THIS EDITION OF THE WEEK IS PRESENTED BY 1517.ORG |
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NATIONAL REVIEW
DEC 06, 2024 |
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◼ In fairness, they did say if Trump won there'd be martial law.
◼ President Biden repeatedly vowed, and his White House indignantly insisted, that he would never pardon his adult son Hunter, then claimed he had changed his mind out of fatherly love. But Hunter's legal strategy made sense only on the assumption that a pardon would occur. It was the political calendar that temporarily stayed his hand. A pre-election pardon would have wounded his and, ultimately, Kamala Harris's 2024 campaign; so Hunter was charged and, when the Department of Justice failed in its efforts to make the case disappear with a sweetheart plea deal, he was prosecuted for his tax and gun offenses. The defense strategy—admit nothing, allow Hunter to be found guilty on every charge with no concern about mounting prison exposure—presumed a pardon. And so the pardon came . . . with Biden already out to pasture and Harris having lost. Judge Mark Scarsi, who presided over the tax case, acknowledged Biden's power to erase the charges but ripped the president's attempt to pretend that Hunter had been selectively prosecuted by Biden's own DOJ. The opposite was true: The pardon continues a pattern of coddling and advantage no normal defendant would have received.
◼ Now Biden's aides are reportedly considering blanket preemptive pardons to "a range of current and former public officials" whom the Trump administration might prosecute. The list is expected to include figures like former public health official Anthony Fauci and California senator-elect Adam Schiff. These individuals have not yet been charged with any crimes, and the Biden team does not know what crimes they might be charged with (or, for that matter, might have committed). Didn't pay all your taxes? Don't worry, you're covered. Hired a nanny who's not a legal immigrant? No sweat, you can't be prosecuted. Committed perjury before Congress by insisting that the U.S. was not funding gain-of-function research? Just point to the pardon. Get-out-of-jail free cards apparently do exist, and some in the White House want to hand them out the way Oprah used to give out cars.
◼ The nomination of Pete Hegseth to be the next secretary of defense appears to be on shaky ground. Besides his relative inexperience in managing large organizations, the nominee has been beset by allegations of womanizing, frequent drunkenness, and misuse of funds while serving as the president of Concerned Veterans for America from 2013 until 2016. His mother, Penelope Hegseth, in a furious note to him in 2018, declared: "I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man." She told the New York Times that she had fired off the original email "in anger, with emotion," that she had quickly apologized, and that she now fully supports her son's nomination. Finally, according to anonymous claims sourced to Fox News employees, Hegseth's problematic drinking continued during his years there. Yet plenty of Hegseth's former co-workers state, on the record, that they saw no such thing. As of this writing, no Republican senator has stated an intention to oppose the nomination, but at least six have expressed concerns. Perhaps the biggest indicator that the nomination may sink is the report that President-elect Trump and his team are looking at other options to run the Pentagon, including Florida governor Ron DeSantis, Iowa senator Joni Ernst, and Tennessee senator Bill Hagerty. Hegseth says he has no intention of withdrawing from consideration and has reportedly told Republican senators that, if he is confirmed to the job, he won't drink at all. Whether senators find that pledge reassuring or disconcerting is not yet clear.
◼ The president-elect's nominee for secretary of labor is a co-sponsor of the PRO Act, supported legislation that would require every state and local government to collectively bargain with left-wing public-employee unions, was endorsed in her last election by the American Federation of Government Employees, and has received praise from Senator Elizabeth Warren and from Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. No, you aren't in an alternative reality where Kamala Harris won the election. Trump's intent to nominate Representative Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R., Ore.) as secretary of labor traduces conservative principles and undermines his own agenda. Unions stand in the way of policies Trump supports, such as school choice and civil service reform. Trump romped through the Sunbelt states that are growing in part because they don't have powerful government unions demanding the tax-and-spend policies that blue-state residents are fleeing. Chavez-DeRemer could have been the token "Republican" in a Harris cabinet. A Republican administration needs a pro-worker, not pro-union, secretary of labor.
◼ In United States v. Skrmetti, the Supreme Court is asked to decide whether a Tennessee law that restricts the use of puberty blockers and hormones by minors violates the 14th Amendment. To begin with the obvious, the 14th Amendment says nothing of the sort; under its original public meaning, this case is no contest. The Court's decision to treat workplace transgender discrimination as "sex discrimination" in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020) was an error, but it also read different statutory language in a different context. The equal protection clause says nothing about sex discrimination; the ultimate question is whether distinctions make sense. The Court has long and rightly ruled that racial classifications don't. It has long used "intermediate scrutiny" for sex distinctions because sex differences obviously matter in many contexts. The challengers to the Tennessee law argue that it is sex discrimination to restrict gender transition treatments but not identically restrict every other treatment using the same hormones or puberty blockers. But if boys becoming men is different from boys trying to become women, or if testosterone has a different effect on the bodies of boys than it does on the bodies of girls, then the Tennessee law draws a rational distinction. The rest is semantics. |
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This Advent devotional brings daily reflections to prepare your heart for Christ's coming. Discover the peace He brings to our restless lives, the hope that calms our fears, and the joy that lights our way. Perfect for personal reflection or sharing with loved ones. Learn More |
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◼ UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was murdered in midtown Manhattan by a masked gunman who, at time of print, remains at large. The killer stalked Thompson and was waiting for him to exit his hotel around 7 a.m., whereupon he shot him several times using a silencer-equipped firearm and bullets with messages on the casings. Someone called in bomb threats targeting Thompson's Minneapolis-area home the same day; these were determined to be a hoax. The reactions on social media to this brazen murder were in many cases celebratory, with people complaining about health insurance companies' purported greed and carelessness. Premeditated murder is not the voice of the unheard, and if any voice is unheard in the health insurance debate, it's that of the 81 percent of Americans who are satisfied with their health insurance, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation survey conducted last year. Sometimes the Sixth Commandment can seem banal, but God had to command it for a reason.
◼ The Syrian civil war slipped off Western front pages in the last decade only when Bashar al-Assad's regime seemed secure against the threat once posed to it by various rebel factions. Fighting has continued in the years since. But this week, the Turkish-backed Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) captured vast swaths of Syrian territory, including Aleppo. The collapse of regime positions is due to the decimation of Assad's Russian sponsors on Ukraine's battlefields, the degradation of the Iran-backed terrorist organizations that support Damascus, and Assad's exhausted legitimacy among them. But HTS's advance also comes at the expense of the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which were forced out of their last stronghold. There are no unalloyed victories available to America in Syria. Our best options now are limited to staving off even worse outcomes. That's why America has a modest footprint in eastern Syria, and why it should stay there and stay modest. |
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◼ In South Korea, the self-coup by President Yoon Suk Yeol earlier this week ended in spectacular failure—and likely ensured his political demise. Yoon claimed that he was defending his country "from the threats of North Korean communist forces" and related elements. But no evidence supporting that position has come to light. Indeed, in his statement revoking the declaration after the unanimous vote of all present lawmakers (190 of 300) to reject it, Yoon did not return to his claims about communist forces. A more likely explanation for the meltdown is that he sought to resolve his political challenges and general unpopularity, which were worsened by the rebuke that voters delivered his leadership in parliamentary elections this year. Now Yoon faces impeachment proceedings, and the leading opposition force stands to benefit. That's bad news, as opposition leader Lee Jae-myung has aligned himself with Beijing and would as president likely scrap Seoul's recent rapprochement with Japan—an understanding crafted to counter China. In addition to recalling dark times in South Korea's past, this presidential self-sabotage may have woeful geopolitical consequences.
◼ Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signaled a shift in Kyiv's posture vis-à-vis the prospect of a negotiated settlement to Russia's war of conquest. He said he is prepared to accept a temporary cease-fire (and if Russia's handling of the "frozen conflicts" it ignites in its near abroad is any indication, it would be only temporary) in exchange for a NATO invitation for Ukraine to join it with its borders intact. Zelensky hopes to regain the country's lost territory through diplomacy afterward. So far, the Kremlin has not signaled any comparable flexibility. Konstantin Malofeev, a Russian businessman who likely speaks for Vladimir Putin, undiplomatically rebuffed a peace plan sketched out by Keith Kellogg, Trump's nominee to serve as special envoy to the parties at war in Europe. "Kellogg comes to Moscow with his plan, we take it and then tell him to screw himself, because we don't like any of it," he told the Financial Times. "That'd be the whole negotiation." It seems safe to assume that there is more fighting to be done before anyone gets to negotiate.
◼ The headline over a report from Politico starts with a statement of fact and ends with a very good question: "Europe is under attack from Russia. Why isn't it fighting back?" Russian operatives are strongly suspected of planting bombs on cargo planes. They are bedeviling nations with cyberattacks. "Russia is using the entire toolbox," Politico quotes Thomas Haldenwang as saying. Until recently, he was the head of Germany's domestic intelligence. Last summer, Denmark's prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, said, "We are simply too polite. They are attacking us every day now." The report says that the Kremlin appears to be "ratcheting up the pressure to see what it can get away with." Dictators such as Putin always do this. They will not stop until they are stopped.
◼ You can think the regulatory state is boring or view the challenge of dismantling it as fun. Fred Smith took the latter view. He founded the Competitive Enterprise Institute in 1984, having worked for the EPA and come to realize that the federal government is more often the problem than it is the solution. CEI has won court cases against the government and produced research that has informed deregulatory efforts ever since. Just about everyone in Washington knew Smith and liked him, even though most people in that capital of bureaucracy strongly disagreed with him. His gregarious personality and fondness for Oreos and cigars made him impossible to hate, and he could explain big ideas such as the importance of property rights with simple sayings such as "You don't spit on your own doorstep." A happy warrior for the cause of liberty, Fred Smith has died at the age of 83. R.I.P.
◼ Lance Morrow was the kind to give journalism a good name. WFB called him "a show-stopping wordsmith, one of those masters associated with Time magazine, in the company of James Agee, Whittaker Chambers, and Robert Hughes." Morrow was born in 1939, the son of Hugh Morrow, a longtime aide to Nelson Rockefeller. Lance Morrow graduated in English from Harvard in 1963. He worked for Time for 40 years, turning out reports and essays. Reviewing a book of Morrow's in 1995, WFB said, "He writes as if the language were at once a dutiful son, an enchanting mistress, a Strad violin, and Houston Control Center, programmed to deliver his message to the moon and the stars. The language is at his bidding, as completely as to any other writer alive." Lance Morrow has died at 85. R.I.P.
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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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