Politics

There’s a nickname for House Speaker Mike Johnson shared among some Hill staffers and observers: “Deacon Mike,” a nod to his quiet Southern Baptist religious demeanor. But it also contains the idea that he is a man elevated beyond his expected station, charged with the monumental task of wrangling an extremely thin Republican House majority when he should rightly be in charge of keeping the worship center donuts fresh and the coffee hot.

Now more than ever, Donald Trump appears to be channeling his inner Lord Palmerston. It was the 19th-century prime minister, after all, who went down in the history books for his declaration that England had no permanent enemies or allies. Generations of statesmen have recited that gelid precept, but Trump is one of the few who actually seems prepared to act upon it. Speaking in Riyadh, he implored Iran – the longtime bugbear of Washington hawks, including Trump’s defenestrated national security advisor Mike Waltz – to strike out upon a new course, vowing that there are no “permanent enemies” for America.

“We do not need loud, forceful communication,” said Pope Leo XIV, the Chicago-born American prelate Robert Prevost – at his first press conference on Monday, “but rather communication that is capable of listening and of gathering the voices of the weak who have no voice.”  His Holiness, who opened by thanking the 6,000 attendees in English before delivering his remarks in superb Italian, also called for freedom for imprisoned journalists, urged members of the Fourth Estate to avoid “ideological or partisan” language in their work and admonished them to pursue a “path of communication in favor of peace.

In America, we are told justice is blind. Hennepin County wants her to peek. Last week, the Department of Justice launched an investigation into Minnesota’s Hennepin County Attorney’s Office after prosecutors were instructed to consider race and age during plea negotiations. County Attorney Mary Moriarty defended the policy as an effort to address “racial disparities” in the criminal justice system. But good intentions don’t excuse bad policy – and this one sends a dangerous message: that some people are less accountable for their actions because of the color of their skin. As a black conservative, I am fully in favor of thoughtful criminal justice reform.

President Donald Trump is continuing his consistently inconsistent stance on abortion as his administration’s Justice Department has asked a federal court in Texas to dismiss a case aiming to increase regulations on mifepristone, an abortion pill shown in some rare cases to involve serious health risks. Trump has claimed many times in the past to be pro-life, even saying in 2016 that “there has to be some form of punishment” for abortions.

“You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.” So goes the bartenders’ refrain to customers at closing time. The Trump administration is issuing that same call to millions of illegal immigrants, beginning with the most violent (and those caught staying with them). You can’t stay here. It’s a wildly popular stance, but it is running into predictable problems. The first is that rounding up the millions here illegally is costly, time-consuming and sometimes dangerous. That problem was vastly increased by Joe Biden’s deliberate decision to open the southern border, allow millions of people to cross it illegally and then lie to the public and Congress about what his administration was doing.