Politics Archives

Tuesday

December 20, 2022

The liberal-conservative tug of war for the GOP

For the last thirty years, the Republican Party has been a battleground between two competing ideologies. One of these is fundamentally liberal, although it is packaged and sold under a variety of brand names: “compassionate conservatism,” neoconservatism, classical liberalism, and — most misleadingly — Reagan conservatism. The other ideology is a rejection of modern liberalism and the post-Cold War elite consensus in American politics. It is skeptical of free trade, large-scale immigration and US involvement in foreign conflicts. Pat Buchanan and Donald Trump are the primary representatives of this view, which is often called populist or nationalist. The two sides are not evenly matched.

Bobby Miller

The January 6 Committee’s criminal charges mean little for Trump

In two weeks, with great sorrow, our nation will mark the second anniversary of the culmination of an unprecedented self-coup attempt by a sitting president: the January 6 Capitol riot, which resulted in five deaths. The callous barbarism we witnessed that day was nothing less than a brazen assault on the fountainhead of American self-governance, the Constitution. No amount of Tucker Carlson’s documentaries or Revolver News clickbait can change that inconvenient fact. Conservatives who dismiss what happened as nothing more than a false flag operation designed to initiate a “patriot purge” are doing themselves a grave disservice. Since July of last year, the January 6 Committee has been charged with investigating the events of the fateful day and what precipitated it.

Charles Fain Lehman

Why Eric Adams has failed to control crime

New York City mayor Eric Adams’s first day in office started with a call to the NYPD. Waiting for the J train to take him from Brooklyn to City Hall, Adams spied three men beginning to tussle. When punches began flying, he dialed 911. He didn’t offer a name until the end of the call: “Adams, Mayor Adams.” The moment, so perfect as to seem choreographed, epitomized Adams’s agenda. Predecessor Bill de Blasio destroyed his credibility with the police department over his eight years in office. Adams, by contrast, was a former NYPD captain who had run on his pedigree, rejected his opponents’ calls to defund the police and promised to revive the plainclothes anti-gun unit disbanded by de Blasio amid the George Floyd protests. The message worked.

Roger Kimball

Why globalism is the enemy of freedom

I was recently asked to say a few words about “Globalism and Freedom” at a conference sponsored by Hillsdale College in Boise. Globalism, I said, is the enemy of freedom. Why? Because globalism systematically attacks and undermines the moral and political filiations that make genuine freedom possible. In order to understand why this should be so, we must begin by pondering the word “globalism” and its adjectival personification “globalist.” Neither occurs in my thirteen-volume edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, which dates from the early 1960s. What does that tell us? For one thing, it tells us that the term “globalism” and its cognates are neologisms. Neologisms come into being for a couple of different reasons.

John R. MacArthur

Randi Weingarten isn’t going anywhere

It was eerily warm in New York the day before the midterm elections, and the president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten — one of America’s most powerful union leaders and arguably the Democratic Party’s most influential non-elected power broker — was bracing for a confrontation that threatened to push the atmosphere past boiling point. We were standing in front of Public School 169, in Bay Terrace, a majority-white, upper-middle-class neighborhood in Queens, where Weingarten was attending a rally for three Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives. “You probably heard that the anti-vaxxers are going to show up,” she told me with a hint of exaggerated amusement.

Ben Domenech

Will Republicans learn from the midterms?

The 2022 midterm elections consumed more than 16.5 billion real American dollars. They featured thousands of candidates and the most expensive Senate race in history, resulting in the election of Democrat John Fetterman from Pennsylvania. Millions of viewers across the country tuned in to watch election-night returns in anticipation of a promised red wave that never came. The 2022 midterms were the political equivalent of the Red Queen’s race — a massive effort, all to end up pretty much back where you started. Post-election recriminations were complicated by how well Republicans actually did. They massively increased their turnout and won the House of Representatives. They saw wide margins of victory by incumbent governors in Florida, Georgia, Ohio and Texas.

Roger Kimball

The Deep State vs Donald Trump saga is not over

As I have said before, I hope that the new Congress, which begins its session in just a couple of weeks, will continue the work of the January 6 Committee, minus Liz Cheney and the other kangaroos. The New York Times, in its best slant-the-news-while-appearing-magisterial modality, described the Committee’s 100-plus-page “Executive Summary” as a “report into the effort to overturn the 2020 election.” But surely the far greater attempt to impact the 2020 election was the FBI’s infiltration of Twitter and other social media platforms, Mark Zuckerberg’s half a billion dollars distributed like alms to NeverTrump sororities in battleground cities, etc., etc. All that should be the work of the new Congress. The old Congress wasn’t interested in the truth.

Cockburn

MAGA Mean Girls: MTG and Boebert trade barbs

Cockburn loves a catfight. Especially between Congress’s kookiest chicks, and one time BFFs, Representatives Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene. The congresswomen have been dragged into the increasingly ugly war over whether or not to back Representative Kevin McCarthy for speaker of the House. Boebert pulled the first punch on The Charlie Kirk Show, where she, accompanied by some lawmakers like Representative Matt Gaetz, took a swipe at Taylor Greene for whipping the caucus to vote for McCarthy — who sweet-talked Greene with promises to restore her House committee assignments. "I've aligned with Marjorie and been accused of believing a lot of the things that she believes in," said Boebert.

Charles Lipson

Surprise, surprise: the J6 Committee found exactly what it wanted

The Capitol Riots on January 6 deserved a serious public investigation because the events were so important. The rioters who entered the Capitol building tried to use violence and intimidation to prevent the peaceful transfer of power by normal, constitutional procedures. That’s as serious as it gets in our democracy. To conduct that investigation, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi established a special “January 6 Committee,” chaired by Representative Benny Thompson of Mississippi and filled with some of the Democrats’ heavy hitters in the House. Its real leader, though, was a Republican: Wyoming representative Liz Cheney, one of Trump’s most outspoken foes.

Monday

December 19, 2022

John Pietro

The January 6 Committee’s recommended charges against Trump, explained

The Select Committee to Investigate January 6 announced Monday that it would refer former president Donald Trump for charges to the Department of Justice’s special counsel. The committee also released its Executive Summary, which includes a description of findings and charges. Since its formation in July 2021, the committee has heard testimony from dozens of officials in the Trump administration and individuals who were associated with the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol. The Executive Summary lists seventeen findings of the Select Committee which inform their decision to refer Trump for charges.

Tents are seen underneath an overpass at a tent encampment in Washington, DC. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Amber Duke

DC is officially clearing out its homeless tent cities

After years of neglect, it seems federal and city officials are finally removing the homeless encampments littered across Washington, DC. Earlier this year, homeless people were cleared from areas outside of Union Station ahead of President Joe Biden's address to the nation from the historic train hall and bus depot. Within the past month, the National Park Service also cleared encampments from Scott Circle. The removals are part of a longer-term plan by the National Park Service. The NPS will be enforcing its "no-camping regulation" across the nation's capital, with the goal of having all encampments on national park land cleared by the end of 2023.

Elle Gyges

Kevin McCarthy’s party games

All that Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy wants for Christmas is the four votes he needs to hold the gavel as speaker of the House of Representatives. But at this point it looks like it will take a Christmas Miracle™. This past week, five members of the contrarian House Freedom Caucus restressed their antipathy for McCarthy. Representatives Andy Biggs, Ralph Norman, Matt Gaetz, Bob Good and Matt Rosendale have promised as a bloc to vote against McCarthy, denying him the 218 votes he needs to become speaker. Biggs ran against McCarthy for Republican majority leader after November’s lukewarm midterm elections — and lost. He knows he is playing spoiler. But what then?

Friday

December 16, 2022

Jessica Dobrinsky

Democrat? Independent? Manchin may be finished either way

When asked whether he will leave the Democratic Party and become an independent at a press conference on Monday, West Virginia senator Joe Manchin said, "I'm not a Washington Democrat, I don't know what to tell you… I have no intention of doing anything right now. Whether I do something later, I can't tell you what the future's going to bring." Simultaneously, Manchin threw a punch at former Senate challenger and current congressman Alex Mooney, stating, "[Governor Jim] Justice is a much better candidate, and he would be doing it for the right reasons. I think Mooney is doing it strictly for his political ambition." While Manchin hasn't yet confirmed a re-election bid, his comments leave the door open for his departure from the Democratic Party.

Matt Purple

The Covid hysterics’ bleak midwinter

A great scourge has descended upon the land, leaving in its wake a path of misery and girlfriends shivering under blankets. Crops have been destroyed, and there are times when (after 5 p.m.) it can seem like we might never see the sun again. Yet the greatest terror ushered in by this darkness is its plague, a relentless onslaught of mild coughs and sniffly noses that seems to have left just about everyone feeling marginally annoyed. The ancients had a word for it, winter, and it's eliciting trembles of horror from the Cassandras over at the New York Times. New Yorkers, the Times recently croaked, "are living not just among the coronavirus and its seemingly endless variants, but a bunch of other viruses too." This "bunch" includes such baffling ailments as the common cold and the flu.

Jonathan Bydlak

Don’t expect Republicans to fight lame-duck spending

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.

Oliver Wiseman

Is Donald Trump finally finished?

Trump’s big reveal suggests he’s finished There was a flurry of excitement earlier this week when Donald Trump teased a “major announcement” for Thursday. “America needs a superhero,” he declared in a fifteen-second clip that featured an animated cartoon of the former president standing outside Trump Tower, ripping open his suit to reveal a superhero suit, lasers shooting out of his eyes. Very normal stuff for a former president. Trump’s supporters waited with bated breath. Was his somnambulant 2024 campaign about to kick into gear? Could he be making a bid for House speaker, wondered some, waving aside the obvious practical obstacles to him doing so. Maybe he’d start tweeting again in a bid to nudge Elon Musk out of the limelight, speculated others.

Thursday

December 15, 2022

Jack Hunter

How did free speech become a right-wing value?

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.

Wednesday

December 14, 2022

Daniel DePetris

The Brittney Griner swap was nothing out of the ordinary

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).

Oliver Wiseman

Joe Biden and the Musk temptation

The Musk temptation Thanks to some complicated cocktail of educational sorting, communications technology changes and ideological realignment, so much of the day-to-day drama of contemporary politics seems to be defined by the relationship between an elite in-group and antagonistic outsider. In a complicated and messy world, the allure of superhero stories is understandable. And so more and more of our politics is forced into a simplistic narrative about, depending on your point of view, a villain or hero. The outsider is either an existential threat to the status quo, or the only person who can save us from a decadent and self-interested elite. Either way, he is a main character. For years, the part of the outsider was played by Donald Trump.

Tuesday

December 13, 2022

Bruce Bawer

Gay marriage has nothing to do with Drag Queen Story Hour

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.