Politics

How to lose the immigration debate With immigration getting more and more attention, Texas governor Greg Abbott has sought his moment in the limelight with an eye-catching proposal for what to do with illegal migrants when they are intercepted at the border. In a response to the White Houses’s decision to lift Title 42, the pandemic-era health order that empowered border agents to turn migrants away, Abbott announced that his state “is providing charter buses to send these illegal immigrants who have been dropped off by the Biden administration to Washington, DC.” Migrants relocated from the border to Texan cities like San Antonio, Abbott said, would be put on buses, driven north and dropped off at the Capitol.

Barack Obama returned to the White House this week, and his presence was a straight up blast from the past. The 2010s might not be our most culturally defined decade, but surely the Age of Barry still has a few touchstones worth recalling. That was back when it was cool to say “there’s an app for that,” all the way back when the Speaker of the House was...actually it was still Nancy Pelosi. And it was back when everyone, and I do mean everyone, could not shut up about Obamacare. Sure enough, Obama was back in Washington to once again revel in the passage of his signature health law, even if it had just undergone yet another round of tweaks to make it work this time for real.

The loneliness of Merrick Garland Merrick Garland is not a popular man. The attorney general has been disliked on the right ever since he issued a memo last year villainizing parents protesting school board meetings. But he now faces growing criticism from the left for what many Democrats consider an overly ponderous approach to January 6 prosecutions. Having spent the Trump years lamenting a loss of norms and claiming to want positions of power to be filled with sober, responsible characters, Democrats are growing impatient with an attorney general who follows exactly that approach. Why, they ask, hasn’t there been more butt-kicking and name-taking with regard to the riot at the Capitol? And, in particular, why isn’t Trump feeling the heat? Among the “lock him up” crowd?

Russian atrocities shock Washington Washington was, once again, focused on events in Ukraine this weekend. And for good reason. Horrifying evidence of possible war crimes emerged in Bucha and other towns near Kyiv that had been under Russian occupation. The images of mass graves, evidence of torture and the bodies of civilians, shot with their hands tied behind their back, sparked fresh outrage more than a month into the war. “Concentrated evil has come to our land,” said Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in a televised address this weekend. “Murderers. Torturers. Rapists. Looters. Who call themselves the army. And who deserve only death after what they did.

Last week, conservative media company the Daily Wire announced it would begin selling shaving supplies under the brand name Jeremy’s Razors. Why is a media company selling razors? Because Harry’s Razors, a longtime Daily Wire sponsor, recently dropped the partnership due to “misaligned values.” In the launch video for Jeremy’s Razors, Daily Wire co-CEO Jeremy Boreing mocked the woke razor companies with which he plans to compete. “[Michael Knowles] went and said that boys are boys and girls are girls, and that was just too much for Harry's,” Boreing said. “And it's not just Harry's, either. Gillette razors used to be the best a man could get. Then they decided that men are too toxic, unless you're the kind of man who teaches his daughter to shave her beard.

In one of its most desperate moves yet, the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol is considering subpoenaing Ginni Thomas, wife of Clarence Thomas. The Committee wants to review a handful of texts Ginni sent about the Capitol riot, which they feel may influence her husband’s decisions from the bench. The connection is weak, along the lines of Trump being the one who actually slapped Chris Rock. But the need to come up with a new crisis to return attention to the events of January 6 post-Ukraine is real. The genesis of this "crisis" begins with the Hail Mary plans to use the January 6 Committee to rescue Democrats from near-certain midterm electoral defeat.

That the federal budget process is broken is the worst kept "secret" in Washington. The White House and Congress know it. The think tanks know it. A 2010 study from the progressive Center for American Progress called the budget process “not a pretty picture.” The conservative Heritage Foundation said in 2005 that the process “stifles debate, prevents cooperation, and frequently breaks down.” Proposals come along every few years to fix the problem, but nothing ever gets done. “The fundamental reason why the federal process is broken is because Congress doesn’t have a budget,” says Kurt Couchman, a senior fellow at Americans for Prosperity. “Congress doesn’t do a budget. Congress does appropriation bills, there are 12 of them.

Watchers of the news might be forgiven for thinking the Biden administration is worried about the election-year optics of more migrants at our southern border. The International Committee of the Red Cross is predicting high waves of migration through Mexico and Central America. The Department of Homeland Security last week requested help from the Pentagon. Also last week, the administration announced that asylum officers, rather than just immigration court judges, will be permitted to adjudicate the claims of immigrants seeking asylum at the border. In addition to these initiatives, I’d suggest another policy: do away with birthright citizenship and dual citizenship.

Modern American conservatism is composed of three distinct traditions: libertarian economics, foreign-policy hawkism and social traditionalism. This “fusion” was born of a contingent historical moment, the Cold War, when the Soviet threat forced different social classes and their ideological spokesmen to band together in common cause. There was no eternal principle demanding that these groups tie their destinies together — a fact that became apparent with Donald Trump’s rise, which divided the three camps along various axes of alliance and enmity. Fusionism is dead. Well and truly dead.