NATIONAL REVIEW
APR 19, 2024 |
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◼ The president suggests his uncle was eaten by cannibals. Finally, a palatable Biden.
◼ Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is only the second cabinet member ever to be impeached, and the first since 1876. Rightly so. He has ignored federal statutes requiring that illegal immigrants be detained until they are removed, given asylum, or otherwise legally adjudicated. He has twisted the definitions of legal status, extended "temporary" protected status to 700,000 Venezuelan migrants in response to their home country's long-running misgovernment, and handed out meaningless court dates, sometimes a decade in the future, as a substitute for enforcement today. The House charged him with "willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law" in disregard of seven enumerated statutory requirements, and with a "breach of the public trust" for false statements to Congress and obstruction of congressional oversight. The Framers did not intend mere "maladministration," in the sense of bad policy or incompetence, to be impeachable, but this goes well beyond that: It is flagrant, deliberate nullification of Congress's power to make law. Mayorkas took an oath to uphold the Constitution and discharge the duties of his office, and he has violated that oath. Yet every Senate Democrat voted to dismiss the charges without a trial. That will only embolden this administration's view that laws are just suggestions to the executive branch.
◼ The jury has been selected in Donald Trump's New York criminal trial. We could be headed to opening statements next week in the first criminal trial ever against a former American president—in the so-called hush-money case prosecuted by elected Democratic district attorney Alvin Bragg. His required presence in the courtroom meant that Trump had to skip Thursday's oral argument in the Supreme Court, at which the justices considered his claim of immunity from criminal prosecution in the election-interference case brought against him by Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith. He is also missing the action in South Florida, where another team of Smith prosecutors recruited from the DOJ is sparring with Trump's lawyers over the admissibility of classified information in their case against Trump for illegally retaining national-defense intelligence. (You may have heard that a different DOJ special counsel declined prosecution against Biden on that same offense even while finding that he'd willfully violated the law.) But it hasn't stopped Trump from appealing an Atlanta judge's failure to disqualify Fulton County's elected Democratic district attorney, Fani Willis, from her RICO prosecution of Trump for trying to undo the 2020 election. Are there due-process concerns about forcing a defendant to confront four complex criminal trials on a calendar pegged to Election Day rather than to law-enforcement needs? If Trump were a detained enemy-combatant terrorist rather than the de facto Republican presidential nominee, we'd be hearing about the Fifth Amendment.
◼ Joe Biden is trying to have it both ways on tariffs. He criticizes Trump's proposals, which include a 10 percent tariff on all imports, as tax hikes on the middle class, which they are. But then he gallivants to the headquarters of the United Steelworkers union and promises to triple tariffs on Chinese steel. The U.S. barely imports any Chinese steel right now, so the economic impact of a tariff would be negligible. That also means the benefits to the steel industry would be negligible. Biden has left in place most of the tariffs the Trump administration imposed, and he has done virtually nothing to reform the existing tariff schedule, which runs to more than 4,000 pages. It would be nice if voters had a choice on tariffs in November rather than two candidates echoing each other.
◼ The rate of inflation stopped falling in June 2023. Every month since then, the year-over-year change in the consumer-price index has stayed between 3 and 3.8 percent. It should be 2 percent, and really it should be lower than 2 percent for a while to compensate for the past two years. But getting down to 2 percent is a must. Core inflation (which excludes energy and food prices, which are volatile) is higher than overall inflation, so right now the inflation-target misses aren't due to energy markets. But with more conflict in the Middle East, energy prices could increase again. It's rare for inflation to spike once and return to a low, stable level. In the past, more than one spike or stagflation has been the norm. Before cutting interest rates, the Fed needs to see evidence that those last few percentage points of excess inflation are disappearing. One thing that would help: spending cuts. Fiscal policy is highly expansionary, working against monetary policy with a $2 trillion deficit. Congress must stop making the Fed's job harder than it needs to be.
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◼ Cutting waste, fraud, and abuse has long been a promise of politicians. Oftentimes nowadays, it's a diversion from the primary drivers of the debt: entitlements and interest. But waste, fraud, and abuse are nonetheless real, and damaging. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimated that federal agencies made $236 billion in improper payments last year, and that's an underestimate because not every federal agency provided information. If errors were random, we would expect to see roughly the same proportion of overpayments as underpayments. But 74 percent of improper payments last year were overpayments. Only 5 percent were underpayments. The rest were other kinds of errors. It's a pretty good sign that the federal government is too big when it can make mistakes worth six times more than the Department of Justice's annual budget and most people don't bat an eye.
◼ Like the Pentagon, California's vast array of homelessness agencies and programs has become un-auditable. That was the astonishing conclusion reached by state auditor Grant Parks in a new report. Parks was able to determine that the state has spent $24 billion over the past five years to address the problem of homelessness, but as to where that money went, and whether it's making any difference, Parks's guess is as good as the next guy's. "The State lacks current information on the ongoing costs and outcomes of its homelessness programs, because Cal ICH [the California Interagency Council on Homelessness] has not consistently tracked and evaluated the State's efforts to prevent and end homelessness," he wrote. Over the five-year period covered by his audit, California's homeless population grew by about 20 percent, from 151,278 in 2019 to 181,399 in 2023. Roughly 30 percent of the country's entire homeless population is now clustered in California. Rather than helping people get back on their feet, the state's unaccountable homeless–industrial complex—comprising nine agencies and more than 30 programs—appears to be subsidizing an ever-growing population of dependents.
◼ Much of late has been said, pro and con, about the political tendency calling itself "national conservatism." Much of it has been said in National Review—in both directions. National conservatism asserts, among other things, that both the Left and parts of the Right have overvalued individual freedom and undervalued national sovereignty. "NatCons" claim adherents throughout the Western world. In Brussels, local police, at the behest of political authorities, sought to shut down a recent NatCon conference, blockading it to prevent anyone who left the venue from reentering. The ostensible justification was "public safety." The mayor of the Brussels district in which the conference was held was blunter: "The far Right is not welcome" in his jurisdiction. It was not surprising behavior: Top-down diktats originating in Brussels helped bring national conservatism into existence. The shutdown was unacceptable. As a group of freedom conservatives ("FreeCons"), a liberty-oriented coalition on the right that frequently contends against the NatCons, put it, "the use of public authority and police force to shut down peaceful conferences and public meetings is anathema to a free and open society." Fortunately, a Belgian court intervened to allow the conference to proceed. Freedom has its uses. |
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◼ Since 2001, when the Netherlands became the first country to legalize euthanasia, about ten other countries have normalized, in some form, what is euphemistically called "assistance in dying." Critics of the Dutch law, which limited eligibility to patients whose conditions are "hopeless and unbearable," argued that its criteria were subjective and prone to gradual loosening. Now among those scheduled to die is a 28-year-old woman with autism, depression, and borderline personality disorder whose symptoms, her psychiatrist concluded, will never improve. In neighboring Belgium, the president of a health-insurance fund suggested that euthanasia should be made available to elderly persons who would like to relieve the state of the burden of their care. The clinical provision of death perverts the patient–physician relationship and the medical vocation, whose purposes are curative and palliative. Killing is neither.
◼ Threatening a ban on weekend driving unless climate policy were moderated, Germany's transportation minister, Volker Wissing, secured a compromise from the country's left-wing ruling coalition despite cries of despair from environmentalists and the far-Left Greens. The new measure will gauge Germany's progress toward net-zero emissions across the entire economy instead of demanding that individual sectors force emissions down to an impossibly low level in order for German commerce and transportation to continue. With Germany reducing its emissions by 10 percent in a year—in part because of high energy costs and a downturn in the economy—and as the populace begins to understand the expense of allowing environmentalists to manage their lives, the political winds are shifting. Wissing's victory returns reason to the lands between Rostock and the Rhineland.
◼ Uri Berliner worked as an editor for NPR for 25 years. He wrote a piece for the Free Press about the transition of the public-media organization to one-sided progressivism. NPR suspended him, and then he resigned. That's probably to be expected for writing a huge article about why your employer is failing at its mission, but it's clear that NPR has learned nothing from Berliner's thoughts. The organization's new CEO, Katherine Maher, has no experience in journalism but plenty in progressivism. The former Wikimedia executive has a seemingly unlimited supply of past social-media posts and recorded remarks delivered in perfect progressive-speak with little to no discernible content behind them—think of a more corporate Kamala Harris. If NPR were an entirely private organization, it would be well within its rights to operate as a hyper-progressive outlet. But if the U.S. is going to have public radio—it should not, but let's grant for the sake of argument that it does—it should strive for evenhandedness. All things considered, taxpayer funding for NPR should go to zero.
◼ PBS made William F. Buckley Jr. the subject of the latest installment of its American Masters documentary series. There is much to recommend the film, which spans WFB's well-lived life from beginning to end, covers the major episodes in his career from his time as a student at Yale to the fall of the Soviet empire, and aptly situates him within the context of his times. There is extensive archival footage of WFB, capturing his wit, eloquence, gentlemanliness, and joyous mischievousness. But the film paints an incomplete picture of his views on questions of tolerance and equality. And it ends on a tendentious and discordant note. It veers abruptly into a montage of the events of January 6, 2021, and gives a platform to critics of conservatism to argue that Buckley's philosophy contained dark and menacing elements that laid the groundwork for the Capitol riot. It's clearly absurd to connect Buckley to an event that took place more than a dozen years after his death and that everything in his decades of public advocacy suggests he would have wholeheartedly condemned. We're glad that PBS felt compelled to feature Buckley in its series, but it should have resisted the temptation to distort his legacy for its own ideological purposes. |
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An Israeli air-force strike inside Syria killed two Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps generals, including one of the architects of the October 7 massacre. Iran spent several days telegraphing its intention to attack Israel directly in response. Then it launched over 300 suicide drones and missiles, both ballistic and cruise, toward Israel.
Almost all the ordnance that Iran launched failed or was intercepted before it could penetrate Israeli airspace. Jerusalem was aided in that spectacular operation by its Western allies, the U.S., the U.K., and France among them, and by its Middle Eastern partners, including Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The coalition arrayed in Israel's defense is almost as wondrous as the Iranian regime and its terrorist proxies are threatening. Nevertheless, the direct attack on Israel from Iranian territory was unprecedented. Until we hear otherwise from either party to this conflict, a state of war exists today between Israel and the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Jewish state is obliged to reestablish deterrence to stave off future similar attacks.
That prospect does not sit well with Israel's Western allies. President Joe Biden reportedly told Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to "take the win" and stand down. British foreign secretary David Cameron agreed. "I think this is a time to think with head as well as heart and to be smart as well as tough," he said. "We're advising them to take a breath before responding," an unnamed U.S. official told Politico. Indeed, the whole point of the West's intervention in Israel's behalf was to relieve pressure on Jerusalem so that it would not feel "compelled to come back with another overwhelming response and we can de-escalate and be done," another official told Politico.
It's unlikely the Israelis believe they are so secure that they can afford to all but ignore this brazen act of war. Indeed, it's difficult to imagine a polity anywhere on earth that would take a similar attack in stride. To advance the notion that Jerusalem can afford to brush off this assault—which, one U.S. official told Semafor, was designed to culminate in "mass casualties and infrastructure damage"—media outlets have cited military experts who claim Iran's attack was "designed to fail." It is highly unlikely that the Iranian mullahs expended all this ordnance only so that their regime would be humiliated on the world stage. In all likelihood, this attack was intended to overwhelm Israeli air defenses and kill as many Jews as possible, thereby advancing the objectives that Iran's terrorist proxies have feverishly pursued since October 7.
Israel cannot allow direct Iranian missile strikes on Israeli territory to become background noise. It will have to impose consequences on Iran to deter similar attacks in the future—attacks that may be far more successful next time. That might frustrate Israel's Western partners, but their national survival is not on the line. Israel's is.
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