Politics

Lame-duck sessions of Congress are rarely uneventful. Whether it’s cramming through spending at the last minute or cramming through even more spending at the last minute, our legislature can always be counted on to rubber-stamp bills that lacked political support before Mariah Carey returned to the airwaves. Leading the charge for the opposition this time around is the self-declared speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy. A Bloomberg headline recently proclaimed that “McCarthy Draws Line on Spending,” and trumpets seemingly blared out from the heavens heralding that Republicans had — finally — rediscovered their fiscally conservative bona fides. But not so fast: this is a script we’ve seen before.

In early May, I explored the left’s reaction to billionaire Elon Musk potentially buying Twitter and his vow to make it a free speech platform again. Since then, Musk and his vision have repeatedly been portrayed as “right-wing.” It’s the damndest thing. Canadian Conservative politician Andrew Scheer picked up on this strange phenomenon back in April, saying that that the corporate media framing free speech as a “right wing value” was just plain weird. As though to drive home the point, Twitch’s Zachary Ryan called Musk a right-winger on Monday. And over the weekend, entrepreneur Samir Tabar had a question for a whiny Robert Reich: https://twitter.com/SamirTabar/status/1601984560345907200 Answer: since, well, now. The evolution of this trend is not new.

Viewed from a coldly logical perspective, releasing Viktor Bout for Brittney Griner is a highly lopsided trade in favor of the Russians. The former was one of the world’s most prolific arms dealers on earth, a man responsible for sending weapons to some of Africa’s deadliest conflicts during the 1990s and early 2000s. The latter was a basketball player who was arrested for a smidgen of cannabis oil in her luggage. The two offenses are incomparable, which is one of the reasons why conservatives were so upset about President Biden green-lighting the swap. Donald Trump and John Bolton don’t agree on much, but both believe the decision was the epitome of feckless surrender (for Griner’s family, of course, it’s anything but).

The main reason why I lined up in the pouring rain to vote for Bill Clinton in 1992 was that he’d campaigned as a gay-friendly candidate. It wasn’t just his promise to allow gays to serve openly in the military. It was that he talked about gays as if we were human beings and not demons — fully equal to our heterosexual brothers and sisters. Back then, for gay Americans, every new election cycle meant one thing for sure: we’d have to gird ourselves for a fresh round of gay-bashing by presidential hopefuls. Clinton seemed to promise a new era in politics, when our very existence would no longer be an issue. Well, Clinton won the election. And four years later he signed the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA. “Defense” as in defense from us.

Will Washington clamp down on crypto? Sam Bankman-Fried is set to testify before Congress tomorrow. If he does so, it will be the latest in a series of public appearances and interviews that suggests the disgraced crypto conman thinks he can spin his way out of trouble — and leaves the rest of us wondering, why isn’t he in jail yet? The hearing comes as Washington mulls how the law should handle cryptocurrencies. For some time now, lawmakers have wanted to do something about the burgeoning crypto craze and address the fact that no comprehensive regulatory framework for the sector exists. The fall of FTX underscored the point. With further trouble afoot in crypto-world, Washington is divided on muddled and cross-party lines over what to do about this Wild West of finance.

Today’s progressives like to imagine they're clever when it comes to engineering a carbon-free future. Yet when we look at the record, we see green policies yielding self-defeating public backlashes. The effort by California’s legislature to ban all gas-powered vehicles by 2035, for example, has wreaked havoc on the state’s economy. It's produced not only the nation’s highest energy prices and last summer’s rolling blackouts but the need to import expensive electricity from neighboring states. And while European governments would like to blame Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine for their countries’ high energy costs, angry voters know that prices began spiking years ago, when green activists forced the shutdown of coal plants across the continent.

Sinema goes solo “Nothing will change about my values or my behavior,” said Kyrsten Sinema when she explained this morning’s surprise announcement that she is changing her party affiliation from Democrat to independent. That assurance poses a question: why leave? “Registering as an independent and showing up to work as an independent is a reflection of who I’ve always been,” she explained in a video clip on Twitter. In an article for the Arizona Republic she went further: “I have joined the growing numbers of Arizonans who reject party politics by declaring my independence from the broken partisan system in Washington. I registered as an Arizona independent.

The Congressional Black Caucus, which describes itself as the "conscience of the Congress" elected its new chairman last week. Its choice? A man who had a long-running affair with a twenty-one-year-old intern. Representative Steven Horsford of Nevada previously served as the CBC's vice chair under Representative Joyce Beatty. Beatty said she was excited to "pass the baton" to a fresh batch of "capable leaders." Of course, there was no mention of Horsford's extracurricular activities in the announcement of the caucus's new leadership. The Spectator reached out to every member of the Congressional Black Caucus to ask if Horsford's affair with an intern concerned them.

We have all seen a sign, usually in a mom-and-pop business, declaring, “We reserve the right to refuse service to you.” In a free society, it is hard to argue with this assertion. Shouldn’t a business owner, landlord, or proprietor have the right to decide whom to serve to and whom to decline to serve? This is the essence of the freedom of association, which includes the reciprocal right to refrain from association. Or does it? In Colorado, cake artist Jack Phillips was threatened with draconian legal penalties for declining to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple due to his religious objections to such unions. In 2017, the Supreme Court granted Phillips a reprieve from his ordeal, but the litigation continues.