Politics

Madison Cawthorn is paying the price for trying to seem cool on a podcast. The North Carolina congressman carried himself with the air of a high school kid with a “girlfriend” who “goes to a different school” as he spilled the beans on how similar Capitol Hill was to the depiction in House of Cards. Cawthorn described being invited to orgies by older members of Congress and seeing politicos taking cocaine. “I look at all these people, a lot of whom I’ve you know looked up to through my life… then all of a sudden you get invited to- ‘well hey we’re gonna have a sexual get-together at one of our homes, you should come!’… and you’re like ‘w-what did you just ask me to come to?

Biden’s magic budget fools no one It’s easy to get too excited about a president’s budget. OK, maybe not. But it’s certainly possible to read too much meaning into the fiscal plans issued by the White House. So it is with Joe Biden’s record-setting $5.8 trillion budget, published this week. As Jonathan Bydlak writes for the site, the documents aren’t the law, and even in a functioning Washington, they are only the start of the budget process. In a dysfunctional Washington, they are good for little more than messaging. What is the message of Biden’s budget? “Its significance is limited to telling us what we already know: the administration wants to spend — a lot,” writes Bydlak. The White House has spun this budget as a pivot to the center.

The Democratic Party is out of the office. Quite literally. Nancy Pelosi, who controls administrative policy in the House, this week extended the in-office moratorium and proxy voting through the middle of May. Pelosi says she based the policy on the recommendation of the sergeant-at-arms who wrote that there is still an ongoing “public health emergency due to the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 remains in effect.” Quite the contrast to the president’s message. Pelosi's extension follows reporting from the Washington Free Beacon last week that most Democratic offices in DC remain shut, citing Covid-19 pandemic and workplace restrictions as the reason.

Asked by Senator Marsha Blackburn during the Senate Judiciary Committee’s recent hearings whether she could define the word “woman,” Judge Katanji Brown Jackson replied, “Can I provide a definition? No, I can’t. I’m not a biologist.” That's an interesting standard. Can Judge Jackson define a human being? Can she affirm that she is one? Apparently not. Only a biologist could do that — or a woke progressive liberal, and zie would be wrong. The Judge may possess certain credentials that would make her a worthy addition to the Court. Yet intellectual honesty, common sense, independence, and moral courage do not seem to be among them. A few members of the press took notice of her idiotic response, as did a sizable number of the Twitterati.

The Covid test A spike in Covid cases in Europe has professional Covid worriers worrying. Is America ready, asked the New York Times this week, quoting an epidemiologist lamenting that the country has chosen to “forget” rather than “do the hard work” since the last peak. Another accuses policymakers of “wearing rose-colored glasses instead of correcting our vision.” If a new wave does arrive on these shores, professional pandemic-watchers will complain about our complacency and accuse policymakers of once again falling short. The real question though, is what the rest of us will do. Thankfully, the signs point to the hypochondriacs being ignored. A new Pew poll finds that voters see Covid as just the fifteenth most important issue.

New York mayor Eric Adams lifted the vaccine mandate for all of the workers in New York City on Thursday. It was a unifying moment for a city in desperate need of some good news. Just kidding! Eric Adams did not lift anything. Instead, Bill De Blasio’s successor offered a group of New Yorkers an exemption from having to take the Covid-19 vaccine. According to CBS, “New York-based performers and athletes who play for New York's home teams will be exempt from the city's vaccination mandate for private businesses.” This is great news for wealthy Yankees players and insufferable celebrity attendees of this year’s Met Gala. After all, nothing says VIP treatment like being able to make your own medical decisions. Now for the bad news.