Connexion
A single clause can ruin an entire bill and this is killing Congress’s work, says Rep. Harriet Hageman, the lawmaker who took out Liz Cheney.
There are all kinds of phrases and jargon that are particular to Congress and legislative procedure, so much so that sometimes it sounds like the folks on Capitol Hill are speaking a different language. When members of Congress talk in “legislative speak,” normal people tend to tune them out because, unlike D.C. careerists, they are not obsessed with the minutiae of the process.
But at least one term is pretty clear on its face: “poison pill.” As it relates to Congress, a poison pill is a detail contained in a bill that makes the entirety of the legislation unpalatable. Sometimes they are obvious, and sometimes they must be rooted out, but if we care about the direction of this country, we must always make the effort to find them.
On February 4, 2024, the Senate released the “Emergency National Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2024,” the purpose of which was to provide $60 billion dollars to Ukraine, $14 billion to Israel, and ostensibly, $20 billion “for the border.” While Senators Schumer, Lankford and others would have you believe that it was a “border security bill,” it was nothing of the sort. It was instead a classic bait and switch, whereby the Democrats received a windfall of additional funding for the military-industrial complex, Ukraine pork, and the ability to expedite the processing of illegal immigrants. Actual “border security,” however, was non-existent.
While the advocates of this monstrosity tried to gaslight us into believing that it did not grant the requisite “get out of jail free cards” to tens of thousands of illegals each week, that is in fact what it did—even empowering President Biden to unilaterally “declare an emergency” and increase those astronomical (and indefensible) numbers exponentially whenever he chose.
In sum, the Emergency National Security Supplemental Appropriations Act provided no security for Americans at all—it instead ratified the catastrophic open border policies of the Biden/Mayorkas dance team.
This bill fortunately died before ever leaving the Senate chamber. Despite that win for the American people, it is still worth discussing the larger issue of poison pill clauses that are so often overlooked in legislation in both the House and the Senate.
This particular bill in fact included the poison pill to end all poison pills—the Senate bill all but guaranteed that no one who is opposed to unlimited illegal immigration, the destruction of our social safety net, the importation of the world’s poorest, the scourge of human trafficking, the flooding of our communities with illegal and deadly drugs, and the non-stop invasion of military-age men from malign countries around the world, would get a fair hearing to challenge it in court. How did the drafters in the Senate accomplish what would be nothing short of abolishing the First Amendment’s guarantee that we may “petition our government for redress”? By making sure that only the most liberal two courts in the Country would have jurisdiction to hear any such cases.
Even though Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California are bearing the brunt of the Biden/Mayorkas border disaster, the courts in those states would never have any say as to how this new law would be interpreted, applied, or enforced. Even though Governors Abbott and DeSantis have been at the forefront of exposing and challenging Biden and Mayorkas’s refusal to comply with existing immigration law, this bill would prohibit them from filing a lawsuit in Texas or Florida in order to protect the citizens of their respective states. Even though our border communities have been overrun with illegals, forcing them to dedicate their limited human and financial resources towards taking care of them, this bill would prohibit them from seeking relief from judges who have a better understanding of the on-the-ground situation, instead forcing them to file their cases in Washington, D.C.
Now, why would the Democrats (and useful Senate Republicans) seek to so severely constrain a state, a community, or a citizen from pursuing legal redress in those courts that are closest to them? Why would a “border bill” include a provision designed to strip American states, cities, and citizens from seeking judicial relief in the forum, venue and jurisdiction that is the most convenient, the most knowledgeable, and with the most skin in the game on the issue at hand?
Very simply, the D.C. District Court and D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals are two of the most notoriously liberal courts in the entire United States of America. They consistently side with liberal Democrats on every radical policy that they seek to pursue, endorsing and legitimizing agency decisions and actions that could never make it through the legislative process. They have made an absolute mockery of “the rule of law” and equal protection in their handling of the J6 proceedings, the unlawful actions of Black Lives Matter, and the anarchy of Antifa. They have become so politicized when it comes to implementing the progressive agenda, that no one who seeks a fair trial, application of the law to the facts, or relief from government overreach would ever file a lawsuit in either the D.C. District Court or Court of Appeals. They have largely become simply an arm of the Democratic Party, especially in relation to any issue that involves matters of political import.
But that isn’t even the worst part. Because these courts would have “sole and original jurisdiction over any challenge arising from the Secretary’s authority to exercise the border emergency authority” to decide all matters related to the Senate bill, there would never be a “split in the circuits” allowing for review of the decisions they made. What does that mean? Under our judicial system, the United States Supreme Court takes only approximately 100–150 cases per year—less than 2% of all cases for which the litigants seek Supreme Court review. One of the most important determining factors controlling whether the Supreme Court will accept an appeal or “grant cert” is if there is a “split in the circuits,” meaning that two or more of the Circuit Courts of Appeals disagree on a defining question of law when deciding similar cases that have come before them. The Circuits, in other words, must disagree as to what the law is.
In practical terms, we may have a circumstance whereby the Fifth, Eighth, Sixth, and Eleventh Circuits decide one way on a particular question of law, and the Second, Ninth, and Fourth Circuits may decide another way. Once the issue has percolated sufficiently, the Supreme Court may take up the question to pronounce how the law will be applied.
If, however, the D.C. District Court and the Circuit Court of Appeals are the only two courts that are allowed to decide any questions regarding the meaning, interpretation, application, or other aspect of the Senate Emergency National Security Supplemental Appropriations Act bill, there will never be a split in the circuits warranting Supreme Court intervention. This does not mean that the Supreme Court will never weigh in on these issues, but it makes it a lot more difficult to ensure that it does.
The use of “poison pills” isn’t limited to just the border bill. If we review another bill from the Senate—one that actually passed, which was dubiously called the “emergency spending package”—we see the same tactics leading to another legal concern. The bill contains what could be considered an “impeachment clause” should Donald Trump become President in January 2025.
It does so by including $1.6 billion for foreign military financing in Ukraine, and $13.7 billion for the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative. These funds expire on September 30, 2025—eight months into the possible second term of President Trump. These are the same accounts President Trump was impeached for pausing in December 2019. If Democrats were to retake the House of Representatives, this would create an opportunity for yet another sham impeachment vote.
These examples are only two within the last thirty days and were inserted into bills that garnered extra scrutiny. They should be a wake up call to Republicans in the House and Senate: We must scour every single bill that comes our way to ensure that these jurisdictional tactics and adverse consequences related to legislation are blocked at every turn. Anything short of waging war on this radical effort to rewrite our laws on venue and jurisdiction is nothing short of legislative malpractice.
The post Stop Playing Legislative Games appeared first on The American Conservative.
Eagle Scout, hobo, Reagan speechwriter—John McClaughry is the most underappreciated man in American politics.
The two most desirable qualities in a politician—wit and an aversion to wielding power—are, to the media and the deciders, the most disabling. Wit, whether folksy (Morris Udall) or caustic (Bob Dole), is no aid to presidential ambitions, and Ron Paul’s admirable renunciation of the sword caused the press to regard him as a loon. The witless (Nikki Haley, Gavin Newsom) and power-crazed (Hillary Clinton, John McCain) get much better press.
There hasn’t been a politico in our lifetimes who has combined wit with an inappetence for controlling others quite as potently as Vermont’s John McClaughry. I checked in with John, still irrepressible at 86 years of age, upon the recent online publication of The Decentralism File, a rich lectionary appearing courtesy of the E.F. Schumacher Center and accessible at www.centerforneweconomics.org.
Eagle Scout, hobo (as “Feather River John” he rode boxcars for 5,000 miles), Steve McQueen lookalike, Vermont state representative and senator, speechwriter for the pre-presidential Ronald Reagan, agrarian-libertarian-populist idea man, a Jeffersonian in the best sense of that honorable and now nearly extinct adjective—John McClaughry is the most underappreciated and unheeded man in modern American politics.
As a politico, he was…offbeat. Combing through my thick McClaughry file I find this reply form for those who donated to his 1992 campaign for Governor of Vermont:
Dear John: I am enthusiastically enclosing the proceeds of my invalid mother’s pension account, or equivalent thereof, to support your campaign for Governor. I certify that I am not under indictment or otherwise in a position to cause you more embarrassment than this contribution will cause me.
Republican McClaughry ran and lost that race to Democratic incumbent Howard Dean, just as he ran and lost a 1982 primary race for U.S. Senate to incumbent Robert Stafford: by offering a vison of “a land where power, like the ownership of property, is not concentrated in the hands of the few, but distributed widely among the many.”
The many, alas, did not pull his lever. John’s friend Frank Bryan, the University of Vermont professor who wrote the standard academic work on town meeting governance (Real Democracy), explained McClaughry’s political dilemma: “How, with limited funds, to articulate his views to an electorate that does not possess the necessary concepts or language?”
The concepts and language are on glorious display in Schumacher’s Decentralism File, described by John as a digital collection of 120-plus “selections of decentralist thought from many different historic eras, authors, and countries…exhibit[ing] the depth and breadth of decentralist thinking across the political, social, and economic spheres of human organization, and across time.”
Stretching from Lao Tzu through Wendell Berry, the Decentralism File’s authors include Jane Jacobs, George Kennan, Paul Goodman, Norman Mailer, Robert Nisbet, and unexpected communists (Rosa Luxemburg!) and anti-communists (Richard Nixon!). The New Left Students for a Democratic Society’s Port Huron Statement is here, as are manifestoes from Plaid Cymru of Wales and the Cornish Nationalist Party.
Bobby Kennedy (the first one) is represented by two speeches in which he laments that “Bigness, loss of community, organizations and society grown far past the human scale—these are the besetting sins of the twentieth century.” They are no less besetting in the 21st. John recalls, “I spent two hours with RFK in 1968 at Harvard and found him a changed and better man from his earlier days as a savage partisan.”
I’ve always dismissed the Clash’s admonitory lyric “The new groups are not concerned/With what there is to be learned” as humorlessly dogmatic, but—and jeez I sound like an old guy—I do wish the young ’uns would explore the inspiriting and fecund traditions, based in love and liberty and cooperation, to which we are heirs. Robert Nisbet and Dorothy Day are much better for the soul—not to mention our country—than keyboard belligerents fantasizing over ways the state can punish their political foes.
A recent cancer diagnosis won’t stop John McClaughry from adding to his proudest accomplishment: he has been elected Town Moderator of Kirby (pop. 521) every year since 1967. He’s also wrapping up his long-gestating memoir, Lizard Tracks Across the Jello, though he concedes that “the first 2,500 pages drag in spots.”
When I ask John what he’d have done differently in his career if he’d known then what he knows now, he answers, “I would have seized supreme power and crushed my opponents under my iron heel!”
John McClaughry is just about the only politician at this authoritarian moment who would make that joke—and just about the only one who wouldn’t actually mean it.
The post Small Is Bountiful appeared first on The American Conservative.
Biden’s insistence that everything is fine cuts against voters’ actual daily experiences.
One of the most succinct campaign slogans of the modern era came out of the 1992 Clinton campaign: “It’s the Economy, Stupid,” which picked up on the feeling Americans were less concerned with the incumbent’s apparent foreign policy success (remember Desert Storm?) than the nation’s changing economy. Clinton spun his personal concern for voters’ well-being off this, with the catchphrase “I feel your pain.”
Things seem headed for some sort of through-the-looking-glass-style repeat in 2024, as the incumbent is hoping to sell voters on the strength of the economy when they are more than skeptical. Bidenomics’ thrust seems to be “The Economy Is OK, Stupid.”
“Bidenomics,” the word itself, melds two of the incumbent’s vulnerabilities: First, he is Joe Biden, 81 years old, “the Crypt Keeper”; second, the economy is fine, and just fine, if you don’t look at it too closely. Not much can be done with the first liability, but the second opens the door for Donald Trump to run on a populist version of the economy argument that could leave Biden looking uninformed and out of touch.
The New York Times paints the brightest picture of Biden’s economic world. Bidenomics propaganda points out that, in 2020, the average wage of workers who still had a job rose without talking about those who were laid off, disproportionately service workers. Growth in wages for everyone was then held down because those low-wage workers were being rehired at their old salaries.
Bidenomics fanboy Paul Krugman actually went as far as writing in the Times, “Until recently I thought everyone—well, everyone following economic issues—knew this.” Stupid voters, not keeping up with the Times. “There are two big questions right now about the U.S. economy,” says Krugman. “One is why it’s doing so well. The other is why so many Americans insist that it’s terrible.”
This dumb line of reasoning seems to attract progressives. One coined the term “vibe-cession” to describe the gap between the common perception and cherry-picked economic indicators. Others insist it’s poor perception and political polarization that are mostly to blame. Then, there is good old social media and its misinformation, reinforcing the “bad economy belief.” A former Federal Reserve economist quoted by, of course, the Times, wrote that a “toxic brew” of human bias for negative information and the attention economy lead to consumer pessimism. If only those rednecks who don’t subscribe to the New York Times could see the view from up there.
The problem down here is economic reality, off-limits in Bidenomics. Start with inflation. Things cost more, with some of the highest jumps in prices in decades. (With the exception of the pandemic, there hasn’t been a year with average annual inflation above four percent since 1991.) Even after years of the Fed raising interest rates (see mortgages, below), inflation coming down does not fix the everyday problems of Americans.
“Inflation,” as economists define the term, is nearly meaningless to most voters because it excludes food and energy prices: two significant parts of any household budget. To include those parts of most voters’ lives, you’re looking for the Consumer Price Index, which includes everything but which rarely appears in feel-good tales of the Biden economy. Even then, watch the magician’s hands closely; prices at the pump are down more than 30 percent since their peak last year, but still up considerably since Biden took office. Some 74 percent today say they’re “at least somewhat worried” that the cost of living will climb so high that they will be unable to remain in their community.
Now about those mortgages. As the Fed raised interest rates to push back inflation, loan costs rose in kind. Average monthly payments on a new home jumped to $3,322 in the third quarter of the year, data from real estate investment firm CBRE shows. It means they have risen 90 percent since the final quarter of 2020—just before Biden took office in January 2021—when it was $1,746. Home ownership is becoming an unattainable dream to many Americans. Interest rates above seven percent and soaring house prices mean buyers are facing one of the least affordable markets in recent memory.
The low unemployment Biden touts does mean more Americans are working, but says nothing about mediocre wages, underemployment, and those forced into two or more jobs to make ends meet. A Blueprint/YouGov poll on the economy found just seven percent of respondents were principally concerned about the availability of jobs, while 64 percent were most worried about prices.
Bidenomics, of course, famously focuses on jobs created. Even then the numbers are slippery; the vast majority of this touted job growth comes from restoring job losses from the pandemic. Check instead the broader unemployment rate that includes underemployed and discouraged workers, which, at 7 percent, is nearly twice as high as Bidenomics claims. And watch claims of rising wages—most rises have been negated by inflation growing at an even faster pace.
Perhaps most significantly among economic perceptions is voters’ view of the future. According to the New York Times, a poll from March found that “just 21 percent of respondents felt confident that life for their children’s generation will be better, matching the record low since this question was first asked. In 1990, 50 percent of those asked felt life would be better for their kids.” The national debt, $5.7 trillion when Bill Clinton left office, has reached $34 trillion. This constitutes a form of intergenerational theft; rising interest costs will eventually require higher taxes or cuts in federal programs or both.
Food prices are up almost 6 percent under Bidenomics. Some 59 percent of parents will spend more than $18,000 per child on child care in 2023. The overall average manufacturer’s suggested retail price of new vehicles in 2023 was $34,876, 4.7 percent higher than the previous year. Average annual health insurance premiums increased 7 percent in 2023. The average family premium has increased 22 percent since 2018.
The Biden people have it just 180 degrees wrong; perception does matter and is not “wrong.” And it does not matter that some of the economic effects listed here are not Joe’s “fault.” Past experience shows the guy in the Oval Office takes credit or accepts fault for what happened on his watch, at least in most voters’ minds.
This is because while a few economists are voters, very few voters are economists. What the economy feels like at the checkout, at the end of the month, at the pump, matters most and will drive voting choices. So a recent poll found just two percent of registered voters said economic conditions are “excellent,” with only 16 percent saying they were “good.”
A majority of voters already trust Trump more than Biden on the economy. You can’t just tell the voters they are wrong and that all is actually well when it is not. Bill Clinton called it in 1992, Donald Trump will surely emphasize it this year, but Joe Biden hasn’t heard it yet with the election just about ten months away: It’s the economy, stupid.
The post It’s the Economy Again, Stupid appeared first on The American Conservative.
A new batch of unsealed documents holds new puzzles for those who want to believe.
Unsealed by a federal court in New York: The first two tranches of documents pertaining to Virginia Giuffre’s lawsuit against the now deceased financier and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s former lover and accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.
More documents are expected to be unsealed in the near future, but the first tranches released Wednesday and Thursday, about 60 of an expected 250, offered a treasure trove for those who have asked the essential questions surrounding Epstein’s mysterious death for the last four and a half years: What kind of blackmail scheme was the late Epstein running on his island and other properties? Was Epstein and his inner circle connected to intelligence agencies (and, if so, which ones)? Who was Epstein’s clientele? Did Epstein actually kill himself?
Readers were left with more questions than answers.
The hundreds of pages of documents revealed more than 170 different names of individuals associated with the lawsuit: victims, accomplices, associates, and clients. In December 2023, Judge Loretta Preska of the Southern District of New York ruled that the first tranche of documents were to be released on January 1, 2024; however, that timeline was briefly delayed for individuals, mainly Epstein’s victims, to petition to have their identities protected. Two individuals managed to keep their identities protected as they battle in court to maintain their anonymity in the Epstein affair.
Former presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump were among those named in the documents.
In the tranche of documents released Wednesday, Giuffre testified that she never saw Trump on Epstein’s island, at other Epstein properties, or ever in Epstein’s presence. Furthermore, Giuffre testified that Trump never flirted with her, which conflicts with a previous report that claimed Trump flirted with Giuffre. Giuffre also testified that she was unaware of Trump attempting or performing any sexual acts on her or other girls victimized by Epstein. Trump went unmentioned in the tranche released Thursday afternoon.
Meanwhile, Epstein accuser Johanna Sjoberg testified in a 2016 deposition that Epstein once told her, “Clinton likes them young, referring to girls.” What’s more, Maxwell testified in 2019 that she flew on “Jeffrey Epstein’s planes with President Clinton,” a claim that is backed up by testimony of Epstein’s former pilot Dave Rogers and the planes’ previously released flight logs. Clinton was also mentioned in the second tranche of documents. In an unsealed email from Giuffre sent in 2011, Giuffre alleged Clinton sought to intimidate Vanity Fair into not publishing stories about Epstein’s sex trafficking. The email, sent to reporter Sharon Churcher of the U.K. tabloid Mail on Sunday, claimed that she feared retribution for going public with her allegations against Epstein, “considering that B. Clinton walked into VF and threatened them not to write sex-trafficing [sic] articles about his good friend J.E.” Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair at the time, told CNN that the alleged Clinton threat “categorically did not happen.”
Another person named in the documents was Doug Band, a former aide for Bill Clinton, who had said in an interview that he had tried to keep Clinton from meeting with Epstein but that the former president continued to associate with him.
Other names included in the list were previously known, like Prince Andrew, who has faced heinous accusations from alleged trafficking victims, and French modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel, who committed suicide in jail while awaiting trial for alleged sexual harassment and rape of minors over 15 years old.
One of the more bizarre episodes recorded in the documents released Wednesday involved the late physicist Stephen Hawking. In a typo-ridden email sent January 2015, Epstein told Maxwell he was willing to pay a reward to friends and acquaintances of Giuffre who could testify that allegations Hawking participated in an underage orgy were false. The email was sent shortly after an article was published claiming Hawking visited Epstein’s private island, but did not include any claims about Hawking participating in sexual acts with minors.
The two questions that will become thematic as more documents are unsealed: Will the justice system and media have any appetite be for holding the rich, the powerful, the few accountable? If they don’t, how will we manage to do so?
The post The Eps-Files appeared first on The American Conservative.
As the 2024 campaign and the national security scene heat up, the ongoing rehabilitation of the 37th president comes into play in the GOP civil war.
To inaugurate proceedings at the Nixon National Security Summit on Thursday in Washington, Fox’s Jacqui Heinrich shared striking writing from Richard Nixon to Bill Clinton.
In a recently declassified letter, the 37th president counseled the 42nd: “I have reluctantly concluded that his situation has rapidly deteriorated since the elections in December, and that the days of his unquestioned leadership of Russia are numbered,” remarking on the then-President of Russia Boris Yeltsin. “[Yeltsin’s] drinking bouts are longer and his periods of depression are more frequent. Most troublesome, he can no longer deliver on his commitments to you and other Western leaders in an increasingly anti-American environment in the Duma and in the country.”
Comments on the doomed Yeltsin era can almost seem inane, close to thirty years on, at least amid the largest land war in Europe and in the shadow of Putin, the most fearsome Russian ruler since Stalin. A fait accompli makes for poor copy. Of course, Yeltsin was a shambolic wreck fated to failure (never mind the talent that enabled his ascent), and obviously the vulgarian Russian bear would only ever respect and understand animal force (disregard perhaps the most talented diplomatic force on the globe, and arguably the world’s finest literature).
But one man who understood the truth, that fate is fluid, was Richard Nixon. He spent his sunset years rebuilding a reputation in tatters, crafting himself as a member of the “our son-of-a-bitch” school of foreign policy with the understanding his truest jury would be people he never met. As the last president to enjoy a drink to something like a fault, and whose own darkness seemingly never permitted him to fully trust his fellow man (even as they kept electing him), Nixon’s warning to Clinton about Yeltsin’s personal descent and the limits of democracy’s appeal came during the greatest bear market in history for such a view, the alleged end of history.
Nixon is gone, but much less alone now.
Indeed, something about the man, our Shakespearean president, is fitting for this moment, as the country careens toward its most chaotic presidential election since 1860 and ponders “a world which now seems terrifyingly near to a spiral into a world war,” as TAC’s founding editor Scott McConnell put it last week.
As the 2024 campaign and the national security scene heat up, the ongoing rehabilitation of the 37th president comes into play in the GOP civil war as well. Teasing his new film, the preeminent conservative activist Christopher Rufo said, “I tell a new story about a man, reviled in his time, who left behind a blueprint for counter-revolution—the last hope for restoring the American republic.”
At the very least, something’s in the water.
Seeking to capitalize is none other than the Richard Nixon Foundation itself. Based out of Yorba Linda, California, but marinating this week in Washington, it is led by Jim Byron, who, in his early thirties, has really only ever worked for the organization. It is chaired by Robert C. O’Brien, the last Republican president’s national security advisor. O’Brien passed on a Utah Senate run earlier this autumn, but, with Americans held sword-on-neck in Gaza, he is back in the news as the former president’s chief hostage negotiator. That O’Brien could reprise his former position in a second Trump Administration or even be on the ticket—a Mormon national security-oriented upgrade to Mike Pence who could help in Arizona and Nevada—are facts also never far from the discussion around him.
Notably, the Nixon Foundation is more Trump-curious than its friendly, Californian rival: the Reagan Foundation. Like its namesake, the Nixon Foundation has one foot in the establishment, and one foot in the populist id. It’s a difficult, perhaps even impossible balance. And yet.
For instance, generally a hawk’s hawk, Florida’s Congressman Mike Waltz said at the event that the current American line on Ukraine is “not sustainable” and that hard conversations need to recommence with the Europeans. This is the legislator who once endorsed years and years more in Afghanistan to a dyspeptic CPAC audience response. Waltz is a former Special Forces officer, and whatever else, one with probably a large future. If he’s saying this, Ukraine skepticism is no longer ghettoized to the conservative avant-garde.
Congressman Ro Khanna, a Golden State Democrat and former student of John Mearsheimer, and former Trump Defense official Elbridge Colby, also scouted for a big future role in a successor Administration, led a panel skeptical of the war in Eurasia. Colby is also a member of O’Brien’s American Global Strategies group, where he represents the realist edge of O’Brien’s big tent that at times has been more overtly committed to the Ukraine hardline.
In many ways, it was striking who the defense of the Kiev’s government’s preferences fell to: the Democratic establishment. Jane Harman, the former L.A. Congresswoman and former president of the Wilson Center, remarked “Do I support more support for Ukraine? Yes.” More for Israel? Yes. More U.S. border funding? She opined that it is not a “zero sum game” while hailing the rosier times of budget surplus. She urged the gathered to “contemplate that.”
Without missing a beat, former Congresswoman Harman said: “What did we miss in the nineties? Just about everything. We missed the rise of China. We missed the rise of terrorism. And we missed” Russian anxieties about the expansion of NATO.
“They were totally offended,” she added.
Harman closed by positively mentioning uber-internationalist Wendell Willkie, the 1940 GOP presidential nominee who failed to stop Franklin Roosevelt’s unprecedented third term and the solidification of the New Deal. Democratic reverence for Republicans who scantily disagree with them would seem to be an old tradition.
To round it out for the hardliners, former NSA head and United States Cyber Command Michael S. Rogers blasted “incrementalism” on Ukraine, implying he believes true support for Ukraine has never been tried. The merger of America’s brass with the Democratic establishment (and its distance from the Republican rank-and-file) is, of course, perhaps the most important story in politics as America contemplates not just one war, but three.
Mike Pompeo, the former Secretary of State, attended the dinner the night before but passed on the main event itself. Pompeo was the surprise guest-of-honor at Governor Glenn Youngkin’s “Red Vest Retreat” in Virginia Beach, where the gathered discussed how the Commonwealth’s governor is absolutely not running for president. Notably, the state of Pompeo’s relationship with Donald Trump is a bonafide unknown. Would Pompeo be snubbed entirely from a second Trump team? Why did Pompeo pass on a 2024 race? (That now looks smart—ask Ron DeSantis.) Is Pompeo angling to be Youngkin’s VP or Defense Secretary?
It should be said: O’Brien has not quite endorsed Trump. O’Brien jokes, given his service on Scott Walker’s Hindenburg-style effort, that if he endorsed him, that would actually cause Trump to lose. More seriously, O’Brien spoke of a side of Trump not flashed for the cameras. The 45th president is an “incredibly cordial man,” O’Brien claims, who exhibited tremendous “sympathy” for his fellow world leaders during the Covid crisis, frequently phoning to check on their health.
Most relevant: O’Brien closed his remarks by discussing a “GOP approach” to foreign policy and national security, one that he said is quite different from the Democrats, but one (he implied) in which a thread can be weaved from Nixon, to Reagan, to Trump.
For skeptics, there’s the rub. O’Brien also served in an administration not mentioned (to this writer’s knowledge) at the event: that of George W. Bush. And some that would see a far more restrained foreign policy of the United States do fear wolves in sheeps’ clothing. Or as Jacob Heilbrunn, the editor of the National Interest and author of They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons, commented to me after the event: “Can the regime change doctrine be rehabbed or is it just California dreamin’?”
The post The New Nixonians appeared first on The American Conservative.
The Mysteries finds humanity exactly where the Calvin and Hobbes impresario wants it: Cowering before certain annihilation.
The Mysteries, Bill Watterson and John Kascht, Andrews McMeel Publishing, 72 pages
Several months ago, I wrote in these pages a long biographical piece about Bill Watterson and why he quit Calvin and Hobbes. I had originally intended the essay to be a review, more or less, of The Mysteries, Watterson’s first original book since 1996. But owing to the withholding nature of his publisher and the grinding schedule of The American Conservative, days before my deadline I was left with a nonexistent book by a man famous for a singular disappearing act.
In panic, I ransacked my notes for something usable. I found that I had both too little and too much background research to handle the piece properly. So I followed the advice which Lytton Strachey gave to biographers in that unenviable position: I rowed out over my great ocean of material, and lowered down into it, here and there, a little bucket, hoping to bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen from those far depths to be examined with a careful curiosity. I found the catch satisfying, if incomplete.
In any case, the book did eventually arrive—last week. I’m glad I didn’t see it before I wrote the essay. Without the book, I, like most everyone else who has written about Watterson, was forced to reckon with his silence, to treat him as if he were a dead man who has passed into blank nothingness. And if The Mysteries is any guide, that’s exactly how Bill Watterson wants to be treated.
The book is short, less than 400 words long. It’s a social parable of the sort James Thurber often wrote after he went completely blind. The text is by Watterson, but most of the illustration work is by the caricaturist John Kascht. (Watterson contributed the backgrounds: forests, cityscapes, art galleries, and the like.) Kascht’s people, as anyone who has seen his work at the National Portrait Gallery already knows, are grotesque: clay-like medieval figures who appear to have been derived from the artist’s reading of A World Lit Only by Fire. When paired with Watterson’s painterly landscapes, the effect is that of a stop motion film.
The story—if it can be called that—is this: Sometime in the Middle Ages, a frightened and suspicious people built a walled city to protect themselves from the Mysteries, which lived in a dark forest. These were reputed to have “bizarre and terrifying powers” and they regularly visited unexplained calamities on the people. But, one day, the king sent his knights out to capture a Mystery, and, when at last a knight returned with one in tow, everyone was surprised by its ordinariness. “Once understood, its powers were not all that remarkable,” Watterson writes. “And over time, each new Mystery they discovered was even less impressive.”
This is a rather sardonic gloss on the Scientific Revolution, and as the story moves on, Watterson only intensifies his criticism of progress. It is a great subject of his. Ever since he was a child, Watterson has held a reverence for the natural world and a hatred for anything that threatens it. When he was growing up in suburban Cleveland, he lived in a house which backed up to an undeveloped forest, which he loved because it was “a bit wild and mysterious and beautiful.” These days, the forest has been paved over. “Looking at a cul-de-sac of McMansions doesn’t have the same impact on the imagination,” he admits, with more than a little bitterness.
Now he gets his revenge. As more Mysteries are discovered, soon the people’s fear and wonder give way to laughing and mockery. Sprawling cities are built in place of the old fortresses and everywhere there is a general feeling that human beings are at last masters of the natural world. But all the while, in a clever artistic choice, Kascht still dresses his people in their ragged peasant clothes, suggesting, perhaps, that even though many people today live in gleaming cities and surround themselves with luxury goods, we are no more dignified than our ancestors.
The story ends when at last the natural world reasserts its power over the people. The sky turns strange colors; the ground quakes; and the animals flee to the far corners of the earth. Only when it is too late do the people begin to worry. And then, they too disappear. “Time moved on,” Watterson writes. “Centuries passed. Eons passed. The universe continued as usual. And the Mysteries lived happily ever after.”
These last five sentences take up the last four pages of the book. On each page there is a stark illustration of the moon and desert planets or the stars of a distant galaxy, bright lights shining for no one at all. This is the purest expression of Watterson’s work and beliefs. After Calvin and Hobbes, he abandoned comics for painting, mostly of the American Southwest. Here, finally, he found a landscape whose massive scale annihilated his own fears, desires, and longings by the simple fact of its overawing vastness.
“You’re reminded that we’re on a planet, that we’re just little specks, and Nature will kill you if you’re stupid,” Watterson once said of these desert scenes. “Somehow I find all that deeply comforting. That’s my church.”
The post The Church of Bill Watterson appeared first on The American Conservative.
The Wen Ho Lee case taught China that crying racism would trump incriminating facts.
Is it racist to think that a Chinese person is more likely to spy for China than someone with no Chinese ancestry who was born in America?
That was the premise of much of the left-wing opposition to the Justice Department’s so-called China Initiative, its investigation of Chinese technology theft that was launched in 2018 and canceled by the Biden administration in 2022 over claims of ethnic profiling. It is the premise of many news articles written about Chinese scientists leaving the United States in increasing numbers, supposedly because they feel targeted by authorities. Yet if you asked the average man on the street, he would say that taking someone’s country of birth into account in an espionage investigation is just common sense.
Where did the Chinese get the idea that playing the race card would be an effective way to fend off reasonable investigations of suspicious conduct? From the precedent set by the case of Wen Ho Lee in 1999.
When I mentioned Wen Ho Lee at a panel in Washington, D.C., recently, none of the people in the room, mostly twenty-somethings, had any idea who he was. His case was a massive news story during the late Clinton era, one that taught the Chinese a lesson about American vulnerabilities that they are profiting from to this day.
The story of Wen Ho Lee, as it has gone down in history books, runs something like this: An absent-minded computer programmer at Los Alamos cut a few corners on security procedures and for this he was scapegoated as a Chinese spy by the Justice Department, which picked him because he was Taiwanese-born and ethnically vulnerable. The title of Lee’s ghostwritten memoir sums it up: My Country Versus Me: The First-Hand Account by the Los Alamos Scientist Who Was Falsely Accused of Being a Spy.
According to an August 2000 episode of 60 Minutes, the security lapses Lee committed were very ordinary, the kind of thing many other Los Alamos scientists did when they were in a hurry. The crime of mishandling restricted data, to which Lee pled guilty in exchange for the other charges being dropped, he says he did because he wanted to create backup copies of his work and so transferred the files from a secure to an unsecure network before putting them onto portable tapes.
But it was not just his own work that Wen Ho Lee downloaded. The program called “Big Mac” simulates a nuclear explosion in order to show the effects of design changes on the operations of a bomb. Running a test took hours or days on a Cray supercomputer. Out of 223,000 lines of code, Lee had contributed less than a thousand. He downloaded the whole thing, and more, including weapons designs and sketches.
As soon as Lee became aware that he was under investigation by the FBI, he began deleting the incriminating files from his computer and refused ever to tell authorities where the backup tapes were; he claimed he destroyed them. Far from being a shortcut taken in a hurry, analysts say creating his tape library would have taken Lee at least 40 hours.
Lee’s behavior drew the FBI’s attention because investigators had unrelated reasons to believe there was a spy at Los Alamos. China conducted a nuclear test in 1992 that indicated sudden advances in their miniaturization technology. Their breakthrough bore a striking resemblance to America’s W88 warhead, the kind used on Trident missiles, which meant that either the Chinese had converged on the same design overnight or someone gave it to them. “It’s like they were driving a Model T and went around the corner and suddenly had a Corvette,” one scientist said.
Investigators started with the small circle of people who would have had access to those designs and looked for red flags. Wen Ho Lee had three, in addition to his inexplicable tape library: the call, the meeting, and the hug.
In 1982, Lee called up a Taiwanese-born engineer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who had been forced to resign from his job after being caught at the airport on his way to China carrying classified secrets. Lee had never met the man, but he called him and offered to help him find out who had tipped off the authorities. This phone call was picked up on the FBI’s phone tap of the engineer and then forgotten about for 15 years until Lee himself came under investigation. Lee says he called his countryman merely out of sympathy. One FBI agent who investigated Lee said, “I’m Italian, but I don’t call John Gotti and say, come on, John, I hear the FBI’s after you, can I help you?”
In 1988, on one of his many visits to China, Wen Ho Lee met in his hotel room with Dr. Hu Side, the head of China’s nuclear weapons program. Lee claims nothing improper occurred at this meeting, only that Hu asked him to disclose classified information and he refused. But when Lee was debriefed after his trip and provided a list of all the Chinese scientists he had met, he left off Hu.
In 1994, a Chinese delegation including Hu Side visited Los Alamos. Wen Ho Lee crashed a private meeting to which he had not been invited in order to greet the visitors, and Hu gave Lee a hug. When the Americans asked their translator what the two men were chatting about in Mandarin, the translator replied, “They’re thanking him because the computer software and calculations on hydrodynamics that he provided them have helped China a great deal.”
To those three red flags we might add a fourth: Sylvia Lee, his wife. Officially, Sylvia Lee had an administrative job at Los Alamos; unofficially, she was the lab’s social ambassador to visiting Chinese delegations. Her unofficial duties soon outgrew her official ones, and her bosses were annoyed to find her racking up thousands of dollars in long-distance and international calls on the office phone bill.
Sylvia was a problem employee in other ways. Once, when given an assignment she thought was beneath her, she deliberately deleted the relevant files, including classified designs that belonged to a third-party contractor. Her bosses confronted her, and she admitted that she had deleted the files to teach them a lesson about valuing her work. “Then she played that game of ‘I don’t understand,’ and I was ready to fire her on the spot,” her supervisor recalled. He kept her on at the request of the H.R. department, and also because two CIA agents visited him and implied that they wanted Sylvia to stay where she was.
(Wen Ho Lee played “that game of ‘I don’t understand’” when under interrogation, too. You can observe it in his 60 Minutes interview, and no doubt he also used it with the FBI: Respond to a tough question with a generic answer and hope your evasiveness is chalked up to language trouble.)
The visit by the CIA agents is a reminder that nuclear espionage takes place in a world of mirrors where hidden actors are always at work. Sylvia’s bosses had no idea she was passing information to the FBI and the CIA. When Wen Ho Lee’s case came up for trial in the summer of 2000, the judge originally assigned the case suddenly recused himself without explanation. It was later revealed that a woman connected to the defense accused the judge of making a sexual advance. He denied it but bowed out to keep the allegation from being made public. The judge who replaced him was so sympathetic to Wen Ho Lee that during sentencing he apologized to Lee from the bench. Was this judge switch the result of a deliberate scheme? In the world of espionage, such things do happen.
Why is the Wen Ho Lee case remembered as an example of racist scapegoating? Clearly the FBI had many reasons to be suspicious of Lee apart from his ethnicity, even if, as is often the case with espionage investigations—including the Lawrence Livermore engineer caught red-handed at the airport—they did not have enough to get a conviction in court.
One reason is that Wen Ho Lee had a very good P.R. team. He became a cause celebre among Chinese-Americans, who showered him with donations, and Lee was able to hire high-powered lawyers and first-rate Los Angeles publicists. They knew exactly what kinds of emotional appeals would work on the American public: scientist vs. bureaucrat, one man vs. the system, and, above all, innocent racial minority vs. white bigots. According to the excellent book A Convenient Spy,by journalists Dan Stober and Ian Hoffman, the entourage around Lee and his daughter Alberta grew so big and so controlling that his older supporters wondered, “Had Wen Ho and Alberta gone Hollywood?”
It was these consultants who set up the sympathetic press interviews and brought in prominent Chinese-American lesbian activist Helen Zia to help co-write Lee’s memoir. The book itself is not very convincing. For example, Lee says the reason he tried to sneak into his office at 3:30 a.m. on Christmas Eve after his security clearance had been revoked was not to destroy evidence but because “I wanted to continue working on the scientific paper I was preparing” and “somehow I thought that the swipe card might work again at off hours.” Still, the book reassured Lee’s defenders that he would continue proclaiming his innocence.
The second reason Lee was able to paint himself as a martyr is that many powerful people in the Clinton administration did not want to turn over any rocks having to do with Chinese espionage. It is often forgotten now, but Clinton’s second term was rocked by China scandals. Huge sums from foreign donors were funneled to Democratic campaigns by way of Chinese money men such as Charlie Yah-Lin Trie and John Huang. In exchange, bigwigs including People’s Liberation Army officers were given access to the White House, and Huang was given a position at the Commerce Department where he could encourage and monitor the export of sensitive items to Asia. Huang also received security clearance, intelligence briefings, and access to classified documents at Commerce.
A scandal this big should have resulted in an independent counsel and banner prosecutions, but it did not. In September 1999, FBI whistleblowers revealed that the Justice Department’s campaign finance task force had thwarted their investigation—refusing, for example, to pursue a warrant to search Charlie Trie’s office even after incriminating documents including photocopies of checks from foreign donors to Clinton’s legal defense fund were found shredded in his trash. A Wall Street Journal editorial summarized the whistleblowers’ testimony: “What emerges from these FBI accounts is a portrait of not merely a botched investigation but of an active coverup.”
The Wen Ho Lee case broke in the middle of the Chinagate scandal. (Incidentally, another Chinese-American who worked at the Commerce Department and was close friends with John Huang was Hoyt Zia, the brother of Lee’s co-author, Helen Zia.) Accusing Republicans of anti-Asian xenophobia was one way that Democrats downplayed the Chinagate revelations. When the Wen Ho Lee investigation failed to come up with a smoking gun that showed him passing secrets to China, the same people took up his cause as further evidence that only paranoid racists were suspicious of naturalized Asian-Americans.
It is impossible to know for sure, more than 20 years later, whether Wen Ho Lee was a spy. But one thing is certain. Wen Ho Lee is invoked today as an example of why racial profiling of Chinese scientists should be avoided at all costs to avoid targeting blameless people, when that is not, in fact, the lesson of his case at all.
The post Playing the Race Card to Protect Chinese Spies appeared first on The American Conservative.
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