Weekend Jolt: Are You More Annoyed Than You Were Four Years Ago?

WITH JUDSON BERGER

May 04 2024

Are You More Annoyed Than You Were Four Years Ago?

Dear Weekend Jolter,

Do you ever get the sense that, in this close election between two historically loathed people, all it would take to win would be for one of them to antagonize voters just a little less?

On the bright side for him, President Biden has considerable room to work with — as it seems his administration and allies have been intent on aggravating people as much as possible in quotidian aspects of their lives. And in bigger ways: The FAFSA debacle, for one, has left a huge, Healthcare.gov-sized crater in his government's reputation, leaving many students — and their parents — in limbo during college-acceptance season. But the annoyances and threatened disruptions are mounting apart from that, often the result not of agency ball-dropping but deliberate regulatory choices. The recent decision to backpedal on a proposed menthol-cigarette ban is one indication Biden realizes the tendency could be hurting him.

"It's hard to exaggerate how abysmal Biden's polling has been lately," Rich Lowry writes. The president's latest quarterly average approval rating, per Gallup, is under 39 percent and, for that period, lower than any of the previous nine presidents'. A brutal CNN poll released on Sunday showed not only Biden trailing Donald Trump by six points while the latter stands trial, but 61 percent viewing his presidency as a failure. Jim Geraghty provides his usual spot-on diagnosis of the underlying political problem:

This presidential election is a battle between two candidates and campaigns whose primary concerns and worries are light-years away from those of the majority of the electorate.

Trump, true to form, aims to make the race about how unfairly he's been treated, about the "stolen" 2020 election, etc. And Biden, Jim writes, "would love for this year's election to be about forgiving student loans, union jobs, climate change, gun control, abortion," and so forth. Yet poll after poll show it's the economy and inflation/cost of living, along with immigration, that weigh on voters' minds.

Instead of focusing narrowly on those things, the Biden administration is pursuing the above laundry list, while also:

• Botching the rollout of new college financial-aid forms. This can't be stressed enough. Jim writes here about how the Department of Education fumbled the congressionally mandated overhaul of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid system. Per the Associated Press, the muck-up has, for some, delayed college decisions by months and raised concerns that many students will simply not attend: "Across the United States, the number of students who have successfully submitted the FAFSA is down 29% from this time last year." In Jim's words, "God help you if you have a high-school senior applying to colleges this year."

• Finalizing a rule that is meant to raise wages for au pairs but could make the program too expensive for many families, and potentially even double the cost.

• Pursuing EPA regulations meant to move manufacturers and drivers away from gas-powered cars and toward electric vehicles and hybrids — on a timetable that seems to underplay the enormous amount of work still needed to build out the charging infrastructure and improve the EV experience itself. As NR's editorial on the push noted, EVs were just 7.6 percent of new car sales last year.

• Pursuing a range of rules that seem designed to torment businesses, dealing with everything from overtime policies to noncompete clauses to emissions disclosures to independent contractors. Some of these emanate from independent agencies — but independent agencies run by people Biden appointed, so the president's separation from these disruptions is limited. These measures won’t all necessarily redound to the benefit of employees, either.

• Until recently, trying to ban menthol cigarettes.

As NR's editorial explains, proponents of the latter idea considered it an act of racial benevolence, but that assumption inevitably collided with the likely consequences of the rule:

Menthols are popular among black smokers, so banning them would help improve disparate racial health outcomes, the argument goes.

Like many "anti-racist" arguments, this one sounds more racist the more you think about it. Not being able to ban a product in general but settling for only banning the version of it popular with black people doesn't put very much faith in the decision-making abilities of black people, who are fully capable of evaluating their decisions just like anyone else. . . . A national ban on the type of cigarette preferred by black smokers increases the chances for black people to confront law enforcement and face penalties for evading a ban that most white smokers wouldn't face.

So the administration announced it's shelving the idea.

It's a start. What Biden's government should do, more broadly, is resist the self-sabotaging forces of progressive hyper-activism. Noah Rothman's magazine piece last year on "the war on things that work" is a useful reference point, cataloguing the ways activists have been "waging a crusade against convenience." This includes, especially at the state level, fulminating against gas stoves, fighting the scourge of gas-powered lawn equipment, and banning single-use packaging in grocery stores. On that New Jersey bag measure, Noah wrote that the environmental benefits are unclear given that reusable bags take more energy and resources to make (read this; it's priceless) — and "the only observable effect of the ban has been to make daily life marginally more expensive and noticeably more annoying."

Democrats, do you ever look at Trump's Truth Social feed and feel like Jon Lovitz? Maybe stuff like this is why.

Speaking of: The administration's persistent efforts to wipe away (transfer to taxpayers) college-student debt, especially while struggling to process present-day financial-aid applications, are yet another way to alienate voters. If the policy wasn't invidious enough, one has to suspect more than a few (million) people saw the images this week of college students camping out, vandalizing property, occupying school facilities, and getting justifiably arrested and thought, perhaps while making their monthly car payment: So let me get this straight . . .

Reagan once asked, "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" The 2024 version might be: Are you more or less annoyed?

NAME. RANK. LINK.

EDITORIALS

Columbia has itself to blame for this week's chaos: A Crisis of Columbia's Own Making

Don't do it: An ICC Arrest Warrant for Netanyahu Would Be a Grave Mistake

The menthol-ban editorial, once more, is here: Biden's Menthol-Ban Backpedal

ARTICLES

Audrey Fahlberg & Brittany Bernstein: Will the Summer of Anti-Israel Protests Be Enough to Split Biden's Delicate Coalition?

David Zimmermann: NYPD Officers Storm Barricaded Columbia Building, Arrest Anti-Israel Protesters

Jeffrey Blehar: 'Occupying' Columbia Protesters Demand Global Intifada, Free Food

Zach Kessel: Northwestern Cuts Deal with Encampment Organizers, Establishes Full-Ride Scholarship for Palestinian Students

Becket Adams: The Return of 'Mostly Peaceful'

Kathryn Jean Lopez: There's Boundless Cruelty to the Antisemitic College Encampments

Andrew McCarthy: Bragg's Prosecution of Trump Violates New York State's Constitution

Andrew McCarthy: How Judge Merchan Is Orchestrating Trump's Conviction

Rich Lowry: Remember When Bill Clinton Stole the 1992 Election?

James Lynch: Congressional Investigators Recommend Nonprofit behind Wuhan-Lab Funding Be Criminally Investigated

Neal Freeman: DeSantis Is Back

Ryan Mills: Overturning Grants Pass Won't Force a Homeless-Camp Reckoning. These Strategies Could

Wilfred Reilly: Caitlin Clark's Salary Is Not the Scandal It's Made Out to Be

Jerry Hendrix: School on the Range

CAPITAL MATTERS

Dominic Pino obliterates the case for web welfare, again: FCC Spins Survey Results to Support Web Welfare

LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.

Brian Allen provides a feast for the senses, with his retrospective on impressionism: Impressionism's Rebels, from Paris to California: Light, Light, and More Light

Anyone for tennis? From Armond White: Challengers Challenges the Zeitgeist

SUFFER FROM LINK-PHOBIA? TRY THESE EXCERPTS INSTEAD

Columbia's NYPD crackdown came far too late. From NR's editorial:

The NYPD said that they had arrested 119 people at Columbia without reported injuries and charged them with offenses including burglary, trespass, and criminal mischief. However, it remains to be seen whether Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg will actually prosecute them.

What is abundantly clear is that things never would have gotten to this point were it not for Columbia's feeble administrators, starting with Minouche Shafik, the university president. Instead of intervening deliberately the moment that protesters began breaking rules, she coddled the protesters and gave them every reason to believe that they would never face any consequences for their actions.

After initially calling in the NYPD to remove the encampment on April 18, the university allowed students to reestablish it immediately after. Deadline after deadline for the protesters to leave the encampment — a clear violation of multiple university rules — passed with no action, as the university attempted to "negotiate" with the protesters. Faculty members were allowed to join with students and shield them from consequences.

Rampant antisemitism and harassment of Jewish students were on display throughout the protests. Demonstrators called for "intifada" — a reference to the waves of terrorist attacks that killed over 1,000 Israelis well before the October 7 massacres — and shouted at a Jewish student, "The 7th of October is going to be every day for you." Chants called for erasing Israel, with its 7.2 million Jews, from the "river to the sea." And — rejecting the idea of even a Palestinian state that exists beside a Jewish one — the protesters yelled, "We want all of it." . . .

Columbia could have saved itself a lot of grief had it adopted the posture of the University of Florida, run by Ben Sasse, the former U.S. senator. The university communicated to protesters how they could exercise their free-speech rights and what crossed the line into disrupting university life for other students, and then it punished those who crossed the line. "This is not complicated: The University of Florida is not a day care, and we do not treat protesters like children — they knew the rules, they broke the rules, and they'll face the consequences," the school announced.

Only in the bizarro world of higher education does a university deserve special recognition for treating grown college students as adults who can be held responsible for their actions.

Rich Lowry finds the historical parallel in Trump's Stormy dealings, and the double standard:

The Manhattan DA has a meaningless business-records misdemeanor wrapped within a theory about an alleged Trump conspiracy to defraud the voters by denying them disparaging information before the election and obscuring, after the fact, the payments that were used to do so.

Bragg is accusing Trump, in effect, of stealing the election. . . .

If this is the standard by which we judge elections, we need to go back and conclude that Bill Clinton wasn't elected legitimately in 1992, either. The Arkansas governor's political operation was, in part, an elaborate conspiracy to keep women who alleged to have had affairs with Clinton quiet. Hillary Clinton was an active participant in the schemes. And so, by Bragg's logic, this Democratic power couple — dominant in the party for a decade or more and still honored today — comprises election thieves.

Clinton had the same underlying problem as Trump — namely, women with embarrassing stories to tell — but the opposite tabloid dynamic; the tabloids were trying to get Clinton, whereas the National Enquirer was trying to protect Trump.

The Clinton campaign fought to silence or discredit women as necessary. Clinton's operatives had the foresight — there's nothing like planning ahead — to secure affidavits of denial from women rumored to have had affairs with Clinton. The truth didn't matter here, of course. They just wanted the exculpatory statements, and the women were usually happy to sign them. Who wants the embarrassment of such matters being aired in public? . . .

Central to the operation to suppress damaging allegations was the private detective Jack Palladino. He would contact women and either get them to sign affidavits denying everything or find a way to attack their credibility.

He convinced the National Enquirer to take a pass on a story about a former Miss Arkansas by providing the publication with affidavits questioning her reliability.

None of this was free. The campaign considered the payments to Palladino election expenses, and made them from its own funds, but hid them. As Michael Isikoff relates in his book Uncovering Clinton, the campaign sent the initial $28,000 to a Denver law firm, which passed along the payment to Palladino's agency. This assured that only the Denver law firm showed up in disclosures with the Federal Election Commission. How was the payment categorized? As legal fees (reminder: Trump is getting prosecuted because he booked his payments to Michael Cohen, his equivalent of Paladino, as legal fees rather than reimbursement of a loan).

On a related point, Andy McCarthy makes a convincing case that Alvin Bragg's prosecution relies on a statute that runs afoul of New York's constitution:

Trump is actually charged not with a conspiracy but with 34 substantive felony violations of a New York statute that makes it a crime to falsify business records with the fraudulent intent to conceal "another crime."

What other crime? The penal statute in question doesn't say. That's a fatal problem because New York State's constitution mandates that a statute must spell out any statutory terms it is incorporating. Under Article III, §16, of the state constitution, incorporation by reference is not permitted.

To be more specific, Trump is charged under §175.10 of the state penal law with "falsifying business records in the first degree." . . .

Note that, following New York's afore-described constitutional rule, the felony business-records statute expressly incorporates the misdemeanor crime of "falsifying business records in the second degree." This kind of incorporation has been approved by the Court of Appeals, New York's highest court, only because it expressly states the terms of a specified statute that are being included. That is, §175.10 expressly cites to and expressly requires commission of the second-degree offense. That offense, §175.05, states exactingly what conduct the legislature has criminalized: in Trump's case, "with intent to defraud, . . . caus[ing] a false entry to be made in the business records of an enterprise." Ergo, people cannot complain that they are not on notice of what it means to falsify business records.

The remainder of §175.10, however, provides virtually no notice — including with respect to its most consequential aspect: the additional element that makes first degree falsification a felony, punishable by up to four years' imprisonment.

The difference between the misdemeanor prescribed by §175.05 and the felony prescribed by §175.10 is that the latter requires proof that the falsifier's fraudulent intent included the concealment of "another crime." But the statute is constitutionally infirm — probably in all cases, but at least as applied to Trump — because it does not state what "other crimes" trigger felony liability.

Under Article III, §16 of the New York Constitution:

"No act shall be passed which shall provide that any existing law, or any part thereof, shall be made or deemed a part of said act, or which shall enact that any existing law, or part thereof, shall be applicable, except by inserting it in such act" (emphasis added).

This is a due-process provision meant to prevent exactly what Bragg has done here: force a defendant to go to trial without being put on notice of the charge.