The Week: The Republican Budget Blowup | December 20, 2024

Plus: Major League Baseball floats a 'golden at-bat' rule.

THIS EDITION OF THE WEEK IS SPONSORED BY NATIONAL REVIEW DECEMBER 20, 2024 NATIONAL REVIEW DEC 20, 2024 ◼ The real drone mystery is why the aliens picked New Jersey.   ◼ Republicans keep fumbling the budget. Speaker Mike Johnson was facing a revolt over a continuing resolution that would have averted a government shutdown but also included extraneous legislation on ethanol regulation, child-care subsidies, regulations on so-called junk fees by ticket sellers, a pay raise for Congress, giving RFK Stadium to the District of Columbia in exchange for moving an Air National Guard squadron to Maryland, full federal funding for a new bridge in Baltimore, and the American Music Tourism Act. At the eleventh hour, President-elect Donald Trump condemned the bill and instead supported a slightly watered-down version that also included a debt-ceiling increase. It failed too, with fiscal conservatives opposed on principled grounds and most Democrats opposed on partisan ones. The best course now would be to pass a clean bill, leave the debt ceiling to next year, and make a plan to ensure that the recent tradition of gigantic must-pass late-December bills ends in 2024. If, that is, enough Republicans remain on speaking terms to work something out.   ◼ Democratic senators Dick Durbin (Ill.), Brian Schatz (Hawaii), and Peter Welch (Vt.) offer a constitutional amendment to eliminate the Electoral College. Schatz says that it's "undemocratic," but few advanced democracies choose their chief executive by a pure national popular vote. The Electoral College is in practice decisive only when neither side can command a majority; geographically broad support is the next-best thing. Practicality counts, too: Imagine not just the chaos of a national recount, but an entire election turning on California, which did not finish its first count until December 4. Geographically dispersed decisions can apply local law and be less susceptible to the mob pressures of a January 6. A unitary national vote would either give disproportionate power to the vote counters of the nation's most partisan precincts or (what the progressives may prefer) also require junking our whole current state-based electoral system in favor of a federally administered uniform election regime. The thirst for a president chosen by national plebiscite also reflects the inflated view that modern politics gives to the presidency: We elect senators by state and House members by intrastate districts. This is our system, and it works. That should be enough.   ◼ To no one's surprise, it turns out that there were FBI informants in the mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. A Justice Department inspector general's report found that there were 26 such informants there to surveil the 2020 election protesters, and 17 of the 26 entered the restricted Capitol grounds. None has been prosecuted. The report found that no agents were in the crowd. The report confirms what longtime observers of the bureau already knew about its methods of spying on the domestic political fringes. The usefulness of these informants is called into question by the IG's conclusion that the FBI failed to gain any intelligence from them before the fact. This is further proof that the FBI is miscast as an intelligence-gathering organization. That said, the notion that January 6 was some sort of "fedsurrection" entrapment engineered by federal agents remains nonsensical.   ◼ Trump has picked Harmeet K. Dhillon, a veteran civil rights litigator from California, as assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division at Justice (CRD). Republicans regard Dhillon as smart, articulate, and tough. She will need all those attributes. The CRD has been the cutting edge of woke-progressive lawfare through the Obama and Biden administrations. Dhillon must be ready on Day One with a plan to force the CRD to fight discrimination, in accordance with the law, rather than further it. Dhillon should also address the scourge of antisemitism, which the Biden administration and big-city progressive prosecutors have largely ignored. There will be much more on Dhillon's plate. She should treat free speech as a civil right that the government must protect; bolster, rather than undermine, voter-integrity laws; restore the proper understanding of asylum for foreigners from Biden-era excesses; and scrutinize the CRD's proliferation of "pattern or practice" discrimination lawsuits, by which the feds, with their bottomless budget, bludgeon municipalities and their police forces into signing consent decrees that put local law enforcement under federal monitoring. Perhaps Dhillon could begin her tenure by dropping the outrageous prosecution of Dr. Eithan Haim for the "crime" of transgressing the Biden DOJ's transgender dogma by blowing the whistle on Texas Children's Hospital. This would be a worthy message to the nation, and to Dhillon's subordinates.   ◼ Colleen Shogan, the national archivist, shot down another attempt to smuggle the Equal Rights Amendment into the Constitution. The deadline for ratification passed decades ago, but modern advocates have spent the past few years pretending that they can ignore it. That was too much for even Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who said that the effort would have to start over. The Department of Justice released statements in accord with that obviously correct conclusion during both the Trump and Biden administrations. The activists' latest tactic has been to get the archivist to agree that the amendment has been ratified. Shogan declined. We have commended her in the past for taking a strong stance against activists who defaced the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Now we can commend her for opposing a different type of vandalism against them.   ◼ At the peak of corporate wokery in 2020, NASDAQ issued three rules pressuring listed companies to disclose the "diversity" of their boards by race, gender, and sexual orientation. NASDAQ compelled companies that failed to employ at least two "diverse" directors to explain publicly why. Those rules, which must be approved by the Securities and Exchange Commission, received the SEC's blessing in August 2021. Now, a panel of all active judges of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, by a vote of 9–8, has ruled that the SEC exceeded its statutory authority by approving rules unconnected to the congressional purpose of protecting investors from fraud. This kills the rules unless the Supreme Court revives them. As Judge Andrew Oldham observed in his opinion, the NASDAQ rules aim to coerce: "Corporations that do not meet those objectives must explain why they failed. That is not a disclosure requirement. That is a public-shaming penalty for a corporation's failure to abide by the Government's diversity requirements." Woke capital is an abuse of powers for purposes never granted and for which there is no accountability to voters or shareholders. A MESSAGE FROM PHILANTHROPY ROUNDTABLE ◼ In 2006, Crystal Mangum, working as an erotic dancer, was hired to entertain a party attended by members of the men's lacrosse team at Duke University. She later alleged that multiple attendees, including team members, raped her. Mangum, now serving time for an unrelated murder conviction, recently recanted her allegations in a jailhouse interview. "I testified falsely against them by saying that they raped me when they didn't, and that was wrong," Mangum admitted. That confession is long overdue. The allegations became a national scandal in which the press played down the facts of the case in favor of hyperbolic and highly theoretical disquisitions about the intersection of sex, race, and privilege. The team was swiftly banned from campus, and several lacrosse players were eventually prosecuted. But the case fell apart when it was learned that the prosecutor, Mike Nifong, suppressed exculpatory evidence. He later resigned and was disbarred, and Duke administrators reinstated the team. But some of the players reportedly found securing employment difficult in the years that followed, and one even felt it necessary to change his name. The episode was an early instance of what our culture is belatedly coming to recognize as woke hysteria.   ◼ Thomas Spence—former president of Regnery Publishing and, as of March, a senior adviser to the Heritage Foundation—was hired by Hachette Book Group to lead the company's new conservative imprint, Basic Liberty. Some Hachette employees wrote a letter to management to express their disapproval of the company's decision to "platform a person who contributes to the advancement of the Heritage Foundation's vision for America," or, presumably, any conservative vision that contrasts with their own. But Hachette has long enriched its catalogue and that of its subsidiary, Basic Books, by "platforming" such authors as Thomas Sowell, Niall Ferguson, and George Weigel. Its employees should stop writing long enough to start reading.   ◼ "University of Michigan Ends Required Diversity Statements," read the headline in the New York Times. The subheading: "The school, a bastion of DEI, will no longer require the statements in hiring decisions and is considering a broader shift in its policies." What's more, the university fired a DEI administrator accused of making antisemitic statements. With all of this good news, we may have to sit down. A MESSAGE FROM PHILANTHROPY ROUNDTABLE ◼ The International Longshoremen's Association wants to ban automation technology at the ports it controls, which means every major port on the East and Gulf Coasts, to protect monopoly wages for its roughly 20,000 working members, at the expense of the millions of Americans who bear the costs of inefficient ports. Trump has in the past supported the ILA, and he has reiterated that support after winning the election, even though a dockworkers' strike could cause him headaches in his new term. The Taft-Hartley Act gives the president the power to enjoin that strike, yet he appears to be embracing unilateral disarmament.   ◼ How Canadian to stab someone in the front, not the back, and after a provocation. Justin Trudeau had told Chrystia Freeland, the country's finance minister, that he no longer wanted her in that job, but he offered her something else. After some reflection, Freeland, who was also deputy prime minister, wrote to Trudeau, resigning from his government. The timing was awkward, coming shortly ahead of the government's fall economic statement. (Also awkward: The numbers revealed that Canada was running higher deficits than planned.) The reason Freeland gave for resigning was the need to avoid "costly political gimmicks" (some giveaways), given the need to "keep our fiscal powder dry" ahead of a battle with the incoming Trump administration over tariffs ("aggressive economic nationalism"). While Freeland's discovery of fiscal virtue, however belated, is admirable, she is almost certainly trying to position herself for a leadership challenge. Trudeau, meanwhile, wants to lead his Liberals at an election, which is due no later than October 2025. Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, far ahead in the polls, wants an earlier vote. Canadians should at least thank Freeland, a key figure in a catastrophic government, if her resignation brings that about.   ◼ Israel has long known that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which operates in Gaza, employs Hamas fighters. Hamas documents recently seized by the Israeli military and shared with the New York Times show that at least 24 people UNRWA employed in the schools it runs were members of terrorist organizations. Although the cozy relationship between Hamas and UNRWA—so cozy as to admit no daylight, literally, in tunnels beneath UNRWA buildings—is not news, it is new to see the facts laid out in the Times: "Almost all of the Hamas-linked educators, according to the records, were fighters in the Qassam Brigades" in possession of weapons including Kalashnikovs and grenades. Meanwhile, a Hamas terrorist who took part in the October 7 attacks, killed in an Israeli air strike in November, turned out to be an employee of World Central Kitchen, the U.S.-based charity run by José Andrés. After Israel found that at least 62 WCK staffers "were linked to militant groups," reports Reuters, WCK "fired dozens of Palestinians working for the charity in the Gaza Strip" while maintaining it has seen no proof of those links. Perhaps it should look in its pudding.   ◼ Either as a trial balloon or as a troll of the game's fans, Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred floated the idea of a "golden at-bat" wherein any batter could be plugged into any spot in the lineup during a game. Baseball has always changed, or fearsome sluggers would still hit more triples than home runs, as Home Run Baker did in the 1910s. The pitch clock has been a big success, ending the outrageous dilatory tactics that altered the culture of the game and ridiculously inflated game times; last season, games averaged about two and a half hours, the same as in the mid 1980s. But trashing the integrity of the lineup in pursuit of manufactured late-inning drama would be a mistake. On this one, Manfred has swung from his heels, and missed.   ◼ Lily Phillips, a 23-year-old British woman, is said in one news account to have made an "unconventional career choice." She calls herself a "porn star, escort, OnlyFans girl, I don't really care." (OnlyFans is a popular site on which young women—often described euphemistically as models and influencers—upload pornographic videos of themselves and virtually interact with their "fans" in exchange for money.) The nature of Phillips's career was the subject of a recent documentary titled I Slept with 100 Men in One Day, in which she, with the logistical assistance of her nine employees, did just that as a sort of social media stunt. The film makes for grim rather than titillating viewing. She starts out seemingly nonchalant and upbeat, telling the filmmaker that she enjoys her work. After the completion of her feat, she emerges shaken and teary-eyed. "It's not for the weak girls, if I'm honest," she says. "It was hard. I don't know if I'd recommend it." Nevertheless, Phillips has announced that she plans to break a world record by bedding 1,000 men in a single day. Medical experts quoted in the media have expressed concerns for her physical health. The rest of us might spare a prayer for her soul.   ◼ Maximilian Lerner died in 2022, at 98. Guy Stern died in 2023, at 101. Now Victor Brombert has died, also at 101. All of these men were "Ritchie Boys," refugees from Europe to America who were trained at Camp Ritchie, in Maryland, to go back to their native continent and gather intelligence for their new country during World War II. Brombert was born in Berlin in 1923. He was Jewish (as were many of the Ritchie Boys). In the war, he was at D-Day, the Liberation of Paris, and the Battle of the Bulge. After the war—which he was amazed to have survived—he went to Yale, both for college and for graduate school. He would become a professor of comparative literature, first at his alma mater, then at Princeton. Not until late in his life did he talk about the war. The hundreds of students he had taught over the years were shocked to find out, and deeply impressed. God bless the Ritchie Boys. R.I.P. 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