Dear Weekend Jolter,
The road to the first 2024 presidential debate was paved with accusations that Republicans were shamelessly circulating "cheap-fake" videos that made President Biden look more doddering than he is. Some were unfavorably cropped or otherwise missing context but still revealed troubling scenes — and, as Becket Adams writes, "a handful of unfairly manipulated clips do not excuse away the entire body of footage showing" the president's decline.
Thursday's debate, at last, made Democrats’ deny-your-eyes strategy untenable. Biden’s performance, broadcast to millions on live TV, couldn’t be dismissed as RNC-manufactured disinfo — creating an unprecedented level of consensus among even publications and pundits friendliest to Biden that he had a terrible night with grave implications. "President Joe Biden's debate performance will go down as one of the worst onstage appearances by a sitting incumbent in modern political memory," Audrey Fahlberg assessed, in reporting on the party fallout.
Mere seconds into the debate, the hoarse and halting commander in chief struggled to articulate not only his vision but anything at all. He could barely parry Donald Trump's embellishments, even on layup issues like January 6, in which the Republican dramatically downplayed the egregiousness of his own conduct. The agonizing encounter closed with a scene of two old men arguing in front of a couple other people about their golf handicaps — in other words, what both of them should be doing at this stage in life. But the two men are also running for president, and one of them does not appear capable of making it through a matinée, let alone four more years in office.
So what now? As Audrey reports, Democrats are floating the idea that Biden should step aside before the convention. "There is a deep, a wide, and a very aggressive panic in the Democratic Party," CNN’s John King intoned of the "game-changing debate" in the moments after it ended. The Times followed with a report along similar lines.
The coming weeks will reveal whether the "panic" translates into an astonishing moment in American political history or is yet another crisis made evanescent by this contest’s insuperable inertia. Already, prominent Democrats including Barack Obama are speaking up in support of Biden’s continuing his campaign, essentially arguing his debate showing was bad but Trump is worse.
"Jill Biden is now the most important person in politics," Phil Klein writes. If the first lady can be convinced to convince her husband to withdraw, he could be replaced. Otherwise, Democrats are most likely stuck with him. As NR’s editorial notes, they have only themselves — and Joe Biden — to blame. Mark Wright puts the party’s predicament down to hubris, plain and simple:
Anyone with eyes to see knew two years ago that Biden's advanced age was his fundamental liability in this election. But Joe Biden insisted on seeking reelection for a second term that would end when he would be 86 years old. A supermajority of Americans and a majority of self-described Democrats don't think that Biden is up for the job, and a debate performance that bordered on elder abuse has now carved that opinion into immutable granite.
Perhaps it’s not too late for Democrats. And, as MBD warns, "if Biden's bad performance really does lead to his departure from the race, Republicans will miss him." But as it stands, Trump is not really in a dead heat with Biden in the 2024 race. He's winning it, in battleground after battleground, and Biden’s debate performance practically locks in that dynamic. If he stays in the race, as Dominic Pino predicts he will, Biden's best hope may be that Trump is sentenced to prison in a couple weeks in his New York case (we can't rule it out) — not a great position for the incumbent president to be in. The Supreme Court, separately, is yet to rule on Trump’s immunity claims.
Phil puts the state of play in painfully simple terms: "Joe Biden lost the election. The only question is whether he stays on the ballot."
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
"An unspinnably bad performance": The Biden Debate Debacle
Assange is free, but he's no saint: Julian Assange Is No Hero
Court ruling or not, the Biden administration's suppression of speech still needs to be checked: The Supreme Court Gives Biden a Mulligan for Stifling Free Speech
ARTICLES
James Lynch: How the Democrats Could Still Replace Biden as Their Nominee
Charles C. W. Cooke: Remember Who Lied to You
Ryan Mills: Supreme Court Rules Bans on Public Camping Do Not Constitute Cruel and Unusual Punishment of the Homeless
Ryan Mills: Portland Is Spending Millions to Remove Tents from Its Sidewalks. Why Is the County Handing Out More?
Zach Kessel: Supreme Court Strikes Devastating Blow to Power of Federal Agencies in Landmark Ruling
Philip Klein: Overturning Chevron Is Functionally Bigger Than Overturning Roe
Dan McLaughlin: Supreme Court Turns a Blind Eye to Federal Authorities Pressuring Social-Media Companies to Ban Speech
Jeffrey Blehar: The Fall of Jamaal
Andrew McCarthy: Merrick Garland's Special-Counsel Appointment of Jack Smith Is in Peril
Mike Pence: Dobbs Was Only the Beginning
Lauren Noble: Bureaucracy Is Eating Higher Education. Just Look at Yale
Caroline Downey: Mother with Young Child Ejected from Plane after Accidentally 'Misgendering' Trans Airline Employee
Caroline Downey: Texas Children's Hospital Still Leaning into Gender Ideology Even after Trans-Procedure Scandal
Matthew X. Wilson: Biden Health Official Pushed to Scrap Age Minimums for Transgender Surgeries, Court Documents Show
Christian Schneider: When Will Americans Tire of Hardball Politics?
Marco Rubio: President Biden's Misguided Policy toward the Houthis Hurts Americans
Jimmy Quinn: 'Evil': 84-Year-Old Israeli Hostage Breaks Silence on Captivity in U.N. Teacher's Home
Noah Rothman: Julian Assange's Plea Deal Is a Tragedy
CAPITAL MATTERS
Joel Kotkin examines demographic trends, and how they could redound to Republicans' benefit: The Election: An Old Picture Changes
Dominic Pino shares some narrative-challenging facts about work: Most People Like Their Jobs
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Praise, from Armond White: Last Summer's True Confession
Sumptuousness is the order of the day at the Met's Tiffany show. From Brian Allen: Tiffany Rules as Gilded Age Splendor Returns to the Met
YOU'RE HALFWAY THERE
While you/we were witnessing the expiration of a presidency, the Supreme Court was issuing hugely consequential decisions, with more to come next week. Phil Klein explains why its ruling on the so-called Chevron doctrine is so big (I'm reproducing his post in full here):
The Supreme Court, in a 6–3 decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts, overturned the Chevron doctrine. Functionally, this is a bigger deal than the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Don't get me wrong, I wrote on the day Dobbs was decided that it was the biggest victory in the history of the conservative movement. Roe was terrible constitutional law in which judges hijacked the democratic process to impose their ideological preferences. It forced states to accept the moral stain of allowing millions of abortions per year no matter what the legislatures, or their people, wanted. The overturning of Roe was a political earthquake. The overturning of the Chevron doctrine, in contrast, will not decide a single race this year.
In terms of the operation of the federal government, however, its effects will be more sweeping.
Since it was decided in 1984, Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. has been central to the massive expansion of the administrative state. By instructing courts to defer to a federal agency's interpretation of actions on which Congress is not explicit as long as such interpretation is "reasonable," it left the door open for the government to pursue all sorts of actions without direct permission from Congress. It also led Congress to increasingly shirk its obligations of lawmaking and defer authority to agencies.
This is a huge win for those of us alarmed by the growth of government specifically when it comes to actions taken by the executive branch that have never gone through Congress.
In other Trump news, Andy McCarthy is putting the potential for a big prosecutorial development on our radar screens:
In the coming weeks, there is a very real possibility that the federal district court in Florida will rule that Attorney General Merrick Garland's appointment of Jack Smith as a special counsel (SC) violated the Constitution's appointments clause (Art. II, §2, cl.2).
If Judge Aileen Cannon, the Trump-appointee who is presiding over Smith's illegal document-retention prosecution against former president Trump, were to make such a ruling, would the Biden Justice Department have to start the case over from scratch? Perhaps, but I think that's unlikely.
More likely: AG Garland would have to reassign the case to a district U.S. attorney appointed by President Biden. That probably wouldn't cause much delay. It would, however, force Garland to abandon his independent-prosecutor deception — i.e., the artifice by which he and Biden claim that they have no involvement in the government's prosecution of Biden's electoral opponent and that all decisions are being made by Smith, a supposedly independent actor. In truth, Biden and Garland are controlling the Trump prosecutions — as a matter of constitutional law, and as a matter of fact. . . .
Attorneys who authorize the investigation and prosecution of federal crimes must be officers of the United States because they wield significant government power. Under the clause, there are just two ways of qualifying as an officer of the United States: the appointee must either be (a) nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, or (b) appointed to a position that "shall be established by law" — which is to say, by a congressional statute.
Smith, who has run the Trump investigations since his SC appointment by Garland on November 18, 2022, was not appointed under either of those procedures.
You can say this: These are boom times for tent manufacturers. Ryan Mills has the story on local Oregon governments who had been working at cross-purposes, with Portland spending millions to clear campsites from sidewalks and the county distributing more tents to restore them (a post-publication update — the county has since agreed to pause this practice amid negotiations with the city):
As part of a settlement agreement last year, the City of Portland agreed to prioritize removing campsites that block sidewalks and to establish a system to report problematic camps. The city also agreed to stop distributing tents and tarps to homeless residents, with limited exceptions, including exceptions during severe weather events.
[John] DiLorenzo told National Review that he believes the city is "really doing a good job" living up to its end of the agreement. Still, he wanted to find out why, despite those efforts, there were still tents clogging the sidewalks in some parts of the city.
He thinks he now knows: Multnomah County's Joint Office of Homeless Services.
According to county data, between May 2, 2023, and May 31, 2024, the Joint Office distributed loads of camping gear from its warehouse, mostly to dozens of nonprofits and religious organizations who provide aid to the region's homeless. Those supplies included: 6,492 tents, 6,635 sleeping bags, 23,928 tarps, 16,980 rain ponchos, and 35,283 blankets.
Critics say the county is perpetuating a costly cycle: The city spends millions of dollars clearing homeless encampments only for the Joint Office to spend millions more providing those same homeless residents with replacement tents, tarps, and sleeping supplies. The revelation has exposed further division and distrust between city and county leaders, who are increasingly at odds over their homeless response.
Over the past few years, as sprawling homeless camps took over Portland parks and sidewalks, the Democrats who lead the far-left city have moved to the center on the issue, taking a decidedly less-permissive approach to homeless camping in an effort to improve its national image and make the city more livable. The city is now paying a contractor $26 million to clear homeless camps from city property, according to media reports.
DiLorenzo said polls show that even many progressive Portland residents are tired of "warehousing people outdoors." Multnomah County leaders, on the other hand, continue operating in a left-wing "ideological echo chamber," he said.
County and Joint Office leaders say that while they would prefer that no one live unsheltered, providing the homeless with camping gear is a "humane" and "defensive" response while they continue to increase the region's shelter capacity.
But city leaders, fed-up residents, and their advocates say that providing the homeless with tents and other camping gear "enables self-destructive behaviors" and incentivizes people to stay outdoors, jamming up sidewalks and fouling public parks. The county, they say, is actively hindering their efforts to keep the city clean and to abide the settlement.
Caroline Downey follows up on the children's hospital at the center of a recent whistleblower controversy:
Texas Children's Hospital is at the center of a public-relations firestorm for covertly performing experimental sex-change surgeries and hormone therapies on gender-confused children — but that blowback hasn't stopped the hospital from encouraging employees to embrace gender ideology in their interactions with patients.
Last year, Dr. Eithan Haim, then a surgeon at TCH, revealed that the Houston-based hospital was conducting transition surgeries on and administering cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers to children, despite leadership announcing it had stopped these interventions the year before, in accordance with a legal opinion issued by the state attorney general declaring such procedures abusive.
Despite significant public backlash and the launch of an investigation by Texas attorney general Ken Paxton into Haim's revelations, the hospital's commitment to gender ideology persists. While the medical procedures have apparently stopped, the TCH human-resources department still requires that its staff complete a training for interacting with gender-confused patients. The training — most recently administered last month, according to a TCH staff member — implies that staff should unquestioningly affirm patients' dysphoria, regardless of their age or whether their self-diagnosis has been confirmed by a mental-health professional or parent. . . .
Other slides in the training portray "LGBTQIA+" as an aggrieved minority group, citing statistics that 57 percent experience depression, those aged 16 to 27 are five times more likely to attempt suicide, and 71 percent choose not to reach out to a crisis support service in a crisis.
An October 2019 study from the American Journal of Psychiatry found no evidence that surgical and hormonal gender-transition interventions improve mental health, undercutting the activist narrative that the gender medicalization of minors constitutes "lifesaving care."
A March study produced by a group of Finnish scientists found that suicide among gender-dysphoric youth is extremely rare and most likely driven by underlying psychological problems.
Severe gender dysphoria that led to medical transition had no notable relationship to increased suicides. The study indicated that psychiatric distress could be an antecedent to gender dysphoria, rather than a by-product.
Shout-Outs
Liel Leibovitz, at Tablet: Salman Rushdie's Beautiful Revenge
Hannah Nightingale, at the Post Millennial: New Jersey middle school apologizes for teaching that the Islamic State is a terrorist organization
Catherine Herridge, at the Free Press: Protecting Sources Is a Hill Worth Dying On
CODA
Happy Fourth, everyone.
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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