Lyndon B. Johnson

It was the summer of 1954, and Texas Senator Lyndon B. Johnson was locked in a primary fight with fellow Democrat Dudley Dougherty. Flush with cash, Texas oil tycoons threw their support behind Dougherty through tax-exempt organizations like Facts Forum and the Committee for Constitutional Government. But Johnson, political shark that he was, quietly slipped in a new amendment to the IRS code banning tax-exempt organizations from engaging in partisan political activity. Lyndon Johnson sailed through the primary, and the name Dudley Dougherty became lost to history. The Johnson Amendment lived on, though in the present age, it has been contorted by political activists to crack down on Christians.Johnson’s intention was not to censor religious institutions.

Donald Trump this weekend floated the idea of running for a third term. Unless he’s doing it in 1940 when Franklin D. Roosevelt did, it’s unconstitutional. I don’t mean unconstitutional for Judge Boasberg or Judge Chutkin or some zealot in robes in San Francisco or Seattle. I mean unconstitutional in capital letters for any judge, including a 9-0 vote on the Supreme Court. The legal background here is straightforward. When FDR ran for a third term in 1940 and for a fourth in 1944, there was no legal or constitutional prohibition against doing so. There was simply a well-established norm, begun when George Washington returned to Mount Vernon after two terms. That norm was respected by every subsequent president. Until FDR.

Kristi Noem has been taking heat for packing heat on her dog. In an excerpt from her upcoming book, the South Dakota governor admitted to shooting her family’s wire-haired pointer, Cricket. After ruining a peasant hunt and killing her neighbor's chickens, Noem took the pooch out back and sent her to a gravely grave. The news has sent shockwaves across the country — all but tanking Noem's hopes of "softening" Trump's image as a female VP pick — but Noem is far from the first politician to be embroiled in a canine scandal. Barack Obama Hot dogs aren’t the only dogs Obama enjoys. Before becoming the proud parent of his pet Bo, Obama admitted to eating dogs in Indonesia with his stepfather Lolo Soetoro.

President Joe Biden just proposed the largest budget (as a percentage of America’s economy) since the country was fighting Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and Fascist Italy. He’s doing it when there is no emergency, only an overweening desire to pass progressive programs quickly, before they lose their legislative majority. The best historical analogue to his proposed budget increase is Lyndon Johnson’s cradle-to-grave Great Society Program. It has the same flaws. In fact, Biden’s program is best understood as the next step in a long political arc, extending from Franklin Roosevelt to LBJ to Obamacare. All of them proposed centralized government solutions to almost every social problem, particularly endemic problems among the poor.

If you want a perfect example of how the progressive mindset betrays African Americans, look at the now viral video of two white women spray-painting a Starbucks with Black Lives Matter slogans while a black woman pleads for them to stop. 'Y'all doing that for us and we didn't ask you do that,' says the black woman. 'Don't spray stuff on here when they gonna blame black people...and black people didn't do it.' 'Don't police people's way of expressing themselves,' says the white woman's white friend. That is a neat metaphor for how white liberal Americans have behaved for the last 40 years, taking actions they think show support for minorities but which only hurt them more. https://twitter.

Peregrine Worsthorne, the hugely distinguished British journalist, has died aged 96. He was a wonderful man and a brilliant columnist, who once described his job as 'the articulation of an intelligent, well thought out, coherent set of prejudices'. He also worked as Washington correspondent for The Times of London and the Daily Telegraph. In 2014, he wrote the following piece about meeting various American presidents. It was his last contribution to The Spectator. RIP. I feel a bit of a fraud writing about the ‘presidents I knew’, since journalists do not really get to know the great figures they interview or shake hands with. Indeed the relationship between journalist and great personage is about as false as any relationship can be, since each is trying to make use of the other.