NATIONAL REVIEW
JUL 12, 2024 |
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◼ The obvious solution for Democrats: Replace Biden without telling him.
◼ White House visits by neurologists, hitherto private, now admitted without being explained; the crooked, ne'er-do-well son taking part in staff meetings and press conferences; the New York Times, liberalism's Old Farmer's Almanac, calling on its disgraced commander (twice!) to do the gentlemanly thing—like the toothless locals or ancient rituals that are the signs in horror films of impending disaster, both the pleas of sometime admirers and the clumsiness of his own and his protectors' actions seem to impel President Biden to leave the race. But here's the thing: He has the nomination locked up. He is the incumbent in an office he has spent decades pursuing and that his inner circle has every reason, from continued access to the prospect of pardons, to want him to keep. Moderate congressmen fearful of losing their seats in a GOP wipeout will be ignored. What leverage did they ever have in this administration? Democrats may have pretended that Biden's debility was a Republican invention a little too long for their own good.
◼ Republicans meanwhile should look to their own paladin. Donald Trump revels in seeding the body politic with insane and destructive ideas that are beneath the dignity of the office he seeks and, for that matter, beneath any American dedicated to constitutional norms and principles. The best window into Trump's ignorant and destructive id is often his Truth Social account. While normal Americans were making plans for Independence Day, an obsessive on Truth Social was declaring, "Elizabeth Lynne Cheney is guilty of treason. Retruth if you want televised military tribunals." "Retruth," in the idiom of Truth Social, means "to repost." Trump of course retruthed. The former president also took time to retruth a post calling for Mike Pence, Mitch McConnell, Cheney, and a dozen prominent Democrats to be jailed because they saw fit to tell the American people the truth that the 2020 "elections were fair." Republicans would be wise to remember that character is destiny and that Trump has never had any.
◼ The last time there was a Republican platform, in 2016, its discussion of abortion policy was a model of succinct good sense. It needed updating, given events since then: the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the passage in multiple states of protections for unborn children, and the political backlash to both. Team Trump has come up with new language that attempts to sound conciliatory without containing concessions intolerable to pro-lifers. That language, though, includes logical and factual errors. It claims, for example, that states' authority to restrict abortion comes from the 14th Amendment. Serious students of the topic have conflicting views on what the amendment means for abortion, but none of them think that. The platform no longer endorses federal legislation on abortion but does not rule it out, either—which raises the question of what the drafters think they have accomplished politically. Democrats will continue to say that Republicans will ban all abortions nationwide if they can, and nothing in the platform contradicts them. The revisions advertise the party's (and Trump's) obvious fear of the issue while doing nothing to address that fear. We understand that tactical retreats are sometimes necessary in politics, but disorderly ones rarely are.
◼ Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for a 6–3 majority in Trump v. United States, held that presidents have absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for "official acts" within their "core constitutional powers," such as decisions about prosecutions, military force, and pardons. While the Constitution says nothing about presidential immunity, the Court recognized that criminalizing the discretionary powers vested by Article II in the president is tantamount to Congress's unconstitutionally restricting those powers. The majority was adamant that courts must "not inquire into the President's motives" in exercising them. While the decision does not immunize presidents from prosecution for private misconduct even if it may tangentially relate to a president's status, it extends at least "presumptive" immunity to other official acts. And it draws the "official acts" line so broadly that it may include even presidential tweets. Discerning that line will likely require protracted proceedings that will make trying Trump before the election infeasible. It may even complicate Trump's New York conviction, because the Court restricted the use of presidential official acts as evidence. The Court soundly rejected, however, Trump's theory that he was immune from prosecution because he was acquitted by the Senate in his second impeachment trial. Elections, impeachment, court decisions, and the power of the purse remain available tools to restrain presidential abuses. It marks a failure of our system that it was necessary for the Court even to address this question.
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◼ Scarcely anything was more central to the framers of our Constitution than the separation of powers as the core safeguard against the erosion of all our other guarantees of liberty. Woodrow Wilson and other Progressive Era intellectuals thought this old-fashioned, inefficient, and an obstacle to rule by experts. Wilson's heirs still defend the bureaucratic administrative state, which interprets its own laws, runs its own courts, and is insulated from removal by the executive. In a series of decisions this term, the Supreme Court struck back. In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the Court overturned the Chevron rule, which allowed agencies not only to exploit statutory ambiguities but to demand that courts defer to their legal interpretations. As Chief Justice Roberts detailed in an opinion for another 6–3 majority, Chevron, minted only in the mid 1980s, never sat comfortably with the traditional law-interpreting role of the judiciary. It also clashed with the Administrative Procedure Act, passed in 1946, which provided that a court's review of agency action must "decide all relevant questions of law" and "interpret" the relevant "statutory provisions." If the ruling revives in Congress the habit of writing laws, and in agencies the habit of obeying them, it will have served the country well. Agencies are but creatures of law, and law is but a creature of the sovereign people's right to self-government—a government of laws, and not of men.
◼ The "Project 2025" policy book—a document of 900 pages organized by the Heritage Foundation and featuring a series of essays by conservative authors providing policy advice to an incoming Republican president—has taken on mythical status among the very online Left, which regards it as part of a nefarious plan by which Donald Trump would impose fascism if elected again. On July 4, the Biden rapid-response team posted an imagined dystopian Fourth of July after implementation of Project 2025, featuring the Reflecting Pool surrounded by women in red Handmaid's Tale uniforms with the Washington Monument having been turned into a cross. But Trump's message: 2025 Project? I hardly knew ya. Trump took to Truth Social to say, "I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they're saying and some of the things they're saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them." Trump's distancing caused Democrats to point out the number of former administration officials and allies who participated in drafting the document as well as Heritage's presence at the Republican National Convention. But it will be hard to make the election about a 900-page document that few voters will read and Trump says he wants nothing to do with.
◼ Boeing agreed to a plea deal with the Department of Justice over two deadly crashes of its 737 MAX aircraft in Indonesia and Ethiopia. The company pleaded guilty to defrauding the government by misleading regulators about an aircraft system that caused the crashes. Boeing will pay a fine of $243.6 million and be required to invest $455 million in safety, with an independent monitor overseeing the company for the next three years. But this should not be viewed as a purely private-sector failure. Boeing arguably benefits more from cronyism than any other U.S. company. The Export-Import Bank finances other countries' purchases of its jets, including the 737 MAX series. The regulatory agency that Boeing has pleaded guilty to misleading, the Federal Aviation Administration, told Congress in June it was "too hands-off" in its oversight, after a door came off an Alaska Airlines Boeing. This extremely cozy relationship with government has been viewed as necessary for Boeing's international competitiveness, but amid these safety concerns, orders are drying up and more customers are looking to Airbus for new planes. By preventing the case from going to trial, the DOJ is also likely preventing more information from coming to light about government complicity in Boeing's failures. |
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◼ Seventy-five years ago, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization came into being. In its time, the longest-lived multinational security alliance in history has persevered throughout the Cold War, extended its remit beyond the European theater, and expanded to encompass much of the continent—a process that accelerated following Russia's renewed determination to reconstitute the Soviet empire by force. This expansionism discomfits those who are persuaded by Moscow's argument that the voluntary, defensive alliance is the real aggressor in Europe. "They have pushed Ukraine into being in NATO," Senator Tommy Tuberville (R., Ala.) insists. "That is the reason he is fighting this war." The opposite is the case. Ukraine's ambitions to ascend to NATO membership were paused indefinitely at the Alliance's Bucharest summit in the spring of 2008, as were Georgia's. It's no coincidence that Russia invaded Georgia not four months later and did the same to Ukraine the moment its Moscow-friendly government collapsed. As Speaker Mike Johnson said in a speech this week, NATO isn't perfect. It has a free-rider problem, albeit one that the deteriorating security environment on the European continent is rapidly erasing. But NATO provides the architecture for restraining its more zealous members from taking rash action as well as for inducing reluctant allies to act collectively in Europe's defense. As Johnson put it, NATO has been extraordinarily successful in "deterring war and conflict and maintaining peace" and is therefore a "very important thing to maintain, and we support it."
◼ The decision by France's Emmanuel Macron to call snap parliamentary elections after the strong showing by Marine Le Pen's Rassemblement National (RN) in elections for the EU parliament looked unwise at the time, and it looks even worse now. The populist-Right RN, which has struggled to dislodge the antisemites and other bigots from its ranks, topped the poll in the first round of voting (with Macron's Ensemble coalition reduced to third place). Second came the left/far-left Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) coalition. Before the second (and decisive) round of voting, frantic horse-trading between Ensemble and the NFP led to a "republican front" that successfully closed off the possibility of an RN government, although who will form a government remains unclear. Neither Ensemble nor the NFP has the seats to rule alone, and a straightforward partnership between the two is hopefully inconceivable. That's because the largest party in the NFP, the far-left LFI, is led by a former (sort of) Trotskyist with a habit of making "misunderstood" comments antisemitic enough to reinforce LFI's appeal to Muslim voters. Next up: probably an ineffective minority centrist government. That will likely mean that the next presidential election will be fought out amid unresolved and deepening financial woes and a hardening political divide.
◼ The Gaza pier is concluding its long walk abroad, with the project set to depart foreign shores in the coming days as the last of U.S. aid staged in Cyprus makes its way to the beaches—whereupon much of it will be stolen by Hamas and used in its war against Israel. While officials do their best to pretend that the pier was something other than an abject failure that saw three instances of protracted inactivity due to storm damage and nearby fighting (with three U.S. servicemen wounded while working the pier), it's difficult to countenance $230 million in operation costs for a mere 9,700 tons of aid. A truck can carry 15 tons of aid. The 300 trucks arriving in Gaza per day took three days to surpass the aid delivery from the pier in its life span. Ill-conceived, unsuited to conditions, and overdue to be put out of commission, the pier must be a metaphor for something.
◼ Not content with killing her husband, Alexei Navalny, the Kremlin has now issued an arrest warrant for Yulia Navalnaya, who is in exile. She has just become the chairwoman of the Human Rights Foundation, which is based in New York. Putin and his agents are expert and determined hunters, not caring where their prey lives. After hearing about her arrest warrant, Navalnaya called Putin "a murderer and a war criminal" and said he belonged in prison: "not somewhere in The Hague, in a cozy cell with a TV set, but in Russia, in the same kind of penitentiary and the same kind of cramped cell where he killed Alexei." Yulia Navalnaya is a brave woman, whom the democracies should do what they can to protect. |
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