The contemptibles are not going to quietly accept yesterday's defeat

         Last September, I wrote a post at Precipice titled "My Personal Struggle With Contempt."  It riffs off of 

an essay at Law & Liberty by John O. McGinnis entitled “Is Civic Decline an Existential Threat?” It really doesn’t cover any ground that hasn’t been covered before. It notes the three main components of our present crisis: decline of education, decline of civic associations, and the transmutation of the religious impulse. McGinnis even shares my inclination toward pessimism about our prospects for any kind of civic restoration.

McGinnis is properly aware of how tough it is to surmount ill will given the array of obsessions the Left has imposed on society as a whole:

As McGinnis points out, climate alarmism, which demands a halt to human advancement regarding such modern blessings as safety, comfort and convenience, is something that we ought not to abide by. He also notes the normalization of the Howard Zinn’s and Nicole Hannah-Jones’s view of America’s essence, and this likewise falls outside the parameters of “just one of many viewpoints we ought to consider in our nation’s classrooms.”

I would add to his enumerations the mainstreaming of historically unprecedented notions of human sexuality, such as the expansion of the definition of marriage to include unions of two people of the same sex, and the legitimization of self-identification with the sex opposite one’s DNA and genitals. Carl Trueman is exactly right in asserting that, of all the bizarre novelties we’re living with, this one takes us into realms devoid of reference points. In combination with artificial intelligence, it has the capacity to completely untether us from assumptions we as members of the species Homo sapiens have held since our arrival among the planet’s life forms.

And then there is the septic infection on the Right:

Conversely, the fact that well over half of those who identify with one of the nation’s two major political parties intend to vote for the most unfit, vulgar and infantile person to ever enter US politics, even after two impeachments, four indictments, and the increasingly unhinged nature of his social-media blurtings cannot be permitted to be seen as a new normal.

Along those lines, New Right abandonment of the free-market component of conventional conservatism’s vision erodes the overall centrality of human freedom on which that vision rests. Some very smart people have gone in for this. It seems they have lost sight of what Adam Smith, Frederic Bastiat and Henry Hazlitt had to say about how an individual’s freedom of choice about what to own, buy, sell, invent and market is a divinely granted gift. This one really does boil down to a binary choice. One is either free to come to an agreement with one’s fellow human being about the value of a good or service being considered for exchange, or we’re talking about central planning. Prattle about “settling for imperfect arrangements” that compromise this freedom of choice, this personal sovereignty, stinks of rudderlessness.

This is what I mean by inhabiting an ever-narrower sliver of terrain. There is no space in our public square for a healthy prescription for peaceable co-existence.

I then publicly forced myself to be real about my reaction to the lay of the land, and its spiritual implications:

That said, all the destructive devotions I’ve discussed here are embraced by my actual various fellow human beings, and I have to figure out how to hold them in some kind of basic regard. I pass them on the sidewalk. I host them for Thanksgiving dinner. They’re colleagues at the university where I teach. I have them as social-media friends. 

If I hold them in contempt, which Merriam-Webster defines as “the feeling that a person or a thing is beneath consideration, worthless, or deserving scorn,” I cage myself in a kind of isolation in which productive existence becomes impossible. 

More fundamentally, in so doing, I sin. No matter what they have proclaimed or done, they were created by the same God who fashioned me, and have the same right to breathe and pursue happiness that I have.

The struggle hasn't abated. That has been brought home to me as I encounter the Trumpist response to the excellent victory for the international rules-based order achieved yesterday in the House of Representatives.  

The Federalist, a perfect example of a once-actually-conservative site that has been wholly given over to MAGA-ism, has among the daily sewage it's inflicting on the world this morning Shawn Fleetwood's piece in which he trots out the by-now-disgustingly-familiar look-Ukraine-can't-possibly-decisively-defeat-Russia-so-instead-of-shoveling-more-money-at-the-Ukrainian-resistance-to-being-invaded-we-ought-to-be-moving-toward-a-'realistic'-end-game angle. Not a word about the fierce determination of the Ukrainian people and leadership to reassert the country's sovereignty. Oh, and also that disingenuous zero-sum horseshit about the US southern border.

At the similarly septic American Conservative, Bradley Devin, in a piece titled "What's Next After the Ukrainian Mistake?" the author makes the help Johnson got on the House floor yesterday his focus, with a strong implication that Johnson was driven by a cynical foremost motivation of keeping his Speaker job.

Utah Senator Mike Lee, who is a prime example of this sepsis consuming a once-honorable-Constitutional originalist with a mainstream Rightist set of principles, decided to post on Twitter (X, if you must), a hey-look-we-got-'em-now reaction to the package's passing that lists objections of varying degrees of speciousness, such as - well, he starts out with that always-handy red herring, the US southern border - and including funding for gender advisors to the Ukrainian army and humanitarian aid to Gaza.

From his choices of objections and the way he words his screed, it's obvious he's reaching, while the sane majority - well, maybe it's just a plurality - of Westerners are celebrating the assertion of national sovereignty for three important West-inclined nations.

The Washington Examiner has a roundup of explanations from House Republicans who voted against the aid package. They strike a similar tone to the foregoing:

“I stand with the Ukrainian people in their fight against Russia, but not at the continued expense of hardworking American taxpayer,” Rep. James Comer (R-KY) wrote on X. “The United States cannot continue to spend blindly when those funds could be better utilitzed right here at home. As Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, I made a commitment to safeguard taxpayer funds from waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement.”

“For the Swamp, it’s Ukraine First and America Last,” Rep. Dan Bishop (R-NC) wrote. “Gleefully waving Ukrainian flags as the American people suffer under Biden’s border invasion.”

“We must be thoughtful and strategic with our dollars and put Americans first, which is why I voted to send funds to our borders, Israel, and Taiwan, and not send dollars to Ukraine until we have a strategic exit plan with quantifiable metrics,” Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-WI) wrote in a statement.

Last month at Precipice, I wrote a post looking at a number of laudable, indeed noble, efforts of people who to some degree hang onto a self-identification as Republicans to plan for a time when the Trumpist infection passes out of the party. (In the process, I date myself as Boomer.) 

 

 

Some are more effective than others. I’ve written before about how Heath Mayo, founder of Principles First, badly dented his movement’s raison d’être by chiding Republicans for not signing on to legislation codifying same-sex marriage, calling such legislation a “no-brainer” that would strengthen the family unit. Such a position is a de facto resignation to secularization. Acknowledgement of a transcendent order becomes a quaint notion our society has outgrown if we listen to such an argument. 

Most self-identified conservatives can’t accept that.

Among publications that have sought to clearly repudiate the MAGA impulse, some have admirably continued to hew to a recognizable conservative vision (think The Dispatch) and some have bought into the binary-choice framing, which has made them Democrats for all intents and purposes (think The Bulwark; I was particularly dismayed to learn that Mona Charen had deemed the stay-home and consideration of a third party options as “the coward’s way out”).

The publication that has conferred Senior Freelance Contributor status on me, The Freemen Newsletter, has spawned an interesting undertaking. I’m not exactly clear on whether it’s going to be called the Reagan Caucus or the New Reagan Caucus, but a number of younger folks who appear on the masthead are having lively discussions on Twitter (X, if you must) and Slack regarding mission, tactics and standards for alliances.

The Freemen founding editor, Justin Stapley, laid out his druthers about the enterprise in a recent piece entitled “DeTrumpification of the GOP.” He sets the table by resolutely proclaiming what I assert above - namely, that despair is not an option, that our conservatism obliges us to see this as a universe of possibility. (He does so by taking issue with a 2021 Dispatch piece by Jonah Goldberg, someone high in Justin’s pantheon of good guys - and mine) in which Goldberg looks seriously at the third party option.)

Justin sees a Reagan Caucus thusly:

Taking Reagan as a symbol of an old-school approach to Republican politics and a commitment to conservative principles unstained by the reactionary nature of Trump’s brand of nationalist populism, this Reagan Caucus is declaring an intention to engage in the GOP's primaries and processes to push back against MAGA’s control of the party, and pledges to withhold their support of Republican candidates who embody or acquiesce to the toxic nature of the MAGA movement.   

If non-Trump conservatives take this path, it can solve several of the problems with the third-party route:   

• We could still participate in the Republican Party and wouldn't further abandon the party to the very forces we wish to curtail.  

• We would be encouraging more participation in the party processes instead of further enabling control of the processes by those we oppose. 

• We wouldn't be seen as a rival or spoiler political party.  

• We wouldn't be operating from the get-go as a spoiler effort.  

• We would have clear organizing principles and, especially, could demonstrate a contrast to the party's current direction given that the actual “agenda” of Trump and MAGA changes at his whim (TikTok).

• We could both endorse acceptable Republican primary candidates and actively work to get them through the process.   

• There would be nothing keeping us from endorsing acceptable Republican candidates who lost in the primaries as independent candidates should the eventual nominee prove to be wholly unacceptable, or throwing our support behind other independents or even third-party candidates.  

• The caucus's declared values would hopefully keep members from being less inclined to support Democrats unless the Democratic candidate moved to accommodate us as a more moderate alternative in the mold of Manchin or Sinema.  

I think this approach has a good shot at accomplishing what Jonah proposed in 2021 while answering the concerns many had with his proposal, including myself. There have long been various caucuses within both political parties and many other organizations and lobbying entities that support or withhold their support of party nominees based on declared principles.

So, the Reagan Caucus is not going to be doing anything new or threatening, and it could engage in ways that would still accomplish the goals that Jonah put forward, arguably in more effective ways given that we'd still be engaging in the GOP itself without other Republicans easily dismissing us as a rival or spoiler party. We could force a genuine debate on principles and vision that could transcend Trump and Trumpism instead of becoming a reflexive opposition that loses its intellectual grounding in the struggle of the general election. 

And besides, even most Trump voters still love Reagan, and this effort could be an effective way to provide a better contrast between an actual conservative vision and the angry, unprincipled direction that Trump has taken the party.

His optimism is enviable. Maybe he has an ear closer to the ground than I do, although I know a lot of local Republicans. Maybe that ground is more arable in Utah, where he lives, than it is here in Indiana.I think of my state’s gubernatorial race. There are four Republican candidates. The television ads of three of them try to outdo each other in boasting of the Trump connection. The fourth candidate has chosen a noteworthy departure, framing himself as being in the lineage of Reagan and Mitch Daniels, a universally admired Indiana native who served as everything from governor to president of Purdue University to president of the Hudson Institute to head of Eli Lily’s North America operations to Reagan’s OMB director. I don’t know much more about that candidate, but I’d still want an answer to the question of who he intends to vote for for president come November.

As I say, the folks who are fired up about this project are, from this Boomer’s perspective, young pups, and they are already setting about taking concrete actions - becoming Precinct Committeemen, running for office, deciding how to structure the project organizationally.

In their back-and-forths, they demonstrate a grounding in that which they ought to be grounded in. They know who Russell Kirk, Fredrich Hayek and Frank S. Meyer are. 

Two things: I hope they understand the ferocity with which the Trumpists will attempt to stomp them into the dust, and the challenge they’ll face maintaining their standards for forming alliances. I’m already seeing arguments along the-tent-must-be-big-enough-to-bring-in the-less-ate-up-Trumpists lines. That could muddy the mission from the get-go.

Please note the phrase about ferocity in the last paragraph of the above excerpt. And note how quickly the Trumpists went to work upon the passage of yesterday's aid package.

I have real trouble forgiving them for what they've done to conservatism's prospects. They're proud of their incoherence and their vaunting of stubbornness as a primary admirable basis for political engagement.

I'm trying really hard not to let this post become a venomous rant, but I can say that actual conservatives remain mired in a two-pronged existential battle: against a Left working overtime to impose climate alarmism, militant identity politics, and wealth redistribution, and a Right wholly given over to worship of the least savory traits human beings are capable of exhibiting. 

At this point, I still intend to stay home the first Tuesday in November. 

 

 

 

Another clash of competing leftist interests

 The most recent post here at LITD dove into the irony of a countercultural icon, Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone co-founder, who checks off the proper boxes right down to coming out as gay after a marriage that produced a son, getting ousted from the board of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (which he also co-founded) for telling a New York Times interviewer that he finds white male rock titans more substantive interviews than female or black ones.

Today we look at another deliciously ironic loggerheads: organized labor versus the climate alarmists:

If you want to understand why the United Auto Workers union is striking now, look at the three factories it chose to target for its first wave shutdowns.

The General Motors plant in Wentzville, Missouri, makes the Chevy Colorado and the GMC Savana. The Ford plant in Wayne, Michigan, makes Ford Rangers and Ford Broncos. And the Stellantis plant in Toledo, Ohio, makes Jeep Wranglers and Jeep Gladiators.

What do all these vehicles have in common? Unlike electric vehicles that lose money, these vehicles are among the Big Three’s most profitable products. They are also exactly the type of vehicle President Joe Biden wants to eliminate by 2032, when his new regulations mandate that two-thirds of all cars sold in the United States must be EVs.

Not only do EVs have fewer parts than gasoline models, which means fewer jobs for auto workers, but every plant that produces mufflers, catalytic converters, and fuel injectors will have to shutter, either permanently or long enough for a complete overhaul to make EV parts.

Biden’s obsession with EVs has essentially made all UAW-organized factories in the Midwest obsolete. Why would a car company invest there when they could build a new factory in a state where workers aren’t forced to join unions?

It's all I can do not to digress here and go on a diatribe about Biden's presumption that he can insert himself into the workings of the free market - which, to reiterate the basics, boys and girls, is merely the sum total of the millions of agreements to which buyers and sellers arrive daily, ideally without government interference - by executive diktat, no less. But let's stay focused.

Current UAW president Shawn Fain may not be collectivist enough for the Trotskyists, but he's a pretty classic figure for a labor activist.  He comes from the heart of flyover country - Kokomo, Indiana - where his dad was police chief and two of his grandparents were UAW members who worked at a Chrysler facility there. Fain himself went to work at the Chrysler castings plant as an electrician in 1994 and pretty much immediately started climbing the union ranks. 

In the current situation, he champions the position that union members ought to continue to get paid even if an automaker shutters a plant. 

I do need to digress a bit here and get into the question of what is and isn't a right. 

Fain and his ilk take it as a given that there is some kind of right to a livelihood. Making things that are desirable into "rights" is how we got government involvement in health care - an aspect of life that figures into the current auto industry strike situation.

It's actually understandable that he would conclude thusly. Cars, as well as self-propelling transportation generally, and communications technology, too, came on the scene at the outset of the twentieth century with such impact that by the 1920s, they were a given. And they were made in factories by people earning hourly wages. 

But just as their arrival on the cultural landscape was a manifestation of how unbridled human inventiveness could introduce drastic changes, innovation continued apace and wrought further changes. The 1980s forced the Big Three to move over to make way for foreign car makers to erect US plants. And many of those have stayed non-unionized, which should have been a sign to the UAW that its ability to make demands had limits. 

And now comes another wave of change, albeit not born of human inventiveness but the heavy hand of the state.

So who's going to blink first as the climate alarmists, backed by the coercive power of government, go toe to toe with the UAW, which is still locked in a mindset that sees the mid-twentieth-century model of the town factory guaranteeing generation after generation a secure lifestyle? 

There's a way to avoid this scenario of bad alternatives, if anyone is interested. 

Let people buy the kinds of cars they want to buy, and remove all government - and union - interference in how they're priced - which, to a considerable degree, is still based on the carmakers' costs.  Then we can see what the market says about what the cars are worth.

ADDENDUM: I don't know if this qualifies as a digression or not, but the Very Stable Genius is going to skip the second Republican presidential candidates' debate in order to address the UAW. It's pretty obvious what he's doing: striving to take some of the wind out of the sails of Biden's expression of support for the union. It's of a piece with what he recently said about Florida's six-week abortion ban. When the VSG hedges his political bets, he's not particularly sly about it.

Trump has no principles. He does anything he does in order to see if it will bring him glorification. 

Yeah, I guess that was a little bit of a digression. But it's good to know where the charlatan of Mar-a-Lago fits into the current situation. 

 

 

Joe Biden is a very different kind of president from Donald Trump, but he's every bit as terrible

 In the runup to last fall's election, and in the interim period between that and the inauguration, my Twitter feed was full of sentiment along the lines of how refreshing it was going to be to have some moderation, interest in unity,  level-headedness and decency characterizing the office of president. I cringed at every instance of coming across such expressions, most of which came from people who had always voted Republican but were now done with that party due to the Tumpism phenomenon.

For the record - and I've said this in various ways many times here at LITD - I did not vote for Trump in 2016 or 2020. I wrote someone in both times. From the moment he descended the escalator in 2015, I knew he was bad news. I won't rehash the reasons, which LITD readers are presumably all too familiar with. Even though I never cottoned to the term "Never Trumper," I guess that's what I am.

But I knew Biden was not as he was being portrayed by the tweets. His track record is one way of knowing that. Additionally, there were no signs of pushback against the leftward lurch of the Democrat party during the campaign or transition. He was on board with its agenda and in fact was looking forward to taking the leadership role in implementing it.

And since January 20, it's been one executive order, statement, cabinet appointment and policy proposal after another. From profligate spending to social-justice preening to indulging in climate alarmism, he's behaved in utterly predictable ways.

Consider the last week.

On the subject of race, he went there. He straight-up said the country he presides over is rife with systemic racism. It's a falsehood, and, if one looks at intent, probably a lie:

President Joe Biden has continued to push the narrative of “systemic racism” against black Americans when it comes to police shootings in the aftermath of the trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. But Chauvin's conduct is an outlier, not the norm. It isn't just the data that demonstrates this. The very examples that activists themselves choose to highlight undercut their own assertion that racism is an inescapable, ubiquitous part of American life.

The latest example of how shaky the "systemic racism" narrative really is comes from media outlets such as NPR and the New York Times. Short on good, clear examples of unjustifiable brutality, they are now trying to tie the apparently justified police shooting of 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant to George Floyd’s death after Chauvin’s trial. 

Body camera footage shows Bryant ignoring officer commands and charging at another woman with a knife. At that point, the officer shoots her four times. Despite what appears to be a clearly justifiable use of force to protect another person's life (a black person's life, in fact), the White House still tried to tie the incident to "systemic racism."

This is typical. The examples that activists and their media allies cite persistently undercut the idea of systemic racism. To this day, the police shooting of Michael Brown continues to be cited as an example of racism. But Brown was shot in self-defense by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, after Brown attacked the officer and reached for the officer’s gun. Jacob Blake, whose case is also cited, was a domestic abuser and an accused sex predator armed with a knife. He ignored police instructions when they confronted him over his violating a restraining order taken out by the woman he had abused.

If the activists' inability to find convincing anecdotes doesn't convince you that "systemic racism" is a bogeyman, then consider the data. Of the roughly 330 million people living in the United States, 1,021 were shot and killed by police officers in 2020, according to the Washington Post police shooting database. Of that number, only 55 were unarmed. Of those 55, 18 were black.

Even those 18 are not clear-cut cases. Fred Brown, for example, was shot after he tried to choke one police officer in a confrontation that occurred because his girlfriend reported him for assault. An officer killed Kurt Reinhold after he got into an altercation with police officers and tried to grab one of their guns. In other cases, such as the shooting death of William Green, the officer was at least charged with murder, so (as in Chauvin's case) it cannot be said that such behavior goes unpunished.

The idea that police officers are gunning down black Americans across the country is complete nonsense. The numbers don’t bear it out, and even the high-profile examples that are cited, from Brown to Blake to Bryant, make it clear that those pushing the narrative can’t back it up.

Then there is his push to halt human advancement - also known as using the coercive power of government to tell energy companies what kinds of energy they can produce and consumers what kinds of energy forms they can buy - hell, even what we can eat:

In anticipation of the virtual Leaders Summit on Climate, a two-day global gathering of more than 40 world leaders, President Joe Biden declared that the United States had a "moral imperative" to adopt an "ambitious" goal of cutting greenhouse-gas emissions by 50% from 2005 levels by 2030 and 100% by 2050.

Such an effort, if we were serious about it, would entail massive destruction of wealth, a surrender of our international trade advantages, the creation of a hugely intrusive state-run bureaucracy at home, the inhibition of free markets that have helped make the world a cleaner place and a precipitous drop in the living standards of most citizens -- especially the poor.

Of course, it should be said that those who oppose the expansion of fracking and nuclear energy -- most elected Democrats, it seems -- aren't even remotely serious about "tackling" carbon emissions, anyway. Around 80% of American energy is generated by fossil fuels and nuclear right now. Around 20% is generated by "renewables" -- predominantly wind and hydropower (which is unavailable in most places). Only around 2% of our portfolio consists of inefficient and unreliable solar power -- this, even after decades of subsidies and mandates.

It's always funny to hear people speak about solar panels as if they were some sort of cutting-edge technology. The discovery of the photovoltaic effect goes back to 1888. President Jimmy Carter declared a national "Sun Day" in 1978 and put 30 solar panels atop the White House. One of those panels is now on display at the Science and Technology Museum in China -- not only the top producer of solar panels and carbon emissions but also the nation that would most benefit from the United States' unilateral economic capitulation.

To reach Biden's goal, the United States would need to envelop most of the nation in panels and windmills and then rely on enormous Gaian prayer circles -- may she grant us sunshine and gale-force winds. We would be compelled to eliminate most air travel and cars -- making new ones produces lots of carbon emissions -- and retrofit every home, factory, warehouse and building in America to utilize this type of energy. We would need to dramatically cut back on our meat and dairy intake as well.

And then there is his stoking of resentment against "the rich." The present form that's taking is his push to tax capital gains:

President Joe Biden wants to end the preferential U.S. tax treatment of investment income that has benefited the nation’s wealthy as he seeks to fund a sweeping new social-spending program. But he will need to overcome a major political hurdle in Congress to do so.

The White House plans to propose almost doubling the capital gains tax rate for those earning $1 million or more, to 39.6%, according to people familiar with the proposal. That wouldn’t affect many. Only about 0.32% of American taxpayers reported adjusted gross income of more than $1 million and capital gains or losses on their returns, according to Internal Revenue Service tax return data from 2018.

The move would send the top federal rate on the appreciation in assets sold by the rich as high as 43.4% when including a surtax to help pay for Obamacare. And it would upend a century-old precedent of under-taxing investment relative to wages and salaries.

Surging stock and property prices over the past year only strengthened the Biden team’s determination to follow through on campaign pledges to demand higher taxes from the best-off. The president is betting the initiative will be popular enough to win passage in Congress, where he can’t lose a single Democratic vote in the Senate and only a handful in the House, since Republicans are likely to be united in opposition.

Stocks dropped the most in more than a month on the news Thursday, with the S&P 500 Index closing down 0.9%, though futures trading early Friday in Asia suggested some stabilization.

Let me reiterate something else I've said many times: From a moral standpoint, it doesn't matter one subatomic particle whether someone is rich, middle-class or poor. His or her money is his or hers. Government ought to have to puke all over itself to take the first red cent of it. If the purpose for which government says it's justified in taking it is not something James Madison would. approve of, no dice. Hands off. 

No, sorry, everybody, Joe Biden is no improvement over the Very Stable Genius. He is greatly pleased with his party's shift even further leftward than where it was under Obama. Its gives him the opportunity to establish a legacy as a Doer Of Big Things like FDR and LBJ. 

Now, back to my point about the Trumpist infection of the Republican Party: the GOP is in no shape to counter this, unless the three percent of sane grownups among its elected officials - people like Liz Cheney, Peter Meijer, Adam Kinzinger and Ben Sasse - can wrest control away from the sycophants, nuts and cowards. That's one hell of a tall order.  Post-America may be too far gone for such a possibility to have a chance. 

 

 

 

Transformation at the speed of light

 Remember when, at the outset of his first four years, Barack Obama said that the "fundamental transformation of America" was underway? Remember the apprehension that those not on board with such an agenda felt, knowing where he was coming from in saying it - his having been mentored by Frank Marshall Davis and Rashid Khalidi, his intimate involvement in the network of Chicago radicals, including Heather Booth, Robert Creamer, Greg Galluzzo, Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers? 

That was a mere warmup for what's underway now. 

Just so far this week, these developments have occurred.

Your tax dollars are once again going to go for the extermination of fetal Americans:

The Biden administration on Wednesday moved to unwind former President Donald Trump’s anti-abortion restrictions on federal family planning funds.

New rules proposed Wednesday would largely return the Title X program to its pre-Trump formation, allowing more abortion clinics to participate in a program that provides free or subsidized contraception and other health services to about 4 million low-income Americans each year.

The move stems from a pledge President Joe Biden made as a candidate, followed by an executive order he signed shortly after taking office directing HHS to review the Trump administration’s Title X rule. At the time, he pledged to “reverse my predecessor’s attack on women’s health access” and “undo the damage that Trump has done.”

DC statehood is no longer a remote possibility:

The House Oversight and Reform Committee approved a bill on Wednesday that would make Washington, DC, the country's 51st state.

The Washington, DC Admissions Act or H.R. 51, introduced by DC Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, is expected to pass a full House vote along party lines next week.

Those in favor of statehood argue that DC residents are being denied their most basic democratic right to representation in Congress. The city has one non-voting member of the House and two "shadow senators," who are unelected and can't vote.

Wealth redistribution specifically for the purpose of codifying collective guilt based on skin color is likewise gaining steam:

A panel in the House of Representatives has passed legislation to create a federal commission to study the issue of reparations.

The historic move marks the first time that the House Judiciary Committee has acted on the decades-long effort.

Despite the historic success, just the creation of a committee to study reparations for the descendants of millions of enslaved Africans led to a lengthy debate in the U.S. House and passed by only 25-17, with all Republicans opposed.

The bill could be on the House floor for a vote by this summer.

Texas Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee spearheaded the bill, which would create a commission that would examine slavery and discrimination in America from 1619 to the present. It would decide how Americans are educated on the atrocity, consider a formal national apology and consider compensation to descendants. Currently, the legislation has its most co-sponsors ever in the House: 176.

And this sinister idea is also getting a boost in the House:

Congressional Democrats introduced legislation Thursday to expand the US Supreme Court from nine to 13 justices, drawing angry protests from Republicans accusing their rivals of attempting a power grab to enact President Joe Biden's agenda.

The surprise move appears to be an effort by the party's progressive wing to pressure Biden on the explosive issue, less than one week after the president announced he was forming a commission to study reforming the nation's high court including the question of expanding its bench.

Several liberal Democrats have said such expansion is necessary after Donald Trump gave the bench a firm conservative majority by getting three of his picks onto the Supreme Court during his presidency, including one just eight days before the 2020 election.

"Our democracy is under assault, and the Supreme Court has dealt the sharpest blows," congressman Mondaire Jones said in a tweet announcing he and three other Democrats, including House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerrold Nadler, were introducing a bill to add four seats to the bench.

"To restore power to the people, we must #ExpandTheCourt."

Nancy Pelosi went on record saying she doesn't support the bill and has no plans to bring it to the floor for a vote, but do you doubt that that will hamper the relentlessness with which its sponsors will continue to push, seeking a path of least resistance, like floodwater?

The hard left senses its moment. 

And what does resistance to this multi-pronged assault on a recognizable United States of America look like?

Outside of a handful of principled actual conservatives inside government (think Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Larry Hogan, Peter Meijer, Ben Sasse) and among the general populace, such resistance looks like a failed personality cult full of sycophants, cowards and nuts.

It is very late in the day.

 

 

 

 

Thursday roundup

 One of my gigs in life is covering local government for a media company that owns four radio stations and a news website. I never ceased to be amazed, when attending redevelopment commission, city and county council meetings is the number of projects that depend on federal grants to get done. I can maybe understand it in situations involving an interstate highway, but for the most part, the question looms in my mind, how did this arrangement come to be where so many local dollars get shipped to Washington and run through its bureaucracy in order to get dispensed, after an application process that allows that layer of government to bask in its power to decide fates, back here?

This question arises in a particularly egregious form - getting to the basic matter of government keeping its hands off people's money in the first place - in the case of an aspect of the recently passed, obscenely bloated, COVID relief package. Robert Verbruggen at National Review has the details:

The [particular amendment in question] doles out $350 billion to state and local governments, nearly $200 billion of it to states. (There’s also, separately, money for schools and public transportation.) But states haven’t seen their revenues decline anywhere near that much, and some states aren’t hurting at all. So for many governments this is just a big windfall to spend.

But not so fast! The Democrats who passed the bill don’t want the free money to go to something icky, and they especially don’t want it to go to something really icky like tax cuts. So they put restrictions on how the money can be spent, including this language:

A State or territory shall not use the funds provided under this section or transferred pursuant to section 603(c)(4) to either directly or indirectly offset a reduction in the net tax revenue of such State or territory resulting from a change in law, regulation, or administrative interpretation during the covered period that reduces any tax (by providing for a reduction in a rate, a rebate, a deduction, a credit, or otherwise) or delays the imposition of any tax or tax increase.

As Walczak notes, not only does this bar states from explicitly and directly using the money to cut taxes, but it makes it pretty tricky for them to cut taxes at all between now and 2024. It will still be okay for a state to cut a tax if the change is fully offset by a spending cut or other revenue increase, because in that case the state can show it financed the tax cut without the new money. But the situations get complicated from there.

For example, states are allowed to use the money to pay public-health officers who deal with the pandemic. But many of these folks would have been employed even without the federal cash, and money is fungible — which is to say, this frees up money for use elsewhere in the budget. If a state sees that resulting budget surplus and decides a tax cut is the appropriate response, that would appear to be prohibited, because the federal money “indirectly” financed the tax cut. 

It's a pretty wonky deep dive, but Scott Lincicome at the Cato Institute's website dispenses handily with the idea that industrial policy and tariffs and such are necessary for national security reasons. 

Tim Miller at The Bulwark on why Paul Gosar is absolutely part of the nuttiest wing of the Repubican side of the aisle in the House. 

This piece by Roger Kiska at the Acton Insitute's website actually dates from December 2019, but I saw it shared on Facebook and its message, that the leftist assault on our civilization's Judeo-Christian foundations explicitly takes its cue from Gramsci's notion of the long march through the institutions is even more salient now.

Jonathan Tobin at the New York Post says that one sure sign of the imperiled health of our society is that it can't debate trans ideology's effect on kids.

Donald G. McNeil, the recently fired New York Times science writer, writing at Medium, recounts his experience with what happened. 

Religion News Service on Beth Moore's split from the Southern Baptists:

“She has been a stalwart for the Word of God, never compromising,” former Lifeway Christian Resources President Thom Rainer said in 2015, during a celebration at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center in Nashville that honored 20 years of partnership between the Southern Baptist publishing house and Moore. “And when all is said and done, the impact of Beth Moore can only be measured in eternity’s grasp.”

Then along came Donald Trump.

Moore’s criticism of the 45th president’s abusive behavior toward women and her advocacy for sexual abuse victims turned her from a beloved icon to a pariah in the denomination she loved all her life.

“Wake up, Sleepers, to what women have dealt with all along in environments of gross entitlement & power,” Moore once wrote about Trump, riffing on a passage from the New Testament Book of Ephesians. 

Because of her opposition to Trump and her outspokenness in confronting sexism and nationalism in the evangelical world, Moore has been labeled as “liberal” and “woke” and even as being a heretic for daring to give a message during a Sunday morning church service.

Finally, Moore had had enough. She told Religion News Service in an interview Friday (March 5) that she is “no longer a Southern Baptist.”

“I am still a Baptist, but I can no longer identify with Southern Baptists,” Moore said in the phone interview. “I love so many Southern Baptist people, so many Southern Baptist churches, but I don’t identify with some of the things in our heritage that haven’t remained in the past.”

Batya Ungar Sargon, Newsweek's deputy opinion editor, writing at Persuasion, on how the anti-racist vision is "perfect for affluent whites who want to be heroes in a story about justice."

If anything here is a must-read, it's Washington Examiner editor Hugo Gurdon's takedown of the leftist hijacking of the term "equity."