to call for abnormal measures.

Here’s the way I see it: Being tacky is not an impeachable offense. 

That's shameful. But it captures the essence of how Trump's shills views the lay of the land. They've completely lost sight of the fact that the waging war against the Democrats - and, to be sure, we must wage war against the Democrats - can be done far more effectively, in a way that presents a compelling case to those remaining citizens who are not ate up with tribalism. But as it is, you see, we have forfeited an essential arrow in our quiver: the conservative insistence on dignified bearing - on basic maturity.

It's still early in the day. I haven't checked out too many outlets yet, but I'm sure more "defenses" of this nature are being posted even now. For instance, I'll bet the daily lineup at Townhall will include an ample share of gleeful fist-pumping. If anyone out there has the stomach for how it's being treated at Gateway Pundit and American Greatness, let us know.

The dilemma for actual conservatives remains what it has been for four years. Leftists can hold this guy up and say, "Behold the face of the Right in modern America," and the Trump throne-sniffers will actually be in agreement with that basic utterance.

Jobs numbers and the GDP are in excellent shape, but culturally and spiritually, post-America is in the same state of rot it has been in for decades. And the economic good times are going to be fleeting, too. The number of people in a position to craft, implement and defend policy based on really and truly addressing this nation's $25-plus trillion debt is too few to matter.

Again, I say, I wish that someday I'd awaken to find that this blog's name had become obsolete, but such a bright morn still eludes me, and us.

As Ted says, the Department of Education must be dismantled pronto

It's this kind of dog vomit that is why it's on Ted's Five for Freedom list of agencies and departments he'd like to kill:

A top Obama appointee in the Department of Education personally assured a group of LGBT activists that the White House is “aggressively engaged” in the fight to allow transgender students use whichever bathroom they please at school.

DOE Assistant Secretary for the Office of Civil Rights Catherine Lhamon delivered the good news at an LGBT summit hosted by the White House in Michigan last Thursday, where she gave the keynote address.

The event was co-sponsored by activist group Equality Michigan, which has led a statewide charge to allow schoolchildren choose their name, gender and bathroom, all without parental knowledge or input. Officials from seven different federal agencies attended the event, according to the Equality Michigan website.

Equality Michigan executive director Steph White blasted out a giddy email to supporters after the event, which she called “a great catalyst that will propel our collective work forward.”  The email included an excerpt from Lhamon’s remarks, which White called “refreshingly clear.”

This is where we find ourselves when we spend a century inured to the expansion of government beyond its Constitutionally specified functions. It's not just the waste of taxpayer money on ever-metatstasizing bureaucracy. These agencies and departments become sinister tools in the Freedom-Hater goals of governing with an agenda, neutering the cattle-masses, and obliteration not only standards of decency but the basic understanding of nature that the human (or perhaps make that formerly human) species has always had.

Spiritual monsters.

The precedent for not confirming election-year SCOTUS appointees goes back quite a ways

To 1960, at least:

Read it and weep, Democrats. The shoe is on the other foot. David Bernstein at the Washington Post’s Volokh Conspiracy blog:

 Thanks to a VC commenter, I discovered that in August 1960, the Democrat-controlled Senate passed a resolution, S.RES. 334, “Expressing the sense of the Senate that the president should not make recess appointments to the Supreme Court, except to prevent or end a breakdown in the administration of the Court’s business.”  Each of President Eisenhower’s SCOTUS appointments had initially been a recess appointment who was later confirmed by the Senate, and the Democrats were apparently concerned that Ike would try to fill any last-minute vacancy that might arise with a recess appointment.

The GOP opposed this, of course. Hypocrisy goes two ways. But the majority won.

As it should this time.

Hat tip: Instapundit

There is no Constitutional obligation on the part of Congress to confirm any judicial nominee. Ever, actually.

The Most Equal Comrade's signature style: smashing economic freedom and shredding the Constitution in one fell swoop

He did it again with the edict regarding overtime pay for managers in service and retail industries.

Our enemy president

The Most Equal Comrade is going to use an executive order to raise the minimum wage for federal contractors.  So many layers to peel back on this one.

I'm not a constitutional scholar, but I do know that spending bills must originate in the House of Representatives, and this is a spending decision, is it not?

To reiterate something I've found occasion to assert fairly often here at LITD, the minimum wage is bad and wrong for the following reasons:

• It is government telling a private organization how to conduct its affairs.
• It distorts the true market value of an hour of a given type of labor
• It elbows those who are in most need of a way to enter the world of work - young, unskilled people, particularly minorities - out of the job market

Then there is the Freedom-Haters' understanding that the minimum wage issue is a tailor-made focal point for their overall class warfare.  It is essential to their propaganda that the cattle-masses never consider the fluidity of income brackets or the effect of ambition on an individual's upward mobility.  The FHers must paint a scenario of fixed groups within society: some kind of mythic " the man"-type stratum that has all the power and prestige and holds the fates of various victim groups in its hands.

The Most Equal Comrade will play this to the hilt tonight.  We must make sure our weapons - clear, reasoned explanations of how freedom actually works and how prosperity happens - are cleaned and loaded.  This is a particularly intense battle in the war for America's soul.

A tacit admission by the MEC and Sebelius that FHer-care has failed

A WSJ editorial says that the Most Equal Comrade has basically repealed Freedom-Hater-care.


And us Tea Party types would appreciate some acknowledgement of what we were trying to do last summer:

Mr. Obama's actions are as damning about ObamaCare as anything Senator Ted Cruz has said, and they implicitly confirm that the law is quarter-baked and harmful. Mr. Obama is doing through executive fiat what Republicans shut down the government to get him to do.

***

The President declared at his Friday press conference that the exemptions "don't go to the core of the law," but in fact they belong to his larger pattern of suspending the law on his own administrative whim. Earlier this month he ordered insurers to backdate policies to compensate for the federal exchange meltdown, and before that HHS declared that it would not enforce for a year the mandates responsible for policy cancellations. Mr. Obama's team has also by fiat abandoned the small-business exchanges, delayed the employer mandate and scaled back income verification.

To employ one of Cass Sunstein's favorite terms, we just need to nudge the MEC to go that last little step and make the death of his signature "achievement" official.

The perspective of a few days

While I still agree with those who frame Rand Paul's filibuster as genuinely pivotal, it is well and proper that the tempering views of others whose concern for national security I deeply respect get an airing.

Bill Kristol at the Weekly Standard points out that it should give all of us pause that Code Pink applauded what Senator Paul did.   Methinks he focuses so much on the official reason for Paul's move, and its ramifications for cross-ideology interest, that he loses sight of its sheer energy.

Andrew McCarthy at NRO quotes Hamilton's Federalist 23 in order to reinforce his point that no one in any age can know the full scope of possible threats to our exceptional and precious democratic republic.

He then, in his own words, fleshes this out. Right now, we are engaged in a protracted conflict with jihadism, and seem to have the resources we need to fight it effectively.  But the nature of the struggle could morph, or be joined by other struggles, and then we would really need to parse the Constitution for just what it does - or doesn't specify in the way of executive power:

In the ongoing conflict, the enemy does not have fortifications inside our territory that would enable its operatives to keep the police at bay. As long as we catch them in time, our enemies can be safely taken into custody. And if we catch them on the precipice of deadly action, ordinary law-enforcement principles allow for the use of lethal force to stop them.

But that may not always be the case. We could have enemies with much greater capabilities, enemies including traitorous Americans. The fact that we do not appear to need lethal military force in the homeland in this conflict does not mean we will never need it.

So leave the Constitution alone. The Constitution does not tell us what should or must be done in a particular situation. It tells us the outer limits of what is legitimate in all threat situations. To shackle our power to meet a threat, as Hamilton explained, is to put us in peril.

The goal, according to Senator Paul, is to shackle the president. That is done by trimming his sails in the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), not by trimming his constitutional power.

There's no denying that this is a singularly noteworthy moment.  The filibuster's energizing effect beyond the scope of its ostensible purpose must be taken into account, by anyone interested in seeing the real present dynamic at work  in the political landscape.

That said, at some point Senator Rand Paul is going to be asked how much daylight there is between his own worldview and that of his Rockwellian father, and he'd better have an answer that satisfies the broad spectrum of conservatives.