Politics

Mike Pence was never likely to win the Republican nomination for president, and today he recognized the inevitable. He withdrew from the race. Now is not the time to focus on why his candidacy never gained traction. It is the time to remember his great contribution to our nation on January 6, 2021. On that fateful day, Pence did the right thing, despite enormous pressure from Donald Trump and a rioting mob to do the wrong one. He resisted that pressure at great risk to his political future and personal safety. He deserves our praise and gratitude. On January 6, Pence was presiding over the Senate as the electoral votes for president were counted. The duty was a limited, constitutional role assigned to the vice president.

Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota has thrown his hat into the 2024 presidential election ring, challenging President Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination.   Phillips’s candidacy is being heralded by many outlets — and acknowledged by Phillips himself — as a “long shot,” with the New York Times noting Biden’s “significant financial advantages.”   Still, Biden isn’t exactly the obvious choice to represent his party in 2024: Axios reported last month that a CNN poll showed “two-thirds of Democrat-leaning voters say the party should not nominate President Biden for a second term.

Welcome to Thunderdome, where after three long weeks, the Republicans in the House finally found their path toward a speaker — and boy is it a Flamin’ Hot Cheeto of a choice. Louisiana’s Mike Johnson, known for his kinglike dominance of the green line meme, is your new speaker of the House. He is eminently difficult to categorize, a cipher, an ardent social conservative with little in the way of fiscal conservative instincts but with a lot in favor of Zionist support for Israel. If you are a Squad member, this guy’s your nightmare. But he’s also likely to drive the media crazy, because he’s basically an unupdated social conservative from 2004. Perhaps not exactly what the Democrats had in mind when they helped Matt Gaetz knife Kevin McCarthy.

It took a few weeks, but Republicans got their act together and did the impossible: elected a new speaker of the House, Louisiana’s Mike Johnson. Johnson and his team have an incredible amount of work ahead of them — from funding the government to fundraising for House Republicans. What’s particularly noteworthy to me in the hours ahead of Johnson becoming speaker is the all-out effort Democrats and their media mouthpieces are making to define him — mostly by spreading provable misinformation.  Johnson’s Democratic counterparts on the Judiciary Committee immediately lashed out at him for being a member of the Freedom Caucus, which is an outright lie.

Attorney Jenna Ellis, a former legal advisor to Donald Trump’s 2020 election campaign, pled guilty to one count of aiding and abetting false statements and writings on Tuesday morning.    Ellis, who was charged alongside Trump and seventeen others with violating Georgia's anti-racketeering laws, has become the latest co-defendant to enter a plea deal in the case to overturn Georgia’s election results from the 2020 presidential election. Ellis’s guilty plea also implicates claims of voter fraud made by former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and other Trump lawyers during a December 2020 Georgia Senate committee hearing.   Ellis distanced herself from the former president in a tearful statement before the court.

You can lead an electorate to the electronic vehicle charging station, but you can’t make them plug in.   That’s the lesson President Biden is learning as American consumers reject the “green” future the administration has been trying to mandate through the EPA’s proposed emissions standards and billions in EV subsidies and tax credits.   The American people, however, just aren’t buying the climate change is “even more frightening than a nuclear war” line Biden is selling.

If you are paying attention, you know that nature is full of inklings and adumbrations. I am writing in New England in mid-September — and it was just about a week ago that a subtle change in the atmosphere proclaimed the advent of autumn. It was not just that the weather listed cooler; it was also that the entire sensory gestalt shifted. The world suddenly bristled with different smells and colors and sounds. Browns and yellows and reds were edging out summer greens in the leaves. The roads were carpeted with acorns. You knew that the world was confronting you with different prospects and expectations. Something similar happens in the world of politics. For a long time, a certain narrative reigns.

A primetime address in the Oval Office is the pinnace of presidential speechifying. Ronald Reagan used the room in 1986 to console the nation after the Challenger blew up on live television. George W. Bush declared the global war on terrorism there. Donald Trump leveraged the weight of the Resolute Desk as he talked to Americans about a deadly but mysterious virus called Covid-19 for the first time.   Tonight, it was Joe Biden’s turn. The topics, the wars in Ukraine and Israel, couldn’t be more different with respect to the players, the stakes or the circumstances leading up to them. Even so, Biden tried to convince the American people on the idea that the two wars were one and the same.