THIS EDITION OF THE WEEK IS PRESENTED BY |
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NATIONAL REVIEW
JUN 28, 2024 |
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◼ Time for Democrats to come up with their own Great Replacement Theory.
◼ Lincoln–Douglas or Webster–Hayne, this was not. Joe Biden and Donald Trump lived down to expectations. Neither explained what he intends to do with power the next four years. Both were lost at sea when confronted with questions about the nation's finances. They were livelier comparing golf handicaps. But Trump sounded like the Trump we've long known: blustering, bragging, and spinning fantasies for the marks of his sales pitches. His lowest moments came with his voluminous baggage: One does not want to start a sentence with: "Number one, I didn't have sex with a porn star . . ." But he drew blood with his visceral disgust at Biden's policies on the border and late-term abortion, and by demanding about Afghanistan, "Did you fire anybody?" There's no polite way to say it: Biden sounded weak, wheezy, decrepit, and overwhelmed. His best moments came when he got indignant, but even then, his mantra of "The idea!" got almost as old as he sounded. Democrats can scarcely hide their sense of panic and dread.
◼ Jamaal Bowman, incumbent representative for New York's 16th congressional district, lost the Democratic primary to Westchester County executive George Latimer by 17 points. It was a richly deserved outcome for a congressman who stood out even in the progressive "Squad" as noxious and juvenile. Bowman's unfitness for office was obvious enough when he was mostly known as the only member of Congress to have attempted to delay a House vote by yanking a fire alarm. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for it. Since the October 7 attack on Israel, Bowman has been a font of base antisemitism. A mere month after the attacks, he denied claims of Hamas rapes and atrocities as "lies" and "propaganda" disseminated by the Jewish state. (He only belatedly apologized, with truculent insincerity.) He fulminated conspiratorially to Politico about "the certain places where the Jews live and concentrate" in his district. He ended his campaign by shrieking vulgarly at a rally about how AIPAC was "coming for my family." Voters were unpersuaded. Nobody doubts that George Latimer will be anything but a loyal party-line Democrat; that he is not a deranged antisemite is more than enough.
◼ Not at all chastened by the failure of his tariffs when in office, Trump seeks a much larger trade war if he becomes president again. The tariffs on China have not changed Chinese behavior, but they have raised prices for Americans, and the retaliation from China has harmed American exporters, especially in agriculture. Biden thinks they're a good idea and has extended them—which should at least be a warning that maybe they aren't a good idea. Yet Trump says he wants to go even further, with a minimum 10 percent tariff on all imports, completely belying any of the "strategic" justifications for "targeted" tariffs that protectionists invoke when they want to sound sophisticated. He now says he wants tariffs to replace the income tax. The individual income tax raised about $2 trillion last year, and total U.S. imports were valued at around $3.5 trillion. Squeezing $2 trillion in revenue from a $3.5 trillion tax base is economically impossible, and attempting to do so would be economically destructive. Trump's biggest legislative accomplishment, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, was a solid conservative tax reform that lowered rates and broadened the base, making the tax code less economically distortive. He should seek to build on that, not undermine it with Smoot-Hawley 2.0.
◼ In Los Angeles on Sunday, pro-Palestinian activists demonstrated outside the Adas Torah Synagogue in the Pico-Robertson neighborhood, a center of the city's Jewish community. They blocked the entrance to prevent the public from attending a real-estate fair for properties in Israel. Counter-protesters gathered, and fighting between the two camps soon broke out. Elected officials including Mayor Karen Bass, Governor Gavin Newsom, and President Joe Biden were quick to condemn the original protest and ensuing violence. "Intimidating Jewish congregants is dangerous, unconscionable, antisemitic, and un-American," Biden said in a statement on X. "Americans have a right to peaceful protest. But blocking access to a house of worship—and engaging in violence—is never acceptable." Excellent. Now where are the prosecutions? |
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A masterful biography by historian Randall Woods |
"An insightful read and a tour de force." |
—Daniel Walker Howe, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of What Hath God Wrought |
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◼ In Murthy v. Missouri, the Supreme Court declined to rule on whether the federal government had violated the First Amendment by repeatedly putting pressure on the country's social-media networks to censor their users. The Court instead dismissed the case on the ground that the plaintiffs lacked standing to bring it, explaining that it was taking no position on the underlying dispute. In his dissent, Justice Alito expressed his displeasure. "This," he wrote, "is one of the most important free speech cases to reach this Court in years." And, as a result of the Court's abdication, "officials who read today's decision" would now know that "if a coercive campaign is carried out with enough sophistication it may get by." That may be true. But it need not be, for Americans are still in possession of a Congress. Should it so wish, that Congress can determine under what circumstances the executive branch may communicate with the nation's social-media companies, it can require that all such communications be made public, and it can put in place punishments for executive employees who skirt the rules. Several such bills have already been introduced. The court having bowed out, it's time for legislators to step up.
◼ In 2022, the Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling in the case of New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. In 2024, in the case of United States v. Rahimi, the Court narrowed the scope of that ruling at the first opportunity it got. In Bruen, the six-justice majority had established a test for the examination of Second Amendment claims: Gun laws had to fit within the context of the "historical tradition of firearm regulation." In Rahimi, the Court limited how rigorous the government's "historical analogues" were expected to be. The plaintiff in the case, Zackey Rahimi, is a domestic abuser who, on multiple occasions, had fired his guns while in public. He was subject to a restraining order. But he had not actually been convicted of anything. In Rahimi's view, this rendered the government's decision to strip him of his rights facially unconstitutional, given that, at the time of the Founding, there were no laws that deprived eligible persons of their right to bear arms without their first having been found guilty of a crime. Clarence Thomas was the only justice to agree. The Court ruled that while the fact that the government considered Rahimi "dangerous" was insufficient to strip him of his rights on its own, 18th-century "surety" laws provided a close enough analogue. In essence, Chief Justice Roberts concluded that Bruen did not require the "historic twin" that Thomas desired, but a provision that was "relevantly similar." It found one, and may well tend to do so in future Second Amendment cases, too.
◼ "Apparently, the Court has simply lost the will to decide the easy but emotional and highly politicized question that the case presents." So laments Justice Alito in his dissent from the Supreme Court's surprising decision not to decide Moyle v. United States. The case concerned a federal law, known as EMTALA, that requires hospitals to provide emergency care to all comers. (Some of them had previously been dumping costly patients on other hospitals.) The Biden administration contends that the law overrides Idaho's ban on abortion in certain situations, although it was unable to identify any situations that would not already be covered by Idaho's life-of-the-mother exception. Alito (joined by Justices Thomas and Gorsuch) forcefully argues that the Biden administration's position is unsound. But three of his colleagues who we expect will ultimately agree with his position—Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Kavanaugh, and Justice Barrett—evidently decided right after oral argument in April that the Court shouldn't have taken the case up so quickly. They even decided to allow the district court's injunction against Idaho to be reinstated for the time being. So the Ninth Circuit will next decide Idaho's appeal, and the case will then return to the Supreme Court. In the meantime, expect a torrent of false claims that Idaho is endangering women's lives. |
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◼ The Oklahoma supreme court has ruled that the nation's first religiously affiliated charter school, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, violates the First Amendment. The case made strange bedfellows of left-wing advocacy groups and Gentner Drummond, Oklahoma's Republican attorney general, who virulently opposed the school and even argued the case himself. The crux of the argument advanced by Drummond and adopted by the Oklahoma supreme court is "strict separationism," an interpretation of the establishment clause. Jefferson's "wall of separation between church and state" is taken to mean that most interactions between government and religion are prohibited. "Strict separationism" has not found favor with the U.S. Supreme Court in recent years. In Carson v. Makin (2022), for instance, the Court held that Maine's ban on parents' use of school vouchers for religious schools violated the First Amendment. The same principle should hold true in Oklahoma, where secular charter schools may receive public funding while schools such as St. Isidore's are shut out solely because they are religiously affiliated.
◼ The Department of Justice settled a long-running dispute with European and Australian allies over the fate of Julian Assange this week by just giving up. The founder of WikiLeaks was given the opportunity to plead to a single felony count in a U.S. courthouse. He was sentenced to time served and swiftly returned to his native Australia. This is a travesty. Assange's outfit revealed American methods, assets, and allies in the Afghan and Iraqi theaters, exposing the allies to retribution and imperiling U.S. soldiers and diplomatic personnel. It even revealed how America's enemies could frustrate the jamming technology that U.S. troops used to disable improvised explosive devices. And Assange was not a passive wholesaler of classified information pilfered by others. He participated in the pilfering. The indictment against Assange alleged that he "agreed to assist" Private Bradley Manning "in cracking a password" to a "United States government network used for classified documents and communications." U.S. prosecutors will not be able to make that case thanks to this deal. The victims of Assange's crimes will not see him face justice. The radicals and professional "outsiders" who celebrated Assange's release do so with reckless disregard for American national security.
◼ Now that Alexei Navalny is dead, Vladimir Kara-Murza is probably the foremost political prisoner in Russia. Twice, in 2015 and 2017, state agents poisoned him. They did the same to Navalny in 2020. Like Kara-Murza, he survived the poisoning. He died in prison four years later. Kara-Murza has now been transferred to an especially punitive, especially horrific, facility. The given reason, says his lawyer, is that he failed to put his arms behind his back for several seconds after being ordered to do so. Kara-Murza's health is very bad. The effects of the poisonings linger. It seems that the authorities are killing him slowly. The way they did Navalny. The way they did Sergei Magnitsky, at the end of the 2000s. Boris Nemtsov, Kara-Murza's friend and mentor, was simply shot to death on a bridge within sight of the Kremlin, in 2015. The life of Kara-Murza should be a worldwide cause.
◼ "Our concepts" become "all the more precious for our awareness that they, and therefore we, fail to intersect with 'reality' at any point," a fictitious English professor writes. She and a gaggle of literary scholars exchanging profundities about Winnie the Pooh were written into existence by Frederick Crews, a real-life veteran English professor. His more than a dozen books include monographs on 19th-century novelists and an unflattering biography of Freud. Crews spent decades debunking loopy psychoanalytic theory, and in particular the fraud of "repressed memories." He admired scientific thought and practiced his skepticism with panache in the New York Review of Books and in the classroom, for 36 years, at Berkeley. His style-and-composition handbook for writers was a commercial and critical success. A prose stylist as well as a thinker, he leavened his indignation with mirth to construct delightful if merciless takedowns of intellectual flapdoodle. "There's no right and wrong in criticism, only smarter and dumber," he explains through one of his fictitious professors. "But ideologizing is always dumb. It cramps your style, foreclosing the behind-the-back dribbles, the no-look passes, and the alley-oop reverse jams that could put some soul in your critical game." Dead at 91. R.I.P.
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