Charles Lipson

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.

Every president is criticized, sooner or later, for taking too many days off, for lounging around when we’ve hired him to work. Since the media hates Republicans, that criticism is usually directed at them, but even some liberal publications have noticed that — shock! — Democratic presidents play golf, too. That criticism, most recently in Amber Athey’s article in The Spectator, is wrong. It misses the bigger, more important issues — and not just because our country would be well served if most presidents did less, not more. It’s fun to compare the President with Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, but there are three problems with criticizing presidents for escaping to their beach house in Delaware or their ranch in Texas or California.

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.

Who wants bipartisanship? The short answer is: neither side, so neither is getting it. Activists in both parties have been clear about that. There was a moment, last spring, when it seemed Democrats might opt for centrism. It came when Rep. James Clyburn endorsed Joe Biden, who went on to defeat Bernie Sanders and capture his party’s nomination. Biden promised general election voters a center-left agenda and extensive bipartisanship, though he did bow occasionally to his party’s left-wing. Biden may have been promising moderation and bipartisanship, but Donald Trump was not. Quite the contrary. He was a populist candidate who actually governed like one.

The latest target for online mobs is South Carolina’s Republican senator Tim Scott. His 'crime' is apparently being a black conservative who gave a thoughtful televised response to President Biden’s address to a joint session of Congress. The mob responded by calling him 'Uncle Tim', a none-too-clever play on the old racial epithet, 'Uncle Tom'. Twitter allowed that hashtag to trend. Scott has endured such insults before. So have all black conservatives.  They shouldn’t have to stand alone in their response. Good people, including those who disagree sharply with conservatives, should stand with them. Slanders like these, left unanswered, degrade us all. Sen. Scott spoke because Republicans chose him to give the party’s official response to President Biden’s address.

NBC's flagship news program completely garbled one of the week’s top stories: a deadly fight among teenage girls in Columbus, Ohio, which ended with a policeman shooting and killing a knife-wielding attacker, 16-year-old Ma'Khia Bryant. The network’s coverage was an abomination. NBC omitted vital information and distorted what actually happened. The Biden White House immediately piled on, insisting that the Columbus shooting was the product of racism. They did so at an incredibly sensitive moment — minutes after a Minneapolis jury convicted policeman Derek Chauvin of murdering George Floyd. Since NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt and other media programs did not report the Columbus story fairly or accurately, let’s do so here.

Joe Biden was elected as a moderate-left Democrat, but he is not governing as one. He pledged repeatedly to work across party lines, but he is ramming through the biggest, most expensive progressive agenda in American history without any Republican votes. He is almost certain to try it again with his next two spending proposals, the largest since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs. As the White House pushes these mammoth bills with only Democratic votes, Americans are realizing they got a very different president from the one they bargained for, the one they were promised during the campaign. What’s unclear is whether they will recoil from this new reality. Throughout the summer and fall, Biden ran as a unifier who could work across party lines.

The gloating over Rush Limbaugh's death ought to shock the conscience. That’s not a political statement. That’s a cri de coeur about how our basic sense of human decency has been warped by political differences. To take one example, a Yale Law professor tweeted he wasn’t just happy Limbaugh had died, he was euphoric. He’s not some drunk being carried out of a rowdy bar. He’s the Charles F. Southmayd Professor of Law and Philosophy at Yale Law School and the Director of Yale's Center for Law and Philosophy. A lesser mortal, a blogger for Media Matters, tweeted her mock condolences to “hell’s other residents.” Does anyone doubt her reception at work will be a pat on the back, not a pink slip? https://twitter.

It wasn’t so long ago that Congress finally kicked its ‘earmarking’ habit, where they loaded up big spending bills with special projects to benefit donors and local interest groups. The idea was to give reluctant representatives and senators a reason to sign onto the bill. Congressional leaders thought it was a small price to pay. The benefits were obvious, both for party leaders and backbenchers. They captured specific benefits and offloaded the costs onto taxpayers. Best of all, the costs were nearly invisible until some high-profile scandals came to light. That’s what killed the whole arrangement in 2011, when Republicans gained control of the House and were forced to answer to the party’s rising populist movement.

January 6, 2021 is a day that will live in infamy. On that day, our Capitol was assaulted by a violent mob, forcing the House and Senate to run for cover, interrupting their affirmation that a new president and vice president had been elected. Now that the rioters have been dispersed and the election formally completed, the vital task is to restore a sense of public order and constitutional continuity. Vice President Mike Pence is doing that. President Trump is not. The President’s latest decision, not to attend the inauguration, is yet another damaging expression of his petulance. Democrats have seized the moment and pressed their partisan advantage by saying President Trump should be immediately removed from office.

When a violent mob broke into the Capitol building, they did more than breach the barriers of House and Senate chambers. They breached the barriers of our Constitution and the Republic for which it stands. The scale and symbolic significance of this attack are new and profoundly troubling. But it is also the culmination of several disturbing trends. For months now, we have witnessed a degradation of public order — mobs roaming city streets, unpunished; an effort to take over and firebomb a federal courthouse in Portland, unpunished; delegates attacked on the streets of Washington after the Republican convention, unpunished. And now this, far worse than anything that came before. One photograph captures this appalling collapse of law and constitutional order.

Recent political talk has focused almost entirely on January 5 (the Georgia Senate runoffs) and January 6 (congressional certification of the Electoral College results). Important as they are, we also should remember January 20. On that day Americans will witness a truly remarkable tradition: the peaceful transfer of power between opposing parties. Such handovers are extremely rare in history and a towering, hard-won achievement. Our next one is worth celebrating, regardless of how you voted.It is especially important for Donald Trump to attend this one since he has contested the November outcome so aggressively. Those challenges have gone well beyond formal legal contests. He has rallied supporters to challenge the legitimacy of the election outcome.

Whoever Joe Biden picks for attorney general is in a lose-lose situation. Why is that job so hard? At least three reasons stand out:  The ongoing criminal investigations of Joe Biden’s family A boiling cauldron of divisive legal questions facing the new administration, particularly immigration and gun control Pressure to investigate everything the Trump administration ever did All those will land in the attorney general’s lap. The first one, involving the Biden family, is especially vexing.The probe into Biden’s grifting kin will face the AG immediately. The President-elect’s son Hunter and brother James both grew rich by trading on the family name. That, in itself, is not illegal.

Before the showdown in old Western movies, one character would issue a barbed challenge and his rival would confidently reply, ‘Them’s mighty big words. Are you big enough to back ’em up?’ That’s the question facing President Trump’s lawyers. Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis threw down the challenge at an incendiary press conference on Thursday. Now, they have to back up ‘them big words,’ and do it fast. The stakes couldn’t be higher. It goes beyond who sits in the Oval Office next January 20.