Politics

Omarova and out Saule Omarova, Joe Biden’s pick to be one of America’s top banking regulators, has withdrawn from the nomination process. You may remember Omarova — as I explained in the DC Diary a few weeks ago, she is the shoplifting radical with a track record of dicey economic thinking. Why is Omarova backing out of her bid to lead the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency? According to the president, it’s because “from the very beginning, Saule was subjected to inappropriate personal attacks that were far beyond the pale.” According to the New York Times, “Bank lobbyists and Republicans painted [Omarova] as a communist because she was born in the Soviet Union.” It might be true that a few Republican lawmakers took their red-baiting too far.

For the fourth time in the last four years, Minnesota is trying a police officer for excessive use of force in a highly-publicized case watched by people around the world. In three of the four cases, an officer killed a black man during an alleged misdemeanor stop in the Twin Cities metropolitan area. On April 11, 2021, Kim Potter, a former police officer from Brooklyn Center, Minnesota was training a new officer, Anthony Luckey, when they pulled over twenty-year old Daunte Wright. Luckey told Wright he was questioning him for displaying in his white Buick both an air freshener from his rearview mirror and  expired license plate tabs.

Much has been written about the expansiveness of the Biden administration’s signature priority: the Build Back Better Act (BBB). The legislation is projected by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to spend more than $1.6 trillion in its attempts to address countless Democratic priorities ranging from climate change to the expansion of Medicaid. One aspect of the bill, however, has attracted far less fanfare than it should have: its impact on the cost of prescription drugs. Provisions in the bill would, among other things, impose rebates on drug manufacturers if prices rise faster than inflation. It’s an idea that sounds great in the current moment of creeping inflation, but is ultimately little more than a market distortion likely to produce an array of adverse consequences.

Bob Dole, RIP An epic American life came to an end when Bob Dole died at ninety-eight in his sleep on Sunday morning. Reading Dole’s obituaries, it’s hard not to be moved by his journey from the small Kansas town of Russell to the top of American politics, via near fatal injury in the Second World War. As the Wall Street Journal account of Dole’s life puts it, “Bob Dole went from the plains of Kansas to the battlefields of Italy, where he was left for dead with grievous wounds, before a dogged recovery enabled him to become a widely respected leader of the Senate and Republican nominee for both president and vice president.” In a piece for National Review, Craig Shirley salutes Dole for being “the first and best compassionate conservative.

In the past three weeks, two small communities in two Dairy Belt states have seen tragedy — and, of course, two very different media reactions. In Oxford, Michigan, Ethan Crumbley, a fifteen-year-old student, opened fire with a handgun at his high school on Tuesday. He killed four students and wounded eight and was taken into custody. After a brief search, both of Crumbley’s parents were arrested on manslaughter charges, for purchasing the firearm and gifting it to him. Ethan Crumbley has been charged with twenty-four different felonies including terrorism. Shortly before the shooting, a teacher identified disturbing signals in classroom, including his drawings depicting suicide, mass death, blood and firearms.

We are less than a month away from entering 2022 — so why does it feel like March 2020 all over again? Cable news networks are obsessively covering the new Omicron variant of Covid-19. They are hellbent on scaring the daylights out of any unsuspecting viewer who accidentally flips onto their programs. To be fair, the media is taking cues from the president. According to the Washington Post, the Biden administration is reportedly weighing up a seven-day self-quarantine for all travelers arriving on our shores, regardless of vaccination status, including US citizens and permanent residents. Travel bans, which fell out of fashion in the Trump years because they were "xenophobic", are suddenly back in vogue. It all begs the question: didn’t Joe Biden promise to shut down the virus?

John Eastman, a former member of Donald Trump’s legal team, has just declined, through his attorney, to cooperate with the congressional inquiry into the events of January 6, 2021 at the Capitol. I think he was right to do so, for several reasons. In the first place, the congressional inquiry would be better named a congressional vendetta. Its composition is heavily weighted towards Democrats. The committee includes no “ranking members” of the opposition as the rules stipulate, hence the frequent invocation of the “Star Chamber” in descriptions of the inquiry. It is less an investigation than an inquisition.

Rubio's anti-slavery stand Last night, Chuck Schumer hit another bump in the road on the way to passing the National Defense Authorization Act, the must-pass legislation that was supposed to be the most straightforward item on the Democrats’ December legislative to-do list. A bipartisan attempt to move things along via unanimous consent on the bill, which would mean votes on 20 amendments, was scuppered by Marco Rubio. Rubio had proposed an amendment to the legislation that would ban imports from Xinjiang, where, according to the US government and others, the Chinese government is carrying out a genocide against the Uighurs. Earlier on Wednesday, the amendment had been included on the list of measures that would be voted on.