Connexion
The furore around the case underlines how vague the concept of “election interference” is.
The former President Donald Trump says Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s hush money case against him is election interference. Prosecutors say the same about the hush money payments themselves.
The question then becomes: What is election interference?
“This case is about a criminal conspiracy,” said Bragg deputy Matthew Colangelo. “Trump orchestrated a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election.”
“The prosecution detailed allegations of a sensational tabloid scheme to ‘catch and kill’ stories that could prove damaging to Trump, a plan, the DA’s office said, that was elicited with Trump’s blessing and that he was directly implicated in,” writes NBC News’ Katherine Doyle.
One of the legacies of the Trump-Russia affair is the persistence of imprecisely defined “election interference.” In that case, the phrase was used to describe unmistakable crimes like hacking and stealing emails, but also generally hamfisted Russian attempts to swing American public opinion.
Many Democrats believe, or at least told pollsters they believed, that Russia altered the vote totals to get Trump elected. This was not backed by any evidence, but it is a perfectly reasonable way to interpret the term “election interference.”
Much of what was described as interference had to do with the publication of unflattering information about Hillary Clinton through WikiLeaks dumps of her emails. (Forever memorialized in the segments of the press that attribute her 2016 loss to a trivial matter of “her emails!”)
“The Russians—in my opinion and based on the intel and the counterintel people I’ve talked to—could not have known how best to weaponize that information unless they had been guided,” Clinton later said when she laid out her own theory of Trump-Russia collusion. “Guided by Americans and guided by people who had polling and data information.”
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation never found any evidence of such collusion or coordination, just indications that the Trump camp liked the anti-Clinton info getting out there.
The most damaging revelation might have been the Democratic National Committee’s attempts to tip the scales in favor of Clinton during the primaries. This news led to some Bernie Sanders supporters staying home, voting for third-party candidates like the Green Party’s Jill Stein, or even pulling the lever for Trump. This in turn helped Trump penetrate the “blue wall” in the Rust Belt.
You could argue that the information was overblown. Clinton would have likely won the nomination without the DNC’s favoritism—Richard Nixon would have still won a 49-state landslide in 1972 without Watergate—and that these were mild interventions by an entity that is primarily tasked with electing Democrats. Bernie had never really run for anything as a Democrat before those primaries, even though he caucuses with them in the Senate, and was sincerely viewed by most party professionals as a weaker general election candidate.
But the information was also true and of public interest. All the talk of Russian interference never really grappled with how to reconcile the public’s need to know pertinent if politically inconvenient facts with the understandable desire to not have our elections influenced by hostile—or even friendly—foreign powers.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) just recently suggested Israeli voters should replace Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Voters here replacing the Squad would undoubtedly be welcomed in Israel.
Allegations of interference in the Iranian hostage crisis bedeviled Ronald Reagan’s campaign, with the New Republic declaring the science settled on the matter last year. Nixon has similarly been painted with the collusion brush for interference in Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam peace talks, a story given legs in Trumpian fashion by LBJ-ordered surveillance.
But in the hush-money case there is no foreign government involved. The placement of favorable stories and the attempted killing of negative ones is pretty central to how modern political campaigns do business. Partisans have been trading accusations of “dirty tricks” for virtually all of the country’s history.
If we’re going to begin to criminally prosecute people for the seedier side of politics, we are probably going to have to develop a better working definition of election interference than “attempting to swing public opinion in a way that will benefit a candidate I don’t like.”
It’s probably too much to ask that the election-year Bragg case against a leading presidential candidate get us there, but hope springs eternal.
The post The Bragg ‘Interference’ Allegations Are Business as Usual appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: Could the hush-money case against former President Trump be over before it has even begun?
Today, the hush-money prosecution of former President Donald Trump started in earnest. But could this case be over before it has even begun?
In the prosecution’s opening statement, Matthew Colangelo, on behalf of the Manhattan district attorney’s office, told the jury that Trump orchestrated “a criminal conspiracy and a coverup,” to win the 2016 presidential election. Predictably, in his own opening statement, Trump’s leading lawyer Todd Blanche told the jury that the former president is “innocent” and “did not commit any crimes.”
The statements were directed towards the jury composed of 12 members and six alternates. Finding members to serve with impartiality has unsurprisingly proved difficult. When court proceedings began on Monday, one of the twelve jurors met with Justice Merchan and both sides’ attorneys because they were concerned for their safety. Before the jurors were chosen from the 96 prospects, they were among the scores to fill out a 42-question form.
One question, the results of which have been reported by the New York Times, asked about the media appetites of prospective jurors.
Where the Trump jurors say they get their news.
— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) April 19, 2024
Amazing marker of how far the NYC tabloids have fallen: Only 1 of the 18 read the @nypost, and zero read the @NYDailyNews.https://t.co/9AaEo7M9Hq pic.twitter.com/0dhK1hs8XT
The most frequent response from jurors on the list: the New York Times. The Gray Lady has been deeply involved in the deep state’s effort to delegitimize President Trump’s election in 2016. Even disgraced FBI agent Peter Strzok admitted in 2017 that the Times’ reporting was full of errors. Nevertheless, the Times reporters who worked on this Russian collusion story received Pulitzers.
Only one juror watches Fox News, and only one other reads the New York Post (the outlet that originally broke the Hunter Biden laptop story). One other juror says they receive their news from X (formerly Twitter) and Truth Social—which has caused some users on social media to suggest this juror will prevent a Trump conviction.
Maybe so, but to pretend that the jury members’ media appetites suggest anything other than a difficult road ahead for the former president is disingenuous. In fact, that’s the entire point of the operation: get a conviction against Trump before the election by trying him in the most hostile territory imaginable.
The post Trump Could Be in Serious Trouble appeared first on The American Conservative.
Will the Supreme Court draw a line between the contradictions of presidential immunity?
With the Supreme Court set to begin arguments on Donald Trump’s immunity claims this Thursday and the landmark decision likely to be handed down no later than the end of June, the Deep State weighed in. That itself is a scary thing, but even more frightening is this: What if they are right this time?
Fourteen retired four-star generals, admirals, and other military leaders (including the former NSA head Michael Hayden, who certainly knows a thing or two about illegal orders) filed an amici brief with the Supreme Court, arguing against former President Trump’s claims of immunity in his criminal cases, particularly those dealing with J6.
Trump argues the charges against him related to J6 should be thrown out because he was acting as president at the time. Prosecutors denounced the idea, with the generals taking a side with their brief. Amicus curiae is a Latin term translating to “friend of the court.” It refers to a person or organization that is not a party to a case but offers information or expertise to assist the court in making a decision, although they do not have the same legal standing as briefs submitted by the parties directly involved in the case. They can be, as in this case, an argument by a third party for deciding the case one way or another. The generals et al. are decidedly against Trump having immunity, as any good Deep Stater would be.
They argue Trump should not be granted immunity by the Court for three reasons: The claimed immunity would undermine the national commitment to civilian control of the military; Trump’s immunity would undermine the military’s adherence to the rule of law, its orderly functioning, and public trust; and Trump’s claimed immunity, by implicating the peaceful transition of power in particular, threatens national security.
The arguments for the first point are largely what you’d expect them to be, spraying out everything from George Washington’s address to Youngstown Sheet and Tube, centering on the idea that a president, immune from prosecution for anything he does while in office whether related to his official duties or not, could indeed order the military to do anything.
One argument you can expect to hear more of is that the president could order the armed forces to murder a political opponent live on TV. The president would be untouchable, and the soldiers who faced such an order would be flummoxed as the Constitution subjects the armed forces of the United States to both civilian control and the rule of law. (In the United States, murder is still illegal—for now.) “Such a President would be able to break faith with the members of the armed forces by placing himself above the very law they are both sworn to uphold,” the brief says. It would allow “the Commander-in-Chief to weaponize the powers of the U.S. military to criminal ends.”
It is important to step back and understand the president is already considered immune from criminal prosecution while in office, and that he serves under the ultimate check and balance of impeachment. He currently can be prosecuted for acts done while president after he leaves office, the current situation with the two ongoing J6 prosecutions, the as yet unstarted Jack Smith case in Washington and the Fani Willis case in Georgia, which is lurching into motion soon.
Trump argues that he is immune from prosecution for the things he said on the morning of January 6, 2021, words that in the eyes of the law could add up to inciting the mob to attack the Capitol. (Note, however, that Trump is not charged with incitement, a specific legal term. It can get confusing.)
Nonetheless, there is little confusion in the generals’ brief. They argue that, if the
President is absolutely immune from criminal prosecution [this] has the potential to severely undermine the Commander-in-Chief’s legal and moral authority to lead the military forces, as it would signal that they but not he must obey the rule of law. Under this theory, the President could…direct members of the military to execute plainly unlawful orders, placing those in the chain of command in an untenable position and irreparably harming the trust fundamental to civil-military relations.
The generals’ second argument is compelling. Service members have a long-standing duty to disobey unlawful orders. This requires service members, who are required to obey all lawful orders, to disregard patently unlawful orders from their superiors and prohibits service members from using such orders as a defense to criminal prosecution. Immunizing the Commander-in-Chief from criminal prosecution would put service members in the impossible position of having to choose between following their Commander-in-Chief or obeying the laws enacted by Congress. Again, see the example of the president ordering the murder of a political opponent, the argumentum ad absurdum of this case.
The generals cite something almost as clear, the My Lai massacre in Vietnam where the officer in charge on the ground was not successful in using “but I was only following orders” as a defense. Interestingly, Trump’s Supreme Court filing also cites My Lai, drawing a different lesson: The My Lai massacre serves as evidence the military would resist carrying out the President’s hypothetical order to murder a political rival because someone blew the whistle, albeit after the killings.
That is wrong, say the generals’ in their brief:
[T]he very fact that officer in charge on the ground felt emboldened to kill civilians on the basis of ‘superior orders’—in that case, from a captain—demonstrates that our system remains vulnerable to the risk that servicemen or women may commit crimes when ordered to do so. That risk is all the graver if the person giving the orders is the president, particularly one protected by absolute immunity.
The generals make their argument conclusively, stating,
Receiving an unlawful order thus places service members—already pushed to extremes by virtue of their vocation—in a nearly impossible position. On the one hand, disobeying a lawful order is punishable by court-martial and contrary to everything service members have been trained to do. On the other hand, the duty to disobey imposes on them the obligation not to rationalize obedience of an unlawful order simply out of deference to one’s superiors—including the Commander-in-Chief.
The third argument in the brief is not as compelling—basically a variation of “Orange Man Bad/Dictator,” in that the cases at hand, dealing with J6, concern specifically the peaceful transition of power at the White House. The generals argue that it is a bad case to set any kind of precedent, and our adversaries will be taking note of what they consider a breakdown of democracy. Constitutional crises are bad for the defense business when the bad guys are watching.
The case puts a lot on the line. In Washington alone, Trump is facing four J6 felony counts accusing him of defrauding the United States. Prosecutors allege he stood at the center of a conspiracy to block the certification of votes for Joe Biden. Granting Trump sweeping immunity would not only end this prosecution and the one in Georgia; it would set a precedent for all future presidents.
Besides, Trump already has a decent defense in saying his remarks on the morning of J6 were covered by the First Amendment, with or without immunity. Of course, in the end, none of this may matter. The real purpose of the request for immunity may prove to be simply delaying Trump’s trial until after the November election, in which case he wins no matter what the Court says.
The post The Generals’ Trump Brief Actually Makes a Compelling Case appeared first on The American Conservative.
Democrats could save Speaker Mike Johnson, but they once again find themselves in a can’t-lose situation.
The House has passed House Speaker Mike Johnson’s $95 billion foreign aid package.
The House took several votes on the foreign aid package. As The American Conservative has explained, Johnson chose a procedural maneuver called a MIRV to consider the foreign aid package, which meant the House passed one rule to govern the process over each part of the four-part foreign aid package. As Johnson had to rely on Democratic support on the Rules Committee to advance the package to the House floor, Johnson once again found himself relying on Democratic support.
The House passed Ukraine aid 311 to 112, with 210 Democrats and 101 Republicans supporting the legislation. One hundred twelve Republicans voted against. As for Israel aid, 173 Democrats joined 193 Republicans in voting for the legislation. The final tally was 366 to 58. Indo-Pacific aid, mostly directed towards Taiwan, was the least contentious of the bills considered, and passed 385 to 34. The final part of the legislation, the 21st Century Peace through Strength Act, passed 360 to 58.
While Democrats saved Johnson’s foreign aid package—not out of the goodness of their hearts but because it favored their priorities—it remains to be seen whether Democrats will save Johnson’s speakership. Yesterday, Rep. Paul Gosar came out in favor of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s motion to vacate. Between Green, Gosar, and Massie, Johnson’s critics could have the votes at a moment’s notice to invoke privilege and oust Johnson. Massie told the press that he does not expect the anti-Johnson operation to be taken today, but the clock is ticking as the House enters a week-long recess.
It’s a can’t-lose for Democrats.
Allowing Johnson to be ousted, once again throws the GOP into chaos, well beyond the House. Former President Donald Trump has claimed he supports Johnson and some within Trump’s orbit have reportedly said Mar-a-Lago is unhappy with the divisiveness in the House. Ousting Johnson throws Trump into conflict with some of his biggest supporters in the House. The GOP controlled House will once again seem incapable of governing, this time even closer to an election. The risk, however, is that there are enough Republicans in the conference angry enough at Johnson’s handling of appropriations, FISA, and foreign aid that they’ll replace Johnson with a more conservative speaker with a reputation for being a fighter—someone like Rep. Jim Jordan. Nevertheless, it feels unlikely; if Johnson is ousted, someone cut from the same cloth will probably replace him.
But Democrats could also save Johnson by voting against the motion to vacate at large enough margins to overcome Johnson’s conservative objectors. This also makes sense. Johnson has given Democrats almost everything they’ve asked for and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries doesn’t have a chance at becoming speaker, so why rock the boat? The question becomes: Has Johnson run out of things to give Democrats to incentivize keeping him in the House’s top spot? If so, then the last thing Johnson can give Democrats in his brief tenure is to create another crisis in Republican ranks on the way out.
The post What’s Next After the Ukraine Mistake? appeared first on The American Conservative.
Johnson’s foreign aid will cost the American taxpayer $95 billion. Conservatives are at their breaking point.
House Speaker Mike Johnson has finally unveiled his foreign aid package. His plan to get it across the finish line, however, remains less clear.
There are three main bills in Johnson’s package that will provide aid to Ukraine, Israel, and the Indo-Pacific respectively. Although the supposed urgency for this aid package stems from Iran’s strikes on Israel, the bulk of the package’s funding, just over $60 billion worth, is aimed towards Ukraine. Israel receives quite the chunk of change, however: $26 billion courtesy of the American taxpayer. The Indo-Pacific region gets just over $8 billion. This brings the total price tag of Johnson’s foreign aid bonanza to $95 billion. Sound familiar?
The resounding answer for conservatives in the House is yes. Johnson’s future hangs in the balance, and his conservative wing is nearly out of patience.
“This latest ‘America last’ package is just another failure of leadership,” Rep. Bob Good (R-VA), chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, told The American Conservative in a phone interview. “We’re going to borrow nearly $100 billion that we don’t have to further exacerbate our debt situation to defend Ukraine’s border, along with other countries, to pass this with predominantly Democrat votes.”
The package, Good said, “[does] not to do anything for America, not to do anything to keep us more safe and secure, not to keep our promise to fight for border security.”
The first bill, the Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, provides Israel “$26.38 billion to support Israel in its effort to defend itself against Iran and its proxies,” per a readout from House GOP appropriators. The U.S. will provide $4 billion to replenish the Iron Dome and David’s Sling missile defense systems, $1.2 billion for the Iron Bram defense system, $3.5 billion for procurement of more advanced weapons systems, $1 billion for artillery and munitions production, $2.4 billion for U.S. operations in the region, and $4.4 billion to replace weapons provided to Israel from U.S. stockpiles. Finally, a sweetener for Democrats: $9 billion is directed towards humanitarian relief.
The second is titled the Ukraine Security Supplemental Appropriations Act. GOP appropriators claim that $13.8 billion will be directed towards “the procurement of advanced weapons systems, defense articles, and defense services”; another $26 million will be for oversight of U.S. aid to Ukraine.
Then there is $11.3 billion for current U.S. military operations in the region. But what are those operations? Have the nature of these operations been made clear to members of Congress? If so, why haven’t legislators talked about them? This fraught question might have something to do with it: What kind of U.S. personnel are involved?
The Ukraine supplemental also provides for $23.2 billion to replenish U.S. stockpiles, which is far short of the investment necessary to bring U.S. stockpiles back to pre-war levels. A large amount of the money appropriated for U.S. weapons procurement, however, is transferable to other limited purposes should the executive branch deem fit. To make matters worse, the alleged replenishment of U.S. stockpiles is predicated on providing even more aid to Ukraine. The Ukraine supplemental increases the presidential drawdown authority from $100 million to nearly $8 billion for fiscal year 2024.
Johnson seems eager to give Biden the unilateral authority to continue America’s involvement in two foreign wars. Both Ukraine and Israel supplementals include identical increases to the presidential drawdown authority.
The Ukraine supplemental also provides nearly $500 million for refugee entrance and assistance.
Furthermore, most of these appropriations creep well into 2025, potentially limiting a future Trump administration’s diplomatic options, just as Sen. J.D. Vance warned in this magazine’s pages.
“We ought to not be passing legislation that impacts past early in the year once the Trump administration gets the opportunity to get their team in place and their appointees confirmed and on the job and running,” Good told TAC. “President Trump obviously has a very different view of Ukraine than President Biden or even half of the Republicans in the House.”
Sadly, from Good’s point of view, “apparently Speaker Johnson seems to want Ukraine [aid] as much as Democrats do”—even if that means handcuffing a future Trump administration.
Trump, trying to avoid literal handcuffs in a New York courtroom over the next few weeks, posted on Truth Social,
Why isn’t Europe giving more money to help Ukraine? Why is it that the United States is over $100 Billion Dollars into the Ukraine War more than Europe, and we have an Ocean between us as separation! Why can’t Europe equalize or match the money put in by the United States of America in order to help a Country in desperate need? As everyone agrees, Ukrainian Survival and Strength should be much more important to Europe than to us, but it is also important to us! GET MOVING EUROPE! In addition, I am the only one who speaks for ‘ME’ and, while it is a total mess caused by Crooked Joe Biden and the Incompetent Democrats, if I were President, this War would have never started!
Finally, the Indo-Pacific Security Supplemental Appropriations Act would provide $3.3 billion for submarine infrastructure, $2 billion for Taiwan and other regional partners, $542 million to strengthen U.S. capabilities in the region, and $1.9 billion to replenish U.S. stockpiles.
But that’s not all—there are two other bills the House might take up.
The fourth bill, titled the 21st Century Peace through Strength Act, is a grab-bag of middle-of-the-road GOP foreign policy items. This bill includes REPO provisions for the seizure and use of Russian assets to fund America’s involvement in Ukraine, the TikTok sale or ban, and a litany of sanctions targeting Iranian leaders, Iranian industries, and proxies throughout the region.
The fifth bill is a watered-down version of HR 2, the border security bill passed out of the House earlier this Congress.
At first glance, it might appear that Johnson is attaching real border security to Ukraine aid. While Johnson wishes the GOP base to believe that, the facts are less compelling.
“The fifth bill, that’s the pretend, weakened, border Security, so to speak, but it’s not going to have any leverage attached to it,” Good said. “The Senate will just ignore that fifth bill of course and not take it up. It’s showmanship, it’s theater. I think this further diminishes the speaker before the Republicans across the country.”
Much remains up in the air on Capitol Hill, but Johnson seems to be pursuing a procedural maneuver that leaves border security on the outside looking in, as Good suggests. Johnson’s idea is to pass two rules. One will govern the House’s consideration of the border security bill. The other rule will lump together the first four bills—Ukraine aid, Israel aid, Indo-Pacific aid, and the 21st Century Peace through Strength Act. That rule will govern how the GOP considers these pieces of legislation and will probably result in whichever of these four bills that pass on the House floor getting bundled together and presented as one bill to the Senate, a procedural maneuver known as a MIRV (for “Multiple-Impact Reentry Vehicle,” a type of multi-warhead missile payload—this is what passes for humor among parliamentarians).
“The MIRV process is just completely ridiculous,” Rachel Bovard of the Conservative Partnership Institute told TAC.
That is why House conservatives seem to be trolling the amendment process. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has offered an amendment to Israel aid that would fund “space laser technology on the southern border.” Greene is also toying with an amendment that would “conscript in the Ukrainian military” any member of the House who votes for Ukraine aid.
Democrats are having fun, too. Rep. Jared Moskowitz proposed an amendment to name Greene, “Vladimir Putin’s Special Envoy to the United States Congress.”
“[The MIRV] is an interpretive dance, basically, because it allows different coalitions within the House to pass each section. Ukraine can’t get enough votes by itself; Israel, because the Democrats probably can’t get enough votes, doesn’t pass by itself,” Bovard told TAC. “Different components of the legislation pass with different factions. But nobody votes for the final bill.” This Frankensteinian piece of legislation will then be handed over to the Senate.
“This is worse than John Boehner. If you consider John Boehner the peak level of violence against conservatives, Mike Johnson is about to leap that hurdle,” Bovard claimed.
“This is new for me,” Good said of the MIRV. “In my first three years here, I’ve not seen this before. Now I have learned that it’s been used sparingly a few times in recent history over the last 20 years or so. The bills will come under the same rule as separate votes, but then they’re packaged together, the four of them go to the Senate. And so you’ve got Ukraine picking up the lion’s share at $60 billion.”
Border security is unlikely to be attached to one of the foreign aid bills or covered in the MIRV. It looks as if GOP voters’ number one priority will again take a backseat to the border security of a foreign nation.
“It’s the same song, second verse, isn’t it?” Good said, likening Johnson’s foreign aid package to the Senate’s $95 billion package passed in February.
The text of the rule that will govern this process is not publicly available yet. Currently, the House Rules Committee is deadlocked. The conservative contingent of the Rules Committee, Reps. Chip Roy and Thomas Massie, refused Wednesday evening to go along with passing a rule for the border security bill because it would not be attached to the foreign aid package.
The event revealed the true priorities of some GOP House members.
“The three members who refuse to support the Speaker’s agenda should resign from the Rules Committee immediately,” Rep. Mike Lawler tweeted. “If they refuse, they should be removed immediately. They are there on behalf of the conference, not themselves.”
“Sorry, not sorry, for opposing a crappy rule that is a show vote / cover vote for funding Ukraine instead of border security,” Roy replied.
Getting rid of Roy and company on the Rules Committee is easier said than done. “Because the House approves committee assignments, changing them also requires a vote of House,” Bovard told TAC. “Johnson could try. He’s made his alliance with hawks and appropriators, so maybe they help him.”
On the other hand, getting rid of Johnson might prove relatively easy.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has a motion to vacate primed in the hopper. All the Georgia Republican has to do is ask for privilege to trigger the motion, and leadership has a 48 hour window to give Greene’s motion a vote. Greene has courted a key ally in Massie, who previously announced he’d cosponsor the motion after Johnson caved on warrant requirements in FISA reauthorization.
“If [the motion to vacate] is triggered, after everything has just gone on, there’s going to be conservatives who will have a hard time not supporting it if the vote is put in front of them,” Bovard said.
“The battle lines were very clear at the end,” an unnamed GOP lawmaker told the Washington Post. “It was very clear [the motion to vacate] will be brought if the speaker’s plan proceeds.”
Yet Johnson might use the MIRV process to change the rules on the motion to vacate. As it stands now, a single member can file a motion to vacate the speaker, a concession conservatives squeezed out of the ill-fated Kevin McCarthy in the speakership fight at the beginning of the current Congress. Johnson and some of his allies are reportedly considering using the rules that govern the foreign aid package to change the number of members needed to trigger a motion to vacate. Alternatively, Johnson might also consider changes that limit the motion to vacate to members in leadership. Then there’s what Bovard described as “completely nuclear”: “It’s possible that they turn off the privilege [for the motion to vacate] in the rule.”
“Speaker Johnson plans also to kill the motion to vacate procedural device, with Democrat votes, IN THE PENDING RULE,” Rep. Dan Bishop tweeted. “No Republican who is not an avowed double agent will survive politically after voting for that rule.”
Yet Johnson announced on X, formerly Twitter, that he would not be changing the motion to vacate rules. “Since the beginning of the 118th Congress, the House rule allowing a Motion to Vacate from a single member has harmed this office and our House majority,” the speaker’s tweet read. “Recently, many members have encouraged me to endorse a new rule to raise this threshold. While I understand the importance of that idea, any rule change requires a majority of the full House, which we do not have. We will continue to govern under the existing rules.”
If the speaker changes his mind, don’t expect House conservatives to be surprised. They’ve come to regard Johnson as a flip-flopper. “Previously, the speaker was for paying for supplementals. Now he’s against paying for them. He was for using the Ukraine supplemental to leverage border security. Now, he does not want to do that. He was for paying for Israel aid as a standalone. Now, he does not want to do that. So here we are, again, letting down the American people,” Good told TAC. “We said the border was the hill we would die on. Now we’re just dying politically for the Democrat priorities.”
If Johnson does stick to his promise, don’t expect conservatives to thank him either. Johnson will need to do a lot more to assuage their concerns with his leadership.
Where does that leave Johnson, then?
Johnson could decide to side with his own conference to pass the rules and the bills that fall under them. If he does that, he will have to attach border security to Ukraine aid, separate the foreign aid bills out, and be willing to let the legislation die in the Senate (adding border security to Ukraine aid would effectively kill the legislation).
The other option, siding with Democrats, is more likely. It won’t be the speaker’s first time doing so. So far, Johnson has denied courting Democratic support. “I have not asked a single Democrat to get involved in that at all. I do not spend time walking around thinking about the motion,” Johnson said, according to POLITICO.
Siding with Democrats would almost guarantee the motion to vacate would be triggered. “I don’t think that’s a sustainable position,” Good said of Democrats saving the Republican speaker, POLITICO reported. Massie agrees: “They will doom him.… They won’t save him. How is that sustainable?”
“If his speakership depends on Democrats it becomes harder for [Republicans] to vote for him in subsequent motions to vacate,” the Kentucky Republican added.
Despite Johnson’s assurances, Good told TAC he expects Democrats to get this legislation over the line. “I think the Democrats will provide as many votes as are needed to pass the rule. They will overwhelmingly vote for the ultimate supplemental package,” Good said. This process “represents the worst of Washington.”
“It’s one thing for a rule to pass with Democrat support on the House floor. But it’s a different thing to force it out of Rules with minority votes. I don’t think that’s ever happened,” Bovard claimed.
“The Rules Committee is an incredibly partisan committee—the minority always votes against the rule, the majority always supports it,” Bovard explained. “Now, we’re in a situation where the majority doesn’t support it. How Johnson handles this, I don’t know. If he forces a rule out of Rules Committee on the backs of Democrats to fund a war that his conference doesn’t want to fund—”
Bovard paused. “Nobody’s in charge at that point. You don’t have a majority party at that point.”
In Bovard’s estimation, it’s nearing “Joe Cannon levels of tyranny.”
“The Joe Cannon parallels here are creepy,” Bovard explained. “Joe Cannon was the most tyrannical Speaker the House has ever seen. They called him ‘The Czar Speaker.’ In 1910, he basically ran the Rules Committee, ran the house, members had no rights, and the only thing that saved the House from Joe Cannon was a revolt of the members.”
If Johnson doesn’t change course, Bovard told TAC he’s headed for “utter destruction of House practice and tradition.”
The post What is Johnson Thinking? appeared first on The American Conservative.
The former president’s fight extends beyond the courtroom.
The weakest legal case against former President Donald Trump may now be the most important one. It is the first case against Trump to go to trial. It is the first to offer near-daily shots of the presumptive Republican nominee inside a courtroom. It offers the best chance of appending “convicted felon” to Trump’s name, if not putting him in a jail cell, before the election.
Trump’s hush-money trial begins as President Joe Biden appears to have begun to close the gap in their rematch. The latest New York Times/Siena College poll has them virtually tied, with Trump clinging to a 1-point lead. The former president is just 0.2 points ahead of the incumbent in the national RealClearPolitics polling average.
The American people have seen courtroom dramas on this scale before. O.J. Simpson’s death this month reminded the public of a divisive trial that was daytime viewing for millions for months. More recently, there was the legal battle between actors Johnny Depp and Amber Heard.
Voters are at this point no strangers to Trump trials specifically. No civil judgment against Trump or his businesses has dented his poll numbers. Among Republicans, the numerous indictments across multiple jurisdictions improved those numbers to the point where he went from the odds-on favorite to win the GOP nomination for the third time to holding an insurmountable lead.
Perhaps more surprisingly, Trump has remained competitive in the general election throughout all the indictments and suits. He has led Biden more often, both nationally and in the top seven battleground states, than at any point in 2020. Overall, Trump’s numbers are better than they have been since he first began running for president nearly nine years ago.
Despite Jan. 6, two impeachments, the 2020 election, the Russia investigation, and the various criminal cases, Trump has at least as good of a chance of returning to the White House as he does of becoming a convicted felon.
One big question is whether it is possible for him to do both. The public polling and some of the primary exit polls suggest there are voters who currently support Trump who will not vote for a convicted felon. These numbers may not only be sufficient to cost Trump the election; they may transform the current competitive race into a more lopsided affair in the Democrats’ favor.
If that is true, then all it takes is for a single Democratic prosecutor in a Democratic jurisdiction with a Democratic-leaning jury pool to find Trump guilty of something—say, one count out of dozens—and it’s game over. For this reason, some of us argued Trump would be an extraordinarily risky general election nominee for the GOP.
It’s a risk Republicans nevertheless decided they wanted to take.
This is in no small part because the legal pile-on against Trump looks manifestly unfair to so many voters who already back him or are still open to doing so.
The George Soros–connected Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg ran on going after Trump. He stretched the law to get around the statute of limitations and to turn misdemeanors into felonies. He stacked charges to get 34 felony counts out of a single incident. And he is basing much of his case on the word of Michael Cohen, the former Trump legal fixer whose words and deeds have already landed him in prison.
It is therefore possible that many people who tell pollsters they wouldn’t vote for a convicted felon would not actually be dissuaded from pulling the lever for Trump if the ex-president’s prosecution was viewed as a partisan charade.
Not everyone sees it this way, of course. There are many people who think Trump has played it fast and loose with his businesses, women, and his election claims for long enough that he deserves some consequences even if many of the legal cases against him are dubious in some particulars.
It’s a question of justice delayed versus justice denied.
Yet how many of these hold-Trump-accountable voters are not already in Biden’s camp? And how many find Biden’s record so wanting that they might once again look past a seedy payment to a porn star? Will that payment be seen as a bigger example of “election interference” than Bragg’s prosecution of a leading presidential candidate during an election year?
The answers to these questions will likely decide who wins in November.
The post Trump Begins the High-Wire Act appeared first on The American Conservative.
The White House has rejected an Israel standalone bill. Will the Speaker send one out anyway?
The House, under the leadership of Speaker Mike Johnson, could vote in the coming days on an aid package to Israel. But will Ukraine aid be attached?
If the White House has its way, the answer is yes. “We are opposed to a stand-alone bill that would just work on Israel,” White House National Security Communications Advisor John Kirby told members of the media Monday. Johnson, however, reportedly told House Republicans at a conference meeting Monday evening that Ukraine and Israel aid should be separated. Is Biden willing to use the veto to get his way, and if he is, will that force Johnson to reconsider?
“House Republicans and the Republican Party understand the necessity of standing with Israel,” Johnson told Fox News on Sunday. Previously, the House had advanced two aid bills for Israel—in fact, Johnson’s first legislative act as Speaker was passing a stand-alone aid bill for Israel.
“We’re going to try again this week, and the details of that package are being put together. Right now, we’re looking at the options and all these supplemental issues,” the speaker continued, signaling an openness to keeping aid to Ukraine and Israel bundled.
Over the weekend, Iran launched a strike with more than 300 missiles and drones in response to an Israeli strike on an Iranian consulate in Damascus that killed 13, including senior military officials. Very few of the Iranian missiles and drones ended up hitting their targets; Israel, with assistance from the U.S., Britain, and France, shot down most. The Jordanians, critics of Israel’s campaign in Gaza, also shot down drones and missiles that entered its airspace. Iran gave ample prior warning of its retaliatory attack and used slow-moving drones, suggesting its actions were meant to be non-escalatory in nature. Despite the apparent scale, Iran expected most of its projectiles would be shot down.
After the Senate failed to strike a deal that would provide supplemental aid to Ukraine, Israel, and the Indo-Pacific in exchange for border security, the Senate passed a $95 billion aid package without border security provisions in February. Johnson has refused to take up the legislation, but has repeatedly stated he wants to create an aid package for Ukraine and Israel that won’t cost him the speaker’s gavel.
On Sunday, in the wake of the Iranian attack, Johnson spoke with President Joe Biden, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. The group urged Johnson to bring the $95 billion supplemental, nearly two-thirds of which is funding for Ukraine, to the floor.
But Johnson would most likely have to bring the $95 billion package to the floor under suspension of the rules, and it’s unclear whether two-thirds of the House would be willing to sign on. While the weekend’s attack has added urgency, Johnson faces a House GOP growing increasingly skeptical about America’s involvement in Ukraine and a House Democratic conference that increasingly questions U.S. support for Israel. Threading the needle, and doing so while keeping his job, is going to be difficult for Johnson.
For its part, the Senate has refused to consider House-passed aid packages too. The first Israel aid bill Johnson passed out of the House offset the costs via spending cuts, most of which from Biden’s IRS expansion.
In the past few weeks, Johnson has been flirting with various ways to offset future expenditures on the war in Ukraine for his future aid package, such as providing Ukraine aid in the form of a loan or using the REPO Act to seize Russian assets.
“I think these are ideas that I think can get consensus, and that’s what we’ve been working through,” Johnson said in the wake of a Friday meeting with former President Donald Trump, who is more comfortable with the idea of Ukraine aid as a loan. “We’ll send our package. We’ll put something together and send it to the Senate and get these obligations completed.”
While Johnson’s decision to separate Israel and Ukraine aid is aimed primarily at shoring up support from the more conservative wing of the conference, some House Republicans, such as House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Michael McCaul, believe the conflicts are intertwined. “What happened in Israel last night happens in Ukraine every night,” McCaul said on CBS’s “Face The Nation.”
What happens with the impending aid package remains to be seen. That doesn’t mean Johnson’s House will be idle, however. Johnson is preparing a legislative barrage against Iran in the coming week. The speaker is putting 17 bills about Iran and Israel on the floor—11 of which will proceed under suspension of the rules.
The post Will Ukraine Actually Be a Part of Mike Johnson’s Aid Package? appeared first on The American Conservative.
There is no magic button. Trump would have to go further than even allies assume.
The American civil bureaucracy accomplished enormous successes from the time the Constitution was adopted through the Civil War and the early years of Reconstruction. The country incorporated more than half the land mass that comprises the contiguous United States today, including through the Louisiana Purchase. The U.S. undertook and accomplished enormous public works projects, constructing the Erie Canal and the National Road, the nationwide telegram system, and the transcontinental railroad. Americans were victorious in battle, successfully repelling the British invasion in the War of 1812 and winning the Mexican-American War. These were sensational and advanced accomplishments, unrivaled among the rest of the contemporaneous world.
Today, the civil bureaucracy of that era is derided as the Jacksonian “spoils system,” which its numerous critics describe as a web of political patronage that allowed individuals to purchase positions in the federal bureaucracy with their political donations. A system as crass as that should be rightfully criticized, but the dominant “spoils system” narrative does not accurately portray the historical reality and instead merely parrots the talking points of Jackson’s political opponents to caricature a movement that actually promoted democratic accountability.
In truth, Jackson did not “gut” the federal government, as his critics allege, but replaced approximately 9 percent of its workforce with loyalists who wanted to advance the policies he had been elected to enact. This was not an affront to democracy but rather the embodiment of it, and it was not without precedent. In proportion to the size of the federal government at the time, President Jefferson gutted a larger percentage of the federal workforce when he took office, and other early presidents supported the president’s power to remove any member of the executive branch. Such removal, even at a larger scale, was not anti-democratic but a core feature of the political accountability of the executive branch.
Today, the civil bureaucracy is not creative, accomplished, or even responsive to the president; it is stagnant and a drag on the country, and it is no wonder. Rather than being staffed with regular Americans chosen for their ideas or leadership capability by a duly enacted president, the bureaucracy of today is composed of credentialed box-checkers insulated from political accountability by undemocratic civil service protections. Of the roughly 2.2 million federal bureaucrats and 10 million federal contractors, only about 4,000 roles are political appointees accountable to the president. What is worse, this unaccountable bureaucracy is an active arm of the Left, and not any reflection of the diversity of political thought among the American people or their elected leaders.
One can judge the bureaucracy by its controversies. IRS bureaucrats targeted “patriot” organizations for their conservative identity; the national security agencies wielded anti-terrorism authorities to investigate a rival presidential campaign and unmask its senior-level political advisors; bureaucrats across numerous agencies applied pressure to social media companies to repress conservative political speech with which they disagreed; and even the Department of Justice, supposedly the paragon of neutrality and the arbiter of the rule of law, has embarrassed itself over its irreconcilable enforcement choices. It executed a pre-dawn raid of Roger Stone, while allowing the statute of limitations to run on most of Hunter Biden’s crimes. It prosecuted Peter Navarro for refusing to answer a congressional subpoena, but when Eric Holder did the same, DOJ declined to bring charges. It raided, arrested, and prosecuted a pro-life protestor who was ultimately acquitted on all charges, while Antifa and BLM rioters were never charged.
Unsurprisingly, a leftist bureaucracy willing to wage war on its political opponents is also unwilling to help them achieve their policy priorities. Today, the key challenge facing a Republican president, in the words of political scientist Clinton Rossiter, is “not to persuade Congress to support a policy dear to his political heart, but to persuade the pertinent bureau or agency—even when headed by men of his own choosing—to follow his direction faithfully and transform the shadow of the policy into the substance of the program.” The reason? Federal civil service laws that protect and insulate the bureaucracy from the president’s control, contrary to the Constitution’s demands.
Reforming those laws must be a top priority of the next Trump administration, and the centerpiece of that reform cannot be the Schedule F proposal put forward in the first Trump presidency. That idea, which would at most designate a small proportion of the bureaucracy for greater presidential removal authority and control, cannot begin to stand up against the threat of the administrative state writ large. Nor is there any reason for conservatives to be satisfied with such an incremental, technocratic, work-inside-the-system proposal. The facts are apparent to the American people that the weaponization of government has never been on fuller display. There will not be a more convincing record on which to campaign to dismantle the administrative state, nor will there be a second chance to try. If the administrative state survives unscathed and unreformed after the last ten years of abuses, the already bold bureaucrats will grow bolder and and reform will be out of reach.
Today the Left defends the civil service protections of the federal bureaucracy as if they were handed down on stone tablets, but the reality is that they are an amalgamation of entrenched policies reflecting a progressive worldview, essentially a one-way ratchet that has grown more powerful with every Democrat administration and rarely if ever knocked back when Republicans ascend to power.
The first major attempt at establishing protected status for the civil service was the adoption of the Pendleton Act in 1883. In the years before its passage, the concept of civil service reform was hotly contested and a source of division in electoral politics. Public opinion for the reform coalesced in the aftermath of President James Garfield’s assassination. Garfield was shot and killed by a man named Charles Guiteau, whose professed motivation was having been passed over for a diplomatic position to which he believed he was entitled based on his support for Garfield’s campaign. In reality, Guiteau was mentally ill. He had a history of fraud and dishonest dealings as a lawyer, including pocketing money his clients won in litigation. He was a plagiarist, narcissist, thief, domestic abuser, and a self-professed prophet of God. The idea that Guiteau had any claim to a diplomatic role in the Garfield administration was merely a symptom of his insanity.
Civil service reformers relied on the emotional pull of the Guiteau story to rally support for their cause. The National Civil Service Reform League circulated nationwide a letter relying on “the recent murderous attack” to promote reform legislation. Senator George Pendleton of Ohio was even more explicit when promoting the reform bill that bore his name: Guiteau’s “desire for office—the belief that he had earned it…made this crime possible…made it possible for the assassin to assert that he thought he was doing his party and his country a service.” In fact, what made Guiteau’s crime possible was his insanity, which was surely no basis on which to enact political reform. But rhetoric like this worked, and the Pendleton Civil Service Act was enacted in 1883.
Despite the swelling support for reform based on the despicable acts of a madman, the Pendleton Act’s actual effect was modest. It charged the Civil Service Commission to institute “open, competitive examinations for testing the fitness of applicants for the public service,” examinations that would “relate to those matters which will fairly test the relative capacity and fitness of the persons examined to discharge the[ir] duties.” Jobs were to be available only to the highest-scoring applicants and also apportioned among the states and territories based on the latest census. New appointees were to be given a period of probation at the outset of their employment.
Perhaps most importantly, this new opportunity for open, merit-based civil-service selection was limited to roughly 10 percent of the federal bureaucracy at the time, essentially customs officials (“clerks and persons employed by the collector, naval officer, surveyor, and appraisers”) and some postal employees. Both categories encompassed positions of trust where political accountability was of little importance. It was important that the individuals inspecting citizens’ goods, assessing customs dues, and handling official mail be competitively selected in open, merit-based hiring, not based on political connections.
Over time, the Pendleton Act’s modest reforms have metastasized across the federal government, transforming it beyond what even its proponents would recognize.
First, the act’s coverage expanded until, roughly a century after the Pendleton Act took effect, 90 percent of the federal bureaucracy fell under the purview of the Civil Service Commission. This meant that civil service reforms that were once limited to select trust positions far removed from policymaking are today so expansive that they encompass legions of supposedly non-political civil service employees who actually perform policymaking and policy-advocating work.
The greater reach of these reforms is compounded by the enormously expanded reach of the federal government over the same period of time, a longstanding trend but one that grew exponentially out of the New Deal. Because of the ever-expanding federal government, more civil servants doing policy-related work are protected by civil service rules and the policy work they do reaches further into citizens’ lives than ever before. Protected bureaucrats can designate a neighborhood parcel as a protected wetland, eliminate incandescent lightbulbs in homes, and demand that half of cars sold be electric vehicles, infrastructure inadequacies be damned.
Second, the Carter administration scrapped merit-based examinations, which had been a key feature of civil service hiring beginning with the Pendleton Act. At the start of the Carter administration, the Professional and Administrative Career Examination (PACE) served as a gateway for college graduates seeking top agency positions in the executive branch. The test was a general intelligence exam aimed at assessing and predicting skills in verbal comprehension, judgment, and deductive, inductive, and quantitative reasoning. Studies showed that success on the test was an excellent predictor of success on the job. In the late 1970s, however, other studies emerged that indicated black test-takers performed disproportionately worse on PACE. The data was imperfect, and the Office of Personnel Management believed that the disparate test results had no “bottom line” adverse impact on minorities in PACE occupations because of other equalizing means for entering those jobs, including internal promotion. OPM data showed that 17 percent of the employees in the most populous PACE occupations were minorities, which was higher than the relevant labor market statistics at the time. But activists sued the Carter Administration over the disparate impact of PACE, and in the twilight of his presidency, Carter’s Department of Justice (perhaps without directly consulting the president or his advisors) settled the case with a consent decree that scrapped the test just as the plaintiffs sought and set in place a racial quota system instead: minority applicants must be selected for jobs at a rate proportional to the number who apply.
Various other aspects of the Pendleton Act’s reforms have been abandoned, too. There are no geographic requirements for apportioning civil service roles. Instead, the bureaucracy is primarily staffed by individuals who spend their careers in and around the District of Columbia. Far from requiring probation periods for new employees to demonstrate their fitness for their roles, in today’s civil service misbehavior is extremely difficult to address and firing nearly impossible. Unable to address misbehavior, the civil service now incentivizes performance with pay bonuses. This has not solved the problem. Even the bureaucracy’s worst performers (for example, the Veterans Administration executives who encouraged false reporting about waiting lists for hospital admissions) receive “outstanding” ratings and qualify for these incentives. The Government Accountability Office has acknowledged that the bureaucracy has no way to stratify employees based on the existing performance evaluation system, under which more than 99 percent of federal employees rate as “successful” or above. The result is that pay raises have become automatic and so-called “incentive pay” serves as “free money” to recipients, untethered from exemplary, metric-tested accomplishments.
Other reforms have also contributed to changing the character of the federal bureaucracy. John F. Kennedy gave federal employees the right to unionize and collectively bargain in 1962, and Lyndon B. Johnson expanded the right to include binding arbitration of certain disputes beginning in 1969. Every subsequent Democratic president took executive action to further expand the rights of public employee unions. President Carter enjoyed congressional support for additional pro-public-union reforms that were rolled into the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978. Among other things, that law expressed Congress’s view that public-employee unions “safeguard the public interest” because they promote “the highest standards of employee performance and the continued … implementation of modern and progressive work practices to … improve employee performance and the efficient accomplishment of the operations of the Government.” Nothing could be further from the truth today, when public-employee unions insulate low-performing or outright misbehaving federal employees from termination. Federal public employee unions impose greater costs on taxpayers and interpose quintessentially private interests (the preferences of public employees) between the citizenry and their government.
Not content merely with bargaining rights, Democrats also enacted employment protections for the civil service in the same 1978 Act. These reforms imposed for-cause limitations on subjecting covered employees to adverse employment actions and also guaranteed civil service bureaucrats extensive procedural protections before an adverse action is taken. Adverse actions include not only suspension and termination but also a reduction in grade or pay. The procedural protections include advanced notice of any adverse action, an opportunity to respond, the right to be represented, and an appeal, to be heard by the new Merit Service Protection Board, which the 1978 Act also created. These are exactly the kinds of procedural protections that a private sector union might be expected to bargain for; public employees of the federal government, however, enjoy these protections by statute, outside of any collective bargaining.
The net result of these changes is that our federal bureaucracy reflects neither the ideals of the Founders nor the principles that supposedly justified the growth of the administrative state and accompanying civil service “reform” over the past 150 years.
The Founders believed in accountable government and rejected proposals that would have insulated executive branch officers, even minor officers, from the president’s sole control. In 1789, the early Congress debated a bill to create a foreign affairs department, including what removal authority should govern it: removal by the President, or authority based in Congress, or blended between the branches? In debating the bill, Madison spoke about the Constitution’s intentions for accountability at all levels of the executive branch and the best protections against maladministration:
The danger to liberty, the danger of mal-administration has not yet been found to lay so much in the facility of introducing improper persons into office, as in the difficulty of displacing those who are unworthy of the public trust. If it is said that an officer once appointed shall not be displaced without the formality required by impeachment, I shall be glad to know what security we have for the faithful administration of the government. Every individual in the long chain which extends from the highest to the lowest link of the executive magistracy, would find a security in his situation which would relax his fidelity and promptitude in the discharge of his duty.
And he minced no words about where the chain of executive authority should terminate:
If the president should possess alone the power of removal from office, those who are employed in the execution of the law will be in their proper situation, and the chain of dependence be preserved; the lowest officers, the middle grade, and the highest, will depend, as they ought, on the president, and the president on the community. The chain of dependence therefore terminates in the supreme body, namely, in the people, who will possess besides, in aid of their original power, the decisive engine of impeachment.
In his speech, Madison explains that this structure of executive accountability flows from the Constitution itself, its structure and its guarantee of republican government.
Proponents of the burgeoning and protected civil service bureaucracy claim that the structure of the administrative state today serves other goals, goals the Founders could not have envisioned based on the size of the nation and the complexity of today’s economy. They say the demands of modern governance require rule by experts, best achieved through meritocratic bureaucracy. I have previously written about a key originator of these ideas, James Landis, an intellectual whose idea of a three-branches-in-one administrative state provided the theoretical architecture supporting FDR’s radical reconstructions and expansion of the federal government.
The drive to produce a federal bureaucracy of merited experts has been shared by both parties, such that even efforts to “reform” the administrative state have been undertaken with the goal of encouraging merit and expertise. But if the goal of the federal bureaucracy is merit, we do not have a system designed to produce it. Objective criteria, like civil service examinations, have been jettisoned. Employee performance evaluations are inflated and meaningless. Procedural protections insulate federal employees from consequences for poor performance or misbehavior.
Far from producing a meritocratic bureaucracy, the civil service system produces a bloated and lethargic class of unaccountable “experts,” who have been captured by the political Left. In the 2020 election, of those federal employees who donated to a candidate for president, most donated to Biden. In some agencies, the numbers were overwhelming: 91 percent of total dollars donated by Labor Department bureaucrats went to Biden, 85 percent at the Justice Department, and 84 percent at both the Education Department and State Department. It is no surprise, then, that when federal bureaucrats do muster themselves to get something done, it will be a priority of the Left: requiring religious organizations to provide health insurance for abortions and abortifacient drugs; imposing and enforcing vaccine mandates; enacting rules to allow retirement plans to invest based on environmental and social governance; or investigating the tax status of conservative organizations and churches.
It is impossible to understand the Trump presidency, what it accomplished and what it failed to accomplish, without understanding these attributes of the federal bureaucracy. The President no longer controls the executive branch. He can hire and fire Cabinet heads and some senior positions in each agency, but actually advancing substantive policies requires the participation of bureaucrats who may be happy to act when a Democrat president proposes a reform they support but who are equally happy to sabotage conservative policies through apathy, delay, or open opposition.
In my own experience, executive policy priorities originating from the White House and directed by the president were thwarted by bureaucrats across the federal government who simply refused to provide requested data (“Yes, we keep that data, but no, you can’t see it.”), or threw up flimsy procedural roadblocks (“If you want that information, you’ll have to ask someone else first.”), or dragged their feet for so long that the clock ran out (“Yes, we know we’ve already received two extensions, but we really do need more time”). And that does not account for the ways in which the bureaucracy itself stands as a gatekeeper to policy-making ideas.
In our leviathan federal government, it is impossible to monitor what the government is currently doing without a guide through the system. The only people who know, though, are bureaucrats themselves, little motivated to give an accurate accounting of their operations, thereby making it difficult or impossible to understand what problems exist and devise policies to solve them. The Trump presidency exposed these problems more than any previous administration had because the bureaucracy had never hated a president as much as it hated him.
After battling administrative state intransigence and sometimes outright revolt for nearly four years, President Trump was well aware that something had to give. In October 2020, he issued an executive order often referred to now as simply “Schedule F.” Schedule F required agencies to designate which of their employees were “in positions of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character.” These employees would then be placed on Schedule F (Schedules A through E already existed), and because the order’s language mirrored the 1978 Act exemption for some federal jobs, Schedule F employees would lose procedural protections against adverse employment actions that originated in the 1978 Act.
The idea was smart and its objective good. But Schedule F will not solve the problems embedded in the modern administrative state, and it cannot be the “centerpiece” of a Republican presidential administration’s deep state reforms. It would be like making the cranberry salad the star of Thanksgiving Dinner; even if it’s good, it’s not the main event.
First, Schedule F looks good on paper but is virtually impossible to actuate because it asks the agencies to determine which employees should be added to it. Agency leaders do not want this reform because they do not want to lose the procedural protections that they and their colleagues enjoy. This was on display in the immediate response to Schedule F. Although only a short time remained in the Trump administration (more on that in a moment), no agency placed positions into Schedule F before President Biden revoked it. Only the Office of Management and Budget and the U.S. International Boundary and Water Commission took the preliminary steps necessary to designate positions and would have placed 415 and 5 employees, respectively, on Schedule F. Just 13 other agencies bothered to respond at all, seven to say they needed more time to finalize their analysis, and six to say that they would not be adding any positions to Schedule F.
This exposes some of the problems I’ve already described: If your reform of the federal bureaucracy must be carried out by the federal bureaucracy, then you can be sure that the reform will fail. This is especially true of Schedule F because the determination it asks employees to make (essentially, does a given position make or advocate policy or not) is itself a political question that depends on one’s views of bureaucratic expertise. When officials at the Center for Disease Control recommended COVID responses like lockdowns and masking, were they merely stating expert views on the issues or were they making policy? When Anthony Fauci helped hand out funding for gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Labs, was he making policy or merely stating expert views on meritorious research projects? The answers to these questions likely depend on one’s political views on a variety of topics, including the proper role of government and the fallibility of experts. The Left will say that these bureaucrats are simply charged with “following the Science.”
Second, even if it were possible to fill Schedule F with a meaningfully honest list of policymaking and policy-advocating employees across all agencies, the reform would only address one part of one problem with the administrative state, the inability to take an adverse action against Schedule F employees. It would not recommit the federal government to merit-based hiring through civil service examinations; it would not shrink the bureaucracy or its reach; it would not place the bureaucracy under the president’s direct control or restore the Constitution’s balance of powers. Even the modest reform it does offer—the ability to take adverse action against the small number of newly-designated Schedule F employees more easily, up to and including termination—would be difficult to do in large numbers if an administration were so inclined. For example, the Trump administration never filled all of the political positions it was entitled to fill without the advice and consent of the Senate, sometimes leaving nearly 2,000 such positions open at once.
Third, Schedule F is not durable. Being created by executive order generally means it can be undone by executive order, and a Democrat president would surely do so (as Biden did). So if a future Trump administration spent years coercing agencies to finally designate Schedule F positions, the effort could be wasted just two years later. Plus, by announcing the reform in what turned out to be the waning days of the Trump administration, Republicans laid their cards on the table, and Democrats memorized them. A future administration should expect legal challenges to Schedule F reforms. Even if unsuccessful, such challenges would mire Schedule F in litigation for years, making it difficult to realize the reforms it promises within the span of a four-year term.
Fourth, it is also worth asking what the reform is that Schedule F actually promises. Schedule F has often been justified by its leading proponents as a way to ensure that deadbeat, no-show federal employees can finally be fired, a type of house-cleaning that even federal bureaucrats will acknowledge is necessary. If Schedule F is just cleaning up these dumpster fires, it is good but very modest indeed. If instead, the purpose is to inventory the vast network of policymaking bureaucrats operating free of chief executive control and then delete those positions en masse, the measure could go some way toward shrinking the bureaucracy and could be harder for Democrats to undo. But an action of such consequence would not be likely to succeed without my next point.
Fifth, Schedule F is a technocratic proposal. Solving for the problems of the administrative state requires more than tinkering within the system. The administrative state presents a crisis of self-governance, an attack on the Constitution itself because it betrays some of our nation’s founding principles (separation of powers, checks and balances, a republican form of government). A problem of this magnitude cannot be solved without congressional action, which cannot happen without the buy-in of the American people who must want it. And to want it, they must understand it. Otherwise, the stories will write themselves: TRUMP PUTS EMPLOYEES ON LIST JUST TO FIRE THEM; THEIR CHILDREN STARVE.
If Schedule F is an executive-only sneak attack on the administrative state, then it will be too sneaky to succeed. Big reforms require laying the groundwork that allows the public to follow along. Americans will support big reforms if they know why big reforms are needed, but they will not know if no one tells them.
Some Republicans are doing this, to their credit, and with so much fodder provided by the bureaucracy in recent memory they have plenty of rhetorical ammunition. J.D. Vance and Vivek Ramaswamy have spoken often about the administrative state as the “deep state.” Due in no small part to their influence, a generation of young Republicans are coming to see administrative state reform as the central issue of the time. Vance has said, “We have a major problem here with administrators and bureaucrats in the government who don’t respond to the elected branches. If those people aren’t following the rules, then, of course, you’ve got to fire them, and, of course, the president has to be able to run the government as he thinks he should.” Ramaswamy has described his “dream,” “that the people who we elect to run the government ought to be the ones who actually run the government. Not the managerial bureaucracy in three letter government agencies.” Yes and yes.
I understand and applaud the originators of Schedule F who thought of a way to use the president’s existing power to try to make a dent in the administrative state. The idea is creative, and I wish it had not been debuted at such an inopportune time, when its potential could not be realized and the element of surprise was lost. I am skeptical whether it can be resuscitated for a second attempt.
More importantly, I know that Schedule F is not and cannot be the silver bullet reform that Republicans advance in a second Trump administration. Schedule F is not a solution to the administrative state, and it stands a strong likelihood of becoming a major distraction to achieving more meaningful reforms. Setting Republican sights on Schedule F is like going to the Grand Canyon to see the view from the parking lot. If Republicans focus on Schedule F, Americans will miss the bigger picture, and will also miss their one, best shot at groundswell support for meaningfully diminishing the administrative state.
Now is not the time to tinker with a technical change, moving employees around on lists that are supposed to carry bureaucratic significance. Now is the time to dismantle the administrative state. Shutter an agency (or many); eliminate public employee unions; repeal civil service protections that insulate bureaucrats from presidential control.
And just downsize. In his recent piece for Tablet magazine titled “Twilight of the Wonks,” Walter Russell Mead describes how “bureaucracy is, from an information point of view, a primitive, costly, and slow method of applying algorithms (rules and regulations) to large masses of data.” With improvements in artificial intelligence and machine learning, Mead predicts that “drastic reductions in the size of both public and private sector bureaucracies will be coming.” If, as the Left says, bureaucrats are opinionless automatons just pushing paper, administering benefit formulas, or keeping planes in the sky, then every effort should be made to replace them with computers and technology that will do the job faster and cheaper.
The administrative state presents the single greatest crisis facing our county, a crisis of constitutional magnitude. The Left agrees that a crisis exists but believes the problem is the proposal to reform at all. The Left’s reaction to a change as modest as Schedule F is pearl-clutching and “destroying democracy” talk, because even a minor change threatens their citadel of power within the executive branch. That’s not a reason to pull back, it is a reason to push harder.
The idea that 2.2 million unaccountable, unelected bureaucrats should decide for themselves how best to execute the laws is an affront to our Constitutional order and to the millions of Americans who are subjected to their anti-democratic bureaucratic tyranny. This is a moment for bigger changes. If not now, when? If not Trump, then who?
The post Schedule F Won’t Tame the Deep State appeared first on The American Conservative.
Do you think they really believe this stuff?
Take a dip in the murky waters of recent Trump Apocalypse journalism—it says there’s gonna be a civil war and dictatorship. But don’t worry, not really—it’s just the politics of fear.
In a scary article subtitled “Donald Trump is warning that 2024 could be America’s last election,” New Republic alerts us that, if Trump wins, America is pretty much done being a democracy. “If we don’t win on November 5, I think our country is going to cease to exist. It could be the last election we ever have. I actually mean that,” Trump said out loud at a recent rally, so it couldn’t possibly be hyperbole, busting the chops of the mass media like a smart-aleck guy from Queens might do, or throwing red meat to his unwashed supporters like a wily candidate might do.
After that, you get the standard list of bad things Trump has said: “He has claimed that he wants to be a dictator, but only on ‘day one,’ and plans to install his legal allies at all levels of government. And his Cabinet? It’s sure to be full of ideologues, immigration hard-liners, and outright fascists. Even conservative judges claim he’ll shred the legal system… It might not be a stretch to suggest that Trump could plan another January 6–type event if he loses. After all, only months prior to the Capitol insurrection, he urged the Proud Boys to ‘stand back and stand by’ on a debate stage.”
In another recent article at the New Republic, one writer imagined possible election outcomes, concluding, “The election cycle either ends in chaos and violence, balkanization, or a descent into a modern theocratic fascist dystopia.”
And what politics of fear round-up of Trump Terror Titillation would be complete without this out-of-context quote: “Now if I don’t get elected, it’s gonna be a bloodbath for the whole—that’s gonna be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.” Somewhere after that inevitably comes a mention of how our system of bypassing the popular vote in favor of the Electoral College (in place some 230 years) is undemocratic even if it has resulted in a democracy each and every time it has been used.
Then there are the Christian nationalists, who are supposedly increasingly calling for “dual sovereignty” and implementation of “a Scripture-based system of government whereby Christ-ordained ‘civil magistrates’ exercise authority over the American public” according to a manifesto made public. The result is a United States that is one country in name only. “Christian Nationalism” is supposedly a priority for a second Trump term.
This all is quite an ambitious goal for Trump, given that the only lasting social policy he is remembered for (Dobbs) came from the Supreme Court acting in its standard constitutional way, not by any Trump-sponsored legislation or diktat.
Speaking of democracy being used to destroy democracy, Trump-Apocalyptic writers do love less-well-known Constitutional passages like the Twelfth Amendment. This starts with the Speaker of the House refusing to certify election results which show a Biden victory. Then the Twelfth Amendment kicks in to decide the election. This lets the House of Representatives—the one elected in November, which might be majority or even overwhelmingly Republican—determine the outcome, with each state getting one vote. If things don’t work out for Trump this way, then J6 times 100, yadda yadda.
And they do love invoking the Insurrection Act, something Trump actually never did in his four years. “If this results in fatalities and mass detentions,” says the first New Republic article, “it will exacerbate the situation, leading to many people on both the left and right concluding violence is the only viable option for change, resistance, or as a response to resistance.” New Republic further believes that “right-wing elements have long been itching to use violence to put ‘those people’ in their place,” so watch out when you take the dog out for a walk.
And most of that is horror tales if Trump loses, or gerrymanders a win. What if he actually wins outright and overwhelmingly (aka “the will of the people,” but, oh, never mind)?
The New Republic leads again, stating,
Trump will absolutely let his team attempt to implement Christian nationalism across the U.S. and use every means available to achieve its vision of an America with no immigrants, no trans people, no Muslims, no abortion, no birth control, Russian-style ‘Don’t Say Gay’ laws, license to discriminate based on religion, and all government education funding going to religious schools. Blue states will try to resist this and invoke the same states’ rights and ‘dual sovereignty’ arguments, but it’s unlikely they will succeed due to conservative bias on the Supreme Court and the Trump administration’s willingness to blow off court rulings it doesn’t like. If Trump goes straight to a massacre via the Insurrection Act, civil war is on the table. If Trump manages to bring blue states to heel via legal means, and resistance is insufficient to compel blue state governors to refuse to comply, then we end up with fascist, theocratic, hereditary dictatorship.
In short, says the Washington Post, “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.”
Whew. Once you step across the line into writing about Trump dictatorships and Christian nationalism as living, breathing threats, things get pretty crazy pretty fast. Why is this?
Occam’s Razor says this is all hullabaloo, pure malarkey, with tabloid-jealous writers doing it for the most clicks and dopamine hits, trying to outdo one another trying to whip up fear of Trump. It is good for business, and very easy to do. Freed from the old-school journalism restraints of having to muster facts to support opinions, anything—including imagining a civil war—is possible.
A second possibility is the journalists who write articles such as these are an extreme edge of a broader Democratic strategy of scaring people into not voting for Trump. Scare votes have long been a popular strategy, from the racist propaganda in post-bellum South, to the famous Lyndon Johnson “daisy girl” commercial dubbing his opponent a nuclear monster ready to start WWIII, to Willie Horton, and, of course, to 2016’s “Trump is a Russian spy.”
The current spate of articles have all the hallmarks of traditional fear politics, with a particularly heavy dose of “Framing the Opposition.” Political ads often frame opponents as dangerous or unfit for office, playing on fears of what might happen if they were to gain power. This can be seen as a desperate move, given how they contribute to a climate of distrust and polarization within society.
To be fair, it is of course possible that the writers actually believe what they are writing, that we are steps away from the collapse of democracy. But you don’t believe that, do you?
The post Trump Apocalypse Hysteria Is Spiraling Into Madness appeared first on The American Conservative.
I’ve been going back to eastern Kentucky for over a decade. Since 2016, something there has changed.
Kevin Rogers has five rules: love God, love others, don’t do dumb things, don’t die, and “Get ye, therefore, over thyself.”
“Roger’s Rules” govern the work of Big Creek Missions, an inter-denominational Christian ministry center in eastern Kentucky, the heart of Appalachia. Every year, Big Creek Missions hosts hundreds who come to serve the Lord through service projects to communities in Leslie and the surrounding counties, Clay, Harlan, and Perry.
I was 16 the first time I visited Big Creek, on a trip with my high school, Orange Lutheran. As a kid who had only ever known the Southern California beaches and suburbs, I found an entirely different side of America waiting for me in eastern Kentucky, an America rife with poverty, riddled with drugs, and wrung out of opportunity. It was an America no one—especially in Washington or the other power centers of the nation—seemed to want to talk about. Why was that? How did America forget Appalachia and its people? Why was it left behind in the first place?
The trip triggered a fascination with Appalachia, its history, its people, its culture. It caused me to rethink and, over time, fundamentally change my view of politics. What kind of politics can seek the good for the people I met in the hills of eastern Kentucky? It’s not an easy question. My efforts at answering it myself have been downright embarrassing at points, and I still don’t have all the answers. I likely never will.
Between my first trip junior year and my return as a senior, a presidential candidate emerged who talked as if he hadn’t forgotten the people of the American heartland. In a bizarre twist, that candidate was a billionaire—a real estate mogul and a reality TV star from Queens.
Candidate Trump preached protectionism and derided so-called free trade deals that had hollowed out America’s manufacturing base. Immigration both legal and illegal, Trump said, was undermining the ability of working-class Americans to get good jobs and fundamentally changing the nation’s character. He vowed to unleash American industry and extolled the virtues of energy independence. He aimed to end the forever wars in the Middle East that cost America trillions of dollars and thousands of its sons and daughters’ lives. These issues, and the way Trump pilloried the establishment’s approach to them with ruthless delight, became the foundation of Trump’s political movement.
More importantly, Trump declared what Appalachians had already intuited: “The American dream is dead,” especially for people like them. What Trump was saying on the stump was what Appalachians have been saying around the dinner table for decades. By no means were Appalachians condemning their country by saying these things—Appalachians are the most patriotic breed of Americans you’ll ever encounter—they were simply observing reality and had the courage to say it aloud.
Nearly a decade on, a lot has changed. I’m engaged to be married. Trump’s first term has come and gone. A redux could be in the making. The right has coalesced around Trump’s platform and vision. What, if anything, has changed for the forgotten people of Appalachia?
In November, I returned to Big Creek with my sister, now a freshman at Orange Lutheran, to chaperone her first trip to the hills of eastern Kentucky.
Founded in 1878 from portions of Harlan, Clay, and Perry counties, Leslie County’s history reads more like folklore than fact. Records explain how the area’s creeks and streams received their curious names. Cutshin Creek received its name after an unnamed pioneer slipped and cut his shin on one of the sharp rocks while crossing. “Hell Fer Sartin” creek was named by two prospectors. Upon finding the creek, one prospector turned to the other and said, “This is hell.” The other, in the region’s throaty, rhotic Appalachian dialect, croaked, “Yes, hell fer sartin.”
Leslie is named after Preston M. Leslie, the governor of Kentucky from 1871 to 1875. Though he started out as a Confederate-sympathetic Whig and moved to the Democratic Party, Preslie became renowned in the region for driving out the KKK presence and the roving bands that were wreaking havoc in the backcountry in the aftermath of the civil war. Clay, Perry, and Harlan were pockets of some of the strongest Union support in the nation. More men enlisted in the Union Army relative to population in these and the surrounding counties than anywhere else in the nation.
Leslie has never voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since its creation in 1878. From 1896 to 1928, no democratic presidential candidate managed to capture more than 10 percent of the vote. The closest a Democrat has ever come to winning Leslie was in 1964 when President Johnson captured 47 percent of the Leslie County vote against Barry Goldwater.
In both 2016 and 2020, Trump received 90 percent of Leslie County’s vote. This was an improvement on the internationalist Republican candidates of the 90s and 2000s—Bob Dole, George W. Bush, and John McCain—who each lost at least 25 percent of the vote in Leslie County in their respective bids.
Trump’s message echoed through the hollers of eastern Kentucky. So, too, did the scorn of the former president’s political enemies. One Appalachian I met told me, “I feel like they hate Trump so much because he stands up for us and says what a lot of us think.” They’re out to get Trump, but “they want to go after us, too.” Another chimed in with a chuckle, “They already are.”
In my travels to eastern Kentucky, nearly every person I talked to also told me some iteration of, “Here, we have to look out for one another because no one else will.” The Jacksonian strain of American thought is alive and well in the hills of eastern Kentucky, befitting for a place which started as a backcountry settled by yeoman farmers.
While Appalachia has been the target of substantial government aid on paper, you won’t hear many Appalachians suggest they are much better off than they once were. You also won’t hear many Appalachians credit the government or the NGOs for the improvements that have been made. They credit other members of their community, such as Kevin Rogers of Big Creek Missions, who have started local nonprofits to provide for the oscillating needs of these holler communities.
“I grew up in a house that struggled financially,” Rogers told Orange Lutheran students gathered in the Big Creek gymnasium. The financial constraints Rogers faced at home extended to his church community, where economic insecurity and social instability led to a revolving door of church leaders. “In my church, we didn’t have a lot of money. We had four or five youth pastors in four years.” When he graduated high school, Rogers took over as the church’s youth pastor, “because I got sick and tired of the church running them off,” he explained. “I wanted something deeper for my friends and for my students.”
Shortly after taking the job, Rogers found out that “you can do disaster relief mission trips for really cheap.” In the next three to four years, Rogers and his high schoolers took 17 mission trips to disaster areas. “Because they were looking out for the needs of others, our youth group was growing spiritually. Their hearts were being changed.”
Some time later, the pastor of Roger’s small church approached him and said, “Kevin, my home church is looking for a youth pastor, and I think you should do it, get out of your home church, go do something else.” The pastor’s former church was in a whole other league compared to Kevin’s home church.
“I’m like, ‘Man, I don’t want to do it. Not me—I’m happy here,’” Rogers recounted.
Three months later, Rogers was settling into his new role at the larger church. The youth group Rogers was tasked with leading was four times larger than that of his home church. The students Rogers initially found there seemed to think youth ministry was for their entertainment, not for accomplishing the mission God had given them.
“Their idea of a mission trip was much more elaborate,” Rogers explained. Luxury charter buses would take students and their families to nice hotels. Recreation got in the way of the mission. “From the outside looking in, it appeared that their trips were more of a vacation than a mission trip,” said Rogers. He would do things differently.
The church also held a toy drive around Christmas time. Rogers, joined by members of his youth group and the media team, were tasked with taking the busload of toys northward to a small school in eastern Kentucky called Big Creek Elementary.
“We set up this big production, we had lights, we had a stage, we had sound, all this fancy stuff to share the story of Jesus with these kids,” Rogers recalled. The production was not a classic retelling of the Redeemer’s humble origins. After the show, the church group distributed the toys to the children, but the way they gave the toys out left some of the elementary schoolers in tears.
“We go back to the church and all the students get up there and say how amazing it was, how everybody was changed in Appalachia, and how we changed all these kids’ lives—blah, blah, blah, blah,” Rogers said. “And I’m like, ‘did you not see the kids crying?’”
The time came to plan the church’s summer mission trip. “The student threw ideas at me: ‘Let’s go to Chicago! Let’s go to New York! Let’s go to Virginia Beach! Let’s go back to Orlando!” But Rogers had already made up his mind. “I asked my youth leaders, ‘Y’all love those kids and Big Creek School? Because y’all told me that you love those kids.’ ‘Oh, yeah. We love those kids.’ ‘Are you committed to those kids?’ ‘Oh, yeah. We’re committed to those kids.’ I said, ‘Cool. Because this summer, we’re going on our first mission trip to Big Creek Elementary School.’”
Big Creek was not the vacation destination students in the youth ministry had envisioned. There’s no Six Flags or white sand beaches in the backwoods of eastern Kentucky. “I ticked them all off,” Rogers admitted. Just 30 students and adults made the first trek to Big Creek.
For those who went, the trip was transformational. Students told stories about things they’d never seen before—homes with empty pantries where children had no toys to play with while mom and dad were strung out on meth in the bedroom.
The trip lit a fire in the bellies of Rogers’ students to serve Big Creek and the surrounding community. Word of the small but deeply spiritual trip to Big Creek made its way to the leadership of the association of churches. He was asked to lead an association-wide trip to Appalachia. The next summer, 100 students made the trek up to Leslie County. In the span of four years, the trip grew from 30 to 750 stretched across four weeks at Big Creek.
In 2007, Rogers’ pastor sat him down for a serious conversation. “‘Kevin, it’s time,” Rogers remembers the pastor telling him. “All you talk about is Big Creek missions. You need to ask the Lord if you need to be here, or you need to be there.’”
Rogers replied, “I love my students, and the youth group has grown so much spiritually and numerically.” The pastor told him to pray about it. “God said yes. I kept saying no,” Rogers said. That same year, Rogers received a call from the superintendent that oversaw Big Creek Elementary. “‘Kevin, we’re shutting down Big Creek Elementary, these kids are going to be going down to Mountain View Elementary in Hyden.’” Rogers recounted.
Rogers’ heart broke when he initially heard the news. But the superintendent had another proposal—for Rogers to buy Big Creek Elementary and turn it into a full-time mission. Again, Rogers prayed. Again, God said yes and Rogers said no. A few months later, “through a series of amazing things that happened, and a series of challenging things that happened, I knew it’s time to go and do this Big Creek thing.” Since, Rogers said, “we continue to do simple things. We serve people in need, we look in the community, find the greatest needs, and we go and serve.”
Orange Lutheran High School was one of the first major groups to start visiting Big Creek Missions after Rogers took over the school. The first trip Orange Lutheran took to Big Creek was on extremely short notice—Orange Lutheran had to cancel their plans to serve in Mexico over safety concerns. It found Big Creek Missions and gave Rogers a call. A few weeks later, 40 students and a handful of chaperones were on their way to Leslie County. Now, more than a decade on, Orange Lutheran brings about 170 individuals to Big Creek every fall.
Rogers and his small team of staff and volunteers have converted the old classrooms into dorm rooms, each lined with seven to eight handbuilt triple bunk beds. The old gymnasium is now a place for worship and assemblies. The kitchen and cafeteria are mostly left unchanged; the industrial-sized refrigerators and freezers hold meals for anyone in the community in need. The detached warehouse holds all the tools needed to maintain the campus and for Big Creek’s multitude of construction projects within a fifty-mile radius. In the parking lot, school buses have been replaced with Big Creek branded shuttles, flatbeds, and vans.
With a group of Orange Lutheran’s size, Rogers can dispatch teams of six to ten to work on nearly 20 different service projects, most of which fall into three buckets: construction, community, and caretaking.
The group of six students I chaperoned with one other adult were sent around 20 miles east to assist another area nonprofit, Hope in the Hills.
Jack is a short but sturdy man. His full, white head of hair and the hitch in his gait suggest he’s in his sixties. Arriving on site, where we’d be helping Jack repair and remodel the Hope in the Hills warehouse, Jack stuck out a thick, stubby hand. His handshake was firm and friendly, though his hands felt like sandpaper.
As we became acquainted, Jack explained that Hope in the Hills started as a small service group that would collect donations from his local church. Soon enough, Hope in the Hills was collecting more donations than the church could reasonably store. The group had to set out on their own, and Hope in the Hills was born.
Jack said things ran on a shoestring budget—everything, the donations and the man hours, “came from the good of people’s hearts.” Their regular giveaways, several times a month at local parks or other public meeting places, attracted beneficiaries from Leslie, Clay, Harlan, Perry, and beyond. Hope in the Hills’ donors also came from farther and farther away. Jack said they had to get a bigger truck to collect larger donations from the south and west. Hope in the Hills workers scour public marketplaces to haul back free furniture and other goods to give away, too.
Jack is partially retired now, but four decades or so ago, he started out working in the timber industry, which came to Appalachia’s virgin forests starting in the 1880s. The increased demand for timber and technological innovations for the industry made logging more profitable in places it wasn’t before, though loggers would have to use mule teams, rivers, or even splash dams to get logs out of the hollers.
The timber industry Jack started working in was nothing like the Appalachian timber industry of a hundred years prior. Working conditions, while still perilous, were safer and corporate interests had been beaten back relative to the near-feudal conditions that prevailed before.
By the time Jack found employment, the logging industry in Appalachia was dying. Advancements in sustainable practices for the industry meant once-depleted forests in other states were returning. An explosion of trade deals was making lumber easier and cheaper to import than previously. While the U.S. remains the largest producer of timber in the world, it’s the third largest timber importer in the world. Everyone has heard of Chinese steel’s effect on economic opportunity for working-class men; fewer know about Canadian timber’s impact on workers in Hazard, Kentucky.
Eventually, Jack changed career paths. He began working as a trucker, hauling products once made in the United States but now shipped in from overseas. Trucking was one of the few industries that did not necessarily create displacement. A trucker could still live in Leslie County, Kentucky, rather than move north to work in a factory, though he’d spend most of his time on the road and away from family. Compared to the alternatives in the area, trucking paid well and provided good benefits. There was also a fairly low barrier to entry. A commercial driver’s license takes about seven weeks of training to obtain. Trucking remains one of the top jobs in the United States, especially for working-class white men without college degrees.
Working as a truck driver has allowed Jack to enjoy his partial retirement in the hills of eastern Kentucky without ever having to relocate his family as millions of Appalachians have done since World War II. Beyond his work with Hope in the Hills, Jack tends to a small herd of cattle. He lives in a nice, small prefabricated home overlooking the local school and a creek. A detached warehouse, mostly made of reclaimed tin, is where Hope in the Hills keeps most of its donations.
Our task for the week was to repair and remodel the warehouse. The seasons slowly eat away at the wood and metal of Appalachian homes. Sometimes, they’re swallowed whole. A massive flood in July 2022 swept through 14 counties in eastern Kentucky. It claimed the lives of 45 and displaced thousands.
One of the underappreciated reasons Democratic Kentucky governor Andy Beshear was reelected in 2023 was his handling of the flood. Even those I met in deep red Kentucky admitted the governor did a pretty good job in the aftermath. The electoral map bears this out. In deep-red southeastern Kentucky, Beshear greatly overperformed, managing to capture about a third of the vote.
That said, the devastation is still easy to spot. On the drive to Jack’s place, we passed upside-down mobile homes that had been completely washed away. Others were simply twisted piles of metal. The land isn’t the only thing to carry the flood’s scars. Many of the families in Leslie still do, too. Thankfully, Jack’s property was spared, and the goods stored there have been used to help dozens of families in the community get back on their feet in the aftermath.
Nevertheless, some of the roof’s tin sheets had rusted out and the support beams rotted. New siding was also in order. Inside the warehouse, we were tasked with laying down a fresh coat of paint, building shelves, and reorganizing.
Despite his height, Jack was a confident and commanding figure. He was quick to show friendship and respect when extended to him. We became fast friends when I told him my occupation. “Now, I’ll be completely honest, I’m a Republican,” Jack said as we ventured into politics. For the next three days, our political chat was off and on. “I’ll tell you one thing, Bradley,” he said as we stood at the base of a ladder, “there wasn’t any of these terrible school shootin’s when they taught the Bible in schools.”
Jack had a general vision of what he wanted the finished product to look like, but he didn’t go into much detail. Only towards the end of our talk would Jack say, “If you need anything or any guidance, just ask my daughter Heather—she’s the brains of this whole operation.” Jack, even in retirement, had a boss.
Heather’s father wasn’t her only underling, either. As Hope in the Hills survived on donated time from volunteers, Jack had called in backup. These men were the most eclectic and wonderful group of hillbillies in all of Appalachia.
“Have you ever met a French hillbilly?” A voice like a rebel yell called out from the warehouse as I repaired the siding. I was certainly intrigued. I stopped what I was doing to meet this curiosity. As I entered, a man who seemed in his sixties looked upon a group of students, all frozen in position from their various tasks inside the warehouse. “The name is Bur-zhay,” he told the students in a faux French accent through his Appalachian drawl. As I circled around to this mysterious character’s front, I saw he sported a Ford motor company windbreaker over a neon yellow hoodie. Embroidery on the jacket atop the right side of his chest read, “Burgie.”
Over the three days we spent helping the folks at Hope in the Hills, I’m not sure Burgie handled a tool, lifted a paint brush, or shelved a can of soup. But Burgie is retired—he’s earned that right. What Burgie did was make a long day’s work fly by. With the radio out, Burgie’s stories became a neverending variety podcast with zero breaks or advertisements.
Burgie spent most of his career working at a Ford factory manufacturing parts, mostly transmissions. He got the nickname “Bur-zhay” while on a trip to France with Ford. “When I got there, all these French folk were telling me that I had been pronouncin’ my name wrong my whole life!” He laughed.
Burgie was one of the millions of Appalachians who participated in one of the largest internal migrations in American history. The road north became known as the Hillbilly Highway as job opportunities dried up in the coal mines and forests and Appalachians sought work in the industrial Midwest. In the three decades between 1940 and 1970, 3 million Appalachians took to the Hillbilly Highway. Dwight Yoakam’s 1985 tune “Readin’, Writin’, and Route 23” memorialized the migration in song.
The migration transformed Appalachia. The era of the yeoman farmer, which tapped into the region’s precolonial roots, was over. In the 1950s, forty counties in eastern Kentucky and West Virginia lost about 70 percent of their farm population. Harlan County lost 82 percent, Leslie County a mind-boggling 98 percent. Only 20 fulltime farming operations remained in Leslie by the end of the decade.
A bevy of factors led to the decline of manufacturing in Appalachia. Environmental struggles, increased regulatory burdens, mechanization, and some companies’ difficulties paying retirement benefits all played their part. But it all took place against the backdrop of an increasingly globalized market economy, governed by a ballooning number of “free” trade agreements that spanned thousands of pages, which made foreign goods, and more importantly foreign labor, more attractive than Appalachia. Between 1970 and 2001 in Appalachia, the number of apparel workers declined by 66 percent and textile workers by 30 percent. For those who remained, living off the government dole became a way to make ends meet.
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), signed in 1993 by President Bill Clinton, was the nail in the coffin for manufacturing and other Appalachian industries. Six years later, Clinton would deliver remarks from Tyner, Kentucky, to bring public attention to Appalchian poverty. “I’m here to make a simple point,” Clinton told the nation. “This is the time to bring more jobs and investment to parts of the country that have not participated in this time of prosperity. Any work that can be done by anybody in America can be done in Appalachia.” The problem for Clinton was that those jobs were no longer being done in America.
Burgie spent decades working in that Ford plant far from the hills of Appalachia he called home. He became involved in the plant’s United Auto Workers (UAW) chapter and eventually ascended to a number of leadership positions. As the years passed, Burgie became increasingly disenchanted with his involvement in the UAW. “I don’t want to get into detail about it,” Burgie told me, as we sat on a bench sipping Diet Cokes. “But the point is it stopped being about the workers and more about the politics, and I just didn’t like that so much.”
I asked him what he thought the future of union work might be. “The unions are wondering why people don’t want to be a part of ’em anymore,” Burgie said. “I’d tell ’em the same thing I tried to tell ’em when I was there: just focus on the workers. Folks have a hard time finding good jobs that can provide for a good retirement without the unions, and I think that’s still true. But there won’t be any unions to help people get these jobs, and no jobs to begin with, if they keep going down this path.”
Burgie admired what certain Republicans, Trump among them, were doing to reach out to union workers. Trump, Burgie told me, was the first politician in a long time to name and shame the macro forces making it hard for working class people to get good jobs—immigration and globalization. “Whatever you think of him,” Burgie added, “it was the right thing to say. That takes some guts. I respect that.”
Joe was also in his sixties but much more prepared to do construction work than Burgie. He wore flannel, a vest, and an old rope cap. Thick, wire-rimmed glasses covered a good portion of his short face and rested heavily on the broad bridge of his nose. Myself, Joe, and Matt, one of the other chaperones, and Johnny, another member of our curious band, spent most of the first day working on the roof and siding. Joe had spent his working years in the timber industry, though he was afraid of heights, as our work on the roof quickly made clear.
As Matt and I huddled to figure out how to remove a particularly stubborn piece of rusted tin, Joe made his way to the spot with a chainsaw, slowly inching his way across the gable roof—none of the rotted beams had been replaced yet. This plan definitely violated rule three and potentially four of Rogers’ Rules, but it was already in motion.
As Joe approached, you could clearly see him shaking. “I think it’ll work.” Johnny said. “Be careful,” he yelled at Joe. “He’s afraid of heights,” Johnny said, turning to Matt and I. As I looked back at Joe, he had made his way over the peak of the gable and was heading down the slope to the corner of the roof. Once there, according to Johnny’s plan, he would fire up the chainsaw and punch down through the metal roof. A few steps onto the downward sloping side, Joe surmised this plan wasn’t as good as it initially sounded. With chainsaw in hand, Joe gingerly made his way down the 14-foot drop to the ground.
New plan: We’d use a smaller, cordless metal saw and approach from the bottom. Two men would be on ladders—one sawman, one scrap collector—and the other two supporting the base of the ladders. Joe, who we now knew was afraid of heights, would remain with me on the ground.
“Was being afraid of heights difficult when you were logging?” I asked Joe. “No,” he said, his voice a whispering gruff. “Climbing trees is no problem when they’re on the ground.”
Matt and Johnny were hard at work near the roof while Joe and I got to know each other on the ground. I could tell Joe wasn’t much of a talker. He kept his eyes fixed on Johnny, who teetered at the top of the ladder to reach where he needed to cut. Joe answered my questions about the area and his work experience with a sentence or less.
After about 30 minutes, Joe warmed up. It really got rolling when I asked about the present problems Appalachians face. Joe, with his coughing drawl, spoke about the difficulties young people face in communities like Leslie County. By the government’s metrics, Appalachia is much less impoverished than it was when he was a young man. In 1965, 219 of the 420 counties that make up Appalachia were considered impoverished. Today, that number is 82.
While less of the region faces poverty, things seem much worse by Joe’s telling. Good-paying jobs are few and far between not just here but in the places Appalachians once fled to. It might be a Detroiter’s first time facing the reality of massive job displacement; for many Appalachians, it’s their second. Meanwhile, price increases for the most essential goods—housing, health care, education, groceries—have outpaced inflation at best and skyrocketed at worst.
To add insult to injury, the health care that workers in the area have received has mostly been in the form of prescription opiates. “The drugs have really done a number on this place,” Joe told me. “It’s devastated whole families.”
The opioid epidemic ravaged the American heartland. It almost appears to have been designed to do just that. Companies lied about the nature of the wonder drugs they created. Some extremely bad actors moved in to take advantage of the profits the drugs offered. Even good doctors wrote prescriptions that ruined lives. The influx of fentanyl from the southern border brought another wave of drug abuse. The pandemic ushered in a deadly round of relapses.
Opioids have sapped Appalachia, particularly Appalachian men, of their vitality when their distressed communities needed it most. When opioid addiction takes a life, that’s sad enough. Here, it crushes whole families, even whole communities. Hopelessness begets more hopelessness.
Eventually, our conversation got sidetracked when Joe asked, “Why do you speak with your lips so much?” I wasn’t sure what he meant at first, then I realized that the rhotic Appalachian drawl comes from the back of your throat. My southern California speech patterns are very tip of the tongue. “I’m not quite sure, but I guess you’re right, Joe,” I replied.
An old blue truck kicked dust up on the gravel road leading up to Jack’s property. A man dressed quite similarly to Joe got out and approached. “What’s going on, Joe,” he asked. Joe explained to the man, whose name was Ronnie, that Johnny and Matt were entering their second hour of wrestling with a rusted out tin roof. Johnny and Matt climbed down to greet Ronnie, and Johnny told Ronnie of the original plan for Joe to use a chainsaw. Ronnie, seeming to know Joe was afraid of heights, stared at Joe with a shocked expression on his face. He was a soft-spoken man, but suffice it to say Ronnie didn’t need to say anything to make clear his disapproval of the original plan.
“Ronnie worked in the mines,” Joe told me. Mining had been one of the topics we covered in our conversation at the base of the ladders. I asked Ronnie what that was like. “Dark,” Ronnie chuckled. Ronnie explained that his office was a crawl space hundreds of feet below ground. Ronnie gestured a rounded box around his chest to his thigh to show the size—a few feet by a few feet. Ronnie, also a retiree, was the most slender of the hillbillies assembled but also the tallest, which I assume must have been a disadvantage underground.
Appalachia once produced two-thirds of the nation’s coal. Coal fields cover 63,000 square miles in the region. In eastern Kentucky alone, there are 80 major seams. Most of the region’s mining is done how Ronnie once mined, deep underground, and a third is surface mining, a more controversial form because of its impact on the environment.
Even in the glory days of mining in Appalachia, it was a cycle of boom and bust. World War I brought a major spike in coal production, only to give way to the Great Depression. During World War II, the Office of War Mobilization encouraged coal production as a patriotic duty. Thousands of workers and small-scale operations took advantage of the government’s demand, but that revival was short-lived.
Mechanization arrived after the war as coal operators sought to cut down on labor costs. Inventions like the continuous miner, which integrated drilling, blasting, and loading into one process, “made it possible for ten men to produce three times the tonnage mined by eighty-six miners loading coal by hand,” Ronald Eller writes in Uneven Ground: Appalachia Since 1945. “By 1960 fewer than half of the 475,000 miners in the region at the end of World War II still found work in the deep mines” Eller continues, “and by 1970 the number had declined to 107,000.” Today, coal mining employs just 2 percent of the Appalachian workforce.
Johnny Muncy is Leslie County royalty. He’s not one of the barons who made their fortunes from King Coal nor one of the titans that built holiday homes in the Appalachian hills like the Vanderbilts. He’s not wealthy by any means. But the Muncy name has been associated with the area that is now Leslie County since before its creation.
One of his ancestors, also John Muncy, came to the hills from Burke’s Garden, Virginia. When the Civil War began, John Muncy was too young to fight but convinced commanding officers to let him join the 47th Regiment of the Kentucky Volunteer Infantry. There, Muncy would be among the 77,000 troops that won the pivotal battle of Vicksburg, which secured Union control of the Mississippi river. He’d go on to become a corporal in Company C and serve in New Orleans and Baton Rouge.
John Muncy had eleven children from two marriages. One of his sons, John M. Muncy, born 1868, would go on to establish Hyden’s first and only newspaper, named the Thousandsticks, and serve as a county judge and school superintendent. For the final five years of his life, before he passed in 1937, J.M. Muncy was chairman of the Leslie County Republican Party.
As we joked about Burgie’s frenchified nickname, Johnny Muncy said the best hillbilly nickname he’d ever heard belonged to his grandfather. “His name was William Muncy, but everybody always called him Powder Bill.”
William “Powder Bill” Muncy was a logger around the turn of the century. When a logflow jammed in the river, his grandfather was the only one crazy enough to head down to the jam with a stick of dynamite and clear it. “Whenever they had a jam, they always called for Powder Bill, and he always made sure the logs started flowin’ again. Nothin’ bad ever happened to him, though.”
I never tired of talking to any of my new hillbilly friends, but especially Johnny Muncy. Like Jack, Johnny became a trucker. For three decades, he crisscrossed the country hauling whatever needed transporting. “I spent a lot of time away from home, away from my family,” Johnny said. “Those years on the road take a toll. You miss a lot. I needed to be home.”
Later, Johnny and I got to talking politics. He wanted to know if I had any dirt on powerful people in D.C. I told him that, if I did, I would have already written it.
I asked Johnny what issues people here cared about. He didn’t hesitate: “The drugs.” All over the community, you can find people strung out, sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, even grandparents. Babies live covered in their own excrement, their parents too high to care or too busy looking for the next score. Johnny and Jack knew of at least two drug-related deaths nearby in the last week. In many cases, addiction here starts with prescription pills—from surgery, a disability, or a relative’s medicine cabinet—then moves on to the hard stuff, much of which is now laced with fentanyl.
The epidemic has touched Johnny’s family: One of his sons has struggled with drug addiction. Though his methods were unconventional, Johnny made sure to get his son clean. “It came to a point where I had to physically lock him in a room to get the drugs out of his system,” Johnny said. “I had a six shooter and said, if you come out of there, I’m goin’ to shoot you, because if you keep goin’ down this path, you’re as good as dead anyways.”
“It was a rough few days,” Johnny said, “but he’s strong, and he pulled through.”
Before Johnny issued that ultimatum, he thought he had done all he could to keep his son on the straight and narrow. He bought him a rifle so they could go hunting together. Johnny’s son sold the rifle for drugs. Then Johnny bought him a new hunting bow. That, too, got sold for drugs. Johnny even bought his son a truck to get to and from work. “He stripped everything he could out of that truck. The radio, everything, even the seats, he stripped out of that car to sell for drugs.”
“Young people used to go to church, now their gods are sex and drugs,” Johnny said. “This rotten culture has corrupted their souls.” These days, on Sunday mornings, you can find Johnny’s son in a church pew. “Now he’s given that up, he’s going back to church,” Johnny said.
The right has only begun to grapple with the lives of men like Jack, Burgie, Joe, Ronnie, and Johnny. How to bring manufacturing jobs back, how to end the opioid crisis—these are topics of roundtable discussions across institutional Washington. There’s little agreement on an agenda, but we had to start somewhere.
The men I met in Appalachia have intuited that a realignment is happening. They’ve been waiting for it for a long time. If the right succeeds in bringing a revival to Appalachia, don’t expect these men to direct their thanks to the Republican Party. Their thanks will go to the men and women like Kevin Rogers who have done the Lord’s work and kept hope alive in the hills.
But don’t expect Rogers to take credit. “God gets the glory for what he has done through somebody as messed up as me,” he says. “I cannot stand up here and say, ‘Well, look at what I’ve done.’ Because I kept saying, no, no, no, no, no, no, no to God.”
“I don’t know why people keep coming back to Big Creek, but they do. God brings them here. He gets the glory for it from the beginning to the end. Wherever you are, give Him the glory,” Rogers told students in closing. “Thank you all for being a part of Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood.”
The post Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood appeared first on The American Conservative.
The rules of democracy require abortion opponents to embrace, for now, moderation like Donald Trump’s.
Donald Trump has done more for the pro-life cause than any other president. As promised, he appointed the Supreme Court Justices who overturned Roe v. Wade. Yet abortion opponents are unhappy with the former president, who recently declined to endorse a federal abortion ban. Mike Pence, who served as Trump’s vice-president, called the remarks a “slap in the face.” Lila Rose, the leader of anti-abortion group Live Action, concluded that “President Trump is not a pro-life candidate.”
This conflict reflects a longer-running tension between abortion opponents and the former president. Styling himself as a consummate deal-maker, Trump has a pragmatic way of talking about issues that other politicians discuss in more principled terms. He has repeatedly bragged that he “put the pro-life movement in a strong negotiating position” by appointing the justices who reversed Roe. As one abortion opponent put it, Trump’s message to pro-life Americans is, “I’ve given you leverage now to make a better deal.”
Grateful as pro-lifers are for Trump’s appointments, they find this way of speaking about abortion unsatisfying: A right to life shouldn’t be subject to negotiation. But Trump’s approach accords with what once would have been called democratic habits of mind. When a political debate is framed in terms of rights, the compromises that are natural to democratic life will appear illegitimate.
Trump’s raw rhetoric and deviation from the bipartisan consensus on trade, immigration, and foreign policy have led some to view him as an “extremist.” His refusal to concede defeat in the 2020 election, culminating in the events of Jan. 6, was taken by many to confirm recurring claims that he was a threat to democracy.
Such criticisms obscure the fact that Trump’s policy views on immigration and social issues resemble those of Clinton-era Democrats. His opposition to free trade and nation-building foreign policy, meanwhile, may be closer to the views of the median voter than are the views he rejects.
Even after his remarks on abortion, liberal journalists and anti-Trump Republicans remain reluctant to acknowledge him moderation. Some continued to paint him as an extremist—or at least the leader of an extremist coalition. “Trump and his allies will do everything in their power to ban abortion nationwide, with or without a Republican majority in Congress,” Jamelle Bouie wrote in The New York Times.
A more inventive response came from Bill Kristol, who cited Trump’s abortion moderation as proof that Trump is, yes, a fascist. “This is classic authoritarianism. (See Eco on Ur-Fascism).” Umberto Eco describes fascism as “a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions.” So Trump’s very moderation, his refusal to endorse federal restrictions on abortion, is a sign that he is advancing a nefarious ideology.
When it comes to contradictory political stances, Kristol knows whereof he speaks. The enthusiastic promoter of Sarah Palin and unrelenting critic of Donald Trump, the high-toned opponent of public recognition of homosexuality turned unapologetic advocate for LGBT rights, Kristol himself might be described as a beehive of contradictions.
If Trump’s abortion statement left his critics on the left casting about for a line of criticism, not always convincingly, it raised more serious questions for the right. When Roe v. Wade was in force, abortion opponents eagerly framed their cause in democratic terms. They decried “the judicial usurpation of politics,” as a famous symposium in First Things put it, and hoped that their preferred policies would one day be enacted by a “moral majority.”
This democratic vision of pro-life politics has been weakened by a number of developments. Declining religiosity and rising social liberalism have led many on the right to recognize that they constitute a moral minority—certainly one of the nation’s most important political blocs, one almost completely unrepresented in most elite institutions, but a minority nonetheless.
Meanwhile, the nation’s rapid embrace of gay rights seemed to teach some conservatives a non-democratic lesson in social change. Democratically enacted referenda were knocked down by courts, changing not only the law but—in conjunction with political leaders, business executives, and media properties—public attitudes. “The law is a teacher” became a refrain on certain parts of the right.
The reversal of Roe v. Wade would seem to be an opportunity for this non-democratic idea of social change. But as Darel Paul pointed out in Compact, counter-majoritarian political strategies will be difficult to pursue when the wealthiest and most educated classes—those best positioned to wield legal, economic, and cultural power on behalf of an unpopular view—are opposed.
In this context, Trump’s moderation may be the best the opponents of abortion can hope for. Ryan Williams, president of the Claremont Institute, defended Trump’s statement, saying, “The pro-life movement needs to take its bearings from Lincoln, not William Lloyd Garrison.” It is a wise remark. Lincoln’s statesmanship, not Garrison’s radicalism, led to the triumph of the anti-slavery cause. Lord Charnwood, Lincoln’s great biographer, observed that Lincoln’s approach to slavery involved “watching and waiting while blood flows, suspending judgment, temporizing, making trial of this expedient and of that.” Lincoln’s attitude toward slavery was less radical than Garrison’s; he succeeded by implementing “a policy of deadly moderation towards it.” A little deadly moderation may be just what the pro-life movement needs.
The post Trump’s Lesson for Pro-Lifers appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: The House has passed a FISA reauthorization bill, but the legislation isn’t on its way to the Senate just yet.
The House has passed a FISA reauthorization bill, but the legislation isn’t on its way to the Senate just yet.
On Friday, the House voted 273-147 to reauthorize Section 702 of FISA for two years, with 126 Republicans joining 147 Democrats to pass the bill. Fifty nine Democrats and 88 Republicans opposed the bill.
The most dramatic vote in the House chamber on Friday, however, was the vote on an amendment to FISA reauthorization that would have added warrant requirements when U.S. persons are in question. The amendment, brought by Rep. Andy Biggs, failed in a 212-212 tie. Conservatives in Congress are blaming House Speaker Mike Johnson, claiming he was the tie breaking vote. In total, 86 Republicans voted against the warrant requirement. Once the vote was taken, the chair quickly gaveled the amendment dead, ensuring no vote flips or latecomers that could have changed the outcome.
“To me that was the whole ball of wax…that warrant requirement,” Rep. Jim Jordan said after the FISA reauthorization vote.
NEW: 86 Republicans just voted against @RepAndyBiggsAZ’s amendment to require a warrant to spy on Americans under FISA causing it to fail.
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) April 12, 2024
Here are the names: pic.twitter.com/6mAoJfnlac
Johnson was able to secure a majority of the GOP’s support on the final legislation, but it’s hard to consider that a win when Democrats signed off in higher numbers. Furthermore, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna has filed a motion to reconsider the legislation, which will delay moving the bill to the Senate until early next week. If the House wants to avoid reconsideration of the bill, they’ll have to motion to table Luna’s procedural maneuver. Johnson clearly has the votes to overcome Luna’s challenge, and it’s unlikely conservatives will score any wins.
Unless former President Donald Trump has something to say about it. Johnson now heads to Mar-a-Lago for an election integrity event where the pair will have a joint news conference. But it appears that Trump has been appeased by the idea that he could preside over FISA reauthorization come 2026. For now, Mar-a-Lago is backing Johnson, hoping to avoid any further chaos in the House before the election, so it seems FISA reformers will have to wait.
The post Where Does the FISA Fight Go From Here? appeared first on The American Conservative.
Mike Johnson is mired in a political minefield. What is most likely to cause the House GOP to implode?
“Mike Johnson, he’s literally turned into Mitch McConnell’s twin and worse. He’s a Democrat…. There’s not even any daylight between him and Nancy Pelosi at this point.” Harsh words from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene for House Speaker Mike Johnson.
Currently, Greene has a motion to vacate Johnson’s speakership in the hopper. Greene filed her motion to vacate on March 22 when the house was forced to vote on (and passed) a 1,012-page minibus with a price tag of $1.2 trillion. House members had less than 36 hours to read the bill or be blamed with a partial government shutdown. Just 101 Republicans, far short of the majority of the conference, voted for the minibus.
“Remember, last Congress we were all complaining: ‘We can’t even read these thousands of pages before we have to vote on them.’ We’re now back to the House of hypocrites, and I’m so sick and tired of it,” Greene said before filing her motion to vacate. “Why throw out a speaker for supposedly breaking the rules, and now we have a new speaker that is really breaking all the rules. So like, what changed?”
Certainly, a lot could change in the next few weeks if Greene decides to force a vote on the motion to vacate. Between FISA Section 702 reauthorization and Ukraine aid, Johnson finds himself in a political minefield—one false step, and Greene could blow up his speakership.
But where are the mines, exactly? They’re difficult to sniff out, but Greene provided a window into her thinking on a potential motion to vacate in a Dear Colleague letter circulated to Republican House members on Tuesday. “I will not tolerate our elected Republican Speaker Mike Johnson serving the Democrats and the Biden administration and helping them achieve their policies that are destroying our country,” Greene wrote. “He is throwing our own razor-thin majority into chaos by not serving his own GOP conference that elected him.”
“I will not tolerate this type of Republican ‘leadership,’” Greene continued. Making reference to the fights over FISA and Ukraine aid, Green claimed, “This has been a complete and total surrender to, if not complete and total lockstep with, the Democrats’ agenda that has angered our Republican base so much and given them very little reason to vote for a Republican House majority.”
“And no, electing a new Republican Speaker will not give the majority to the Democrats,” Greene wrote, preempting rebukes if she does decide to go forward with the motion to vacate. “That only happens if more Republicans retire early, or Republicans actually vote for Hakeem Jeffries.”
Neither the FISA or Ukraine aid fight seem to be trending in Johnson’s direction. On Wednesday, 19 Republican lawmakers went against Johnson in a procedural vote to move forward on FISA reauthorization legislation.
The vote against FISA came in the wake of a Wednesday post on Truth Social from former President Donald Trump: “KILL FISA, IT WAS ILLEGALLY USED AGAINST ME, AND MANY OTHERS. THEY SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN!!!” on his Truth Social account. Though Trump’s campaign was spied upon using a different FISA authority (not 702) and some members of the corporate media are claiming that the 19 Republicans who stood against the vote to proceed are blindly doing so at Trump’s behest, the battle lines were clearly drawn much earlier in the week. Surely, Trump brought further attention to the issue and put Republicans in the pocket of the intelligence agencies on the back foot by forcing them to answer hard questions from the grassroots, but by no means was Trump’s weighing in on the topic the deciding factor. (Side note: see how the intelligence agencies, corporate media, and establishment work together?)
Johnson has been working for months to reconcile the divide over 702 in the GOP conference, embodied by the House Intelligence and House Judiciary Committees. The House Judiciary Committee wants reforms to increase transparency and accountability in the FISA process, as well as provisions that would require FISA warrants for agencies to sift through information of U.S. citizens caught up in foreign surveillance and ban the government from buying U.S. persons data from private companies.
Johnson tried to split the baby by taking a FISA reauthorization bill from the Judiciary Committee’s Laurel Lee, a representative from Florida, with some but not all of the reforms. First, Johnson prevented, and would prevent any future amendment, on banning data sales from private companies to the U.S. government—a red line for the Intelligence Committee headed by Rep. Mike Turner. FISA warrant provisions, arguably the biggest priority of the Judiciary Committee, were also made part of the amendment process and not included in the bill’s text.
Johnson, before he was speaker, was in favor of FISA reforms, like warrant provisions, that the House Judiciary Committee proposed. As now-Speaker Johnson devised this plan, he seemed ambivalent at first, but has increasingly soured on warrant provisions. Eventually, Johnson came out fully against warrant provisions, claiming classified briefings given to him as speaker by the intelligence agencies gave him a “different perspective.”
Speaker Mike Johnson elaborates on his FISA flip flop from when he was a rank and file member of the House, explaining that after receiving classified briefings he has a “different perspective.” pic.twitter.com/mrLj9ouEji
— Haley Talbot (@haleytalbotcnn) April 10, 2024
No warrant provisions guaranteed, no deal, House conservatives suggest. Leaving the warrant provisions up to the amendment process with an adversarial speaker is too big of a risk. Now, its leg-fare against Johnson’s FISA proposal. House conservatives are trying to force open the amendment process to loosen Johnson’s grip on the process.
“The Speaker of the House put his finger on the scale, against the amendment. And that pretty much is the story,” Rep. Chip Roy of Texas told POLITICO.
Johnson is running out of time to find a deal before Section 702 expires on April 19. Without a deal, Johnson will likely bring a clean reauthorization, which will find broad uniparty support, to the floor. Another vote that potentially courts more Democratic support and less than a majority of the GOP conference could imperil Johnson’s speakership.
But it seems there has been a provisional agreement between the pro- and anti-FISA factions. Johnson has negotiated with conservatives a FISA reauthorization that would expire in two years. They’re betting on Trump becoming president in November. The next FISA renewal will need his signature.
Greene was not among those who voted no on the procedural vote, but she has hinted her support for the final FISA reauthorization is contingent on warrant provisions.
“We do not believe in warrantless spying on the American people, especially when this bill carves out the ability for Congress to be notified when a member of Congress is going to be looked at through the FISA court,” Greene told members of the media. “That’s completely unfair. The same thing should apply for the American people. But Mike Johnson doesn’t have the trust of the conference. That’s become very clear.”
Johnson’s new two-year FISA reauthorization plan does not include warrant provisions.
Greene met Johnson on Wednesday afternoon—the first time the pair met since she filed her motion to vacate. “I got a lot of excuses,” Greene told members of the media after leaving the meeting. “We didn’t walk out with a deal.”
What’s more likely to cause Greene to trigger her motion to vacate Johnson, however, is if Johnson decides to go forward with Ukraine aid.
If Johnson moves forward with Ukraine aid, it would be one of “the most egregious things he could do,” Greene said. Currently, Johnson is working on an Ukraine aid package expected to be worth $60 billion—the same level of funding for Ukraine provided by the Senate’s previously passed supplemental. Johnson, to maximize Democrat votes, is toying with decoupling Ukraine aid from aid to Israel. But to keep some Republican votes so that a majority of the GOP conference supports the package, Johnson is exploring making some of the aid a loan or using the REPO Act to seize Russian assets to fund further U.S. aid to Ukraine.
Chances are any Ukraine funding Johnson hopes to bring to the floor will also be under suspension of the rules. In this case, it’s a guarantee that Johnson fails to secure a majority of the House GOP’s support and a majority of the support for the package comes from Democrats.
“Let me tell you, when he forces that vote, again, under suspension with no amendments, and funds Ukraine and people find out how angry their constituents are about it, that’s going to move the needle even more,” towards a motion to vacate, Green said. “I’m not saying I have a red line or a trigger, and I’m not saying I don’t have a red line or trigger. And I think that’s just where I’m at right now. But I’m going to tell you right now: Funding Ukraine is probably one of the most egregious things that he can do.”
Johnson might have an unexpected savior, however: Donald Trump. On Friday, Johnson and Trump are expected to give a joint news conference during an election integrity event hosted at Mar-a-Lago. Trump is reportedly displeased at Greene’s maneuvering against Johnson. One MAGA world insider even went so far as to say Greene’s motion to vacate is “100 percent distraction. Unwanted. And just stupid.”
“We’re not going to get trapped into this cycle of bullshit that comes out of members of the House,” the Trump insider claimed.
“It’s fair to say we don’t think she’s being constructive,” another person close to Trump told POLITICO. “It’s no way to run a party; it’s no way to run a House. You can’t work in that environment.”
The bottom line: “The internal fighting is not appreciated by [Trump].”
So, Johnson is heading to Mar-a-Lago to not only beat the war drums for Trump’s reelection effort. The two are expected to talk FISA and Ukraine, and potentially do some horse trading on these issues to protect Johnson’s speakership. Over the course of his 2024 campaign, Trump has balked at being labeled “conservative,” opting instead for “common sense.” The former president has always been a pragmatist and dealmaker at heart—his pragmatic streak has been on full display when it comes to the issue of abortion as of late. But is he willing to make a deal to protect Johnson when two of the former president’s key issues—war in Ukraine and the weaponization of the federal government—are on the line and the biggest—border security—goes unaddressed?
Even then, will it be enough to save Johnson. Greene says maybe not; she’s “not backing off at all.”
This story has been updated with information about the prospective two-year reauthorization deal.
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The dictum: Hug the middle, avoid being tagged as an extremist.
Down deep, in keeping with his background in business and marketing, Donald Trump is a popularist. That being the term, uh, popularized by Democratic political analyst David Shor. It can be summed up easily enough: hug the middle, avoid being tagged as an extremist.
In fact, on a host of issues—he’s in favor of tax cuts, Social Security, and infrastructure, and against illegal immigration, crime, and most trade with China—Trump holds positions that rate as majoritarian. By contrast, many of Joe Biden’s positions—open borders, electric-vehicle mandates, energy export pauses, transgenderism—count as minoritarian.
(Yes, one could dispute every one of these assertions, but electoral politics is about themes and, okay, about optics. For instance, there might be a good reason—or no good reason at all—why the Bidenites chose to celebrate Transgender Day of Visibility on Easter, but they did it, and Trump has made them own it.)
The goal of the pragmatic politico is to play popularist while framing his opponent as an extremist. We might think of it as the electoral equivalent of the children’s game of “pin the tail on the donkey.” Only now, it’s pin the extremist tail on the partisan donkey, the Democrats. Or, of course, pin it on the elephant, the Republicans.
Just last month here at The American Conservative, this author wrote of Trump, “For all his personal vehemence, he is something of a popularist.” I specifically cited the abortion issue, which Trump has long tried to downplay, as part of a middle-muddle strategy.
Now Trump’s April 8 campaign video eliminates all doubt: He’s a center-hugging popularist. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision—which overturned Roe v. Wade, reverting the abortion issue to the states—Trump actually wants to vindicate that position. In that video, he reminded viewers that his three Supreme Court picks all voted for Dobbs. But Dobbs, of course, didn’t ban anything but federal overreach. In the wake of Dobbs, each state must decide; Trump knows pro-life states will restrict and ban abortion, while pro-choice states will not. The result will be a muddle red-blue checkerboard on the map; for instance, Iowa and Indiana pro-life, Illinois, in between, pro-choice.
Is such a piebald outcome satisfactory to either of the respective hard cores on abortion? Of course not. But the problem for the voter-minded pol is that both polarities of the debate, Planned Parenthood (PP), and the Right to Lifers (RTL), can be dubbed, fairly or unfairly, as extremist.
PP’s extremism is well known: In keeping with its tacit reality as a front for abortion doctors (anti-natalist zealots and profit-maximizers, both) it supports abortion up to nine months—and it doesn’t even hide it. Such ne plus ultra, which a former Democratic senator compared to infanticide, would be an anti-popularist loser were it not for one thing: It’s mirrored, even masked, by the perceived extremism of the RTL side, which emerged in the wake of Dobbs.
Put simply, the general RTL goal of a six-week limit on abortion is too much for most Americans. In the meantime, various Republican proposals for the death penalty for abortion, however marginal to the main RTL effort, are duly played up by the MSM and made to look like they’re coming from the GOP establishment.
This author counts himself as pro-life, but it’s been sobering to see the pro-life position getting pummeled these last two years, even in right-of-center states such as Kansas and Ohio. Indeed, the Republican fizzle in the 2022 midterms was attributable, in no small part, to the backlash against the Dobbs decision.
Or, more precisely, the backlash against the way some GOPers acted in the wake of that decision, seeking to nationalize what could have been, post-Dobbs, a state-by-state issue. In September 2022, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, put the issue of a federal ban at 15 weeks on the national agenda; that legislation had no chance of passing, and yet it caused a tremor, signaling to pro-choicers that the pro-lifers were coming for them, even in their pro-abortion bastions.
In fact, the unpopularity of this non-popularism has been pronounced. Hence this Fox News headline from March 27: “Fox News Poll: Record number say abortion should be legal.”
So now comes Trump, seeking a middle path, aiming to let some of the steam out of this pressure cooker—and of course, seeking to aid his own re-election campaign.
Indeed, as this author has argued here at TAC in the past, the divisions in America, red and blue, RTL and PP, are so strong as to defy any consensus; the best answer is legal devolution, such that red RTL and blue PP are both safe in their respective domains. That’s an outcome not satisfactory to any purist, but the possible alternative, civil war, is a good deal worse.
In the meantime, RTL isn’t happy with Trump. “We are deeply disappointed,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. Yet as POLITICO noted, “The group reiterated its commitment to ‘defeat President Biden’ and congressional Democrats.” After all, if Biden is re-elected, his judicial nominees—including, potentially, for SCOTUS—will be PP true believers; if they could, they would reimpose Roe—and more.
Still, the same Lindsey Graham “respectfully” opposed Trump on the abortion issue. Whereupon the 45th president responded, citing “the 10th Amendment and State’s rights.” With those principles in mind, he continued, RTLers in and out of Congress should “proudly get on with helping Republicans to WIN ELECTIONS, rather than making it impossible for them to do so.” Hard to be more popularist than that.
Trump-type popularists can say: Republicans have a moderate position on abortion, letting the states sort it out So what of Democrats? Do they wish to be extremist? Out in public with their anytime pro-abort bloodiness while Republicans are moderate in their Constitution-minded goals? Bring it on.
The post Abortion Shows Us Donald Trump’s Popularist Essence appeared first on The American Conservative.
Social liberalism completed its march toward the unfathomable through increments. There is no reason conservatives can’t win back terrain with the same playbook.
Former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels got laughed out of the 2012 Republican presidential primaries for proposing a “truce” on social issues.
More than a dozen years later, Daniels’s better dead than red (at least when it comes to ink) pitch looks even more out of step with a GOP that is today less focused on the national debt or size of the federal government than the culture war. Its ascendant intellectuals and new voters are more socially than economically conservative, perhaps for the first time since Richard Nixon was in office.
Except former President Donald Trump did bring about a truce of sorts on social issues, at least within his own coalition if not the country as a whole. His strongest supporters have ranged from transgendered tax-cutters to integralists.
Whatever Trump’s libertine personal values, his arrival on the scene unleashed committed culture warriors who make the Religious Right of the 1990s look like country-club Republicans by comparison.
It’s therefore fitting that Trump has delivered more for the pro-life cause than Republicans with clearer anti-abortion bona fides while also being the first GOP nominee to defy most pro-life activists since Gerald Ford in 1976, before the parties sorted on abortion.
That doesn’t make it any less true that there has been a realignment of sorts on the right in which social conservatives are vying to be a bigger part of the furniture than one third of a three-legged stool.
These conservatives cannot help but notice that some of their fellow Republicans would stick out of principle to many positions that poll as badly as a ban on first-trimester abortions, ranging from opposing minimum-wage increases to cutting entitlement programs to fighting foreign wars after the public has turned against them, while heading for the tall grass on the life issue at the first opportunity.
Republicans campaigned for decades on overturning Roe v. Wade. They now seem to wish those promises had gone the way of repealing and replacing Obamacare.
At the same time, social conservatives need more than political courage to be successful (though courage certainly helps). They have to think of how to effectively pursue their policy objectives and build political coalitions that can sustain their wins.
From the conservative perspective, it often seems as if social liberals are able to make the impossible inevitable overnight. It is true that social liberalism occupies the commanding heights of opinion-shaping, from the news media to Hollywood to academia to now even the corporate boardroom and certainly HR departments.
But social liberals often proceed gradually, introducing concepts that most people agree on in the march toward making the impossible inevitable. Consider the advances of gay rights in the 1990s: Social liberals appealed to inclusion in the family, the military, the Boy Scouts, in basic middle-class values. If they had proceeded all the way to Dylan Mulvaney’s forebears in 1996, Bill Clinton would have dropped them more quickly than Bud Light did—just as he did on the issue of gay marriage that very year.
If you go back four years before that, when Clinton was first elected, gay marriage was not a public policy issue at all outside the margins. At the same time, Republicans were being counseled to get over their hang-ups about abortion, which Clinton pledged to keep “safe, legal, and rare.”
“November 1992 marks the end of the 20-year abortion wars,” the more-or-less conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote at the time. “The principle has been settled, though some details remain. Never again will abortion be criminalized, though the question remains as to how far society may go to discourage abortion by creating such inconveniences as parental notification and 24-hour waiting periods.”
Krauthammer was referring to Casey v. Planned Parenthood, a Supreme Court case that year that was a major disappointment to conservatives and pro-lifers. Justices mainly appointed by pro-life Republican presidents failed to overturn Roe. But they did open the door to additional abortion restrictions, and for many years afterward there were incremental pro-life gains.
Thirty years later, the country had both gay marriage and a reversal of Roe. It can be difficult to predict the future, even as confident commentators proclaim we are already living in it.
More important to pro-lifers than any election result this year is ensuring that Dobbs v. Women’s Health Organization is not the pyrrhic victory that Casey ultimately was for our political opponents.
That’s going to require prudence as well as principle and courage.
The post Trump’s Abortion Approach is Prudent appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: Trump and the RNC announced this week that they had brought in $65.6 million in March.
Amid a historic reversal in political fortune, there has been one source of major concern in Donald Trump’s quest for re-election: money.
Trump’s campaign apparatus has spent millions on defending the former president from Democratic lawfare while Biden has raked in the moolah. The Republican National Committee has been pressed for cash too, and is undergoing a top-to-bottom overhaul while the DNC is flush with with the stuff.
But if Donald Trump has demonstrated anything throughout his career in politics thus far, it’s this: Don’t underestimate his ability to mount comebacks.
In a reversal of fortune, the early spring has brought news of a financial bloom. Trump and the RNC announced that they raised in $65.6 million last month. The former president’s effort now has $93.1 million cash on hand entering April, twice the figure announced in March. And Trump’s fundraising in March outpaced his March 2020 fundraising from last cycle when team Trump brought in $63 million.
For the man who would again like to be president, however, there is still a lot of work to be done to erase the deficit.
Biden and the Democrats had amassed a war chest of $155 million by the end of February. Their fundraising numbers for March are expected to be impressive as well. In the 24 hours after the State of the Union address, Biden raised over $10 million. A fundraiser last week in New York that featured former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton brought in another $25 million.
Nevertheless, this is a marked improvement from where Trump and the GOP were a month ago, and party operators are likely hopeful they’ll be able to close the gap more quickly than anticipated. And this Republican money coup mirrors the rabbit out of a hat that Trump pulled in his personal finances.
The post Trump and Republicans Get Needed Financial Reprieve appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: In the leadup to the November election, fundraising will become critical to the success of the GOP’s presumptive nominee.
President Biden’s reelection campaign has thus far raised more money than that of the former President Donald Trump according to the Federal Election Commission (FEC). This news comes as the former president’s legal bills continue to skyrocket.
In February 2024, the Biden campaign raised $21.3 million and spent $6.3 million over the same period of time. Since Biden announced his bid for reelection in April 2023, he has raised a total of $114.7 million and spent around $45.1 million. He also reportedly has $71 million cash on hand to spend on campaigning in the leadup to November’s election.
On the other hand, the Trump campaign has raised $10.9 million, just half as much, and spent $7 million in February alone. Since launching his third presidential campaign in November of 2022, Trump has reportedly raised about $99.4 million and spent $66 million, leaving just $33.3 million in cash on hand.
Trump also has expenses his adversary does not have to contend with: legal fees. The former president is currently facing 88 criminal charges across four different criminal cases (New York hush money, federal election interference, Georgia election interference, and the classified-documents case) in addition to two civil proceedings. Although the cases have yet to go to trial, Trump has already been ordered to pay exorbitant sums for the civil proceedings.
Trump has turned to the “Save America PAC” for help with covering these legal expenses. The FEC reported that the PAC spent about $5.6 million in legal fees in February 2024, which was more than what it raised during that month.
Another super PAC backing the former president, “Make America Great Again Inc.,” reported $25.5 million at the end of February, which is a notable jump from their $19.7 million in January.
The relatively recent departure of Trump’s GOP competitor, Nikki Haley, might improve fundraising numbers for the Trump campaign. Since Haley’s departure from the race following her decisive Super Tuesday loss, the Trump campaign and joint fundraising committees have seen an increase of money from January ($14 million) to February ($20.3 million).
Additionally, the Republican National Committee (RNC), now led by Michael Whatley and Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump, has made raising money for the Trump campaign a top priority over the next few months.
The post FEC: Biden Outraises Trump by Millions appeared first on The American Conservative.
The expected maneuver could prove either electoral gold—or drive a wedge through his ranks.
Donald Trump is teasing a nationwide abortion policy. In answer to President Joe Biden’s promise to “restore Roe v. Wade as the law of the land” (so long as he remains vertical long enough), the former president and 2024 Republican nominee has hinted at a federal limit on abortion procedures, likely in the 15th week of pregnancy, to “make both sides happy” in the leadup to the general election.
It’s a bold move from the former president, not that he’s a stranger to such things. Most Republican politicians and their advisors have declared mum on the subject of infanticide, at least until November 6. (The midterm ballot-proposal trouncing remains an intimidating specter to most.) But Trump is liked precisely because he ignores advisors, and in an election which may well be a referendum on abortion, not to mention IVF, it would be refreshing to know what we’re actually choosing between in November.
The idea that both sides may be contented is bolder still. Unlike a national budget, what is at stake here are two fiercely opposed ideas, one which says all human life is sacred, and another which says some humans are more sacred than others. Compromise on this issue is perceived as total betrayal, at least for the left. As one example of this, 15-week abortion bans are just as unpopular with left-leaning voters as 6 week abortion bans, despite the wide difference between them in terms of abortions prevented. Pro-abortion voters polled by NARAL overwhelmingly rejected the idea that 15 weeks was even a compromise; the same cohort has frequently depicted the idea of a 15-week ban as “an extreme position.” It is hard to imagine any limit on abortion, by timeline, cost, or otherwise, that would not evoke a similar response.
The same conscience does not seem to guide Republicans. While the party has spent decades affirming life begins at conception, the ease with which many have already settled on 15 weeks looks borderline chumpish. The vast majority of abortions nationally happen before 15 weeks: Only 6 percent occur at any point afterward.
The very idea of a middle ground is premised on concessions. It is worth asking why the right continues to give them, while the left does no such thing. Abortion activists have increasingly succeeded in making anything less than abortion on demand with no exceptions, covered by insurance, and up to the point of birth appear to be tyranny, denying women lifesaving reproductive medicine: The human sacrifices must continue. Instead of resisting the ratchet effect, meeting this vigor with truth, many on the right have winced or apologized. In due time, a law preventing abortions after the 15th week of pregnancy becomes not just a “necessary compromise” but even a stunning win. After all, Virginia allows abortions until the 27th week of pregnancy. We’re better than that.
Thus we find ourselves celebrating a little bit less baby killing. The choice has become total death or something less than total death, the amount of which remains to be determined. Still, it is worth asking at what point a party has given away more than it has gained. Case in point: A 15-week national ban is unlikely to actually pass, even with a Republican executive. Despite polling from the GOP suggesting the magic compromise line may be found somewhere in the second trimester, every referendum on it at the ballot box has decidedly not borne this out, and Republicans in the House and Senate have taken note.
That is probably at least in part because there is no rationale for 15 weeks: It is a simple median, and people rarely go to bat for medians. People do go to bat, especially women, when you tell them that men are going to take away their rights. We might learn to work with that.
All of this combines to make a very unpleasant picture for the unborn. With chemical abortifacients far more readily available since 2020, and a plethora of radically pro-abortion laws passed in blue states since the Dobbs decision, the total number of reported abortions in the United States have reached a record high in recent months, even though individual states like Texas and Tennessee have seen declines.
Nevertheless, while making both parties happy seems like a pipe dream, there is one position which will make the majority of women happy—actually happy, that is, not happy-on-medication, gender-confused, girlbossing, quiet quitting, divorced, in therapy, California sober, or writing trashy personals in the New Yorker. This policy is the one that leaves them with more babies rather than fewer. It is the law that protects them from post-abortion trauma, guilt, and depression. It is law that knows and loves the best of their nature, rather than catering to the worst.
The post Can Trump Successfully Navigate an Abortion Middle Ground? appeared first on The American Conservative.
Trump’s chosen candidates are winning from top to bottom of the ballot.
President Donald Trump’s victories in last night’s primaries in Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Kansas, and Ohio were foregone conclusions. All of Trump’s challengers have already exited the race and, for the third straight presidential cycle, Trump has secured the Republican nomination. This alone suggests Trump’s takeover of the GOP is near total, but there’s even more evidence down ballot.
On Tuesday, Trump’s chosen candidates beat expectations. Nowhere was that clearer than in Ohio’s senate primary. The businessman Bernie Moreno bested state Sen. Matt Dolan by nearly twenty points. Moreno received more than 50 percent of the vote and carried every county in the Buckeye state.
Moreno had the momentum throughout much of the campaign, as both Trump and Sen. J.D. Vance not only endorsed Moreno but campaigned with him. At the 11th hour, however, a supposed scandal involving a profile seeking gay sex on Adult Friend Finder from 2008 was traced back to an email address allegedly owned by Moreno. Moreno said the incident was a prank by an intern of his at the time. The known facts of the incident, not to mention the fact that the former intern responsible for the prank came forward and confirmed Moreno’s story, suggest that Moreno is telling the truth. Nevertheless, Moreno’s opponents, both Democrat and Republican, tried to make the story stick, but to no avail.
In House primaries, most of Trump’s endorsed candidates breezed through their primaries. To use Ohio again as an example, all but one of Trump’s endorsements in Ohio were for incumbents, most of whom didn’t even face a primary challenger. While some of Trump’s endorsements cut would-be challengers off at the pass, Trump’s non-incumbent endorsements fared well, too. The Trump-endorsed state Rep. Derek Merrin defeated Rep. Craig Riedel despite entering the race only in December after audio leaked of Riedel criticizing the former president. Merrin quickly captured prominent GOP support.
Tuesday night wasn’t completely free of close calls, however. In Illinois’s 12th district, the Trump-endorsed incumbent Mike Bost edged out former state Rep. Darren Bailey, who had backing from major Trump allies such as Rep. Matt Gaetz. Simply put: Without Trump, Bost would have lost.
The close race in Illinois’s 12th suggests something else, too. Bailey, as seen via Gaetz’s endorsement, sees eye to eye with Trump and Trump’s allies in Congress on policy. Bost, meanwhile, is seen as more establishment. Why Trump endorsed Bost, one can only speculate. But Bost’s narrow margin of victory suggests that, while the Republican base takes a lot of its cues from the former president, they do understand the agenda and politics of the movement Trump has started. When Trump comes into tension with a candidate in the America First mold, they feel it. This makes sense if Trump is truly a figure that tapped into latent attitudes that existed in the GOP before 2016; Trump has only heightened those attitudes and shaped the party around them. This is to say that America First, the MAGA movement, populism—whatever you call it, it will outlive Trump.
For now, however, Trump is still king and, for smaller realms all around the country, kingmaker. Trump has made 88 endorsements in the primaries thus far. Not a single candidate for federal office has lost their primary with Trump’s backing. Only three Trump-endorsed state legislative candidates have lost. Across state and federal primaries, Trump is 58 for 61 thus far. When November rolls around, the 58 winners will have the added benefit of Trump on the top of the ticket once again.
The post Thus Far, Trump Has Huge Coattails. The Best Coattails. appeared first on The American Conservative.
As the Israel-Palestine crisis twists and turns, Washington risks being borne back ceaselessly into the past.
“‘Hotel California’ should be the official song of the Biden administration,” former U.S. diplomat Aaron David Miller recently told the Washington Post. “You can check out any time you want, but you can never leave.” Miller, a negotiator in the Oslo Accords and the Israel–Jordan Peace Treaty, quoted the Eagles’ classic in reference to the Biden administration’s Middle East policy. As the U.S. looks to put the region in the rearview mirror after disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan, heightened American involvement in the Israel–Gaza war is causing a chain-reaction of military repositioning throughout the region.
In his State of the Union address, President Biden called the war in Gaza “heartbreaking.” While Biden claimed Israel has the right to defend itself, the president has grown increasingly frustrated with Israel’s prosecution of the war under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. As Palestinians in Gaza remain in dire need of food, water, medicine, shelter, and other basic goods, Biden announced he is “directing the U.S. military to lead an emergency mission to establish a temporary pier in the Mediterranean on the Gaza coast.”
“This temporary pier would enable a massive increase in the amount of humanitarian assistance getting into Gaza every day,” the president claimed, while adding that “no U.S. boots will be on the ground.”
In the day that followed, however, reports clarified that while the undertaking might not put boots on the ground in Gaza, the construction of the floating pier would require more than 1,000 U.S. troops right off the coast. The pier could take approximately two months to build.
But it’s not just 1,000 U.S. troops that have made their way to the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. According to the Washington Post, the Biden administration has been moving assets throughout the region since Hamas’ brutal attack on Israel last October. The primary objective of the initial repositioning was to deter Hezbollah from opening a new front in the war with Israel from Lebanon. Two aircraft carriers, the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and the USS Gerald R. Ford, each with a 5,000-member crew, made their way to the Middle East. So too did more air defense systems, a squadron of F-16s, and ships from the Bataan amphibious ready group.
In March, as the Biden administration planned its next steps and sought to broker a ceasefire, the Army dispatched several ships, such as the USAV SP4 James A. Loux, the USAV Monterrey, USAV Matamoros, and USAV Wilson Wharf, from Virginia to assist in the pier’s construction. The crews make up part of the Army’s 500-soldier commitment to the pier’s construction.
As the ships departed, Army Brig. Gen. Brad Hinson told members of the media, “We will not be on the shore but we will be on the pier and that pier can extend anywhere out from shore from 800 feet up to 2000 feet.”
On land, there has not been a significant increase in America’s footprint in the region since the Israel–Gaza war began. Although America’s wars in the Middle East have formally ended, 45,000 pairs of boots remain on the ground there. An estimated 13,500 troops are stationed in Kuwait, 9,000 in Bahrain, 8,000 in Qatar, 3,500 in the UAE, 3,000 in Jordan, 2,700 in Saudi Arabia, still 2,500 in Iraq, 2,000 in Turkey, 900 remain in Syria, and another few hundred are stationed in Oman. Just under an additional 1,000 troops were deployed to the region in October in response to the war in Gaza, including “a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense battery from Fort Bliss Texas, Patriot batteries from Fort Sill, Oklahoma, Patriot and Avenger batteries from Fort Liberty, North Carolina, and associated air defense headquarters elements from Fort Bliss and Fort Cavazos, Texas,” according to Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder.
Admittedly, the 45,000 troops deployed throughout the region is a far cry from the 160,000 troops deployed to Iraq and the 100,000 in Afghanistan during the height of the war on terror, but 45,000 landed and an unknown number of troops at sea, is an awful lot for a nation supposedly at peace.
“After 20 years of forever wars in the Middle East, we should we be trying to find ways to extricate ourselves from this part of the world just like we did with the Trump-Biden withdrawal from Afghanistan,” William Ruger, President of the American Institute for Economic Research and former Trump nominee for U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, told The American Conservative. “It seems like policymakers imbued with a kind of primacist worldview are unwilling to restrain themselves and appreciate that we need to be prioritizing Asia over other regions of the world.”
Attacks on American troops in the region thus far have not caused the Biden administration, or the hawkish establishment in Washington, to question whether or not the American empire is still overextended in the Middle East. On January 28, three Army Reserve soldiers perished in a drone attack on the Tower 22 military installation in Jordan near the borders of Syria and Iraq. Forty more were injured. Over a four-month span, from October 2023 to February 2024, U.S. troops in the region have come under attack more than 160 times, injuring 80 more soldiers. Overextension has created a soft underbelly for Islamists and militants to slash, all the while risking further escalation via U.S. involvement. And U.S. strikes on the suspected perpetrators have done little to deter further action, such as U.S. strikes on Houthi positions in Yemen.
“The last time the United States inserted itself directly into a conflict between the Israelis and various Palestinian factions, nearly 250 U.S. Marines, sailors, and soldiers died in Lebanon 40 years ago,” Dan Caldwell, Public Policy Advisor for Defense Priorities, told TAC. “The move by the Biden Administration to establish this pier unnecessarily risks American lives and opens the door to the United States getting more deeply involved in the conflict in a way that doesn’t benefit either the United States or the Israelis. I also worry that this could lead to yet another permanent commitment in the Middle East at a time when we need to be deprioritizing the region.”
“Clearly Americans are both sympathetic to the need of Israel to create security for itself after October 7, but they also, I think, are worried about the plight of innocent people in Gaza,” Ruger said. “Diplomacy seems like a better answer than creating a situation that could lead to more Americans being in harm’s way.”
The post Biden Continues to Imperil U.S. Troops in the Middle East appeared first on The American Conservative.
One of the questions of the past eight years has been whether there be such a thing as “Trumpism without Trump”—some magical set of policies and postures that will activate the voters who carried President Trump to the White House once and may again. This hypothetical construction cuts out the part of the Trump phenomenon that many historical GOP voters find objectionable, namely the man himself.
It has been a bad cycle for that theory. Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy both ran as close to Trump as humanly possible without killing the man and wearing his skin; the voters looked at them, thought for a minute or two, and threw the lever for Donald J. Trump, some of them for the fifth time, including both the 2016 and 2020 general elections. (Indeed, presumably one or two stalwarts for the sixth time, having supported his run for the Reform ticket back in the mists of time.)
If that didn’t end the idea of “Trumpism without Trump,” tonight’s display in Illinois’s 12th Congressional District will.
Mike Bost, the district’s incumbent congressman, decisively beat Darren Bailey, a former Illinois state representative and gubernatorial candidate, 53 percent to 47 percent. Bailey was supported by Florida’s Rep. Matt Gaetz, the most prominent exponent of “Trumpism” currently in the House, perhaps in the nation. (Bost and Gaetz had been at odds over support for the former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.) Bost was supported by Trump. That was that.
And, naturally, Trump won the presidential primary with overwhelming margins—not that it matters at this point, of course.
The post Illinois Primary: MAGA v. MAGA appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: Trump’s chosen candidates won Tuesday night in Ohio, but will they win in November?
With the 2024 presidential election already set to be a 2020 rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, all attention has turned to crucial down ballot races that may determine the balance of power come January 2025. The GOP’s plan to recapture the White House and the Senate runs through Ohio, where Trump has demonstrated repeatedly over the last decade, and did so again Tuesday night, that his takeover of the Republican party is total.
When Trump squared off against Hillary Clinton, he carried the Buckeye state by 8 points after voting for Barack Obama in the two previous presidential elections. Trump won by the same margin in 2020. Two years later, J.D. Vance breezed through his senate election and would soon become Trump’s closest ally in the Senate. Now, another Trump-endorsed senate candidate is preparing to capitalize on Ohio’s shift towards the GOP. On Tuesday night, businessman Bernie Moreno handily defeated Ohio State Senator Matt Dolan in a primary matchup some believed to be a tossup. With a number of crucial endorsements, Moreno had momentum throughout the campaign. While an Associated Press story late in the campaign cycle that claimed an email account of Moreno’s was used to make an account on a website to solicit casual gay sex in 2008 risked derailing Moreno’s campaign, Trump and allies’ continued support proved enough for Moreno to win handily.
With the Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin from the deep-red state of West Virginia refusing to run for reelection when Democrats hold a one seat majority in the upper chamber, it’s safe to say the senate is 50–50 heading into the 2024 election cycle. The map already heavily favors Republicans, though one should not underestimate the party’s ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Nevertheless, none of the GOP’s currently held seats are considered tossups, whereas Democrats have to defend seats in Arizona, Montana, and Ohio.
Of these three races, Ohio seems like the GOP’s best shot to clear 50 senate seats. Ohio is simply more red than Arizona is today. While Montana could be another easy get for the GOP, Sen. John Tester is a political survivor who has won three tight races and remains popular in the state. Unseating Sen. Sherrod Brown, who won the seat in 2000 by defeating Ohio’s current and very popular governor Mike DeWine will be no easy task either, but Trump and the GOP believe they have their man.
In other competitive House races throughout the state, Trump-aligned candidates carried the day. All but one of Trump’s endorsed candidates were incumbents, and most went uncontested. A Trump endorsement doesn’t just have the potential to push a candidate over the line—sometimes it scares competition off entirely.
The only non-incumbent Trump endorsed in Ohio was state Rep. Derek Merrin. Merrin defeated state Rep. Craig Riedel in the GOP’s primary for the 9th District by double digits. In 2016 and 2020, the 9th District went for Trump, but Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur has held the seat since 1983. The GOP aims to send the 77-year-old Kaptur into retirement and expand their razor-thin margins in the House.
Riedel appeared to be the frontrunner and garnered national GOP support until a recording of a conversation in which Riedel criticized Trump was leaked in December. Merrin joined the race shortly thereafter as Republicans sought an alternative to Riedel and earned the backing of House Speaker Mike Johnson and the Congressional Leadership Fund. On Monday, Trump himself endorsed Merrin to help push him over the line.
As it stands now, not a single Trump-endorsed candidate running for federal office has lost a primary. But the real test, for Trump and his chosen candidates, is in November, and a whole lot might hang on Ohio.
The post Moreno Endures in Ohio With Trump and Vance’s Support appeared first on The American Conservative.
The wisdom of LBJ’s resident contrarian George Ball is as relevant today as it was in the Vietnam era.
The phrase “the Wise Men” referring to the American postwar foreign policy elite was popularized by the authors Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas nearly 40 years ago, in a book of the same name.
Isaacson and Thomas chronicled the lives of “six friends” who, they claim, shaped American foreign policy in the postwar era. Yet of these 20th century giants, perhaps the wisest of their number received second billing. Indeed, I would argue today that George W. Ball (1909–1994) is among the least heralded of that generation of diplomats and policymakers. But Ball, who came to be known as “the Devil’s Advocate” within the Johnson administration for his tenacious opposition to the American war in Vietnam, deserves another look—especially today, with the Biden administration leading the country into a proxy war against Russia, a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, and military action against the Yemeni Houthis, among other foreign misadventures.
Ball’s career in public service spanned half a century, from the 1930s to the 1980s. And everywhere one looks, from the New Deal to Lend Lease, from the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey to the birth of the European Steel and Coal Community, from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the war in Vietnam, one will find George Ball.
Such was the esteem with which Ball was held by his contemporaries that by 1980, our country’s wisest diplomat, George Kennan, was expressing to the era’s most famous historian, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., his wish that Ball be named Secretary of State. But that exchange took place nearly 45 years ago, and in the intervening years, Ball has fallen quite unfairly into obscurity alongside other giants of the era, including Charles “Chip” Bohlen and Llewellyn Thompson.
As early as 1961, Ball warned President John F. Kennedy that, with regard to Vietnam, “Within five years, we’ll have 300,000 men in the paddies and jungles and never find them again.” To which Kennedy responded, “George, you’re just crazier than hell. That just isn’t going to happen.”
So who was George Ball, and how did he foresee that things would go so wrong before everyone else?
Ball, a brilliant, self-assured product of the American Midwest, was part of the wave of bright young New Dealers who came to Washington in the middle 1930s. Initially posted to Henry Morgenthau’s Treasury Department, he came to represent a species of Democrat that has nearly vanished, a foreign policy hand who intuitively understood the interplay of power, of interests, and of nationalism in an anarchic world. His early forays into foreign affairs came through his work on Lend Lease, the Strategic Bombing Survey, and then, fortuitously, through his work with the architect of the European Coal and Steel Community, Jean Monnet. Needless to say, the French experience in Vietnam in the 1950s, during which time Ball served as the French government’s chief legal counsel in the U.S., was not a happy one. In his memoir, The Past Has Another Pattern, Ball recalled that he
had listened to innumerable French military and civilian experts discuss their nation’s plans, fears and doubts…. From that experience, I concluded — and have never ceased to believe—that we should rigorously avoid land wars in Asia.
President Johnson’s decision to escalate the war in Vietnam met immediate opposition from Ball, who was by then serving as undersecretary of state. The series of memos and briefings put together by Ball throughout the mid-1960s were so prescient that years later the journalist and author David Halberstam observed that, “Someone reading his papers five years later would have a chilling feeling that they had been written after the fact, not before.”
As early as 1964, responding to the argument that American “credibility” was on the line in Southeast Asia, Ball wrote to the president that “what we might gain by establishing the steadfastness of our commitments, we could lose by an erosion of confidence in our judgment.” We were, in those years, in constant danger of, in Ball’s words, “becoming the puppet of our puppet.” The national security advisor McGeorge Bundy felt that what was really at stake was the country’s image abroad, or as he put it, “the confidence of America’s allies and America’s self-confidence.” Looking back on that period, when all of the president’s top advisers, including Bundy, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk counseled greater American involvement on that basis, Ball noted,
America had become a prisoner of whatever Saigon military clique was momentarily in power. Like a heroine in an eighteenth century novel who gets her way by fainting if anyone spoke crossly, each clique understood how to exploit its own weakness. If we demanded anything significant of it, it would collapse; so we never made any serious demands.
Does any of that sound familiar?
The arguments from the pro-interventionists of the Vietnam era are eerily, indeed, wearingly similar to those advanced in our own time in favor of further U.S. involvement in Ukraine. Rusk and the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., advocated for more boots on the ground on the basis of their belief that if we failed to stop the Communists there, there was no telling how far they would go. President Biden’s warning in his recent State of the Union address that, “If anybody in this room thinks Putin will stop at Ukraine, I assure you, he will not,” is simply a warmed-over recitation of the Domino Theory, which remains, all these decades later, nothing so much as a fantasy—and one that that becomes all the more dangerous the more one believes it.
Given the risks as laid out so cogently, so painstakingly by Ball, why did Johnson and his men insist on moving forward? Why didn’t McNamara, who for years privately expressed grave reservations, step forward and challenge the escalatory policy of the President?
Part of the answer lies with the fact that the Johnson administration’s Vietnam policy was driven by the fear of an influential foreign lobby. In a 1968 interview with the pioneering oral historian Jean Stein, Sen. Joseph Tydings of Maryland found it “amazing” how
all of the top persons were deceived in Vietnam each time they would go over. It was partly the holdover atmosphere from the McCarthy era…the people in the State Department who should have been speaking out were scared to death. No one except George Ball seemed to question and speak out against our policy. They’d seen the power of the China lobby…the young, inquisitive objective voices in the State Department were so scared by what happened…and by the purges by Dulles, Congress, and others during and after the McCarthy era.
Today, the role of ideological enforcer is played not by the China Lobby but by the Captive Nations lobby, led, of course, by the most fanatical interventionists in Washington. Anyone doubting that such a lobby exists might refer themselves to the current controversies roiling the Helsinki Commission on Capitol Hill. In such an atmosphere, where even relatively meek expressions of dissent are drowned out and condemned by pro-interventionists, one must wonder how many within the administration or on the Hill are dissuaded from speaking out by a fear of being smeared as apologists for Russia.
Johnson’s last secretary of defense, Clark Clifford (who emerged as a voice of dissent once Ball left State in September 1966) shrewdly observed that “individuals sometimes become so bound up in a certain course it is difficult to know where objectivity stops and personal involvement begins.” Clifford’s analysis applies with equal force to the current coterie of new cold warriors who seem to place foreign interests well before the interests of the United States.
Ultimately, however, one must concede that Ball’s opposition to Vietnam was ineffective: By the end of 1968 the US had 549,000 troops in Vietnam. Ball later wrote that he had “no inflated view” of the effectiveness of his advocacy. “I like to think that I somewhat slowed down the escalation,” but even so, “I provided no more than a marginal constraint on the momentum.”
The temptation, then, might be to say: So what if Biden does or doesn’t have a Devil’s Advocate of his own?
Given the risks involved, it is far better to have a truth-teller like Ball on the inside, even if he, as Ball was, is faced with insuperable opposition. After all, the pressure on the President to escalate remains immense. France’s President Emmanuel Macron has in recent weeks repeatedly signaled his determination to send boots on the ground should the Russians break through the current line of contact. The Polish foreign minister, Radek Sikorski, who has deep ties to the American political establishment, recently expressed his view that “the presence of NATO forces in Ukraine is not unthinkable.” And within the U.S. establishment the war drums beat as loudly as ever, with articles in organs like Foreign Affairs urging the president to send military advisers to Ukraine.
Indeed, the U.S. has been a co-belligerent in all but in name for some time; after all, three weeks prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, national security reporter Dan Dorfman reported that “U.S. and Ukrainian intelligence have even participated in joint offensive cyber operations against Russian government targets.” And more recent revelations from the New York Times indicate that US involvement on the ground has been more robust than often assumed.
In the end, the absence of a Devil’s Advocate, means, inevitably, as Ball put it, “no restraints and no alternatives.” And alternatives to war are needed now more than ever.
The post Where Is Joe Biden’s ‘Devil’s Advocate’? appeared first on The American Conservative.
The outsized influence each politician has had on his respective nation’s politics is not the same as political strength, let alone invulnerability.
Donald Trump and Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who met at the former American president’s Mar-a-Lago headquarters last week, make for an odd pairing. Leave aside the obvious biographical and temperamental differences (a quick scan of Orban’s Wikipedia entry illuminates the profound gulf between the anti-communist rebel turned conservative populist and the former real estate mogul, tabloid celebrity, and reality TV star). Orban’s recent visit to Mar-a-Lago highlights the oddity of a former American president courting the leader of a small and relatively insignificant Eastern European country. The only precedent that comes to mind is American liberals’ abiding fascination with the Swedish welfare state. Yet no Swedish politician has attained anything like Orban’s level of celebrity on the American right.
Left-wingers would surely respond that Orban and Trump are natural partners because of their shared authoritarian sympathies. This misreads both figures’ circumstances. Like Trump, Orban is weaker than he appears to his most excitable critics.
Trump’s flaws are familiar to anyone who lived through his first administration. His poll numbers rise when he is out of the news and decline every time he re-emerges to say something outrageous or offensive. He never misses an opportunity to bring up old grievances, even when they remind voters of the worst features of his previous stint in office. His share of Republican primary voters compares unfavorably to every previous incumbent.
Orban is a more practiced political operator. He is adept at fencing with journalists in both English and Hungarian. Trump is only called a dictator by his most unhinged opponents, but Orban is routinely described in the mainstream Western press as an “autocrat” or a “strongman,” terms meant to suggest equivalency with the likes of Vladimir Putin. Left-wingers call Hungary a one-party state.
The truth is more complicated. Orban’s government has just been rocked by a scandal that forced a political ally, the former Hungarian President Katalin Novák, to resign from office. Novák was pushed out over a pardon she issued to a man jailed for covering up child sex abuse at a state orphanage. The pardon scandal implicated several other high-ranking members of Fidesz, Hungary’s populist conservative ruling party, and has prompted widespread street protests.
The street protests neatly highlight Orban’s political strengths and weaknesses. The demonstrations took place in Budapest, an opposition stronghold that dominates Hungarian economic, political, and cultural life. They were mostly attended by younger Hungarians, often educated and upwardly mobile, who tend to dislike Orban and vote for the opposition. One reason international press coverage of Orban is unfavorable is because reporters spend a lot of time in Budapest, where the youthful, English-speaking voters they talk to dislike Fidesz’s conservative policies or have tired of Orban’s decade-plus tenure in office. An underrated challenge facing Orban and Fidesz is voter fatigue—many young Hungarians are simply tired of seeing the same faces in the news.
On the other hand, the nature of these demonstrations reflect the weak and fragmented state of the Hungarian opposition. The protests attracted young people because they were organized by ostensibly apolitical social media personalities, and not a left-wing politician or party apparatus. One major rally was headlined by a famous Hungarian rapper. These demonstrations were partly inspired by an ambient sense of discontent with the direction of Hungarian society, but that hasn’t translated into a cohesive political coalition capable of unseating a sitting prime minister.
The protests also serve as a useful reminder that Hungary is not actually a police state. Orban is no civil libertarian, and he has a history of pushing the envelope to win elections and consolidate control over key academic, media, and cultural institutions. However, Fidesz opponents are still able to organize marches and contest elections. The mayoralty of Budapest, arguably the second most important office in a country dominated by its capital, is held by the opposition.
Trump and Orban have something else in common beyond their political vulnerabilities. Both belong to the rare category of politicians who have changed the debate around key issues. Many politicians are more popular than Trump or Orban. Few have had a comparable impact on the political landscape.
If Trump wins again in November, his second administration will probably face the same problems that hamstrung his first term: staffing issues, internal squabbling, a lack of policy focus, and Trump’s own well-documented foibles.
Yet Trump has already reshaped the conversation on several key political issues. The pro-open borders wing of the Republican Party has been effectively vanquished. Both parties are increasingly hawkish on China policy. At least rhetorically, Trump has pushed the GOP to adapt its economic message to an increasingly downscale voting base
Orban has accomplished something similar in Europe. In 2014, he was a lonely voice against mass immigration, a spokesman for cranks, hard-right provocateurs, and others on the political fringe. Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s optimistic rallying cry of “Wir schaffen das!”—“We can do this!”—became the default response among policymakers and the EU intelligentsia to an unprecedented wave of migration from North Africa and the Middle East.
A decade later, Orban’s arguments have carried the day. France’s President Emmanuel Macron, a reliable weathervane for centrist technocrats, recently shepherded restrictive new immigration measures into law. Alternative für Deutschland, now the second most popular party in Germany, has risen to prominence thanks in part to its hard line on immigration. The newly elected Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, a hero to Europhiles and Atlanticists for defeating the Orban-friendly Law and Justice Party, has called mass migration a “civilizational threat.”
Pro-immigrant sentiment persists in the corridors of European power, and restrictionists still have to contend with falling native birthrates, policy difficulties posed by border enforcement, and the fecklessness of their own political leaders. But the conversation around the issue has fundamentally changed since 2014. This is at least partly thanks to Orban, who became an international conservative celebrity because of his uncompromising position on immigration.
Orban is not invincible. His dovish stance on Ukraine, while understandable for the leader of a small Eastern European country that depends on imported Russian fossil fuels, has made him even more of a pariah within NATO and the EU. The pedophile pardon scandal may not resonate outside of Budapest, but the wobbly state of the Hungarian economy surely does. Last fall, Eurostat reported that Hungary’s GDP per capita had been exceeded by Romania’s. The reaction in many quarters was what you might expect from Americans if the World Bank suddenly announced that our economy had been overtaken by Canada’s.
As the next round of parliamentary elections looms in 2026, Orban faces economic headwinds and a vague but persistent sense among younger Hungarians that he has overstayed his welcome. This is an ironic predicament for a politician who made his reputation as a youthful anti-Soviet firebrand; Fidesz began as a party for people only under the age of 30. But when Orban eventually departs office, he will leave knowing that he helped shift European opinion on one of the most consequential issues of the 21st century.
The post Trump and Orban Are Both Weaker Than They Seem appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: This marks the first time that charges in any of Trump’s criminal cases have been dismissed.
On Wednesday, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee dismissed three of the charges against the former president Donald Trump, as of last night the official presumptive GOP presidential nominee.
McAfee’s ruling comes as a setback to Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who is currently facing possible removal from the case due to her romantic relationship with her colleague, Nathan Wade. The question of whether she will be disqualified will reportedly be decided be week’s end.
Trump, along with over a dozen other defendants, has been charged with violating Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO).
The judge made his decision based on the assertion that prosecutors did not provide enough details about the criminal accusations leveled against the former president. He wrote, “The lack of detail concerning an essential legal element is, in the undersigned’s opinion, fatal…. They do not give the Defendants enough information to prepare their defenses intelligently.”
This marks the first time that charges in any of Trump’s criminal cases have been dismissed.
Trump’s attorney, Steve Sadow, said, “The ruling is a correct application of the law, as the prosecution failed to make specific allegations of any alleged wrongdoing on those counts.” He continued, “The entire prosecution of President Trump is political, constitutes election interference, and should be dismissed.”
The judge clarified that prosecutors have six months to submit a reindictment that includes the counts he dismissed to a grand jury. They also could ask for the ruling to be appealed.
Trump is currently set to go to trial on March 25 in New York for allegedly falsifying business records, but his attorneys are currently seeking to postpone the hearing date.
The post Georgia Judge Dismisses Several Trump Charges appeared first on The American Conservative.
If Trump wins come November, it’s vindication. If he loses under these circumstances, it could be a bitter electoral winter for the GOP.
With wins in Georgia, Mississippi, Washington, and Hawaii on Tuesday, former President Donald Trump’s delegate count has surpassed the 1,215 threshold to win the GOP nomination.
The corporate media would make it seem as if Trump just barely held on to become the GOP’s presumptive nominee. “Former President Donald Trump, at last, is the Republican Party’s presumptive presidential nominee,” a lede from POLITICO read (emphasis added). This despite the fact that incumbent President Joe Biden clinched his nomination just last night as well.
Trump captured more than 75 percent of the vote in Washington, 85 percent of the vote in Georgia, 90 percent of the vote in Mississippi, and 97 percent of the vote in the Hawaii caucuses. Those percentages would have been higher still without mail in votes or early votes cast prior to Haley dropping out. Biden performed similarly in the Democratic contests, and did not face an uncommitted protest vote Tuesday night.
Almost everyone knew it was going to be Trump—before the delegates, before the dropouts, before the former president officially declared. Most saw candidates who entered the race to oppose him, besides maybe Vivek Ramaswamy, running straight into a buzz saw. Suffice it to say, when that happens, you don’t come out the same on the other side. Such has been the case for Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis and South Carolina’s former Governor Nikki Haley. Substance and style aside, anyone who tried to go toe to toe with Trump this cycle will continue to have their judgment questioned long into the future.
The primaries have been nothing but a formality, but holding on to such traditions even when there isn’t much need is a rather good thing. Democrats, by scrapping parts of the process, have run into serious discontent with portions of its voter base.
November, however, will be anything but a formality. Right now, things look good for Trump. He is leading in all the major swing states’ polls, and Americans think things were better under Trump than under Biden. And Biden is just too old.
But Election Day is a long way away. Polls don’t win elections. Turnout machines do, and the Democrats’ machine is better. If Trump wins come November, it’s vindication. If he loses under these circumstances, it could be a bitter electoral winter for the GOP.
The post Donald Trump Officially Becomes GOP Presumptive Nominee appeared first on The American Conservative.
Unlike in 2016, in 2024 there’s no obvious happy ending.
A good lens through which to view the impending presidential race is Michael Anton’s essay “The Flight 93 Election,” published in September 2016. With enviable panache, Anton sought to shame the Trump-averse conservative establishment to shed its resistance to the GOP nominee. The political situation was desperate, he argued: progressives were approaching a permanent victory that would destroy whatever remained of the traditional American republic. To hold off 16 years of uninterrupted rule by Obama and Hillary, conservatives had no choice but to swallow their doubts and storm the cockpit; with Trump they would at least have a chance. Filling his piece with memorable tropes (“Conservative Inc.” as the Washington Generals, perennial foil to the Harlem Globetrotters, content to lose and get paid) Anton questioned whether the Washington network held any genuine conservative beliefs at all, so ready was it to lose gradually till there was nothing left to conserve.
One question is whether the state of the nation is worse or better than it was then. The answer is not simple. The victorious Trump had a fair to middling term in the White House. He received no political honeymoon, facing strident opposition from the beginning of his term. He did not build much of his promised border wall, though his flurry of executive orders certainly helped slow illegal immigration. Until the pandemic the economy was strong, notably so for blue collar workers. He didn’t start any wars.
Only towards the end of his term did he begin to realize that he could not hire luminaries from the Republican establishment to pursue his foreign policy agenda. He never achieved broad approval ratings, approaching fifty percent only for a brief moment shortly before the pandemic hit. He faced a highly dishonest impeachment effort (Russiagate) organized by Democratic elites with an assist from deep-state bureaucrats, experienced heavy losses in the 2018 midterms, and then Covid. Trump showed genuinely effective national leadership perhaps for the first time in rushing the development of vaccines that proved effective in diminishing the Covid danger. Leaders of the pharmaceutical establishment delayed the release of promising vaccine test results until after the 2020 vote, ensuring Trump received no political credit.
Many (I among them) believed Trump’s election denial after November 2020 would wreck any hopes of subsequent political career; you don’t have to believe the Democratic claim that the clownish unarmed rioters of January 6 were engaged in “insurrection” to think Trump’s futile and legally unsubstantiated claims of election robbery were banana republic stuff, unworthy of an American president. Like most, I underestimated the loyalty Trump generated from working class voters, who had never been such a strong GOP demographic.
Whether in reaction to Trump or moving to political rhythms untied to the presidency, the country turned sharply left during Trump’s term in office. Wokeness was already a major factor in the media and university circles by 2014, and various anti-policing measures or crude anti-white rhetoric continued to grow during the Trump presidency. They reached a spasmodic climax in the George Floyd riots in summer of 2020. Nancy Pelosi summoned her caucus to kneel in Kente cloth in the Capitol’s Emancipation Hall, while comparable acts of performative submissiveness proliferated wherever one looked. Throughout the country, Black Lives Matter and Antifa led rioters looted stores and burned down police stations, with large scale mainstream media support.
Trump seemed to do little but send off angry tweets. Had it not been for the savvy hand of Attorney General William Barr, who mobilized federal law enforcement officials from all over the country, Washington, D.C. might have experienced a color revolution in early June, with Trump’s presidency ending in the White House basement where he was seeking shelter from the mobs.
If Biden had presided over any kind of normal presidency, he would be a lock for re-election in 2024. He has benefitted from the inevitable post-covid economic rebound. Inflation is problematic, but not so bad as feared a year ago and far from the 1970s’ levels. It was not Biden’s intent, but wokeness has receded somewhat during his presidency: racial discrimination against whites and Asians in college admissions has been ruled illegal by the Supreme Court. Soros-funded pro criminal district attorneys have in at least one case been forced from office, and most now face spirited political resistance. The wave of pro-criminal local legislation passed during the Trump era is being chipped away or reversed. Corporate America is reducing its race commissars, otherwise known as DEI departments, and universities are beginning to debate whether mandatory DEI statements should be an inextricable part of their faculty hiring processes. That bundle of issues—a key reason many pulled the Trump emergency lever in 2016—proves to be at least somewhat disassociated from presidential politics.
But on several critical issues, Biden has been genuinely awful, far worse than his detractors anticipated. Illegal immigration was a huge concern for Trump voters in 2016; Biden’s essentially open border policy managed to turn it into the number one issue for Democrats and independents as well. As an unforced political error, it is astonishing. Before Biden, immigration had never polled as a number one concern for Americans. The surges of people from all over the world crossing the southern border at will is a direct consequence of Biden policies, as his administration hastened to overturn every measure Trump and his predecessors had used to discourage illegal border crossing.
It is hard to understand this behavior from an old line “centrist” Democrat except as a signifier of how much Democrats had changed internally, how important it was for new generation of activists rising to control the party to bring as many unvetted and unselected people into the country as rapidly as they could. The French author Renaud Camus’s concept of “the Great Replacement”—a process through which the historic populations of the West are essentially stripped of their sovereignty through demographic submergence—was long dismissed as conspiracy theory or over-the-top polemic. The Biden record makes one wonder.
In foreign policy, the Biden record is a disaster. From 2016 to 2020, the world was more or less at peace. Today, it is inflamed in conflict, with multiple dangers of escalation into wider war, even nuclear war. Much of this is Biden’s fault. He shouldn’t be blamed entirely for support of Israel and its Gaza operation, which has antagonized progressives in his coalition. Facing a choice between abetting (through imposing a ceasefire on Israel) a barbaric terrorist organization and backing an Israeli government committed to smothering both maximalist Palestinian aspirations and entirely legitimate ones, Biden has failed to find an acceptable path. Netanyahu has always been confident his pronouncements could be ignored without consequence.
Ukraine, a war which has generated roughly twenty times the death toll of Gaza, is more obviously a Biden failure. The veteran American diplomat Chas Freeman recently described the presidential race as a contest “between a senile warmonger and a malignant narcissist.” With Ukraine, the description is apt. Why did Biden refuse seriously to negotiate during the run-up to war, what did he think would happen? He has tied American prestige to Ukrainian president Zelensky’s vision of what should be the only acceptable dispensation—Ukraine retains all of its territory, including its Russian-populated areas, including Crimea, and joins NATO. Anatol Lieven has pointed out that not a single hawk during the Reagan era (which today’s Democrats pretend to respect in counterpoint today’s America First Republicans) imagined bringing Crimea under NATO jurisdiction and evicting the Russian fleet from Sevastopol would be a desirable or feasible goal for the West. Now that Russia is no longer communist, it is American policy.
The United States signed on to this by embracing Nato expansion. Biden as a hawkish NATO-enlarger was never a subject of interest in the 2020 election or any of the previous times Biden ran. (The mainstream press would typically credit his “foreign policy experience.”) It should have been. One can go back to the 1998 Senate debate over NATO enlargement, won inevitably by the side promising greater profits for the military industrial complex, to see its contours. That debate was spirited, and we might take solace from the fact (unlike the present) that it took place at all.
Opposing NATO expansion, Senator Daniel Moynihan, the last intellectual in American politics, warned “We’re walking into ethnic historical enmities. We have no idea what we’re getting into.” Taking Moynihan’s side, Republican senator John Warner of Virginia warned of antagonizing Russia by building an “iron ring” around it. And from whom came the most strident objection to Warner and Moynihan? According to the New York Times, Joseph Biden, “took the floor and erupted…stalking the Senate floor, flailing his arms….”
This was when NATO expansion concerned Poland and Hungary and the Czech Republic, but Biden clearly saw no such limits. Foreshadowing future developments, he brought up Estonia and Latvia and Lithuania, and mocked Warner’s notion that Russia had any legitimate security interests on its borders. A quarter of a century later he would have the chance to translate those beliefs into American policy.
We probably have not heard the last of Ukraine as an issue in this election. It is even money that Zelensky’s army will be facing some sort of collapse before November. Perhaps before that point is reached a figure willing to talk to Russia will emerge in Kiev; perhaps not, and Biden will be facing an Afghanistan-type situation on the eve of an election he apparently believes holds existential stakes for America. The temptation—and there will be many urging him on—will be to go all in to stave off both Ukrainian and his own electoral defeat, add American troops to the advisors and CIA operatives already on the ground in Ukraine and do everything he can to maintain Kiev as an anti-Russia bulwark. We could have a replay of the Cuban missile crisis, this time in Russia’s backyard, over an issue of unbounded emotional significance to the aging Biden and existential strategic import to Moscow.
Biden’s chances to defeat Trump again might be greater with a vice president more people saw as a plausible president. Amy Klobuchar. Gretchen Whitmer. Sherrod Brown. But in Kamala Harris, who will likely be occupying the Oval Office in a year or two if Biden is re-elected, Biden has chosen a successor known for little beyond her difficulty in expressing herself as an adult unless reading from a script. Yes, she is a woman of color, yes, she sought to raise bail money for the rioters in 2020 when the Minneapolis 3rd precinct police station was still smoldering. Besides that, she is associated with no issue, no set of beliefs. The private musings of Democratic luminaries over where she might be parked—Supreme Court? presidency of Harvard?—would be comical were the situation not so dire. Bad as Biden may be, President Kamala?
I don’t concur with Chas Freeman’s view that Trump is a “malignant narcissist.” Narcissist he certainly is. He is not an authoritarian; he had ample opportunity to expand presidential powers during his first term but preferred tweeting to mastering the intricacies of governing. He yearns, at least as much as any politician, to be respected, indeed, to be adulated. With their efforts to keep him off the ballot, whether literally as attempted in several states or through imprisoning him, the Democrats have doubled down with their own version of Trump’s banana republic antics, betraying a lack of faith in “our democracy” surpassing that of any Proud Boy. Efforts to prevent Trump from running seem to have activated a fair play reflex buried deep in the American psyche. Republicans who hoped they might be done with him saw his popularity surge after the indictments; now facing transparently politicized charges in multiple jurisdictions, Trump is polling better nationwide than he ever has.
To circle back to Anton’s analysis, America’s political situation is at once more promising and menacing than it was in 2016. The left is less ascendant locally and culturally: While it racked up huge gains during Trump’s first term, advancing transgenderism, hamstringing law enforcement, imposing ideological litmus tests (DEI statements) on the hiring of university professors, it is hard to defend those gains now. Aaron Sibarium on X, formerly Twitter, noted that the same New York Times editorialist who felt “in danger ” by her paper’s publication of Senator Tom Cotton’s op-ed calling for the National Guard in the summer of 2020 recently embraced New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s actual ordering the National Guard to monitor the subways. People have to “feel safe,” the Times lady wrote.
It is not obvious how Trump’s re-election would impact such battles. There is a considerable possibility that Trump would be unable to govern, and progressives would be re-galvanized by his election, especially if the vote is close and Trump won only an electoral college majority. On the other hand, Biden, freed from the constraint of facing voters again, would double down on the open border policy he embraced for the first three years of his presidency. A President Kamala would certainly go in this direction. And Biden is, unlike Trump, a warmonger. It is not a good moment in American politics.
The post Flight 93 Redux appeared first on The American Conservative.
His Majesty’s Government is bent on destroying Britain’s oldest and dearest patrimony.
I remember when British people used to say things like “They can’t run me in; I haven’t done anything wrong,” or “They can’t do that; it’s against the law.” George Orwell noted in 1941 that a vague belief in law being above power, expressed in such sentiments, was part of the English character. We also used to say that an Englishman’s home was his castle.
But night after night, local TV news bulletins show police in body armor with special battering rams, smashing down the door of some alleged drug dealer’s home. And we are expected and intended to approve, even though these events, plainly done for show, have less than no effect on the vast levels of drug abuse in our society. In fact, although we have had a Bill of Rights in England since 1689, on which much of the American Bill of Rights is based (including, amazingly, the right to bear arms), we are very poorly protected from the state if it wishes to start pushing us around.
Two recent cases in the London courts, one awaiting judgment and the other perhaps awaiting appeal, would be engaging the attention of the Voltaire of our age if we had one.
But we do not. Radicals, in Britain at least, have given up concerning themselves about annoying matters of free speech or the abuse of power. I think this is because those radicals, finally in charge, are actually rather enjoying the sweets of government—the freedom to start wars, and the freedom to squash the liberties of others.
The two cases are those of Julian Assange, an Australian whose Wikileaks organization published American secrets after Chelsea Manning leaked them; and Graham Phillips, an unloveable British video blogger whose reports from Ukraine have, to put it mildly, not glorified the Ukrainian side in the current war in that country.
Here I must give thanks for the Internet, which allows the curious reader to examine the details of these two men’s actions for themselves. There are many such details, and I do not ask anyone to admire either man. I have disagreed with Assange rather fiercely over the drug issue. I don’t much like Phillips’s behavior, especially towards prisoners of war captured by the Russians. But, as the Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter once rightly said, “The safeguards of liberty have frequently been forged in controversies involving not very nice people.”
I won’t even go very deeply into the argument about what Assange published except to say that his supporters fiercely rebut the main (and most widely believed) claim against him—that he endangered Americans by his actions. They say he took careful precautions against doing so, and that no evidence of such harm has ever been produced. I’d add that his revelations about the shocking behavior of American Apache helicopter crews over Baghdad in July 2007 are by any standards an illustration of what journalism truly is and what it is most profoundly for—revealing the concealed truth about the actions of the state, and so increasing the amount of justice in the universe.
The U.S. government wants Assange in its hands, even though, if he were a U.S. citizen, he would (I believe) be protected by the First Amendment. It wants to try him under the oppressive Espionage Act of 1917, which allows no public interest defense. The same rather disreputable piece of legislation was used against Daniel Ellsberg after his 1970s leaking of the Pentagon Papers. This is now pretty universally believed to have been a noble and correct act, and Ellsberg, before his recent death, was a vocal supporter of Julian Assange.
There is no question that this is a political case. It has been openly discussed by the former CIA Director Mike Pompeo, who was highly critical of Assange. If any British government official of similar rank had intervened in this matter in the same way, I doubt that our courts would have allowed the case to proceed. The Extradition Treaty between Britain and the U.S. specifically and explicitly bans political extradition.
Yet the London courts and the British government have so far insisted that Assange (languishing now for years in a UK maximum security prison as if he were a terror suspect) should be sent to America. It is quite astonishing how few British journalists, whose own freedom seems to me to be gravely threatened by these proceedings, have been prepared to back Assange. There is a kind of acceptance of this mighty crushing action, unworthy of an allegedly free country, let alone two allegedly free countries.
Even fewer voices have been raised for Phillips, the only purely British citizen (that is to say, without any other nationality) ever to have been sanctioned by His Majesty’s Government under ferocious recent laws granting ministers arbitrary powers to punish individuals without due process. Generally, such sanctions are levied against governors of Siberian provinces of Russia or Syrian army officers who will never set foot in England and do not need to be worried about them. They have been a way for Britain to look as if it is doing something in various officially noble causes when it is not really. But Phillips, a former minor civil servant, is badly hurt by this treatment.
The expression “Kafkaesque” is used pretty widely and lightly in our language. When we employ it, we do not really think that an individual is being treated remotely as badly as Josef K. was in “The Trial.” Yet Phillips is genuinely trapped in a legal matter in which he can do no right, and from which there is no obvious escape. He owns a modest house in North London and expects one day to return to his homeland. These sanctions, imposed by decree rather than by any court, make him a prisoner of the state. He cannot receive payment for work. Nor can he pay anyone for any services. So he is forced to break the law. He cannot, for example, pay the property taxes on his house to his local town hall. Non-payment is of course against the law. Some time ago, I had to intervene to explain this to that town hall, who might otherwise have taken stern action against him, but who had the humanity to see he was trapped and to act accordingly.
Phillips has been repeatedly told that he could apply for a special license from His Majesty’s Treasury, allowing him to live some of his life. He understandably resisted this, believing that to do so would be to accept a punishment unjustly imposed on him. Now that he has sought to apply for such a license, he has found that it has not in fact helped him very much. His British bank still does not wish to deal with him, for instance. He cannot make it do so. The charge against him is so strange that I find it almost incredible. Phillips is being sanctioned because he is “a video blogger who has produced and published media content that supports and promotes actions and policies which destabilize Ukraine and undermine or threaten the territorial integrity, sovereignty, or independence of Ukraine.”
Two thoughts occur to me. One is that Ukraine must be weaker than we thought if the insignificant video blogs of this little-known person threaten its territorial integrity, sovereignty, stability or independence. The other is that my own newspaper and magazine writing, and my broadcast debate contributions, critical of Ukraine and of British policy towards it, could, under a slightly dimmer government than Britain now possesses, be cited against me in the same way. Phillips, who could barely get the London Foreign Office to respond to his letters about his treatment, took this matter to the High Court in London as a civil matter, thanks to the pro bono support of a London barrister called Joshua Hitchens (to whom I am not related). Joshua Hitchens fought the case hard, on the grounds of free speech, and lost. He has since sought permission to appeal.
In initially refusing him, the High Court said that the arbitrary punishment of Phillips was an intentional outcome of UK sanctions law. It noted that “it is clear that Parliament intended that sanctions could be imposed in response to the exercise of rights of speech and expression.”
These are bad times for freedom of speech in the country that gave birth to it, and worse times for those who thought that the country, or at least a reasonable number of journalists, would rise in revolt against the extinction of its liberty. It turns out that they can do that here—that they can run you in if you haven’t done anything, and nobody but a few eccentrics will care.
The post Assange, Phillips, and the End of Rights appeared first on The American Conservative.
A successful State of the Union isn’t going to bury the age issue for the oldest-ever president.
Joe Biden is back! Ever since the State of the Union, there has been a concerted effort to put the age issue to bed instead of the president. This carried over into the coverage of former special counsel Robert Hur’s congressional testimony.
The New York Times checked the Hur interview transcript and concluded that Biden “appeared clearheaded most of the time.” The Washington Post described the document as a “nuanced portrait” in which Biden “doesn’t come across as being as absent-minded as Hur has made him out to be.”
It may be that the most extreme Republican caricatures of an addled Biden don’t correspond to reality, setting a low bar for competence the president can easily clear. It is certainly the case that the Hur report, followed soon afterward by a slew of discouraging poll numbers, was the proximate cause of the latest round of liberal pundit panic about Biden’s general-election chances.
Voters didn’t need to read a description of Biden as “an elderly man with a poor memory” to worry about his age. Nor do they necessarily need to hear Republican messaging on the subject, since this is a widely held anxiety among younger Democrats and Biden 2020 supporters.
That’s why the State of the Union address was never likely to resolve the issue either. Yes, Biden did well enough delivered a prepared speech for an hour and displayed more than enough energy to calm the speculation he will be replaced as the Democratic nominee at the convention later this year. Certainly, if the speech had gone poorly, it would have extended a negative news cycle for Biden and created further political problems.
But Biden has never flubbed a State of the Union before. He has generally done well on camera in big moments, with the arguable exception of his impromptu press availability in response to Hur’s report. Biden’s biggest hiccups have come up at routine events largely watched by professional political journalists, though some have gone viral on social media or cable news afterward.
The fact that Biden has usually been acceptable in the brightest spotlight and voters still wonder whether he is up to the job ought to worry Democrats. It’s also true that, however well he did last week, the main ad-lib from the speech—the exchange with Marjorie Taylor Greene over Laken Riley and the “illegal”—kicked off days of controversy.
Biden revealed once again he is out of step with the sensibilities of younger progressives. He responded by reinforcing the view of everyone else that he is beholden to these activists at the expense of secure borders or even basic common sense. And it is a problem he is going to have still more difficulty navigating as the Israel–Hamas war divides the Democratic base.
Most important is the context in which Hur mentioned Biden’s memory. The special counsel was never going to be able to file charges over mishandled classified documents while Biden is in office, per Justice Department guidelines. Any indictments would have to come when Biden was a former president, perhaps as old as 86. Under those circumstances, Biden’s forgetfulness was one of several traits that would make it hard to prove intent and win a criminal conviction.
That may be what many voters also see. They observe Biden slowing down, fumbling his words, worsening tics that were present in his style and delivery even when he was a young man. It is probably not a crisis now, they may reason. But it is something likely to only get worse rather than better. And Biden is asking for a second term.
Let’s compare Biden for a moment to Ronald Reagan. During his second term, Reagan was beset with rumors about his failing memory. He occasionally slipped in public, such as when he referred to his Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Samuel Pierce as “mayor.” It became a larger issue of public concern during the Iran–Contra affair.
There is little doubt that Reagan was a better orator circa 1988 than Biden is now. A case could be made that Reagan’s address to the 1992 Republican National Convention or his final public speech in Washington, D.C. just months before his Alzheimer’s diagnosis were finer performances than Biden’s State of the Union.
Reagan, a president I admire, had his memory troubles confirmed by doctors in 1994. He left office shortly before turning 78, the age at which Biden entered—and Donald Trump would reenter—the White House.
What might have happened if Reagan had been constitutionally eligible to run for a third term, which, based on the performance of an inferior Republican nominee in 1988, he would have surely won?
We may be about to find out.
The post Biden’s Age Is Still a Liability appeared first on The American Conservative.
The media theory that Trump’s fans like him because he’s rich miss the essential appeal of the former president.
Even after two laughable impeachments, four ludicrous criminal prosecutions, and innumerable tendentious conspiracy theories, the recent civil judgments against Donald Trump still shock the conscience.
The amounts Trump has been told to fork over—$83 million in the E. Jean Carroll case, $355 million in the inflated assets case, plus untold interest—are preposterously, cartoonishly, even contemptibly large. They reveal a lawfare apparatus so resolute in destroying the former president that it has come to treat astronomical sums as no different than Monopoly money. This impression was only underscored by comments given to ABC News by unbelievably supercilious New York attorney general Letitia James: “We will ask the judge to seize his assets,” James said—as though Trump Tower was a tiny plastic hotel on the game board.
Trump’s adversaries may have reached an apex of irrationality in these latest cases, but the larger strategy of making Trump poor—or, at least, appear poorer than he is—can be traced to the earliest days of the 2016 Republican presidential primary season. Remember the New York Times’ endless speculation about then-candidate Trump’s actual net worth? Or the time Fox News’ Chris Wallace hectored Trump over his four business bankruptcies?
These and other anti-Trump forces imagined that the future president’s appeal was somehow tied to his financial standing. The thinking went like this: if that standing could be diminished—first in perception, now in reality—then his popularity with voters could be diminished, too. In their ignorance of what motivates his supporters, the elites seem to have assumed that the MAGA constituency confessed belief in the “prosperity gospel,” the pernicious, indeed blasphemous belief system suggesting that God’s blessings can be gauged in material wealth.
In fact, this analysis completely misunderstands Trump’s appeal, which, as the elites know, has a particular resilience with blue-collar and middle-class Americans. While such voters have an innate sense of fairness—they believe that what Trump earned through his business ventures he should be free to keep—they do not flock to Trump because he is a billionaire.
One of the most devoted Trump fans in my extended family once told me that she felt that the former president was a good Christian man even though he had all that money—the implication being that men who amass great fortunes are normally viewed with some suspicion among religious people. Laying aside the evaluation of Trump’s personal virtues or piety, I think that suspicion is real, and I think the religious are right to be suspicious.
Some of the worst actors on the world stage are indeed the mega-rich who might be said to buy into the prosperity gospel in reverse (and, of course, absent any actual religious character). People like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos seem to believe that their material wealth confers on them, or at least confirms, their personal virtue and goodness—qualities they are determined to bestow on us, whether we like it or not. We saw a particularly ugly display of something like this mentality when MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow asked E. Jean Carroll what she was going to do with “Trump’s money” and mentioned something about supporting “women’s rights”—as though Trump’s own assets were free to be repurposed to whatever the far Left deems noble.
Ruining the virtue-signaling image Maddow was hoping to convey, Carroll—alas, unable to contain herself—rattled off a shopping list, including new clothes, new shoes, and a penthouse for the preening, contemptible Maddow.
Who, then, is more obsessed with money—Trump or his adversaries?
If the jury and the judge in the recent Trump civil cases feel that wiping out the former president’s bank account will render him less appealing to his supporters, they ought to think again. His constituency is all too familiar with how financially ruinous interactions with the legal system or government agencies can be. Many ordinary Americans will view the verdicts against Trump as akin to the time when they went through an unfair IRS audit or when their small business was targeted in a frivolous lawsuit. Few can relate to the scale of the verdicts against Trump, but many can comprehend the feeling of one’s financial house being besieged.
And for all of Trump’s boasting about all the money he’s made in his life, the man himself seems to be tolerating its imperilment with remarkable resilience and even grace. During a Fox town hall with Laura Ingraham, Trump was asked about the inflated assets case. Of course, he sounded off against the judge and the attorney general and defended his position, but he did not sound like someone greatly troubled by hundreds of millions of dollars in fines hanging over his head. He invoked Alexei Navalny—implying that both were figures targeted by the ruling class—and cited the Eighth Amendment. Amazingly, Trump has, amid his persecution, found higher values than pure and simple money.
If $355 million—plus interest!—is the price he must pay for running for president and winning, Trump appears willing to accept that price. And his supporters will rightly reward him for it. They know what it’s like to be in a financial jam, but they love, honor, and protect their country all the same—just as the next president does.
The post Making Trump Poorer Only Makes Him Greater appeared first on The American Conservative.
How to strike back against cultural Marxism.
We now know the world is flat. How do we know that? Because the left has fallen off the edge. Sixty-four genders? Safe spaces and trigger warnings, as if universities were nurseries? The sky falls if someone uses a “wrong” pronoun, e.g. “she” instead of “multitudes?” Graduates of universities, instead of wearing a mortarboard, should sport cap-and-bells.
When a movement has become a satire of itself, it has hit its culminating point. That is when its opponents should launch a counter-offensive. Happily, it’s already underway. Christopher Rufo’s excellent book, America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything, has inspired parents and school boards to dump Critical Race Theory. Senator Ted Cruz has followed up with Unwoke: How to Defeat Cultural Marxism in America that points to where the counter-offensive should begin, with calling the left what they have become: not “progressives” but “cultural Marxists.”
The term “cultural Marxism” originated in the 1990s when some scholars’ work, including my own, identified the Institute for Social Research, aka The Frankfurt School, as the creator of what we then called “Political Correctness.” (You can find a video history of the Frankfurt School on YouTube under the title, “History of Political Correctness.”) The members of the Frankfurt School self-identified as Marxists, but the Marxism they created was different from that of Moscow. The latter was based on economics, the former on culture. To avoid confusion, a new term was needed, and it seemed logical to label a Marxism that focused on culture, “cultural Marxism.”
The left hates the term because it is de-legitimizing. That is why conservatives should use it, rather than “PC” or “woke.” For example, if you are denounced using one of the left’s boogeyman words—“racist,” “sexist,” “oppressor,” etc.—reply, “That is the language of cultural Marxism, and since I’m not a Marxist, your words are meaningless to me.” Most onlookers will also not be Marxists.
Similarly, when the cultural Marxists talk about “diversity,” ask them if it includes diversity of viewpoints. They hate that question because if they say yes, the lie is obvious. When they admit it does not, follow up with, “So only cultural Marxism has a voice here?”
If Republicans capture the White House this year, there are some specific actions a new administration could take to strike directly at the cultural Marxists’ base in the universities. President Trump set one in motion during his first term: cut off all federal funding, including research funds, to any college or university that does not adopt a University of Chicago-like strong statement on freedom of thought and expression. Most campuses have conservative student groups that could monitor compliance. The rule-making process was not completed before President Trump left office, but his second term could easily see it revived.
Another action that would be immensely popular with all Americans would be to cut the chain the academic robber barons have stretched across life’s river. Without a college degree, a young man or woman’s future earnings are likely to be small. but getting that degree requires tens of thousands, often hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition paid to learn very little. There’s a way to fix this, one I’m sure President Trump would love: simply order that any public school district receiving federal funds, directly or indirectly, must offer extra courses in high school that, if passed, allow the student to receive a high school diploma and a B.A. at the same time. They would have the magic piece of paper without paying a dime.
This is already happening to a lesser degree. A friend of mine’s daughter here in northern Ohio took some extra courses and left high school with an associate’s degree as well as her diploma. She has already established her own business and is on her way to success in real life, sans college debt.
Importantly. the free B.A. would only be a B.A., not a B.S. A B.S. would still require college because, in the hard-science college courses, facts and skills are taught, not the “attitudes” demanded by cultural Marxism. So, those university departments would flourish while the home base of the cultural Marxist “critical studies” departments, the humanities and social sciences, would dry up and blow away. What a shame.
Here’s a final idea, not for government, but for Fox News. Cultural Marxism requires a broad cultural pessimism as the petri dish within it can grow. NBC, ABC, and CBS do a great job of spreading cultural pessimism in their 6:30 evening news programs. They start with Weather porn (“The storm of the millennium is about to hit a third of the country, aaugh!”), have Chicken Little as their host, and leave their listeners depressed and anxious, which is what the cultural Marxists want them to be. Fox does not presently have an equivalent over-the-air news program. Why not start one that dares to present good news as well as bad, in a reasonable balance. They’d have a ratings sweep in a fortnight.
May the counter-offensive swell and sweep all before it as Americans recover what most of us want: a normal life, free of all “isms.” I hear Russell Kirk saying, “Just so.”
The post The Counter-Offensive Begins appeared first on The American Conservative.
No other politician—let alone the current president—has shown the same pragmatic concern for the little guy.
I don’t really have anything in common with Donald Trump. I’m certain that he and I have not endured the same struggles, or have the same exact family values, or share every civil conviction. To be honest, I find aspects of his personality obnoxious and his frequent divisiveness tactless at times. I’ve also voted for him twice.
Thinking back on why I’ve voted for him, none of the reasons have much to do with the man himself. Trump turned the Republican party’s gaze towards the working class—towards people like me. Appealing to this sector of American society is tough. Most of us have been jaded by politics for years; establishment Republicans have been more obsessed with globalist agendas and catering to big business while Democrats have pandered to the highly educated and incited cultural discord. Trump, despite his many faults, lifted the rug to prove to the rest of his party that there are indeed millions of us scampering around down under it—many of us politically homeless and some of us completely disengaged from American politics altogether.
There were a few things Trump did other than acknowledge our existence that earned our trust. His almost comical outsider status, for one thing, worked in his favor. I almost viewed him as a kind of “Carnie” candidate—a political obscurity that you had to see to believe. Despite this, I was also convinced that he was bullheaded enough to pull off at least some of what he was promising to do.
Working in manufacturing at the time in 2016, I often worried about the stability of my future in this almost fossilized American industry. Trump’s talk of getting tough on China appealed to me. Growing up in the Midwest, Ohio specifically, I can drive to several old manufacturing towns nearby that are lopsided husks of what they used to be. A stark reminder of the skin America shed when our politicians and corporations decided that sacrificing the socioeconomic security of millions of Americans was worth the paper-thin bottom lines and burgeoning GDP as a result of outsourcing American manufacturing.
I am not completely averse to the Reagan-era, libertarian economic reflexes that have guided much of the Republican party’s fiscal policy for decades. I think there is real power in the markets these policies make. But I also see how retiring America’s manufacturing backbone here at home only to resurrect it more cheaply overseas has left my neighboring communities. It left the promise of the American dream in shambles for many in rural and suburban America, and for what? Cooler, cheaper widgets? Trump promised to scrape some of the dream back for the working class by renegotiating trade agreements, imposing tariffs, and championing domestic manufacturing growth.
He also promised to help achieve energy independence. Not only would this help the pocketbooks of Americans at the pump, but it would also be a boon to America’s industrial capabilities. Working to counter our dependence on China while also giving America access to cheaper, domestic energy was like unkinking a hose. For many of us in the working class, we saw the reality of fossil fuel use as inevitable—at least for now. Whether it was coming from overseas or being produced at home, we weren’t going to decrease our demand for fossil-fuel based products any time soon.
Then there were Trump’s promises of national security. Everything from securing the border to increasing military spending. Leading up to 2016, ISIS was running rampant and terrorizing various parts of the Middle East. Not long after Trump took office, they disappeared. You no longer heard stories of ISIS campaigns where they seized various territories. Instead, we heard stories of our pursuit of these wolves. Until you didn’t. So much of this was possible because of our military leaders and forces being properly resourced and efficiently commissioned.
While the chaos at the border is more insane today than ever before, at least Trump was willing to acknowledge that it was insane. There is a lie that those seeking moral currency let themselves believe: that enforcing border security laws is inhumane and bigoted. As a Catholic and as an American, I believe we have a mandate to be a nation that welcomes immigrants into our fold. But I refuse to believe that an existence as a perpetual illegal alien is one of security and safety. I want these desperate souls to have the protections and safety nets that are made possible by entering our country legally. I also can’t let myself believe that consistently granting mass amnesty to illegal immigrants is wise either. We must have border security. We must have an orderly immigration system. The work Trump began on this could have eventually led to a more streamlined and safe immigration process. Instead, it fell apart.
What’s the unifying thread? How has this coastal elite billionaire found his way into the hearts of so many ordinary, working-class Americans
Pragmatism. Trump created a mandate for the Republican party to begin the work of fashioning itself into a party that is bullheaded, productive, and committed to ordinary people.
So, while I may not have much in common with Donald Trump, or think he’s much of a sweetheart, I do think he has allowed a much-needed shift to occur. This shift has spurred on new leaders like Senator J.D. Vance, Governor Ron DeSantis, and Senator Josh Hawley. But Trump is the man for now. He’s the one who made it all possible. He forced the Republicans take a meaningful look at an entire class of people who have been fatigued by political and civil malaise for decades. And in the face of a Biden–Trump rematch, I expect much of working class America to continue its shift toward the party that pulled the rug back in 2016, rather than the party that swept us under there decades ago.
The post Why This Electrician Is Still With Trump appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: The former president’s daughter-in-law will probably be an asset in fundraising for the Trump campaign.
On Friday, March 8, the Republican National Committee (RNC) elected Michael Whatley, the chairman of the North Carolina Republican Party, and Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law, as co-chairs. Donald Trump was also declared the party’s presumptive nominee.
Outgoing RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel said, “President Trump deserves to have the team he wants, including the RNC.”
“Over the next eight months, the RNC will work hand in glove with President Trump’s campaign,” Whately said in his acceptance speech.
Indeed, the former president will undoubtedly benefit from having both a family member and a close supporter leading the organization. As the 2024 presidential election rapidly approaches, raising money for the Trump campaign will become a significant priority for Trump and Whatley.
According to an official RNC report, the organization began 2024 quite shy of $9 million in cash on hand, the lowest fundraising numbers since 1993. The DNC reported having $24 million on hand, a decisive, almost trifold advantage.
Trump has made it clear that raising money for her father-in-law will be a major goal for her as a leader of the RNC. At CPAC last month, she made clear that under her leadership, the RNC would go above and beyond fundraising for the Trump campaign.
She declared, “I can assure you that my loyalty is to my father-in-law, and I will make sure that every penny is used properly.”
The post Lara Trump Elected Co-Chair of RNC appeared first on The American Conservative.
The nation’s annual headmaster ritual showcased a president recklessly endangering Americans abroad and pursuing division at home.
The State of the Union has become a ritual humiliation for Congress and the Supreme Court. The House and Senate convene jointly to allow themselves to be used as props in a presidential campaign commercial. The president’s party holler and cheer like sycophants, while the opposition is forced to sit silently as it’s taunted for two hours.
On Thursday, Joe Biden even admonished the justices of the Supreme Court to their faces, like some brave boy snarling at a caged lion in a zoo. They had no choice but to play the part of his punching bag. A Roman emperor could hardly demand a more docile reception.
A few Republicans did shout back at the old man yelling at them from the dais. And the father of a Marine killed in Biden’s botched withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan was arrested for heckling the man responsible for his son’s death.
A republic with a shred of self-respect would not submit to any of this. Congress is under no constitutional obligation to invite the president to deliver such a harangue in person on the grounds of the Capitol itself, in the very heart of the House of Representatives. This practice may not soon end, since each party cherishes the opportunity for a president from its ranks to boast about his own exploits and beat up his opponents when they can’t fight back.
But as the State of the Union—the speech, if not the national condition—gets worse by the year, the question has to be asked whether the “democracy” we hear so much about isn’t harmed more by the abasement of the other branches of government before an imperial president than by an unruly mob storming the Capitol after a contentious election. Thomas Jefferson had no doubt whatsoever on that score.
The great theme of Biden’s re-election campaign is that he is the savior of democracy—never mind the fact that Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine during his watch, not Trump’s. Biden invoked the ghost of Franklin Roosevelt and set the scene for his remarks on Ukraine by reminding listeners of the plight of the world in 1941.
But he then went on to contradict himself in a glaring way. If Putin is the new Hitler, and if indeed he will not stop at Ukraine, then why is Biden only offering arms to the Ukrainians? Lend-Lease didn’t stop Hitler in World War II; it took American and Soviet armies to do that. Yet Biden also said, “there are no American soldiers at war in Ukraine. And I am determined to keep it that way.” So Biden wouldn’t send troops to stop Hitler? Who’s the isolationist now?
Most wars are not World War II—in truth, only one war has ever been World War II, and it isn’t the war that’s raging in Ukraine now, awful though it surely is. Tellingly, Putin also uses cockamamie World War II hype to justify his bloodshed: from the first he’s claimed that the aim of his “special military operation” is “de-Nazification.” The crudest of propaganda methods serve Putin and Biden alike where foreign policy is concerned.
Biden proposed no new strategy for winning in Ukraine, and he offered no explanation for the failures of his strategy to date. If Kiev’s counter-offensive didn’t succeed last summer, how is a nation with even fewer able-bodied fighting men now supposed to win with or without unlimited American arms? What is the definition of winning here anyway, and how will the next several tens of billions in aid achieve more than the last tens of billions? Biden offered no clues. He simply bashed his domestic opposition for not going along with blind war spending.
Biden couldn’t even end a war properly in Afghanistan—how can anyone expect him to prosecute one successfully? Yet Biden cannot politically afford to see Ukraine turn into his second Afghanistan, so whether or not he has a strategy, or even a vision of what victory would mean, he has to see that the war continues until no Ukrainian is left to fight. He doesn’t need to win the war; he only has to make sure it doesn’t end while he’s in office.
The domestic policies itemized and touted in Biden’s speech showed once again that he understands the Democratic Party’s only hope in the 21st-century lies in impersonating the Democratic Party of the 20th-century. Biden sampled and remixed Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Bill Clinton in presenting an account of Democrats as the party of the working class and upward-aspiring middle alike. Predictably, abortion rights figured prominently in the early part of the address as well, and Biden was eager to score points against the GOP by linking in vitro fertilization treatment to abortion. Biden is weak on foreign policy and immigration; he’s staking his re-election on the economy and a restoration of Roe v. Wade.
But foreign crises won’t let Biden fight his rematch with Donald Trump on the terms he desires. Progressives and Muslim Democrats are appalled by his support for Israel’s war in Gaza, and they’ve been driving the “undeclared” vote in key Democratic primaries into the double-digits. Pro-Israel voices in the Democratic Party, meanwhile, are incensed at pro-Palestinian wing, and Biden is caught in the crossfire. Neither side can have been satisfied by Biden’s State of the Union remarks, which included scathing criticisms of Israel, even as Biden continues to supply arms and funds for Israel’s war. The most shocking proposal of the entire address was Biden’s plan to send American troops into the warzone, “to lead an emergency mission to establish a temporary pier in the Mediterranean on the coast of Gaza that can receive large shipments carrying food, water, medicine and temporary shelters.”
“No U.S. boots will be on the ground,” the president insisted. “A temporary pier will enable a massive increase in the amount of humanitarian assistance getting into Gaza every day.” Even aircraft carriers and other war vessels are exquisitely vulnerable to mines, drones, and even row-boat bombs in the asymmetrical wars of the 21st century. The idea that a “pier” will be invulnerable is ludicrous—as is the notion of sending the U.S. military into a war with orders not to fight. Biden is concocting a situation in which Americans in uniform could die—once again—and will be more deeply implicated no matter what in another war and occupation with no clear endpoint. Using American troops in this way is unconscionable: Their purpose is to fight for our nation’s security, not to risk death as noncombatants in Gaza so a war-losing president can play a humanitarian.
Congress has shamed itself by permitting the in-person State of the Union address to become a campaign rally. Preventing Biden from using American troops for a non-military purpose in the middle of a war would be a step to reclaiming the legislature’s honor.
The post Biden’s State of the Union Was a Call to Congressional Resistance appeared first on The American Conservative.
In his State of the Union speech, President Joe Biden implied World War III has begun. The enemies are both foreign and domestic.
President Joe Biden delivered a shouty State of the Union on Thursday night. Whether the best is yet to come or the worst is still ahead is difficult to say based on Biden’s speech, both the intelligible and unintelligible parts.
Biden wasn’t without those looking to steal the spotlight. Throughout Thursday night’s speech, former President Donald Trump, the presumptive GOP candidate, was rebutting and reacting live via posts on Truth Social. Per usual, the Republican party organized a State of the Union response, delivered by Sen. Katie Britt. But, no disrespect to the Alabama Senator, all eyes turned to Tucker Carlson in the aftermath of Biden’s speech. For the first time since leaving Fox News, Carlson hosted a live broadcast reacting to the president’s words.
After taking the night off Super Tuesday, Thursday night might have been Biden’s single best opportunity before election day some eight months away to convince Americans he does not only deserve to serve another four years, but that he’s actually capable of serving out a second term. Despite—or maybe because of—whatever drug cocktail was put in Biden’s ice cream Thursday night, Biden failed.
Prior to the speech, the White House promised a speech that would show “the president’s vision for the future is very optimistic,” in the words of White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients. What Americans heard as soon as the president opened his mouth, however, was a hawkish president stammering down the warpath at home and abroad. He began every sentence shouting into the microphone hoping to project vigor, only to find himself incapable of maintaining the volume and clarity of speech.
“That was quite an experience watching that,” Carlson said to begin his broadcast. “That was possibly the darkest, most un-American speech ever given by an American president. In fact it wasn’t a speech. It was a rant entirely lacking in decency or generosity to his fellow Americans.”
“The whole thing was weird,” Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida told Fox News’ Sean Hannity.
Even on the ultra-rehearsed lines the Biden White House released ahead of time, Biden couldn’t deliver. When it came to the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Biden said, “Look, in it’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court majority wrote the following, and with all due respect justices, ‘women are not without electoral… electoral power… Excuse me, electoral or political power.’ You’re about to realize just how much you….” The president’s words became indiscernible.
What the president meant to say, per the White House:
In its decision to overturn Roe v. Wade the Supreme Court majority wrote “Women are not without electoral or political power.” No kidding. Clearly those bragging about overturning Roe v. Wade have no clue about the power of women in America. But they found out when reproductive freedom was on the ballot and won in 2022, 2023, and they will find out again in 2024. If Americans send me a Congress that supports the right to choose I promise you: I will restore Roe v. Wade as the law of the land again.
When the House Sergeant at Arms announced the arrival of the president, a beleaguered Biden entered the House chamber—and he was late. Trump was quick to make note of Biden’s tardiness. “The President is very substantially late,” Trump said on Truth social. “Not a good start, but let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. I’m sure he had very important things to do, but he is just now getting into the car. They will have to drive very, very quickly, you just don’t want to be late to the State of the Union. They will need Mario Andretti to be at the wheel of the Limo.”
Biden’s lateness was the least of his worries, however. His approval rating is just 36 percent with a net favorability 25 points underwater. Less than a quarter of Americans believe the country is headed in the right direction. Biden trails Trump in the polls in every major swing state, and by a 5-point margin, Americans say they’d vote for Biden’s rival over him—which is why an even wider margin, 9 percent, think Trump will win in November. Nearly three-fourths of Americans simply believe Biden is just too old for the job.
Biden’s central pitch to keep his current address of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave? He’s a wartime president. World War III has already begun, and his presidential campaign is the America’s campaign to take democracy all over the world by force.
“In January 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt came to this chamber to speak to the nation. He said, ‘I address you at a moment unprecedented in the history of the Union.’ Hitler was on the march. War was raging in Europe. President Roosevelt’s purpose was to wake up the Congress and alert the American people that this was no ordinary moment. Freedom and democracy were under assault in the world,” Biden opened. Today, “it is we who face an unprecedented moment in the history of the Union,” Biden claimed. “What makes our moment rare is that freedom and democracy are under attack, both at home and overseas, at the very same time.”
And though Americans tuned in to hear the state of Union, they first heard a speech on the state of Ukraine—a country whose borders Biden evidently cares about more than his own.
“Overseas, Putin of Russia is on the march, invading Ukraine and sowing chaos throughout Europe and beyond,” Biden said. “If anybody in this room thinks Putin will stop at Ukraine, I assure you, he will not. But Ukraine can stop Putin if we stand with Ukraine and provide the weapons it needs to defend itself. That is all Ukraine is asking. They are not asking for American soldiers.”
The president then claimed that “there are no American soldiers at war in Ukraine,” even though there are. When Biden told Americans he’s “determined to keep it that way,” one wonders what he means.
“Assistance for Ukraine is being blocked by those who want us to walk away from our leadership in the world,” Biden continued. “I say this to Congress: we must stand up to Putin. Send me the Bipartisan National Security Bill. History is watching. If the United States walks away now, it will put Ukraine at risk, Europe at risk, the free world at risk, emboldening others who wish to do us harm.”
Behind the president, House Speaker Mike Johnson nodded.
Carlson called Biden’s Ukraine-centered opening “deranged”:
We’re doing this not because it helps us, but because foreign interests are demanding that we do it. America is being used, as we so often have been, and the result of all this is that the world is now closer to nuclear war at this moment than at any time in history, closer than it was during the Cuban Missile Crisis. We have no idea where this is going. You never do once people start to die once wars begin.
The sentiment Carlson expressed is why Americans are increasingly skeptical of the claim that continued involvement in Ukraine—to the tune of billions of dollars and thousands of weapons, shells, and other pieces of military equipment—is in America’s interests. Even the Biden administration seems to have its doubts—the line has quietly shifted from “as long as it takes” to “as long as we can.” Biden seemed to reverse himself again: “We will not walk away [from Ukraine],” said the president.
“This is crazy talk,” Carlson said. “There’s no explanation of what the goal is here. There’s lie after lie. Ukraine can stop Russia. No, it can’t. This has gone on for over two years. NATO was stronger than ever. No it’s not. NATO is on its way to collapse, as is the economy of Western Europe. For not one sentence did Joe Biden explain what the goal of this exercise is, when we’ll know we’ve won and what the future should look like.”
An hour would pass for Biden to address the second war America finds itself entangled in—and the one that poses the most significant challenge to Biden’s Democratic coalition.
The White House may very well have delayed the state of the union speech hoping to have a ceasefire agreement in the Israel-Gaza war in hand. Negotiations in Cairo are ongoing, but Biden is struggling to balance the pro-Israel Democratic establishment with the pro-Palestine progressive base. As of late, the Biden administration has leaned towards the progressives, with Biden, Harris, Blinken and other top officials meeting with Netanyahu’s rival, Benny Gantz—a move that reportedly infuriated the Israeli government—telling Gantz the conditions in Gaza are “unacceptable and unsustainable.”
Nevertheless, throngs of pro-Palestine protestors took to the streets of the nation’s capital to condemn Biden’s Israel policy; thousands more have cast protest votes over the same issue in the Democratic primary in key states.
When Biden came to address the Middle East, he first took a strong pro-Israel line. Biden said the war started because of “a massacre by the terrorist group Hamas” and that “Israel has a right to go after Hamas.”
“Israel has an added burden because Hamas hides and operates among the civilian population,” Biden said before a strong pivot. “But Israel also has a fundamental responsibility to protect innocent civilians in Gaza.”
“This war has taken a greater toll on innocent civilians than all previous wars in Gaza combined,” the president claimed, citing 30,000 Gazan dead. “Nearly 2 million more Palestinians under bombardment or displaced. Homes destroyed, neighborhoods in rubble, cities in ruin. Families without food, water, medicine. It’s heartbreaking.”
Then Biden unveiled he’s directing “the U.S. military to lead an emergency mission to establish a temporary pier in the Mediterranean on the Gaza coast that can receive large ships carrying food, water, medicine and temporary shelters.”
“This temporary pier would enable a massive increase in the amount of humanitarian assistance getting into Gaza every day,” Biden continued. He affirmed, however, that “No U.S. boots will be on the ground.” If that’s the case, one wonders how the pier will operate and who will be operating it.
“Israel must allow more aid into Gaza and ensure that humanitarian workers aren’t caught in the cross fire,” Biden implored.
“This is so reckless that it qualifies as suicidal,” Carlson said of the Biden administration’s foreign policy. “And maybe they are, but the rest of us aren’t.”
While Biden made it clear his first priority is the state of Ukraine and not the state of the Union, the president suggested World War III isn’t just a foreign war but a civil war, too. “Not since President Lincoln and the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under assault here at home as they are today,” Biden claimed.
“History is watching,” Biden said in reference to Ukraine aid, “just like history watched three years ago on January 6.”
“Insurrectionists stormed this very Capitol and placed a dagger at the throat of American democracy,” Biden claimed, calling January 6, 2021 the “darkest of days.”
Biden didn’t only declare war on his opponent and opposition party. He declared war on the Constitution, America’s republican form of government, its checks and balances and the other branches of government. “Many of you in this Chamber and my predecessor are promising to pass a national ban on reproductive freedom. My God, what freedoms will you take away next?” Biden asked rhetorically.
“In its decision to overturn Roe v. Wade the Supreme Court majority wrote, ‘Women are not without electoral or political power.’ No kidding,” Biden claimed. “Clearly, those bragging about overturning Roe v. Wade have no clue about the power of women in America. They found out though when reproductive freedom was on the ballot and won in 2022, 2023, and they will find out again, in 2024.”
“He is so angry and crazy!” Trump said on Truth. “THIS IS LIKE A SHOUTING MATCH, EVERY LINE IS BEING SHOUTED,” the former president said in another.
Despite supposedly fatal flaws in the American system and a nation teetering on the brink of Civil War, Biden shouted into the microphone, “The state of our union is strong and getting stronger.”
“It doesn’t make the news but in thousands of cities and towns the American people are writing the greatest comeback story never told. So let’s tell that story here and now,” Biden said. “America’s comeback is building a future of American possibilities, building an economy from the middle out and the bottom up, not the top down, investing in all of America, in all Americans to make sure everyone has a fair shot and we leave no one behind!”
The president turned to the economy to make the case. “I inherited an economy that was on the brink. Now our economy is the envy of the world!”
“I believe in America! I believe in you, the American people. You’re the reason I’ve never been more optimistic about our future!”
The jury is out as to whether the American people believe in Biden, however—especially when it comes to the economy Biden was so keen to boast about.
Just 26 percent of Americans say the economy is performing excellent or good, while 23 percent think economic conditions are fair and 51 percent believe it is poor. Inflation has slowed, but remains higher than the increasingly-nostalgic Trump era. The most fundamental goods—housing prices, healthcare costs, gas, groceries—have put a real pinch on Americans with families or hoping to start one. Though the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) says unemployment is down and non-farm payrolls are up, 5 million workers are still missing in the post-Covid labor market. Full-time job growth remains flat. More Americans—60 percent of whom are living paycheck to paycheck—are picking up second or third jobs to make ends meet. Real hourly wages lag behind pre-Covid levels. Household income follows the trend.
Where are the Biden economy’s jobs going? To millions of migrants who have poured into the country, legally or illegally, across the southern border, of course. Foreign-born employment is up 2.8 million from pre-Covid levels, and even the BLS has had to admit its figures indicate at least some infiltration by illegals of the American labor market. It’s almost a sure bet the BLS is underestimating the impact of illegal migrant labor.
In Trump’s words: “Why doesn’t he bring up East Palestine and the other Towns all throughout America that he has left behind, and destroyed with Inflation?”
But Biden was more concerned with potato chips and Snickers than the southern border. “Snack companies think you won’t notice when they charge you just as much for the same size bag but with fewer chips in it,” the president shouted. “Pass Senator Bob Casey’s bill to put a stop to shrinkflation!” His predecessor was quick to make note: “Biden talked about the SNICKERS Bars, before he talked about the Border!”
Biden lost steam half way through his speech. “THE DRUGS ARE WEARING OFF!” Trump claimed.
Under the strain of the lengthy speech, the president simply couldn’t manage to organize his thoughts on immigration—the current number one issue for Americans. Biden would have the American people believe the border has never been more secure. “Unlike my predecessor, on my first day in office I introduced a comprehensive plan to fix our immigration system, secure the border, and provide a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers and so much more,” the president claimed. Then, an unexpected surge of urgency: “We can fight about the border, or we can fix it. I’m ready to fix it. Send me the border bill now!” Biden shouted.
“It took him over 40 minutes to get to Immigration, and then said nothing about it!” Trump truthed. Another: “His Border Bill is a Disaster, it would let at least 5,000 Migrants in a day, and that is one of the better aspects of it!”
“The most interesting fact of the speech was the emphasis,” Carlson said. “There was not a meaningful word for the entire duration about the things that actually matter to people who live here, like crime, or inflation, or fentanyl, or the foreign army now occupying our country. But Biden doesn’t care. There was no upside for you in any of the things that he said.”
“To lead America, the land of possibilities, you need a vision for the future of what America can and should be,” Biden said. “Tonight you’ve heard mine.” The president shouldn’t be so sure. That didn’t stop Rep. Jerry Nadler, a man who has had his own problems with aging in office, from telling Biden after the speech, “nobody’s going to talk about cognitive impairment now.”
To which the president replied: “I kind of wish sometimes I was cognitively impaired.”
The post Biden’s State of the Union Was a Declaration of War appeared first on The American Conservative.
Can an un-campaign win?
With the field cleared by Nikki Haley’s Wednesday campaign suspension, Donald Trump and the Republican Party may now consolidate their resources and attention and set their sights on the general election. While the temptation is to rest a moment, in fact it is a dangerous time. This is the last opportunity to fashion a robust framing for the campaign, and to determine which of Trump’s two prior runs will serve as the prototype.
There are three speeches that defined the early Trump juggernaut.
The first was his announcement speech on June 16, 2015, following his literal deus ex machina arrival via golden escalator. “Sadly, the American dream is dead”—powerful stuff. Trump outlined his core policy commitments—immigration, trade, infrastructure, foreign policy, law and order—and his core ethical commitment, namely, a defense of the forgotten man. (A two-way commitment, sure, but an ethical commitment nonetheless.) This speech was broadcast and endlessly rebroadcast; its transcript was printed in full in TIME, POLITICO, and elsewhere. Nobody with a TV or a computer or a radio (or, for that matter, with eyes or ears) was uninformed of Trump’s positions.
That campaign’s messaging was disciplined and forceful. Trump’s 2016 RNC speech expanded on those core policy commitments, and added strong, almost frightening rhetorical flourishes to the ethical commitment: “I alone can fix it”; “I am your voice. So to every parent who dreams for their child, and every child who dreams for their future, I say these words to you tonight: I’m with you, I will fight for you, and I will win for you.”
The (first?) inaugural, the “American Carnage” speech, sealed the deal:
We are one nation—and their pain is our pain. Their dreams are our dreams; and their success will be our success. We share one heart, one home, and one glorious destiny. The oath of office I take today is an oath of allegiance to all Americans. For many decades, we’ve enriched foreign industry at the expense of American industry; subsidized the armies of other countries while allowing for the very sad depletion of our military; we’ve defended other nation’s borders while refusing to defend our own; and spent trillions of dollars overseas while America’s infrastructure has fallen into disrepair and decay.
This is great stuff. Everyone can tell you what Trump 2016 was about, and the slogans that went with it—“Build the Wall,” “Make America Great Again.” The monologues at his rallies and his more issue-focused speeches, like the National Interest foreign policy speech, could point back to this handful of concrete positions and mottoes.
By contrast, the 2020 Trump campaign was unfocused. The party failed to produce a platform, instead belatedly shooting out a 50-item policy wishlist for the second term, which included the oddly specific (changes to the arcana of medical billing) and almost indefinitely broad (“Maintain and Expand America’s Unrivaled Military Strength”). This is hardly the stuff of slogans. There were no great speeches in the 2020 campaign; the defining messaging moments were Trump’s offputting debate performances. (Not coincidentally, it was clear from the end of September on that Trump was losing.) The slogan “Keep America Great” was static, almost sheepish. It was an un-campaign betting that the feebleness of Joe Biden would carry the day. It turns out, it didn’t; a placeholder Republican campaign worked no better for Trump than it did for Mitt Romney.
The question Michael Anton asked at the end of “The Flight 93 Election” and its answer are perhaps now more salient than they were in 2016: “But for those of you who are sober: Can you sketch a more plausible long-term future than the prior four following a Trump defeat? I can’t either.” The rhetoric of 2016 was well matched to the urgency of the situation; it was clear and aggressive. This current run, 2024, has yet to produce a clear message or platform. Part of this is an accident of the contested or pseudo-contested nomination race—the better part of the field was trying to claim “Trumpist” positions against Trump. (Even Haley made a half-hearted stab at a “Trump changed” narrative, excusing herself for serving as Trump’s UN ambassador and then running against him.) This was bound to muddy the waters. The waters must now be made clear, so the 2020 un-campaign is not repeated.
“In the end, they’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you—and I’m just standing in their way.” This comment from Trump’s speech responding to the Justice Department’s indictment of him last June can be a kernel of the message. Something about unity and normality and protecting you, the regular American, from unaccountable powerful forces in the state and its oligarchic friends. Something about pulling back our imperial forces, which are stretched yet thinner than they were in 2016. “Build the Wall” can be dusted off. But the point is that there must be something. Nature may abhor a void; voters certainly do.
Trump needs his second golden escalator moment. May we suggest an op-ed in The American Conservative?
The post It Is Time for Trump’s Second Escalator Moment appeared first on The American Conservative.
“It’s usually the losing party that begs for an easy settlement,” an official commented.
The Justice Department is expected to recommend dropping a fraud lawsuit which implicates Dish Network as early as this Friday, according to sources with the FCC. This proposed dismissal comes just before Dish’s CEO and Democratic donor Charlie Ergen and executives at BlackRock were scheduled to be deposed.
The case goes back to a 2015 FCC Spectrum Auction for valuable bandwidth that could be used for wireless internet. To promote competition, the FCC issued a 25 percent discount called “bidding credits” to “very small businesses” which averaged below $15 million in revenue over the previous three years. Between 2011 and 2014, Dish’s revenue ranged from $13.5 to 15 billion. Nonetheless, Dish, with backing from BlackRock, financed two ostensibly small companies Northstar Wireless and SNR Wireless, which went on to win the auctions, with discounts worth over $3 billion.
SNR and Northstar acknowledged the financing, but certified they had total independence. An FCC inquiry later found “persuasive…evidence” that the two companies served “as arms of Dish,” which had “de facto control.” The FCC, under Ajit Pai, doubted “these companies are, or could ever become, truly independent enterprises” and revoked the credits in 2020.
A senior FCC official familiar with the process tells me, “multi-billion dollar corporations setting up shell corporations to get subsidies designed for ‘very small businesses’ demands serious scrutiny in court.” This scrutiny comes in the form of a qui tam suit filed by Vermont National Telephone Company, which lost the auction to Dish and its financed “very small businesses.” Qui tam actions are filed by private parties on behalf of the U.S. Government, which will recover the bulk of defrauded money under the False Claims Act. Both the Justice Department and FCC supported the lawsuit, noting there was “a substantial interest in any discovery produced in this case that relates to Defendants’ alleged failure to disclose material facts to the Commission.”
After years of procedural and technical wrangling, a federal district court judge dismissed the case in 2021 arguing fraud had not been properly alleged and the government was not harmed. However, last November, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit unanimously reversed and reinstated the case. The three-judge panel unanimously held that the applications “contained false certifications that Northstar and SNR had disclosed all agreements, arrangements, and understandings related to the licenses” made a viable case for fraud.
The case was set to begin trial in February with both Charlie Ergen as well as representatives for BlackRock set to testify under oath. This was delayed; just as the trial was set to begin, the Justice Department informed the parties and the FCC that it would seek to dismiss the case and let Dish and its shell companies off with no penalties.
Alluding to this case and others like it, Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) wrote a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland on Wednesday noting concerns “that the Justice Department, after initially declining, will intervene and dismiss during the late stages of litigation after the relator has spent years and resources litigating the case.” He noted this was both a waste of resources and at odds with the False Claims Act’s purpose of “empower[ing] private citizens to help the government fight and deter fraud.”
“I’ve never heard of a party in any case—government or private—to back down just after a favorable ruling. It’s usually the losing party that begs for an easy settlement,” the FCC official added. Ergen and his wife are major Democratic donors, which has been widely speculated to be a cause for the favorable treatment of Dish by past Democratic administrations. Additionally, while emphasizing he has no first-hand knowledge, the FCC official speculated that Dish’s fights with SpaceX over spectrum may have influenced the decision. SpaceX’s Starlink and Dish have been in a protracted fight over an unrelated spectrum dispute. Musk tweeted “Charlie Ergen is trying to steal the 12GHz band meant for space Internet. Not cool.”
The FCC is an independent agency, and ultimately ruled against Dish on that issue. “The Biden Administration has almost universally sided against Elon Musk’s businesses over the last year.” While it could not fully control FCC’s ruling on Starlink, “if the DOJ protects Dish from the fraud lawsuit—this could sidestep the FCC to harm Starlink,” the official speculated.
While the reason remains undeclared, the Justice Department is inviting speculation by reversing its position and dropping a case implicating a prominent Democratic donor on the eve of trial.
The post Why Is Biden’s Justice Department Going Soft on Democrat Donors? appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema will not seek reelection.
Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema announced Tuesday she will not be seeking reelection come November.
In a video statement posted Tuesday afternoon, Sinema claimed the Senate is a hyper partisan, dysfunctional place. “Because I choose civility, understanding, listening, working together to get stuff done, I will leave the Senate at the end of this year,” the independent senator said. Sinema, still in her first term, has chosen to be one and done.
A message for Arizonans from Senator Kyrsten Sinema pic.twitter.com/1XWFSWgGdh
— Kyrsten Sinema (@SenatorSinema) March 5, 2024
Elected in 2018 as a Democrat, Sinema changed her political affiliation to independent in 2022. Though the Arizona senator continued to caucus with Democrats, it was the beginning of the end of Sinema’s senate career. Democrats are running Rep. Ruben Gallego to replace Sinema. He’ll likely square off against Republican candidate Kari Lake come November.
Sinema was trailing both Gallego and Lake in the polls, but where her centrist supporters run to next is hard to say. Upon learning about Sinema’s announcement, Gallego tweeted, “I want to thank @SenatorSinema for her nearly two decades of service to our state. Arizona, we are at a crossroads. Protecting abortion access, tackling housing affordability, securing our water supply, defending our democracy—all of this and more is on the line. It’s time Democrats, Independents, and Republicans come together and reject Kari Lake and her dangerous positions.”
Lake fired off a tweet of her own, wishing Sinema “the best in her next chapter”: “As a Journalist, I covered Kyrsten Sinema for many years. We may not agree on everything, but I know she shares my love for Arizona. Senator Sinema had the courage to stand tall against the Far-Left in defense of the filibuster—despite the overwhelming pressure from the radicals in her party like Ruben Gallego who called on her to burn it all down.”
Sen. Steve Daines, the current NRSC chairman, welcomed Sinema’s exit. “With recent polling showing Kyrsten Sinema pulling far more Republican voters than Democrat voters, her decision to retire improves Kari Lake’s opportunity to flip this seat,” Daines claimed.
In a head to head matchup between Lake and Gallego, current polls suggest it’s neck and neck for the seat that may determine which party controls the senate come 2025.
The post Sinema to be a One and Done Senator appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: Sen. John Barrasso will not be running to replace Mitch McConnell as GOP leader.
In the shadow of Super Tuesday, another race is taking shape: the race to replace Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
While only one candidate has declared their intent to replace McConnell, bids for the GOP leadership undercard are narrowing the field to replace McConnell.
Last week, McConnell announced he would not seek another term as the Republican party’s leader in the upper chamber come November 2024. While the Kentucky Senator is stepping down from leadership, McConnell said he intends to serve out the rest of his term, which ends in 2027. The surprise announcement, made just days before a (temporarily) averted government shutdown sent Capitol Hill into a frenzy. The spotlight turned to the three Johns of the GOP conference: Senate GOP WHIP John Thune, Senate Republican Conference Chair John Barrasso, and Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who has long had ambitions for Senate GOP leader and jumped in the race the day after McConnell’s announcement. When Sen. J.D. Vance was asked who he’d support for leadership shortly after McConnell’s retirement, the Ohio Senator quipped, “I plan to support John.”
A few days later, Vance told the media that “John Barrasso is certainly one of the leadership candidates who cares a lot, I think, about where the broader conservative movement is.” Nevertheless, Vance added, “I don’t know that he actually wants to run.”
Barrasso has made his decision. The Wyoming Senator will be running for GOP WHIP come 2024, clearing the path for Thune if the number two Republican wanted to jump in. Nevertheless, there could be a spanner in the works for one of the Johns. Rumors continue to circulate that Sens. Steve Daines, Marco Rubio, or Rick Scott could throw their hat in the ring. One of the potential non-Johns, Sen. Tom Cotton, will be running to replace Barasso as conference chair.
If the field gets crowded, a coveted endorsement from former President Donald Trump could become the decisive factor.
The post Senate Leadership Update: One John Bows Out appeared first on The American Conservative.
Don’t expect anything super from Super Tuesday. Expect more of the same.
Super Tuesday is upon us. Across 16 states, from Maine to California, Alabama to Alaska, voters will be casting their ballots today in the most delegate-rich day on the primary calendar. But don’t expect anything super from Tuesday; rather, expect more of the same.
At this point, neither presidential primary seems much of a contest. President Joe Biden is sailing through the primary, thanks in part to his party’s constant maneuvering to protect the beleaguered president. The only hiccup so far: 13 percent of voters in Michigan withheld their support for Biden over his policy on the war in Gaza. Former President Donald Trump, meanwhile, is handily beating former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley in the delegate count with 244 delegates to Haley’s 43. Haley did win the GOP’s Washington, D.C. primary over the weekend, but winning a contest in which just over 3,000 votes were cast in one of the bluest places in the nation does little to build momentum. The D.C. primary results are not causing any campaign donors to suddenly reconsider their decision to pull out of Haley’s campaign.
Trump is going for a Super Tuesday clean sweep to put the nail in Haley’s coffin. In total, 865 Republican delegates are up for grabs in 15 states, which represents more than a third of the 2,429-delegate pie GOP presidential candidates are battling over. Even if Trump were to receive every single delegate on Tuesday, he’d be just over 100 short of the 1,215 delegate victory threshold. A commanding performance could, however, run his last challenger out of the race. Even if Haley refuses to drop out, Trump could have the nomination wrapped up by next week; on March 12, another 161 delegates come up for grabs across Georgia, Hawaii, Mississippi, and Washington.
Two of the Super Tuesday states, California and Texas, have largest delegate hauls in the entire GOP primary process, with 169 and 161 delegates respectively. In California, Trump leads Haley in the polls by an average of 53.5 points. In Texas, the former president’s average lead is 70 points.
It’s the same story in several other Super Tuesday states. Trump is up more than 50 points in Alabama, Maine, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Tennessee. In three of those contests—Alabama, Oklahoma, and Tennessee—Trump’s polling advantage is at least 70 points.
The race is a bit tighter in Massachusetts, Utah, and Vermont, where Trump leads Haley in the polls by 29 points, 27 points, and 30 points respectively. Polling in Virginia is all over the map, but with a comfortable Trump lead.
Other states like Alaska, Arkansas, and Colorado have limited or out-of-date polling but are expected to be Trump wins.
Democrats will be voting in the aforementioned states plus U.S. territory of American Samoa. The incumbent president is expected to cruise to victory in each contest, even though in Colorado a handful of progressive groups have started a late campaign for Coloradans to vote “non-committed” as a number of Michiganders did last week. Even in Minnesota, the home state of Biden challenger Rep. Dean Phillips, the president is up 60 points.
While the presidential contests are set to be a snooze, a few undercard contests scattered throughout the union merit some attention.
In California’s jungle primary, for example, voters will determine who will head to the general election to fill Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s old seat. It’s a talented Democratic field made of three House members. Rep. Adam Schiff, most well known for his involvement in Russiagate, has emerged as the frontrunner, edging out Reps. Katie Porter and Barbara Lee in fundraising and the polls—an endorsement from former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made sure of that.
Because of the jungle primary format, Schiff’s Standing Strong Super PAC has spent millions on advertisements boosting the conservative credentials of the Republican candidate Steve Garvey, a former pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres, with the hopes that Garvey fills the second spot in the general election come November. Schiff’s gamble could very well pay off. Garvey is polling in second, just a few points ahead of Porter. Low turnout from California Democrats in the primary could also spell disaster for Porter and Lee’s senate ambitions.
Come Wednesday morning, North Carolina could be on a crash course with a heated gubernatorial race. Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson and Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein are large favorites in their respective primaries. But as Trump and the GOP look to elevate North Carolina GOP Chair Michael Whatley to RNC Chair, turnout in the purple state of North Carolina could be a sign of things to come.
The post What to Watch on a Not-So-Super Tuesday appeared first on The American Conservative.
The second Trump term offers the opportunity to set America on the path to economic recrudescence—if culture wars don’t distract.
The impression that neoliberalism is finished is widespread. As Julius Krein has rightly pointed out, whether among populists or elites, on the left or the right, you won’t find anyone who believes that tax cuts would suddenly boost growth, or that a new free trade deal would turn China into a democracy. The whole world is rather keeping an eye on what will replace neoliberalism in the most dynamic part of the West: the U.S.
The election of Donald Trump and the resulting upheaval led to a reconsideration of political economy. Tariffs and protectionism are no longer considered outlandish ideas; in this regard, Biden is continuing the policies of his predecessor.
According to Robert D. Atkinson, who coined the term “national developmentalism,” a new consensus has already emerged around Biden’s “Neo-New Deal” project. It has garnered support across the political spectrum, and is enveloped in an aura of inevitability reminiscent of the neoliberal mantra “there is no alternative.”
But has a shift of economic paradigm really occurred? On the contrary, one might contend that what we are witnessing is rather a directionless drift.
Example of this confusion is provided, for instance, by the Biden administration’s report on supply chains. It states that subsidized childcare enhances supply chain resilience. Similarly, the Department of Energy identifies “energy justice” as the most important principle for its vision to achieve clean energy. One gets the impression of a buzzword bingo, rather than of an intellectual renewal.
The crystallization of the new paradigm is hindered by barriers within economic thinking. So-called “sector agnosticism” would be one of them—the notion that all sectors are of equal importance. This means the persistent devaluation of manufacturing, despite its outsize influence on capital investment, productivity, trade, and R&D.
Another neoliberal tenet impeding reflection on a new political economy is the conviction that any state intervention is necessarily wrong. Here, neoliberals continue to use arguments that went unchallenged primarily due to the post-Cold War euphoria. Often forgotten is that monumental endeavors that led to important technological spillovers—from nuclear power to microchip to the Internet—were results of industrial policy.
Yet neoliberalism is not the only barrier to the renewal of the American political economy. On the left, there is a misconception that growth is fundamentally pernicious, a belief that underpins one of the principles of Biden’s green industrial policy. Advocates of “neo-New Dealism” belong to a school of thought that maintains productivity growth inevitably harms workers, and innovation poses a threat to both humanity and the environment, being at best a necessary evil. For many today, growth is an illusion to be abandoned in the name of more expansive social policies and climate change prevention.
Growth is vital not only because it is easier for a society to solve internal problems when it has more resources at its disposal. Geopolitics are an equally important factor. Beijing can afford to do extraordinary things when it comes to manufacturing. As Richard Baldwin reminds us, “China’s industrialization is unprecedented. The last time the ‘king of the manufacturing hill’ got knocked off the throne was when the U.S. surpassed the UK just before WW1. It took the U.S. the better part of a century to rise to the top; the China-U.S. switch took about 15 or 20 years. China’s industrialization, in short, defies comparison.” Moreover, as Baldwin observes, as recently as 2002, China was more dependent on American inputs. Now, the situation has reversed, with the U.S. being three times more exposed to Chinese manufacturing.
For Xi Jinping, achieving high growth constitutes the Party’s core task. China’s economy may experience turbulence, temporarily lose its confidence (such as in the face of a real estate crisis), but it will never deviate from the dogma of growth. To paraphrase Peter Thiel, when you hear degrowth, you should think CCP.
Ideas have consequences, and economics is no exception to this rule. They are not everything, however. As Michael Lind argues, it is not sufficient that a certain theory gains a majority in one party that wins elections. It takes an upheaval to trigger a paradigm shift. With the China shock, the Great Financial Crisis, the pandemic, and now the war in Ukraine, it seems the system has been disturbed enough to finally get rid of its ideological assumptions.
Unfortunately, the debate about the economic future has been reduced to the realm of culture wars, with Democrats pushing racialized welfarism and Republicans fighting against “woke capital.” Neither one nor the other has emerged with a positive project: The left proposes a purely negative program, anti-fascism, anti-racism, defunding the police, while the right is stuck in “neoliberalism of fear,” distrustful of the state, which it views solely as a dangerous tool wielded by the left.
Today, American developmentalism—still a loosely defined current of thought focused on developing the country through state activism—either leans heavily on abstract digressions or gets lost in historical case studies. As a result, it often fails to present concrete solutions or address the specific problems that need solving. Debates surrounding the American political economy risk repeating the mistake Christopher Caldwell criticized Reagan for: the belief that winning the argument automatically leads to political victory. Proving that social programs were ineffective did not bring the Reagan administration one step closer to dismantling them.
The fundamental question has shifted from the size of government—big or small—to the focus on building an effective state and designing an effective industrial policy. Let’s take a look at a few crucial domains that are largely neglected today by abstract debates and outdated economic ideologies.
Young companies are the primary drivers of innovation. However, in America, the number of new manufacturing companies has declined year after year for the past thirty years. One of the main reasons is the lack of funds to scale-up their operations. Capital-intensive, long-term industrial projects, while beneficial to investors and the economic and technological fabric in the long run, do not yield quick returns that venture capital is looking for. China has a myriad of financial vehicles in place to overcome this problem. One of these mechanisms is the so-called guidance funds.
These financial devices bring together market and state actors who pool their resources to meet industrial policy goals and generate returns on investments. Offering financing at the crucial stage of scaling up, they enable rapid expansion. Industrial guidance funds help companies navigate the “valley of death”—a period when production requires significant capital expenditure while future profits remain uncertain—allowing them to survive and develop.
Guidance funds don’t always yield the expected results promptly, as proven by the Chinese semiconductor sector. Yet the outcomes can be remarkable, as seen in the electric vehicle sector, where a combination of state subsidies and loans, coupled with the entrepreneurial drive of private firms, has led to the emergence of major players conquering the world markets. Similar success has come from the billions that have financed telecom companies like Huawei and ZTE. As one Gavekal analyst put it, “China’s well-rehearsed industrial policy can be staggeringly wasteful but still produce stunning results.”
Reform is also urgently needed within the American innovation system. The disappearance of corporate R&D labs has led to a situation in which the U.S. has lost crucial institutions responsible for not only achieving technological breakthroughs but also coordinating their commercialization. The technological advances emerging from the ecosystem have benefited not just the companies that produced them, but the entire economy. Reclaiming the American industrial standing will be difficult without addressing that gap.
Implementing an ambitious industrial strategy will require nothing less than a reform of state institutions. An interesting approach was proposed by Caleb Watney, who argues that “laying the seeds for effective institutional growth in small ways today can pay dividends down the road. And launching a new office or sub-agency is almost always an easier political lift than creating a new agency from scratch.”
Inspired by the institutional experiment successfully conducted by Netflix, he proposes something similar for government. Originally a DVD distribution service by mail, the streaming company was inspired by YouTube and aimed to develop its own platform. To this end, a new division was established, exempt from traditional procedures and structures. Eventually, this division grew and created the company we know today.
Achieving success required a departure from established conventions and standards, adopting new practices, tapping into different talent pools, and utilizing criteria unlike those the organization was previously accustomed to. An effective national development strategy, as Watney highlights, demands a focus on the technical aspect, on issues such as financing mechanisms: “When is an innovation prize a better fit for a technical problem than a loan guarantee, advance market commitment, or a milestone payment? Mastering the nitty-gritty of government procurement best practices is not exactly a sexy policy topic, but it will be essential for building an entrepreneurial state.”
When it comes to procurement, one of the most successful mechanisms was introduced by NASA. When the Agency decided to replace the Space Shuttle, it held a competition which rules diverged from the standards prevailing in the federal government. Three factors, as Eli Dourado explains, “shared development costs, milestone-based fixed-price payments, and goal-driven evaluation—were all geared toward reducing the amount of oversight NASA had to exercise. It allowed the companies to move at their own natural speed, not waiting for NASA to approve specific elements.”
Two companies each qualified for subsequent phases of the project—each time, one of them was SpaceX. If not for the new milestones mechanism, taxpayer money would have been wasted on SpaceX’s competitors, whose projects experienced delays and failed to deliver. The total cost of the program was $800 million, and the result is a new rocket that will take America back to the Moon. NASA’s own project, the new space shuttle, is still behind schedule and has already cost more than $20 billion. Dourado suggests that every agency should have a similar option when it comes to procurement, combining market competition with government financial support.
No industrial strategy can be successful without an adequately educated workforce. America finds itself in the midst of a STEM crisis. The launch of Sputnik represented a moment of realization that without engineers and scientists the U.S. would not win against the Soviets. Today, Americans’ diminishing interest in engineering and science could significantly weaken the country’s position in the 21st-century geopolitical rivalries.
The data paints a damning picture. The Trump administration’s report, “Charting a Course for Success: America’s Strategy for STEM Education,” states that while America has produced 10 per cent of the global total of STEM bachelor degrees over the past 15 years, India and China combined have produced nearly half.
It’s not so much that the level of American universities has declined as that the interest of American students has. National security will pay the price for this significant misallocation of talent, as foreign students are filling the vacancies left by technology-indifferent Americans. The survival of many science faculties already depends on a steady stream of foreigners. According to the National Foundation for American Policy, 81 percent of graduates in electrical engineering are foreigners, 79 percent in computer science, and in industrial engineering that number is 75 percent. Addressing this talent crunch should be a top priority for industrial policy. Especially against the backdrop of Xi’s assertions that he intends to turn China into a scientific and technological superpower. Just as after Sputnik, today education should be wrested from the hands of bureaucrats and recognized as a matter of national security.
Pessimists who claim that American institutional sclerosis is irreversible and that vested interests will block any attempt at reform have many solid reasons on their side. Optimists point to Operation Warp Speed.
The speed and efficiency with which OWS was carried out was remarkable, especially when contrasted with the many shortcomings of U.S. state capacity in other areas. Some argue that it provides a working model for industrial policy that can be applied in other domains.
Alex Azar, former Secretary of the Department of Health involved in OWS, explains how, during the Bush administration, he attempted to secure funding for a pandemic preparedness plan. The sum demanded was not astronomical, but he could not obtain it. In contrast, during the pandemic he received the signal that money is not an issue. “I have to be quite pessimistic about the ability to, on the financial side, execute something like OWS in the absence of a catastrophic, systemic-type crisis,” Azar stated. If Congress had to be persuaded to support Warp Speed, it probably wouldn’t have gotten off the ground at all.
Azar stresses that OWS was based on two key factors: unusually brave and efficient personnel, and exemption from bureaucratic interference. Add to that a great deal of luck coupled with a sense of urgency. Azar cautions against the belief that OWS can be repeated on demand. “We needed a miracle and we got one,” the former secretary reiterates. While OWS is an important case study, one must be careful so it does not build up a sedating conviction that all will end well.
The right must cultivate a passion for technical solutions, exploring specific financing mechanisms and reforming institutions. The culture war won’t serve as a substitute for the effort Americans have long neglected: thinking about their economic development. Tomorrow belongs to those who start reflecting on it seriously.
The post Trump Actually Can Renew the Economy appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: On the eve of Super Tuesday, the former president pulled off yet another unsurprising win.
The former President Donald Trump continued his impressive climb to the Republican presidential nomination with an overwhelming victory on March 4 in the North Dakota Republican caucus.
Trump pulled 84.6 percent to the runner-up Nikki Haley’s 14.1 percent, taking all 29 delegates the Roughrider State has to offer. This is just the latest in an impressive series of primary and caucus wins leading up to Super Tuesday tomorrow.
Trump’s win is significant as North Dakota is the only U.S. state that does not require voter registration to actually vote. Organizations like “Democrats for Nikki Haley” have set a precedent of attempted anti-Trump vote inflation in recent elections, such as in the New Hampshire primary.
Doug Burgum, the governor of North Dakota and former GOP presidential candidate, spoke on Trump’s behalf before voting began. Gov. Burgum also endorsed Trump back in January, writing in a post on X, “America needs a 180 degree change in direction from where Joe Biden has taken us! Donald J. Trump will make America great again!”
North Dakotans were confident that Trump would perform well in the March 4 caucus. Adam Hinz, a North Dakota resident, told The American Conservative, “I think a lot of North Dakotans are looking for someone who is willing to go against the status quo, and it’s certainly hard to beat Trump in that area.”
Democrats will have their primary election in North Dakota on March 30, 2024.
The post Trump Nabs North Dakota, No Problem appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: The decision also ensures that Donald Trump will be on the primary ballot in Illinois and Maine.
In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the former President Donald Trump should remain on the primary ballot in Colorado.
The Supreme Courts per curiam opinion reversed the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling that would have barred Trump from running for a second term under Section 3 of the 14 Amendment due to the events of January 6, 2021.
The Supreme Court argued that the power to restrict ballot access due to such violations lies with Congress. “This case raises the question whether the States, in addition to Congress, may also enforce Section 3. We conclude that States may disqualify persons holding or attempting to hold state office. But States have no power under the Constitution to enforce Section 3 with respect to federal offices, especially the Presidency,” the decision claimed. “For the reasons given, responsibility for enforcing Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates rests with Congress and not the States. The judgment of the Colorado Supreme Court therefore cannot stand.”
Two concurring opinions accompanied the per curiam ruling.
The first, from Justice Amy Coney Barrett, is only a single page. “The Court has settled a politically charged issue in the volatile season of a Presidential election. Particularly in this circumstance, writings on the Court should turn the national temperature down, not up. For present purposes, our differences are far less important than our unanimity: All nine Justices agree on the outcome of this case. That is the message Americans should take home,” Barrett wrote.
The second concurring opinion, from the liberal cohort of justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson, expressed some displeasure over their colleagues’ reasoning. “The majority announces that a disqualification for insurrection can occur only when Congress enacts a particular kind of legislation pursuant to Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment. In doing so, the majority shuts the door on other potential means of federal enforcement,” the three justices wrote. “We cannot join an opinion that decides momentous and difficult issues unnecessarily, and we therefore concur only in the judgment,” the trio concluded.
As for Trump, the former president said it was a “BIG WIN FOR AMERICA!!!” in a Truth Social post.
Meanwhile, Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold tweeted, “I am disappointed in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision stripping states of the authority to enforce Section 3 of the 14th Amendment for federal candidates. Colorado should be able to bar oath-breaking insurrections from our ballot.”
The Supreme Court’s intervention also ensures Trump will be on the primary ballot in Illinois and Maine, two states where Trump was previously barred from running.
It’s not the last time Americans will hear from the court before the presidential election. The Supreme Court will also render a decision in Trump’s presidential immunity case.
The post Supreme Court Vaporizes Colorado Ballot Gambit appeared first on The American Conservative.
Nikki Haley, Donald Trump’s remaining competitor for the Republican nomination, won the DC primary Sunday, her first victory in the race so far. In a contest that drew just over 2,000 voters, Haley scored 62.8 percent—1,274 raw votes—and the District’s 19 RNC delegates. At around 67 voters per delegate, that’s a lot of bang per vote—reminiscent of Mike Bloomberg’s 2020 American Samoa win, which saw about 43 voters per delegate.
I’m a native swamp person—born in the DC suburbs, the son of a technical contractor who was the son of a technical contractor. My high school classmates were the sons of arms dealers and federal research scientists. Haley’s overperformance among the dozens (and dozens!) of Republicans in Washington’s city limits is no surprise. These people are historical and dispositional cold warriors; they want the military budgets to keep going up, not least because their jobs depend on it. There also are not very many of them left, because this kind of outlook finds a home primarily in the modern Democratic party.
The swamp has spoken; it has its candidate. Do the American people need to know anything else?
The post Haley Wins the Swamp (DC Republican Primary) appeared first on The American Conservative.
Following her speech at CPAC last weekend, there have been a number of stories in trash generators like the Daily Beast and New York Magazine about Tulsi Gabbard’s alleged “journey” from Democrat to fanatical MAGA authoritarian and the like.
Not surprisingly, these stories have it backwards. It’s the Democrats, not Gabbard, that, beginning in 2016 with the Russiagate fiasco, have launched themselves on a journey toward authoritarianism at home and neoconservatism abroad.
Gabbard was one of the few in her party to stand up to the Clinton cabal, and she’s paid a bitter price. But unlike those in her former party, Gabbard has been nothing if not consistent, particularly on matters pertaining to foreign policy.
From the time I first interviewed her in June 2016, Gabbard has been a vocal and eloquent opponent of America’s serial misadventures abroad, and nowhere more so than when the Obama administration covertly launched a sinister attempt to overthrow the sovereign government of Syria—a government that posed no threat to the national security of this country and was, at the time, under attack by the very same Islamist forces that conspired to attack us on 9/11. This simple though ramifying truth was lost on too many of Gabbard’s erstwhile Democratic colleagues, who rallied like a pack of Pavlovian pups to Hillary Clinton’s war cry, “Assad Must Go.”
And again, with regard to the Neo-McCarthyism that deformed and debased the Democratic Party, Gabbard was among the very few to look askance at the idea of waging a new Cold War against Russia.
Gabbard reiterated her opposition to the new Democratic War Machine during her ill-fated run for the presidency in 2019–2020. At a small fundraiser for her presidential campaign at the Cleveland Park home of two well-known and well-liked pillars of the D.C. establishment, Gabbard expressed a kind of bemused disbelief that her party had decided to mark her out as a kind of extremist. Perhaps in ways unseen, the threats and smears issued forth from the DNC (and ultimately, Hillary Clinton herself) took their toll on the young candidate—but they did not succeed in silencing her.
Gabbard’s brave antiwar consistency (minus her tolerance for Israeli aggression, which is shared by, among others, Donald Trump, Robert Kennedy, Jr., and Joseph R. Biden), is why Trump needs her in his administration—just not as his VP.
It is widely, and probably correctly, assumed that thanks to the Dobbs decision, the recent Alabama IVF case, and what is viewed by many as his Stone Age attitude towards the fairer sex, Trump will need a reassuring, telegenic, appealing woman as his Number 2. And while Gabbard could fit that bill, someone like Kristi Noem can just as easily fill the role as Trump’s Stepford Wife.
No. Should Trump win in November, Tulsi Gabbard’s talents will be needed elsewhere. This is especially so since Trump’s first term was a disaster in terms of foreign policy appointments, which included one bloodthirsty neocon hawk after another—a dishonor roll including but not limited to Mike Pompeo, Nikki Haley, Mike Esper, John Bolton, and Elliott Abrams.
Instead of whiling away the days in the Naval Observatory, Gabbard should be called upon to make full use of her talents as national security adviser, secretary of defense, secretary of state, or director of central intelligence. Gabbard would be a formidable opponent to the crypto-neocons with which Trump has too often surrounded himself.
The 32nd Vice President of the United States, John Nance Garner, famously declared that the vice presidency wasn’t “worth a bucket of warm p*ss.”
It was as true then as it is today.
The post Tulsi Gabbard Should Be Secretary of State, Not Vice President appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: The former president clinched his second victory in one day with the 2024 Idaho caucus.
The former President Donald Trump continued his unwavering advance to the Republican presidential nomination with an overwhelming victory on March 2 in the Idaho Republican caucus.
Trump pulled 85 percent to the runner-up Nikki Haley’s 13.1 percent. This is just the latest in an impressive series of primary and caucus wins leading up to Super Tuesday.
In the 2016 Idaho Republican primary, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas won with 45 percent of the vote, with Donald Trump coming in second with 28 percent; they received 100,942 votes and 62,478 votes, respectively. In the 2024 Idaho Republican caucus, however, Trump received over 33,000 votes and Haley got just over 5,000.
This drop in turnout prompted some questions. One X user wrote,
This is what voter suppression looks like. Anyone who is involved in this effort to discourage participation in today's Idaho Presidential Caucus has demonstrated why they are not qualified for Republican Party leadership at any level. #idgop #idpol #idleg pic.twitter.com/UA41Hq8fWR
— Heather Lauer (@HeatherLauer) March 2, 2024
As was the case in Missouri earlier in the day, the race in Idaho was a caucus, and not a primary as it had been in years prior. In an effort to consolidate elections and save money, the Idaho legislature voted last year to eliminate the Republican primary.
Some Idahoans were frustrated with the voting process of the caucus, blaming Idaho GOP Chairwoman Dorothy Moon for the ensuing confusion. Voters were under the impression that they would possibly have to wait 90 minutes to cast their vote (even though the actual process ended up being much faster), and that possibly dissuaded some from braving the cold to cast their ballots.
Democrats will have their primary election in Idaho on May 23, 2024.
The post Trump Dispenses With Haley in Idaho appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: Trump’s solid victory in Missouri continues his winning streak against Nikki Haley.
The former President Donald Trump continued his steady march towards the Republican presidential nomination with a decisive victory on March 2 in the Missouri Republican caucuses.
Trump pulled 100 percent of delegates compared to his rival Nikki Haley’s 0 percent. (Missouri determines this based on how many statewide delegates from caucus precincts a candidate takes, rather than on raw vote share.) This performance is a continuation of his domination over Haley from Tuesday’s Michigan primary and bodes well for his performance in the “Super Tuesday” primaries.
In Missouri during the 2016 race, Trump defeated Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas by just 0.21 percent, a notably slimmer margin than he experienced in today’s race.
Missouri Republicans switched from a primary to caucuses after passing an elections bill that canceled the 2024 primary during last year’s legislative session. According to Penny Quigg, the Cole County Republican Central Committee chair, the change made it more difficult for voters to support their respective candidates: “You know, there’s kind of a hardcore group,” she said of today’s voter pool.
The former president was quick to take to Truth Social to announce his win.
THANK YOU, MISSOURI! Together, WE are going to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!! pic.twitter.com/uOCVMH4PNU
— Donald J. Trump Posts From His Truth Social (@TrumpDailyPosts) March 2, 2024
Democrats will hold their own presidential primary in Missouri on March 23, 2024.
The post Trump Wins Missouri: No Surprises Here appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: The case that departing Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell should step aside from the Senate entirely.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has announced he will be stepping down from his perch atop the Senate GOP after what will be the longest tenure as a leader in Senate history.
“One of life’s most underappreciated talents is to know when it’s time to move on to life’s next chapter,” McConnell wrote in prepared remarks obtained by The Associated Press. “So I stand before you today … to say that this will be my last term as Republican leader of the Senate.”
Some Senate Republicans have given conciliatory responses to McConnell’s departure. Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the Senate GOP number two, said, “[McConnell] leaves really big shoes to fill .. We’ll give you more insight into what we’re thinking. Kind of wanna just today honor him.” Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming said, “[the leadership] election is nine months away, and there’s a much more important election between now and then. And that’s the election we need to take the presidency and the Senate and the House and that’s where my focus is.” Thune and Barrasso are two of the three Johns (Senator John Cornyn of Texas is the third) expected to launch bids to replace McConnell.
Meanwhile, Senator Rick Scott of Florida released a statement suggesting McConnell’s departure offers a big opportunity for the Senate GOP. “I have been very clear and have long believed that we need new leadership in the Senate that represents our voters and the issues we were sent here to fight for. As everyone knows, I challenged Leader McConnell last year. This is an opportunity to refocus our efforts on solving the significant challenges facing our country and actually reflect the aspirations of voters,” Scott said.
After news broke, McConnell took to the Senate floor and said, “I still have enough gas in my tank to thoroughly disappoint my critics and I intend to do so with all the enthusiasm with which they’ve become accustomed.”
Surely McConnell does have the capacity to “thoroughly disappoint” his conservative critics in his time as a lame duck. While Thune and Barrasso want to give the conference the space and time to appreciate the man who has been cutting off his own members at the knees, a push for McConnell to exit his role immediately after this round of shutdown negotiations comes to an end is warranted.
As the late Senator John McCain sided with Democrats on almost every important issue on his way out the door, McConnell may have just unencumbered himself from even pretending to answer to any of his conference’s demands. Even before he announced his resignation, McConnell reportedly told House Speaker Mike Johnson at the White House that the biggest thing on Johnson’s plate is Ukraine aid and not the looming government shutdown—the purpose the two GOP leaders were summoned to the White House in the first place.
As Senator Ron Johnson told The American Conservative in a phone call yesterday, “I cannot tell you how often he reminds us how many hundreds of millions of dollars he raised for the Senate Leadership Fund last cycle, and how much he’s raised this cycle.” At Senate luncheons during the border negotiations, McConnell would suggestively make remarks about campaign fundraising before turning the floor to Senator James Lankford. Because McConnell is staying until November, he’ll still have control of at least some of the purse strings. And while McConnell might boast about the way he raised money for the 2022 cycle, the way he spent it shut the door on the GOP’s chances to take back the majority.
“[McConnell is] not about governing. He’s not about getting a result. He’s not about fighting for conservative principles or pushing back on the radical leftism destroying this country,” Johnson told TAC yesterday. “He is about being majority leader.”
Now McConnell is no longer about being majority leader, what will he be about in the eight months before he steps down?
The post Why Is Mitch McConnell Remaining in the Senate Until 2027? appeared first on The American Conservative.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, long under pressure to step aside, finally hit the escape button on Tuesday. But not before one last furor with Hill conservatives.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell announced he will be stepping down as Senate GOP leader come November on Wednesday as Congress hurtles towards a government shutdown with rolling deadlines of March 1 and March 8.
The establishment would have one believe that Washington’s current time and cash crunch is the fault of raucous Republicans in the House, where House Speaker Mike Johnson has razor-thin margins. A closer look, however, suggests that, if Republicans are on the receiving end of another raw deal come March 1, the fault lies not with the man just stepping into his role in the House, but the lame duck departing the Senate.
For the fourth time since October, Congress is faced with another deadline to avoid a partial government shutdown. When this Congress has faced shutdowns in the past, some conservative members have made their peace with a government shutdown if conservative priorities weren’t addressed.
Some conservative members are now supporting a full-year continuing resolution (CR), however. McConnell has made advancing GOP priorities, particularly forcing the Biden administration to execute the law on the southern border, nearly impossible by siding once again with his Democratic counterpart Chuck Schumer and President Joe Biden. If the government does shut down, it will be because McConnell has, at almost every turn, sown discord and disunity throughout the GOP by undermining Republican priorities. In the past six months, the Senate GOP leader’s own conference has rebuffed his commands, particularly when it comes to government spending and Ukraine aid. From this position of weakness, McConnell repeatedly doubled down and dangled campaign funding from Senate leadership over the heads of GOP senators like the sword of Damocles.
Disquiet turned to unrest. “There have been behind closed doors discussions on another attempt to replace him as leader,” one Senate Republican staffer familiar with the matter told The American Conservative. “[McConnell] might not have been aware of this, but his people were probably smart enough to know that there were people having these sorts of conversations.”
“He’s announcing this now because he knew he had a rebellion on his hands,” the staffer added. “He was no longer leading the conference in any real way.”
Rep. Matt Rosendale of Montana put it this way in an email to TAC: “If Republicans aren’t on the same page regarding the border, Ukraine, or spending toplines, it undoubtedly negatively affects our ability to govern.”
Eli Crane, a representative from Arizona, won’t be shedding any tears when McConnell goes to his vine and fig tree. “Our leadership, especially in the Senate, is perfectly content managing the decline of this country. I wish McConnell the best, but it’s time for him to go,” Crane told TAC via email shortly before McConnell announced his pending departure. “His priorities are out-of-touch with everyday Americans, and he’s obsessed with burning the hard-earned tax dollars of our people in Ukraine instead of fighting tooth and nail to secure our borders. How are we supposed to mount a meaningful opposition when our own weak-kneed leadership undermines us at every turn?”
On Tuesday, President Biden met with Johnson, McConnell, Schumer, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to continue working on avoiding a government shutdown.
Of the 12 appropriations bills that need to pass, only four—Agriculture, Veterans Affairs, Transportation-HUD, and Energy and Water—have a deadline of March 1. After the White House meeting, Johnson said, “We have been working in good faith around the clock every single day for months and weeks, and over the last several days, quite literally around the clock to get that job done. We’re very optimistic.”
“We believe that we can get to agreement on these issues and prevent a government shutdown, and that’s our first responsibility,” he added.
Schumer was also feeling optimistic. “There was a little back-and-forth on different issues that different people want, but I don’t think those are insurmountable,” Schumer told members of the media Tuesday. “The fact that we made it so clear that we can’t have the shutdown because it hurts so many people in so many different ways, even for a short period of time, was very apparent in the room.”
“The Speaker did not reject that,” Schumer continued. “He said he wants to avoid a government shutdown. So that was very heartening.”
Nevertheless, Schumer believes a CR, not appropriations bills, are the way to go. “To not shut the government down means we need CRs. And we told that to Johnson,” Schumer told PunchBowl News.
There’s another likely reason Schumer left Tuesday’s meeting at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. feeling heartened. McConnell reportedly spent much of his time pushing for the sans-border-security supplemental. As Jake Sherman of PunchBowl News put it, “MCCONNELL told JOHNSON that the Senate’s foreign aid bill is the only game in town.”
With Republican control over the House and Democrat control in the Senate, passing the needed appropriations bills seems increasingly unlikely. Nevertheless, there are other options on the table for Congress to consider.
The first, and most dissatisfying result for GOP legislators, is another short-term CR that continues current funding levels from the previous fiscal year—a budget set by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Schumer (who received aid from McConnell) and Biden—that will not trigger any cuts. This is the kind of CR Schumer wants and McConnell seems to be helping him get.
Johnson has signaled he’s willing to go forward with a short-term supplemental that extends funding deadlines to March 8 and March 22. Johnson’s Press Secretary Athina Lawson said, “Any CR would be part of a larger agreement to finish a number of appropriations bills, ensuring adequate time for drafting text and for members to review prior to casting votes.” But without a bipartisan agreement in hand Friday that at least addresses some GOP concerns, Johnson is willing to let the government shut down.
The second option is a medium-term CR that extends funding past April 30. If April 30 passes by and the government is being funded via CR, a one-percent cut for discretionary spending kicks in. This provision was part of the Fiscal Responsibility Act (FRA), the debt deal struck by Biden and former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy last year.
Another provision of the FRA, however, could kick in if Congress decides to fund the government via CR for the rest of the fiscal year and begin work on the FY2025 appropriations process, which by statute should begin in April. A full year CR would run into discretionary spending caps, set at $1.590 trillion in total, put into place by the FRA. The cut to government spending in a full-year CR scenario is an estimated $73 billion or 10 percent.
That is where things get murky, however.
FRA negotiations included several “side deals” that used some creative accounting to effectively increase non-defense discretionary spending by $69 billion, which would bring total discretionary spending to $1.659 trillion. Nevertheless, those “side deals” were not made law. Even Connecticut’s Democratic Rep. Rosa DeLauro, House Appropriations Committee ranking member, admitted she voted against the FRA precisely because the “side deals” were “non-binding.” In January, Johnson and Schumer revised the deal previously struck between McCarthy and the Senate majority leader, which shifted some of the side-deal money away from budget gimmicks to internal budgetary offsets. Nevertheless, the caps of $1.590 trillion are still in statute, but Democrats and establishment Republicans in the Senate might suddenly conclude they’re unwilling to fund the government at the reduced levels they agreed to in statute.
Senator Mike Lee of Utah doesn’t see the caps that way, however. “Because of side deals that have been negotiated behind closed doors by McConnell and others, the FRA caps have all but become moot,“ he explained in an email to TAC. “These deals would allow for $54 billion in additional spending, above the FRA caps, to be approved, raising the total expense of these bills to $1.644 billion.”
Nevertheless, Lee thinks a full-year CR is the way to go: “If Congress were to instead pursue a one-year CR we would expend only $1.562 billion, which is well below the FRA cap and even current spending levels. If Republicans are to be taken seriously as fiscally prudent representatives of the American people, a one-year CR is the best option before us for good stewardship of taxpayer dollars.”
The final option is a government shutdown. Previously, Republicans in Congress have called on GOP leadership to stop passing CRs and embrace a government shutdown if conservative demands cannot be met. Back in July 2023, Rep. Bob Good, now the chair of the House Freedom Caucus, said “we should not fear a government shutdown.” Other conservative members expressed the sentiment, too.
Some members of the House Freedom Caucus, however, now support a full-year CR. In a letter to Johnson last week, House Freedom Caucus members wrote:
If we are not going to secure significant policy changes or even keep spending below the caps adopted by bipartisan majorities less than one year ago, why would we proceed when we could instead pass a year-long funding resolution that would save Americans $100 billion in year one?
“A full year CR is different than just a kick down the can down the road temporary CR,” Good told TAC in a phone interview. “A full year CR through September 30 would kick in or activate or kick in the FRA caps that would result in about $100 billion dollars in savings from what is being negotiated currently. It would also cancel thousands of earmarks for both parties worth tens of billions of dollars.”
Good later described a full-year CR as “the best realistic possibility right now that loses the least for the American people.”
Nevertheless, Good told Fox Business on Monday, “The government shutdown is not ideal, but it’s not the worst thing.”
“It would be worse to exacerbate the problem, to further increase our debt and our spending, to make our fiscal situation, which is unprecedented as it is, as you know, to continue to fund a government that’s facilitating the border invasion,” Good added.
Rosendale sounded more enthusiastic about the righteousness of a government shutdown. “The GOP needs to rally behind the idea of no government funding unless our southern border is secured!” Rosendale told TAC. “Passing approps into law is by far and away the most appealing victory that can come out of this current spending battle, it will ensure the deepest cuts and will discontinue Covid-era spending levels. The American people deserve better than the short-term CR to short-term CR style governing that has become standard in Washington.”
If it comes to a government shutdown, Crane is pointing the finger at Democrats and their new lackey McConnell. ”McConnell has been more concerned with escalating a war in Eastern Europe than protecting Americans by securing our border. It’s clear that the American people want to see our border secured. This should be the main priority for every Republican in the House and Senate,” Crane explained. “If conservatives commit to fighting for this objective and McConnell refuses to get on board, and instead, uses his power to pursue a victory for the Uniparty, then he owns a sizable share of the responsibility for a government shutdown.”
It’s difficult enough for Republicans to win the politics of a government shutdown. The Democrats’ structural advantage is nearly total. Keeping the government open requires spending dollars the government doesn’t even have yet. With national debt of more than $34 trillion, it’s not today’s Americans paying for Biden’s spending spree, but their grandchildren. Democrats are completely uninterested in sound money or fiscal responsibility, which means Democrats can always go home and tell their constituents they want to spend the money to fund the government. That places Republicans on the back foot.
While Republican constituents want Washington to stop leveraging their grandchildren’s financial future, few are necessarily thrilled about a government shutdown—the cuts should have already happened. That means Republicans need to make the case that not only current spending levels but underlying politics justify shutting down the government.
Which is why, when government shutdowns do occur, Republicans are often left shouldering the blame. When the government shut down for 16 days in October of 2013 over Obamacare funding, 81 percent of Americans polled by the Washington Post and ABC disapproved of the shutdown. Fifty-three percent of those surveyed blamed the GOP for the shutdown. GOP legislators’ favorables fell to 32 percent; 63 percent disapproved of their work. The government shutdown in 2018 tells a similar story. Another Washington Post–ABC poll found 48 percent of respondents blamed former President Donald Trump and Republicans, while 28 percent blamed Democrats. Eighteen percent said both parties were equally at fault. When the government shutdown again in December 2018, the Washington Post and ABC found 53 percent of respondents blamed Trump and the GOP. Just 29 percent blamed congressional Democrats.
Nevertheless, it’s not all bad news. In the midterms that followed the 2013 shutdown, Republicans expanded their majority in the House and flipped the upper chamber by picking up nine Senate seats. Trump would go on to win the 2016 presidential election. Democrats wound up taking back the House by gaining 41 seats in 2018. In 2020, the presidency and senate went to the blue team.
Righteous government shutdowns are, indeed, possible. Good still might be willing to have one if it comes. “I’d be willing to have a shutdown fight for the American people who understand the spending is unsustainable, and the border invasion is unsustainable,” Good told TAC. “I think we could win a shutdown fight if we’re willing to have it.”
Good might not be wrong. New polling from Gallup this week found immigration is the top concern for Americans by a margin of 8 points. A shutdown over the current situation at the southern border is a relatively straightforward pitch: Until the government can do its foremost priority, protecting the territorial integrity of the United States, it ought not spend time or money doing anything else. In December 2023 alone, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) had more than 300,000 migrant encounters—a record high. Nearly 7.3 million migrants have illegally entered the United States since Biden took office in January 2021. If the Biden migrants became their own state, it would be one of the 15 most populous states in the union.
McConnell, however, has made justifying a government shutdown nearly impossible. As The American Conservative previously reported, McConnell ensured the negotiated border deal attached to the $118 billion supplemental funding package for Ukraine and Israel would fail. McConnell, upon deputizing Sen. James Lankford and other Republican negotiators, ordered the Oklahoma senator to not attach foreign aid in the supplemental to any concrete metric to bring down the number of migrants entering the United States. As Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin told TAC, “McConnell, on his own, told Lankford that’s not even on the table.” With the border deal dead, McConnell was free to do what he and Schumer wanted all along: force a Ukraine funding bill without border security through the upper chamber. So far, the House has refused to consider the bill.
Johnson is still worked up about the border deal. “[McConnell] botched this, he produced such an awful bill. Now he wants to blame Trump and house conservatives.” Johnson became breathless. “I mean, it’s, again, just stunning. Unbelievable!”
Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio wrote about the supplemental funding bill for TAC earlier this month and outlined how McConnell’s betrayal undercut Johnson and embarrassed the GOP. When Johnson fights, “he will be attacked by Senate Republican leaders, at least privately, and will face another negative news cycle. If he doesn’t, his own conference will turn against him.”
Vance gave a prescient warning. “The cycle will replay over the government funding deadline in March,” he wrote. “It will replay over the omnibus debate that follows. It will replay any time the U.S. Congress must actually do something.”
“We have gone from a strong negotiating position in January to one where all our leverage for policy concessions is given away before negotiations begin, Both the Majority and Minority Leaders have the same stated priorities regarding foreign aid, but who is fighting for Republican priorities and a secure border?” Utah’s Lee commented.
“The Republican House majority for 14 months now has battled Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell,” Good claimed.
Rosendale agreed: “Without the support of McConnell in the Senate leveraging items like the House’s HR 2, Speaker Johnson is left without a leg to stand on in the appropriations fight.”
Johnson (the senator) told TAC that McConnell’s actions have placed Johnson (the speaker) “between a rock and a hard place.”
“Ideologically, [Speaker Johnson is] a true conservative, but he’s in an almost impossible position,” Johnson added. “I’ve just seen McConnell undermine the speaker time and time again. Democrats are in a lot better position on the border now than they were three weeks ago. I mean, talk about jaw-dropping political malfeasance.”
McConnell dug his own grave, and is attempting to pull the rest of the GOP in with him. Even though the negotiated border deal ensured that “the border never closes,” in the words of Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, and would actually codify the Biden administration’s dubiously legal parallel asylum system set up via regulation, Democrats can claim that not only are they willing to spend the money but that Republicans just rejected ‘border security.’ McConnell gave them the script.
“Our own Minority Leader has used Democrat talking points against his own conference, undermining our House colleagues in the process, and helped Democrats pass Ukraine funding without border security using a minority of Senate Republican votes,” Lee told TAC. “We should absolutely continue to fight for better policies if a shutdown occurs, but to quote Michael Scott, someone decided to ‘make this way harder than it needs to be.’”
Just as McConnell chose Biden and Schumer over the GOP conference and GOP voters in previous spending fights, he’s once again siding with Democrats. “Shutting down the government is harmful to the country. And it never produces positive outcomes—on policy or politics,” McConnell said in a Monday speech on the Senate floor. “The task at hand will require that everyone rows in the same direction: toward clean appropriations and away from poison pills,” the minority leader added, calling on the House to pick up the Senate’s appropriations bills.
To add insult to injury, while Johnson has a tiny majority in the House, McConnell has what should be a cloture-proof cohort in the Senate. Instead of using the GOP conference as added leverage for Johnson and the GOP, McConnell is leaving Johnson high and dry.
“Why lead Republicans if you’re not going to lead Republicans?” Lee told TAC. “Why ignore border security, at a time when Americans are reeling from stories of illegal immigrant felons killing innocent people across the country?”
For Good, 60 is the magic number. “The House Republican majority ought to be able to get more than the Senate,” Good said. “We only need 217 votes right now, and we’ve got 219. Now that’s a narrow majority, but we do have 219. And the Senate needs 60 votes. Democrats only got 51. Senate Republicans can block just about anything Democrats do. The Democrats in the House cannot do that. If Republicans would unite and do conservative Republican things, we could be really strong.”
From Crane’s perspective, “[McConnell is] not utilizing any leverage the GOP has because he doesn’t want to. It’s disgraceful, but it’s not surprising. I don’t think any leverage the GOP has will be used effectively until McConnell signs off.”
“You’re the supposed Republican leader of the United States Senate, not the chief fundraising coordinator for Ukraine,” Crane said of McConnell. “Americans are being killed because the Biden Administration has cruelly opened our borders and Republican leadership has consistently and corruptly diverted their attention away. We need real leadership, not cowardly controlled opposition.”
“There is still time for Senate Republicans to reflect the will of the American people and demand real border security rather than rubber stamping funds for an administration that is facilitating an invasion of our country,” Lee claimed. “With the right leadership, our conference can refuse cloture, demand consideration of amendments, and keep up personal pressure on Chuck Schumer to blink. But leadership views all this as an impediment to helping Democrats get what they want, which seems to be the real agenda here.”
Johnson would like to see the House Speaker put the pressure on McConnell and the Senate. “The House should pass something and then leave. That’s what I want to see them do. It puts more pressure on the Senate,” Johnson said.
“A full year CR is reasonable,” he continued, “it proves we don’t want to shut down the government, so we passed this. I guess the Senate would have to pass that, or, if they don’t, people voting against you are obviously for the shutdown.”
“[Passing a full-year CR in the House] would be difficult for the Democratic Senate to ignore when it keeps the government open,” Good claimed. “And it’s passing spending at the levels that they agreed to a year ago and were signed into law by the President.”
“Speaker Johnson should stand his ground and not be trampled by the uniparty forces that are conspiring against his fight for a better country,” said Rosendale. “The American people are in his corner and are relying on him to be their voice. He must maintain he has control over the House of Representatives, he does not have to go along with what Schumer and Biden are advocating for.”
“McConnell has been more concerned with escalating a war in Eastern Europe than protecting Americans by securing our border. It’s clear that the American people want to see our border secured. This should be the main priority for every Republican in the House and Senate,” Crane told TAC. “If conservatives commit to fighting for this objective and McConnell refuses to get on board, and instead, uses his power to pursue a victory for the Uniparty, then he owns a sizable share of the responsibility for a government shutdown.”
“Speaker Johnson should stand firm, demand McConnell join conservatives in supporting either HR 2 or a clean year long CR, and tell Democrats they won’t get one more red cent—for Ukraine, or for the salaries of the Biden admin destroying our border—until we listen to the American people and secure their homeland,” Lee told TAC.
Senator Johnson left TAC with some food for thought: “When he became leader in 2007, we were under $10 trillion in debt. Now we’re approaching $35 trillion. And you know who the one constant is in all that time, the one person in every room for every negotiation? Mitch McConnell. This is Mr. Long Game?”
After nearly two decades as the Senate GOP leader, the longest leadership tenure in Senate history, the long game is over for Mitch McConnell.
The post Inside Mitch McConnell’s Last Fight Before Abdicating appeared first on The American Conservative.
Is the real threat posed by the fringes or the responsible-seeming center?
In August, two originalist legal scholars published a paper arguing that Donald Trump was barred from running for reelection under section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Before long, liberal commentators—not generally known for their receptivity to originalist arguments—began to announce that they agreed. Trump had never been charged with or convicted of the crime of insurrection, but no matter. He could be kept off the ballot by the unilateral action of state authorities. In Colorado and Maine, that is just what has occurred.
Depending on whom you ask, Trump’s exclusion from these ballots is either a fully justified measure taken in defense of democracy or a shocking assault on the right of the American people to pick the president. Of course, answers tend to reflect partisan affiliation and ideology. But standing behind this familiar divide is a more profound division: between those who think that threats to our liberties are more likely to come from the unruly fringe and those who think such threats are more likely to emerge from the responsible-seeming center.
For the first group, events like the January 6 protests loom large. There is something disturbing not only in the violence of that day but also in images such as that of Richard Barnett, a retired firefighter and bullrider from Arkansas, propping one of his feet on Nancy Pelosi’s desk. This view reflects trust in present authorities and suspicion of those who challenge them. It was expressed by those who supported restrictions on protest during the Covid lockdowns. It motivates efforts to censor online speech deemed “disinformation.” And it can be observed in the prosecutions of Donald Trump.
Members of the second group may agree that January 6 was a dishonorable episode and that Donald Trump committed various crimes. But they tend to think that such malfeasance is finally less dangerous than the possibility of collusion between national security officials and social-media executives to suppress, for instance, the Hunter Biden laptop story. Even as they oppose violent extremism, they worry about how the specter of it can be invoked to stifle dissent. They see less danger in the antics of political eccentrics than in unquestioning deference to public health authorities.
The second view has its limits. It’s hard to see how a society can function without some trust in authorities, and those who challenge them radically do profess some false and dangerous ideas. But on balance this view strikes me as the more reasonable. After 9/11, some conservative commentators warned that American liberties were at risk of being circumscribed by “creeping sharia.” But what posed a more direct threat to Americans’ freedom: the rulings of Islamic jurists, or the surveillance measures adopted in the name of national security?
Not that the allegations against Donald Trump can simply be waved away. Each case must be judged on the merits, as must the legal argument that Trump is disqualified by the 14th Amendment. Further, it’s hard to say that Donald Trump—who once was and may once more be president—is a marginal actor. But the main abrogation of rights that occurred under his presidency was the response to the Covid-19 pandemic, which was championed by long-serving bureaucrats and by politicians in both parties. It was at this moment, when Donald Trump complied with instead of defying the center, that Americans saw their freedom of assembly taken away.
According to the latest Gallup poll, only 28 percent of Americans are satisfied with the way their country’s democracy is working (in 1984, that number stood at 61 percent). Though there exists remarkable agreement that our democracy is dysfunctional, two radically different accounts are available concerning what its problems are. In the conventional account, democracy is menaced by external actors who seek to overturn its processes and replace its commitments to freedom and equality with illiberal ideas. Fear of these actors motivates attempts to police and restrict online speech, just as it motivated red scares in the past.
A different account of democracy’s problems can be traced to Alexis de Tocqueville, who believed that democratic societies were threatened less by external enemies than by their own internal dynamics. Tocqueville foresaw “an innumerable host of men, all alike and equal,” ruled over by “an immense and tutelary power” that does not directly tyrannize but saps men of their independence and individuality. As Stanley Payne, the historian of fascism, has suggested, this soft despotism may be “the real threat to democracy.” It is marked by a tendency to conformism rather than a flirtation with bizarre ideas. It wears a white lab coat rather than the Q Shaman’s fur and horns.
Defending democracy against this threat, Tocqueville concluded, required working to prevent “the social power from sacrificing lightly the particular rights of some individuals to the general execution of its designs.” Something closer to the opposite has marked the approach of today’s self-styled defenders of democracy.
The post The Left or Trump: Which is a Greater Threat to Democracy? appeared first on The American Conservative.
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