Charles Lipson

The Democrats face so many problems that it’s hard to remember the Republicans face a big one of their own. Donald Trump is not just a problem for Republicans. He’s a problem for the Republic. The problem is not Trump’s policies, whether you agree with them or not. Their populist/nationalist thrust differs from traditional conservativism, but his policies are coloring within the traditional lines of American politics. Many of them — tax cuts, immigration enforcement, increased military spending, credible threats against foreign adversaries — worked well and received enthusiastic popular support. Trump’s emphasis on state and local solutions over centralized ones was a welcome return to standard Republican practice.

President Biden’s wisdom and penetrating intelligence sometimes escape him. So far, they have stayed away for fifty years and show no signs of returning. They are often accompanied by wild exaggerations, invented personal stories and hyperbolic attacks on opponents. Examples are not hard to find, and the public is catching on. The latest fulmination came during a campaign-style rally in Atlanta on Tuesday, aimed at supporting his bill to nationalize election laws. Since that bill contravenes America’s long, constitutionally enshrined tradition that state legislatures control voting rules (as long as they don’t violate individual civil rights), the bill will fail in the Senate, blocked by the filibuster. Biden, once a man of the Senate, has long supported the filibuster.

Vice President Kamala Harris has been quoted as saying her media coverage would be better if she were a white man. She is absolutely right. She wouldn’t have bad coverage. She wouldn’t have any coverage at all. That’s because she would still be a minor senator from a big state, not the second-highest official in the Executive Branch. She was selected only because she has the identity-politics markers so important to Democrats. It should be obvious by now that Harris is a terrible politician. When friendly reporters toss her softballs, she swings, misses and blames them. When she is given hard policy assignments, she swings and misses those, too. (In her defense, her main assignment, immigration, is President Biden’s failure, not her’s.

Preventing crime and punishing offenders is primarily the responsibility of local authorities. They have no greater obligation to the citizens who elected them and who fund the government. It is up to local police, supervised by political leaders and subject to the law themselves, to provide a safe environment for citizens to go about their lives, pursuing their own goals in peace and security. It is up to local politicians to ensure that police are adequately funded and properly trained. It is up to local prosecutors to follow up all justified arrests and prosecute offenders when the evidence is adequate. When police overstep their limits, prosecutors should pursue them too. The goal is a safe environment, subject to the rule of law.

America’s left-wing progressives won a victory this week in their long-running battle with Israel. They managed, at least temporarily, to block $1 billion (£730 million) in U.S. funding to replenish the missile interceptors Israel used to shoot down the latest barrage of terror rockets from Gaza. The funding was initially included in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s stopgap spending measure to raise the debt ceiling and fund the U.S. government. The victory was short-lived since House leaders stuck the funding into another bill after the public outcry. Who opposed the funding? The leaders were the 'Squad,' particularly congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib. Like others on the hard left across America and Europe, they despise Israel.

President Biden walked to the White House podium on Tuesday and proclaimed the US withdrawal from Afghanistan an ‘extraordinary success’. He relied on the unanimous advice of military leaders and strategic advisers for these wise decisions. If there were any failures, they were due to Donald Trump. Never in history, he said, had there been such a successful airlift. Of the Americans who wanted to leave, we got out an amazing 90 percent. Surely that’s a success all around, despite the collapse of the Afghan army, which nobody expected. Of course, as a far-sighted leader, Biden said he had ordered plans for that, too.

Joe Biden emerged from his cave, saw his shadow, and told us there will be three more years of winter. That winter, descending on America’s position in the world, was on public view at Biden’s Friday press conference about Afghanistan. Standing behind him was the Vice President, the secretary of defense, the secretary of state and the national security adviser, a stark contrast to the sad photo of Biden alone on a video call from Camp David with those advisers. Why have them stand there, mute? To convey to the public that the administration was united...and to convey to his advisers that they were all on this sinking ship together.

The announcement that Andrew Cuomo will resign in two weeks follows the total collapse of his political support among Democrats in New York State and Washington. His advisers told him impeachment was now certain, and he resigned just ahead of the inevitable, as President Nixon did when he was given the same message by his erstwhile congressional supporters. The headlight of that oncoming train has been visible in Albany for months. The crash became certain when Attorney General Letitia James of New York issued her damning report on Cuomo’s behavior, buttressed by testimony from 11 accusers. After James’s report and press conference, all the top Democrats in the state and country began calling on Cuomo to resign. The major papers, which always support Democrats, did the same.

The small-minded people who believe in freedom and democratic self-government have their shorts in a bunch over the Biden administration’s invitation to the United Nations to review our country’s civil-rights record. What a superb idea. Long overdue. The countries filling the human rights bodies at the UN have the kind of expertise you can’t get by reading books or following the rule of law. You have to get that kind of experience in the streets. Police brutality? All you have to do is ask the leading members of the UN Human Rights Council like Cuba, Libya, Pakistan, the Philippines, Russia, Somalia, Sudan and Venezuela. They know a thing or two about protecting civil rights. But why stop there?

Nothing could be more predictable than media coverage of the catastrophic building collapse in Surfside, Florida. Cable news will feature it because the story is both shocking and eye-catching. Their obvious problem is that the cable channels have hours of air-time to fill and precious little real information, beyond dreadful pictures and interviews with bereaved friends and family and others who escaped the tragedy. To save hours of watching this low-information disaster footage, the best thing is to read the story on your favorite website and watch very little TV. That is true of every breaking-news news story where real information is scarce at first.

Sometimes, just below the surface lie some very powerful connections among seemingly unrelated problems. That’s true for the seemingly unrelated problems of rising crime, the year-long closure of public schools, acute employee shortages, and parents’ outrage at kids being taught critical race theory. Substantively, these issues are vastly different. Conceptually, they are united by the crucial importance of incentives.  Bad incentives produce bad outcomes, and that’s exactly what is creating many of these problems.