NATIONAL REVIEW
MAY 17, 2024 |
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◼ President Biden has challenged Donald Trump to debate him two times this fall, just in case he forgets the first time.
◼ After exchanging taunts online, Biden and Trump agreed to debate in June. Until there is official agreement on all the details—in fact, until the candidates are on the debate stage—any plans could fall through. But a series of presidential debates would be worthwhile. Biden is an elderly individual suffering from noticeable signs of decline, and there are serious doubts as to whether he is fit to serve a full second term. Trump, no spring chicken himself, skipped all the debates during the primaries and has not had to answer many questions about what kinds of policies he would pursue in a second term. Voters deserve to see both men stand up and take questions in an unscripted format in which each can be challenged by his opponent. Barring something extraordinary, either Trump or Biden will be president next year. Let them face each other, as they face the voters.
◼ Trump's criminal trial in New York is drawing to a quicker-than-expected ending. Prosecutors announced that Michael Cohen, Trump's former lawyer and bumbling "fixer," is their final witness. Trump is unlikely to testify in his own defense. Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg clearly stripped the case down after porn star Stormy Daniels provided graphic testimony of a sexual encounter she claims to have had with Trump in 2006—inflammatory evidence that shed no light on the actual charges and that had Judge Juan Merchan deriding prosecutors for doing what he had green-lighted. Cohen is a loathsome figure, but that could cut both ways with the jury, loathsomeness being what made him useful to Trump for over a decade. Legally, the case is weak. The falsity of Trump's business records is debatable, with Bragg betting heavily on the say-so of Cohen, a convicted perjurer. Even if one stipulates that the records are false, Bragg still needs to prove fraudulent intent that includes covering up a second crime—which Bragg suggests is conspiracy to violate federal campaign laws. The proof on those elements is scant, and it is a due-process affront that we're still guessing on the second crime. Still, juries tend to take their cues from the judge, and Merchan's pro-prosecution bias is barely contained.
◼ Admit it, when you read the New York Times scoop about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. surviving a bout with a parasitic worm that had eaten a portion of his brain, you were both surprised and not surprised. Suddenly Kennedy's wackier statements didn't seem quite so wacky. The Times also reported that he had suffered a bout of mercury poisoning. It's good that Kennedy believes he isn't having any memory loss or other lingering effects, but it's not good that his campaign refused to turn over medical records and that no major candidate has released medical records so far this cycle. In February, President Biden released a "summary" of his most recent medical tests but not his records; in November, former president Donald Trump released a three-paragraph letter from his doctor declaring that he was in "excellent health." In both the 2000 and 2008 cycles, John McCain released his medical records, recognizing that the public needed reassurance given his advanced age. McCain was 71 in 2008. Kennedy turned 70 in January. Trump turns 78 in June, and Biden turns 82 shortly after the election. Jill Stein turns 75 this month, and Cornel West turns 71 in June. All these candidates ought to release their records or, at a minimum, allow a medical correspondent to review and summarize them.
◼ In 2016, Trump broke with precedent by releasing a list of potential Supreme Court picks. It was key to persuading skeptical conservatives who provided the margin of his victory. It was also a healthy move for democratic transparency in light of the outsized role the Court plays today. It is ultimately the voters who are responsible for preserving our Constitution, and they deserve to know what sort of hands they will be leaving it in. Judicial nominations were perhaps the greatest success story of Trump's first term, pursued without the chaos that attended other Trump efforts and unifying the disparate factions of the party. Judges were a winning issue for Republican Senate candidates in 2018 and 2020. Yet, throughout the 2024 primaries, Trump and his campaign were oddly quiet about the judiciary, as Trump seemed content to rest on his laurels while rumors swirled that he was breaking with legal conservatives and was dissatisfied that the courts had not been more solicitous of his false election-fraud claims and demands for immunity from prosecution. In mid March, Trump said he would release another judges list. If he wants to win and govern effectively, he should follow through on the promise. |
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◼ The Supreme Court ruled 7–2 that the appropriations clause of the Constitution allowed Congress, in 2010, to authorize the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to fund itself in perpetuity out of the Federal Reserve rather than have to seek annual funding from Congress. This setup is an egregious violation of the constitutional design, but as Justice Clarence Thomas argued in an originalist opinion for the Court, the Constitution's text requires time limits on appropriations only for the army. Courts can therefore do only so much to stop Congress from giving away its power of the purse. That said, we think that Justice Samuel Alito in his dissent made a persuasive case that the CFPB's design, taken as a whole, is a menace and not comparable to Founding-era statutes that let the post office and the customs collectors fund themselves out of fees they collected. The Court left open the possibility that there might be "other constitutional checks on Congress's authority to create and fund an administrative agency" by means far removed from user fees. In the meantime, any self-respecting Congress would abolish this unaccountable funding mechanism for this powerful agency and restore to the people's representatives control over how their money is spent.
◼ The justices handed a modest victory to aggressive civil-forfeiture schemes in Culley v. Marshall, ruling that when the government seizes property in connection with an arrest, the due-process clause requires only a prompt hearing to determine whether the government keeps it—not an additional preliminary hearing to decide whether the government can hold the property pending that hearing. That's bad news for people like the car owners in Culley, who were without their vehicles for months because friends or family members were busted for drugs while driving them. Justice Brett Kavanaugh's opinion for the 6–3 majority offered a defensible case under precedent and history for not requiring a preliminary hearing. But the Court's lineup bodes poorly for often-overzealous forfeiture schemes. Justice Neil Gorsuch, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, wrote a concurring opinion arguing that the Court should reconsider in a proper case whether modern civil forfeiture truly comports with historical understandings. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing for the three liberals in dissent, bristled just as Gorsuch did with hostility at forfeiture abuses driven by revenue-raising incentives that distort law enforcement and burden those least able to fight the government in court. That's five votes. In the meantime, legislatures should reform these systems without waiting for the Court.
◼ Four years after the coronavirus emerged, former National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins could not identify any scientific evidence to justify social-distancing measures taken during the pandemic. Earlier this year, Collins testified before congressional investigators about the federal government's response to the coronavirus. A transcript first reported by NR shows that Collins was unable to list a single piece of evidence for the six-feet-apart public-health guidance widely adopted by government officials. Collins's admission follows testimony by Anthony Fauci, who told the coronavirus subcommittee that the six-feet concept came out of thin air. In a similar fashion, Collins conceded that the origin of Covid-19 is still a matter of scientific debate, despite his work behind the scenes to discredit the lab-leak hypothesis at the outset of the pandemic. The public reckoning over the federal government's failures throughout the pandemic still has far to go. |
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◼ Biden's announcement of new China tariffs is the latest example of two trends in his administration: talking tough on China but not following it up with effective policy, and bending over backward to appease organized labor. The administration estimates the tariffs would affect $18 billion of imports, equivalent to 4 percent of total U.S. imports from China last year. The tariffs are concentrated in industries that are close to government: steel, semiconductors, and automobiles. A 100 percent tariff on electric vehicles is mostly for show, since virtually no Chinese EVs are sold in the U.S., and the sourcing of EV components wouldn't be such a problem if the federal government and the government of the most populous state weren't mandating their sale. This from the administration that took more than a year to implement new sanctions on China for violating American airspace with a spy balloon, removed sanctions from an arm of the CCP complicit in the Uyghur genocide in a failed effort to get China to crack down on fentanyl exports, and still believes that China is a partner on climate change. But like other policies from Biden, the tariffs make sense as political favors to labor unions. Effusive in their praise of the announcement were the AFL-CIO, the United Steelworkers, and the BlueGreen Alliance (the last is a coalition of unions and environmentalist groups whose members include the United Auto Workers, the Sierra Club, the American Federation of Teachers, the SEIU, and the Natural Resources Defense Council—it's all one progressive movement). Biden is protecting politically important industries, not being tough on China.
◼ As Israelis debate the next stage of their campaign in Gaza and face tremendous pressure from the Biden administration to avoid a major operation in Rafah, their unity government is starting to show cracks. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant publicly attacked Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for not having a plan to govern Gaza in the absence of Hamas. He called on Netanyahu to state unequivocally that Israel will not be involved in governing the area. Netanyahu's chief rival, war-cabinet member Benny Gantz, stood with Gallant, while Netanyahu fired back that he was "not ready to exchange Hamastan for Fatahstan"—a reference to the idea that Fatah, the armed governing party of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, would take control. The dispute recalled the fierce divisions over a proposed overhaul of the nation's judicial system, which led Netanyahu to fire Gallant last year, only to bring him back after masses of protesters took to the streets and unions threatened a paralyzing general strike. The horrific nature of the attacks of October 7 unified Israelis, but Gallant's comments show that very real differences remain.
◼ A newly deciphered papyrus scroll found in a Roman villa that was buried in a.d. 79 under layers of ash from Mount Vesuvius gives a new account of Plato's last evening alive. According to the scroll, found in a house thought to have belonged to Julius Caesar's father-in-law, the feverish and sickly philosopher listened to a Thracian slave girl play the flute and, true to form, critiqued her lack of rhythm. May the vaults and libraries of Herculaneum, long thought inaccessible to us, bring forth new discoveries.
◼ "I am amazed sometimes to think how old I am," says the narrator of "Some Women," a story published in the New Yorker when its author, Alice Munro, was 77. A self-described "plodder" and a tireless editor of her own work, Munro once paid to revise a short story after her publisher had sent it to the printer. In her mid 30s she discarded most of her attempts at fiction. A few years later she published her first book, a collection centered on the lives of girls and women such as she knew in rural Ontario, her home. She made her prose the unobtrusive servant of her unsentimental accounts of what moves her characters and, in the telling, her readers. "It is a challenge to find an unessential word or a superfluous phrase," Peter Englund said in presenting her the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. In "The Bear Came Over the Mountain," she describes the relationship of a man and his wife as she slips into dementia, a condition that claimed her career in her final years, after more than a dozen short-story collections and a mountain of prizes. Dead at 92. R.I.P.
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