 Dear Weekend Jolter, I'm back after a recharge with family just shy of the Arctic Circle (thanks to Jack Crowe for making the donuts while I was away — in Iceland, for the record, not Siberia). The news doesn't quit, of course. Why, since early last week, Pakistan's former prime minister Imran Khan was arrested and Brazil's former president Jair Bolsonaro had his home raided by police, all while Peru juggles the extradition of former president Alejandro Toledo and the detention of more-recent former president Pedro Castillo. And . . . if none of these events created so much as a blip in the continental United States, that's probably because these scandals are no more extraordinary than our own. Gone are the days when, say, the arrest or exile of a former Pakistani leader (more or less protocol on that slice of the subcontinent) might have aroused some morbid curiosity in foreign dysfunction. Developing-nation political chaos is starting to look uncomfortably familiar to the American voter. Okay, it's not quite so bad as Pakistan. But Jim Geraghty, surveying the 2024 landscape, describes a sorry sight: We have one guy who is the likely nominee on the Republican side who is fundamentally and indisputably unfit for public office, and who a majority of Americans thinks should be charged with crimes, including trying to steal an election. We have another guy who is definitely the nominee for the other party who a majority of Americans thinks does not have all the marbles to be president anymore.
Concerns about President Biden's fitness extend well beyond his dotage. Republicans on the House Oversight Committee this week released evidence about Biden family dealings that are alarming, and cannot be easily explained away. From NR's news report: The Biden family and its business associates created a complicated web of more than 20 companies, according to bank records obtained by the House Oversight Committee — a system GOP lawmakers say was meant to conceal money received from foreign nationals. Sixteen of the companies were limited liability companies formed during Joe Biden's tenure as vice president, the committee said in a press conference on Wednesday. The Biden family, their business associates, and their companies received more than $10 million from foreign nationals and their related companies, the records show. These payments occurred both while Biden was in office as vice president and after his time in office ended.
Expect this story to snowball. Also hanging over the Biden presidency is Delaware U.S. attorney David Weiss's investigation involving Hunter Biden. Andrew McCarthy writes that President Biden, by publicly declaring his son's innocence, has already interfered in the probe — this, amid whistleblower allegations that the FBI "has supposedly been sitting on evidence that implicates the president in a bribery scheme." Meanwhile, Donald Trump. He was impeached twice, you may recall. On Tuesday, he was also found liable for battery and defamation in journalist E. Jean Carroll's civil suit. Put another way, by NR's editorial: "For the first time in history, a candidate will seek the presidency having been found civilly liable for sexual abuse." (And so, we simply must nominate him.) Add it to Trump's distinguished pile of legal woes: Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg's questionable case relating to Stormy Daniels (in which Trump was arrested), the DOJ special-counsel investigation covering classified-document handling and January 6, and another stop-the-steal-ish probe in Georgia. Coinciding with these developments, Trump's Mar-a-Lago was raided last year, followed by searches of several Biden properties, both in connection with the handling of classified files. So yeah, Jair Bolsonaro and his problems are boring by comparison — to George Santos alone. None of this is to say America is trending banana republic, or becoming "third-world," as Trump repeated at this week's CNN town hall. Our economy, for one, continues to be an unstoppable and innovative force for good that defies the popular pessimism. But when it comes to our politics, to adapt an admonition: We're not electing our best. NAME. RANK. LINK. EDITORIALS Even Gavin Newsom realizes it: The Ridiculous California Reparations Proposal The Trump-verdict editorial, once more, is here: The Trump Sexual-Assault Verdict The failures run deep in the case of Jordan Neely: The Jordan Neely Tragedy ARTICLES Michael Brendan Dougherty: The Trump Show Returns Dan McLaughlin: The 14th Amendment Doesn't Empower Biden to Borrow beyond the Debt Limit Bill Cassidy: Refusing to Reform Social Security Is a Plan — and a Bad One Rich Lowry: When the Truth Becomes a Dog Whistle Andrew McCarthy: On Hunter, Biden Is Re-running the Obama Fix for Hillary Ryan Mills: Minnesota's 'Orwellian' Bias Registry Will Chill Speech, Could Be Used to Punish Enemies, Critics Say Ryan Mills: Women Turn to Emergency Rooms after 'Being Sold Lies' about Abortion-Pill Safety Wilfred Reilly: The False Jordan Neely Narrative Abigail Anthony: Is Anthropologie the Next Bud Light? Noah Rothman: Trump's Sexual-Assault Verdict Makes Him the Only Choice to Lead the GOP Charles C. W. Cooke: Biden Is Incapable of Resisting the Left Brittany Bernstein: Chip Roy Warns Congress Will 'Blow Crap Up' If Biden Bypasses It on the Debt Ceiling CAPITAL MATTERS Gabriella Beaumont‐Smith finds the culprit: Why Are You Paying More for Baby Formula? LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW. Armond White cracks open a nostalgic account of this profession: The Movie-Based Legends of Journalism Brian Allen visits the Calvin Coolidge historic site in Vermont (and for Part 2, check out the homepage this weekend): A Visit to Plymouth Notch to Commune with Calvin Coolidge FROM THE NEW, MAY 29, 2023, ISSUE OF NR Albert Eisenberg: The Plight of the Detransitioners Dan McLaughlin: The Unjust Attacks on Thomas, Alito, and Roberts Rachel Lu: The GOP Struggles in Its Birthplace Bryan Garner: How Children Once Learned to Write THE PAYWALL COULD NOT CONTAIN THESE EXCERPTS Albert Eisenberg's piece in the new issue of NR is a must-read, on "the plight of the detransitioners." This is a coming crisis that we've been following closely, and Albert writes with great heart about the matter, and about the young Americans affected: The wreckage washing up in the wake of America's mass youth transition are the detransitioners, entering adulthood, sometimes utterly destroyed but determined to have their voices heard. To warn us. They are both part and process of America's growing "LGBT+." They are in fact its last, silent letter — the final transition, back to what they started as, but nothing like they were before. Some things just cannot be put together again. Almost none of the detransitioners have received any form of support from an LGBT organization. They are varyingly pilloried, silenced, or rejected; their social clout vanishes as they try to halt what has been done, to go back. "I was cast out of the LGBT community as soon as I expressed any regret," Chloe Cole tells me. "The mob mentality present in mainstream LGBT spaces is extremely dangerous. The pressure to go along with all the ideas present in the community will [drive] and has undoubtedly driven people to serious harm." It is a fearful prospect that many of today's gay and lesbian adults could have been driven into dysphoria, ultimately rejecting their own physical forms, had they been born just a generation later. But it will be the reality for many of today's LGBT youth, perhaps hundreds of thousands of them. How can you measure their pain — the pain and confusion of an entire generation? You could measure it in mastectomy scars, sewn at the ribcage, or trips to the emergency room to fix the countless complications and malfunctions of a lifetime of surgeries. You could collect all the prescription slips from the endocrinologists and the surgeons and the psychiatrists and plaster the streets of every American city with them. You could add up the years spent in medical treatment — the time taken away from all of life's other pursuits — or all of the bills from the plastic surgeons. The effects of transition and subsequent detransition are severe, they are graphic, and they are set to worsen significantly in the years to come. America's growing wave of youth detransitioners proves it.
We've published several pieces this week dispelling the idea that the 14th Amendment could license a presidential end run around Congress on the debt ceiling. Here's Dan McLaughlin's, explaining why that's not so: In short, the framers of the 14th Amendment would have anticipated that, if the country approached a default on its debt, it would be the responsibility of Congress, not the president, to address that — and they would also have anticipated that, if Congress failed to act, the federal government would stop spending money. Because presidents simply had no power to issue debt without Congress, the language at most imposed a duty on the executive to prioritize debt payments with the resources he had on hand. There is not the slightest evidence that anyone in 1866 would have thought they were amending Article I, Section 8 to create in the president an independent power to borrow money on the credit of the United States, any more than they were authorizing the president to levy taxes without Congress. . . . Advocates of "the 14th Amendment option" are correct, of course, that if Congress fails to pay outstanding debts, it has violated the Constitution, and that the president and the secretary of the Treasury are obliged by their own oaths of office to act within their powers to avoid this so long as they can. But those advocates go off the rails in simply hand-waving away the part where the president's actions must be within his own constitutional powers. Garrett Epps, for example, argues that Biden will have failed in his duties "if . . . the president obeys the debt ceiling." Tribe argues for "ignoring the debt ceiling until Congress either raises or abolishes it." But the debt ceiling is not a limit on Biden's power, it is a grant of power; to go beyond it, Biden would be acting entirely outside of the powers of his office. Tribe further argues that "proponents . . . say that when Congress enacted the debt limit . . . it built a violation of that constitutional command into our fiscal structure, and that as a result, that limit and all that followed are invalid." But if the authorization of debt — which is what the "limit" is — was invalid, that doesn't mean that there is no limit; it means that the debt itself was invalidly issued. That is a conclusion the 14th Amendment does not permit. Tribe adds that "the right question is whether Congress — after passing the spending bills that created these debts in the first place — can invoke an arbitrary dollar limit to force the president and his administration to do its bidding. There is only one right answer to that question, and it is no." But that is precisely what Madison expected Congress to do. There is little judicial gloss on Section 4. The lone U.S. Supreme Court decision, Perry v. United States (1935), stands for little more than the truism that Congress lacks the power to abrogate its commitments to holders of federal debt. A few federal appeals decisions add only the observation that sovereign immunity can make it difficult for holders of Treasuries to enforce them in court without congressional consent. Nobody has even tried to test the idea that the 14th Amendment grants additional powers to the executive simply because Congress is slow to decide the terms of its next authorization of new debt or attaches conditions the president dislikes. Presidents have no power to borrow money on our credit without the consent of our representatives.
A closer look at the California reparations proposal that was so poorly conceived even Governor Newsom took a pass, from NR's editorial: Given the taxpayer-funded sum the task force wants to see allocated to individual beneficiaries — potentially up to $1.2 million per eligible resident — it's reasonable to expect that this policy would create as many inequities as it might resolve. . . . The program the task force envisions is billed as compensation for the descendants of enslaved Americans, but it has defined eligibility in far broader terms than that. For example, black residents who resided in the state from the early 1930s until the late 1970s and were subjected to the Roosevelt-era policy of "redlining" certain districts to create or establish racially homogenous neighborhoods might receive as much as $148,099. Newer black residents don't have to fret, however. Locals who lived in the state from 1971 to 2020 are eligible for compensation addressing the impact of "over-policing and mass incarceration," to the tune of up to $115,260. The biggest lump sum is reserved for black Californians who can demonstrate experiencing "health disparities" presumably attributable to racist policies. For them, up to $966,921 will be on the table. A black senior citizen who has lived her whole life in the state and can claim to have been exposed to all the various harms raised in the report might be eligible for compensation in the seven-figure range. Determining who can stake a legitimate claim to having endured state-sponsored racism among California's roughly 2.5 million black residents would be left to a newly established state agency, which would also process and disburse payments. But the task force doesn't envision an agency that applies much scrutiny to applicants. . . . Recipients of these funds will find that their good fortune has not erased the stain of historic racial injustice nor cleansed human nature of its flaws and frailties. Those who paid the taxes for these sums — almost all of whom had nothing to do with the wrongs in question, which may have occurred before they were born or when they were living in another country — will awake the morning after to find that this gesture has had no meaningful effect on the public debate around America's racist legacy or their supposed collective responsibility for restitution. A program of monetary reparations could in short order exacerbate the racial grievances it was meant to resolve. Then there is the distasteful but nevertheless relevant question of where these astronomical amounts are supposed to come from. Sacramento entered 2022 operating under the impression that it had a $45 billion budget surplus, so the Democrats in command of the state's purse-strings went on a spending spree. . . . But it was all an illusion. California didn't have a budget surplus at all but, rather, a $25 billion deficit.
Rich Lowry delivers a needed fact-check: There's a school of thought that believes that every instrument that makes a sound is a dog whistle. The MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan provided a remarkably telling example of this perspective a week or so ago when he objected to Bill Maher's talking about the problem of murders in Chicago in particular and black-on-black crime in general. Hasan's rant is worth dwelling on because it's such a clear demonstration of how intolerable certain realities are to left-wing opinion, even when they involve black lives in the starkest way possible. . . . Chicago has led the country in murders for more than a decade. Saying that it's out of bounds to talk about Chicago in the context of murders is a little like saying no one should talk about San Francisco when discussing homelessness or Albany when the topic is political corruption. Hasan observes that, well, Chicago is all the way down at No. 28 in per capita murders. One wonders what major city it would be less racist to cite among those with the highest per capita murder rates? New Orleans? St. Louis? Baltimore? Detroit? Memphis? . . . Obviously, people point out the phenomenon of blacks killing blacks to push back against the pervasive idea that the police account for a large share of black deaths. Of course, cops do shoot black people, and some fraction of the shootings are unjustified, but we are talking about a tiny proportion that looms so large because of all of the media attention and political advocacy around the exceptional cases. . . . The proportion of white and black murders that are intra-racial are about the same, roughly 80 percent and 90 percent respectively. But the rate at which blacks kill other blacks is much higher. In 2019, African Americans were about 14 percent of the population and 52 percent of homicide victims.
Shout-Outs John Tierney, at City Journal: A Covid Postmortem Charles Lipson, at RealClearPolitics: If Hunter Is Indicted Chris Morris, at UnHerd: Turkey is the year's most important election CODA I love Nordic rock bands. So I won't pass up an opportunity to plug another one, after briefly meeting a member of their team in Reykjavík last weekend: the Vintage Caravan. They're a trio and, unlike the island's myriad atmospheric post-rockers, stick to riffs and hooks to ground their songwriting. They can cite a range of '70s-era hard-rock influences, but what I detect most is early Sabbath. Flip through these tracks, and see what you think. Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend. | 
Megyn Kelly -> Pete Hegseth responds to 2017 rape accusation. 🔥 vol. 3, issue 13 | December 6, 2024 Quick Hits All the news you need in...
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