Stromata Blog

Malapropism of the Day: Kamala Will Ban Price-Gauging

Words get confused now and then. Hardly anyone knows the difference between “gauntlet” (a glove) and “gantlet” (an American Indian torture). Englishmen often write “prevaricate” (mislead) for “procrastinate” (put off until tomorrow). And even Presidents of the United States think that “literally” and “figuratively” are synonyms.

Kamala the Joybringer therefore did nothing unprecedented yesterday when she firmly cackled that under her reign the federal government will crack down on “price-gauging”.

She has indeed much reason not to gauge prices. The gauge shows that the inflation rate, 1.4 percent when she and that other guy took office, is now 2.9 percent. That’s a slowdown from the nine percent peak that it reached. Nonetheless, it is a rate at which prices double in 24 years and nearly octuple over the Biblical three score and ten. That gauge doesn’t bring Joy. Ban it now!

Quote of the Day: Paying the Dane-geld

That sixteen innocent Westerners, most visibly Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, have been released from Russian captivity is a happy occasion for them, their families and their countries, but it is not, as Jim Geraghty points out this morning, an untainted diplomatic triumph:

 

The message is clear to every Russian spy, assassin, operative, hacker, or criminal: If you get caught, don’t talk. Sit tight. Be patient. Vladimir Putin can and will get you out eventually. He can get anybody out, from an arms dealer so notorious he inspired a Nicholas Cage movie to a guy who’s executing dissidents in front of horrified kids in a German park. There is no monster so heinous and wicked that Putin can’t strongarm a foreign government into releasing him.

 

We should expect additional wrongful arrests, detentions, kidnappings, and abductions in the future, because the U.S. government had made clear that the tactic works; if you arrest our people on nonsense charges and throw them in prison, we will give you back the worst of the worst, the ones who required Herculean efforts to bring to justice.

 

As the price paid for the prisoners’ release sinks in, expect to see this Rudyard Kipling quotation “again and again”:

 

And that is called paying the Dane-geld;

   But we've  proved it again and  again,

That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld

   You never get rid of the Dane.

 

If you have travel plans in Russia, it might be prudent to reconsider.

Quote of the Day: Workers of the World, Unite – Against the Jews

On NRO’s Capital Matters thread, Dominic Pino calls attention to a new priority of Organized Labor:

Seven major U.S. labor unions have issued a joint letter urging President Biden to immediately stop all military aid to Israel. “Mr. President, the time to act decisively to end this war is now. Stopping U.S. military aid to Israel is the quickest and most sure way to do so, it is what U.S. law demands, and it will show your commitment to securing a lasting peace in the region,” the letter reads.

 

The Association of Flight Attendants, the American Postal Workers Union, the International Union of Painters, the National Education Association, the Service Employees International Union, the United Auto Workers, and the United Electrical Workers all signed the letter.

The timing of this démarche, which naturally bears no relation to the ostensible purposes of labor unions, is no surprise. As Seth Mandel observed yesterday –

The Democratic Party’s changing of the guard is almost certainly a milestone in American politics, a bold notch on the timeline marking a point of departure for the party’s approach to anti-Semitism and the Jewish state. The party’s standard bearer 24 hours ago considered himself a Zionist and routinely condemned – even if his administration took no appropriate action against – Jew-baiting mobs on campus. The party’s standard bearer today fears and admires those mobs for, in her preposterous words, “showing exactly what the human emotion should be, as a response to Gaza.”

 

Members of the Biden-Harris administration who resigned over the president’s support for Israel against Hamas see Harris’s succession in that light. Lily Call, a former Interior Department staffer and member of the virulently anti-Israel group IfNotNow, expressed hope that Harris might enact an arms embargo on Israel. “I’ve worked for Kamala, and I know she’ll do the right thing,” Call told Politico. [emphasis added]

Analogy of the Day: The Deist Theory of the Presidency

Joshua Treviño, writing at Armas:

 

The managerial theory is that the discontinued President may persist in office, fully vested with its prerogatives, by virtue of the nature of the office. This is of course totally fictitious: Joseph R. Biden at midafternoon Sunday lost the ability to do nearly every meaningful thing intrinsic to the Presidency, including real cooperation with the Legislative branch, persuading the nation to make war, and representation of the whole American people in government. What’s left is a headless apparatus, dominated but not led – ruled but not governed – by the thousands of functionaries of the administrative state. It is a Deist simulacrum of government, the clockmaker having wound the mechanism, which will then inexorably tick forward undirected. But clocks break, God retains active sovereignty, and the American system requires a President. 

 

Once before in our history, when Woodrow Wilson was incapacitated by a stroke 17 months before his term ended, the White House stood empty de facto, but that truth was hidden from the public. This time the curtain has been drawn back, and the functionaries behind it can no longer fool anyone into thinking that the movements of the mannikin’s lips and limbs are its own.

 

If Joseph Robinette Biden does not resign the Presidency or, in the absence of a voluntary exit, is not removed by impeachment or the abstruse mechanism of the 25th Amendment, the American people will know that he and the Democratic Party have no taste for Constitutional government but are content that the nation be “dominated but not led”.

Quote of the Day: The Guilty Parties

Jeffrey Blehar:

I conclude for now – and we will all resume writing soon, the second we’re done catching our breath – with a feeling of intense resentment for Joe Biden, his handmaidens and collaborators within the administration and the mainstream media, and the Democratic Party as a whole for inflicting a national debacle upon America. (As a Chicagoan, I also harbor a very particular resentment.) I keep returning to the simple truth that Joe Biden’s decline was knowable long ago, as far back as the earliest days of his administration. The denouement to this civic drama has not been fully written yet, but at this point one thing is certain: It is being written as a tragedy.

My sentiments exactly. Joe Biden didn’t abruptly become unable to discharge his duties on the eve of June 27, 2024. His incapacity must have been obvious for a long time to those who interacted with him regularly. Yet they all lied about his condition until the President’s performance in a public forum made it obvious that they were lying.

Democrats keep saying that Donald Trump puts himself ahead of his country. Maybe so, but what were they doing for past twelve months or longer?

“As God is my witness, I thought aid packages could fly!”

From The Telegraph:

Air-dropped US aid packages struck and killed five Palestinians in Gaza after their parachutes failed to open properly, according to reports.

Footage circulating on social media appears to show several packages plummeting to the ground from a transport aircraft.

Either the videos circulating on Gaza social media are authentic, which would be pretty bad, or they are fakes, which would be worse, showing that Hamas wants to scare ordinary citizens away from the air drops. That would make it all the easier for terrorists to appropriate this “humanitarian assistance”.

Soon Hamas will have Americans to shoot at, as our troops construct the dock through which Joe Biden will channel more aid to Israel’s enemies.

Quote of the Day: Biden vs. Israel

Philip Klein, “Biden Delivers the Most Anti-Israel Presidential Speech in History”:

After a perfunctory mention of October 7 and the hostages, Biden then launched an extended attack on Israel’s response to the war and the conditions in Gaza that accepted, whole cloth, Hamas casualty figures that his own administration had previously questioned as unreliable. For those keeping score, his description of the events on the day of October 7 lasted 42 words (or 77 if you count his shout-out to the hostage families present at the speech). The part of the speech describing the “heartbreaking” conditions in Gaza, demanding that Israel do more, and describing U.S. aid efforts in Gaza was 214 words.

Speaking of aid. At the start of his speech, Biden spoke of the “unprecedented moment” we’re in – and in his survey of momentous world events, he made the case for the need for the U.S. to support Ukraine. And he pitched his hare-brained scheme to have the U.S. military build a port in Gaza to facilitate more aid. At no point did he make the case for the component of the security bill that would provide aid to Israel.

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Quote of the Day: Jack Smith, the Delegitimizing Machine

Rich Lowry, “The Jack Smith Wreckage Is Just Beginning”, discussing Special Counsel Jack Smith’s case against Donald Trump and the Supreme Court’s decision to consider Trump’s immunity claim:

The lamentations and denunciations over the past few days have been remarkable, but we ain’t seen nothing yet – whichever way Smith’s case bounces.

If Trump is convicted in the case and loses the election, Trump and his allies will have a ready-made argument that the election was rigged – a Biden-administration prosecutor rushed the case to trial on a political timetable to get the result, a felony conviction, that all the polling said would hurt Trump’s prospects most.

If there is no trial before the election and Trump wins, the Left will have a ready-made argument that the election was illegitimate – the MAGA court did Trump’s bidding by delaying the proceedings, or ruling in the former president’s favor on some question of law; the public was denied crucial information that would have been provided by a trial; an insurrectionist was allowed to skate when he shouldn’t even have been on the ballot, etc.

Jack Smith, in short, is a delegitimizing machine. His prosecution is a stick of TNT in the middle of an already fraught election.

If Jack Smith wanted a civil war, what would he do differently?

Quote of the Day: Deregulation or Subsidies?

Veronique de Rugy on which approach to try first:

At the end of the day, those in favor of industrial policy must make a choice: Will they first eliminate the regulatory obstacles erected by the government and then assess what might productively be done, or will they instead plow forward with further government interventions – interventions destined to fail? I know the answer, and it worries me. With deregulation, there is less opportunity than there is with further regulation to exercise power.

Mme. de Rugy’s specific target is America’s burdensome regulation of construction of semiconductor fabrication facilities:

Case in point: The Biden administration is spending billions of dollars on semiconductor subsidies while fab construction in the US is one of the slowest in the world thanks to regulations, according to this:

The CSET study looked at fab construction between 1990 and 2020 and concluded that for the roughly 635 fabs built in that timeframe, the average time between the start of construction and production was 682 days. Three countries beat that benchmark: Taiwan at 654 days on average, Korea at 620, and Japan at a staggeringly fast 584 days. Meanwhile, Europe and the Middle East were about on par at 690 days, as was China at 701 days.

 

However, the U.S. clocked in at 736 days, well above the worldwide average and second only to Southeast Asia at 781.

 

Time is money, and wasted time is wasted money.

Quote of the Day: An American Metaphor

Michael Brendan Dougherty, “The President Isn’t Home”:

Joe Biden and America are at risk of becoming metaphorically conflated. The country is aging rapidly. The number of Americans over 65 is set to double in the next 40 years. His forgetfulness mirrors America’s own lack of historical perspective. His unsteadiness on the stage is like our own lack of confidence in the national institutions upon which our lives depend for security and independence. His absence of mind seems to reflect the country’s own absence of strategy on the world stage. America is the old power on the world stage, while others are rising.

More to the point in an election year, our lack of confidence in Biden’s abilities mirrors a similar sinking feeling about the direction of our country. Not even good economic numbers can put to bed America’s sense of unease, fragility, and vulnerability.

There is a great majority in this country who looks upon the forthcoming presidential election with something like sullen horror. Why are our institutions producing this rematch? What is it about American democracy that is so paralyzed? Why, for fear of small risks, are we gambling, well, everything on these geezers?

The Border Bill

Much suspicion surrounds the proposed “Border Act” (no strained acronym, praise be), a compromise immigration bill whose details have been negotiated out of public view. The dislike of covenants secretly arrived at is understandable. On the other hand, the United States Constitution was drafted in yet greater secrecy, and it has proved to be a pretty good work product.

The text of the bill has now been released, and Senator James Lankford (R-Okla.) has posted a summary of its provisions.

The chaotic situation along our southern border has metastasized into a major threat to national security. A subset of Congressional Republicans, among whom Senator Lankford taken a leading role, have used such leverage as they have over the Biden Administration (namely, the threat to cut back aid to Ukraine) to produce what they assert is a workable program to secure the border. It would have been better for President Biden to realize on his own that strong measures are needed to reassert control over immigration. The great majority of Republicans want to America continue supporting Ukraine’s struggle to retain its independence. But the Administration is ideologically committed to “open borders”, and only a threat to derail one of its major policies in another area was able to bring it to the negotiating table.

The negotiated document is doubtless imperfect. The question is whether it is good enough to serve its purpose. I will comment after I know enough to form a rational opinion. Unfortunately, many opponents (and some supporters, too) have made up their minds in advance and don’t want to consider any arguments to the contrary.

There is one stupid argument against enacting any sort of compromise: We can get a better deal by waiting until after the 2024 election. Can we? Yes, but only if Donald Trump is elected President and the GOP retains a majority (a working majority, not a razor-thin margin) in the House of Representatives and Republicans gain enough seats in the Senate to overcome Democratic filibusters. Will all that come to pass? If wishes were horses. . . .

Recommended Reading: An Immigration Deal?

Paul Mirengoff is a long-time critic of lax immigration policies. His warnings date as far back as his opposition to the George W. Bush Administration’s liberalization proposals. That he has posted “The case for the Senate border deal” suggests that it has merits that its very vocal opponents have overlooked (links omitted):

 

The idea behind the proposal is to speed up asylum processing, raise the standard for sustaining asylum claims, and close the litigation loophole in the status quo. The plan is to knock out most asylum claims at the front-end and, in all events, to knock out all meritless claims within half a year. . . .

 

Now, let’s look at the second, and related, major thing the proposed legislation would do. It would require the president to close the border after average daily migrant crossings average 5,000 over seven days, or hit 8,500 in a single day. And it would authorize him to close the border after average daily crossings surpass 4,000 in a week. . . .

 

As for the numbers said to be in the proposed bill, it’s important to understand that the bill isn’t permitting up to 4,000 or 5,000 illegal entries per day. It’s fixing the asylum process and adding the staff necessary to process (and in most cases deport) undocumented migrants.

 

If 4,999 immigrants show up in a day, they won’t be granted entry. They will go into the toughened, expedited, and beefed up removal process. And if more than that number show up – as they do virtually every day – making it impossible to conduct the new removal process, that process shuts down at the border until the daily number of crossings dips below a manageable number – 3,750.

 

In other words, the border closing provision is a backstop – a circuit breaker. As Sen. Lankford has explained, “this is a new authority to say, when we can no longer detain and deport, when we can't process the people and actually make a decision right there at the border, then we’ll actually turn those folks back around to Mexico.” (Emphasis added [by Paul Mirengoff])

 

Coming as it does from someone who has no sympathy for the Biden Administration’s “open borders” policy, Mr. Mirengoff’s column is well worth reading in full.

Recommended Reading

William Hawkins on “Houthis, Hamas, and Humanitarian Restraint”:

Restraint is the current term used by progressives seeking a “less military-oriented policy” on our part, but not on the part of enemies who see restraint as a form of weakness inviting attack – and attack they have. Yemen is thus a test case for policy failure based on unrealistic hopes that irresponsibly breed wider conflicts. Lessons of history are thus confirmed.

Abraham Lincoln, Mark Tushnet and Dred Scott

You may have heard of an “open letter” to the Biden Administration, co-authored by Mark Tushnet, an emeritus professor at Harvard Law School (self-described socialist and advocate of scorched earth progressivism), and San Francisco State University political science professor Aaron Belkin (whose self-description is “scholar, author, activist and dancer”), urging the President to “to restrain MAGA justices immediately by announcing that if and when they issue rulings that are based on gravely mistaken interpretations of the Constitution that undermine our most fundamental commitments, the Administration will be guided by its own constitutional interpretations”. If that screed is news to you, you can read critiques here and here and here and many other heres.

Professors Tushnet and Belkin call their stance “Popular Constitutionalism” (a peculiar label, given that one of their main targets is Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, a decision that the populace strongly approves). That doctrine, they say, “has a proud history in the United States, including Abraham Lincoln’s refusal to treat the Dred Scott decision as a political rule that would guide him as he exercised presidential powers”. That is true in a mushy sort of way, but not the way that the professors assert. They see it as justification for massive resistance.

For example, President Biden could declare that the Court’s recent decision in the affirmative action cases applies only to selective institutions of higher education and that the Administration will continue to pursue affirmative action in every other context vigorously because it believes that the Court's interpretation of the Constitution is egregiously wrong.

That recommendation is a trifle odd. The only colleges that aren’t “selective” are those that admit all applicants; by definition they don’t practice affirmative action. It seems unlikely, too, that the professors contemplate drawing an arbitrary line between the most selective tier and the rest. They surely aren’t demanding that Harvard be cut off from the federal money spigot. Any concession that SFFA v. Harvard applied to anyone would be for display purposes only, a thin cover for an all-out push for continued discrimination.

That brings us to Abraham Lincoln, whose views on responding to Dred Scott v. Sandford are worthy of consideration. Lincoln did indeed declare forcefully that the decision was bad law. His principal statement on what its opponents should do about it was set forth in an address that he delivered on June 26, 1857, in the course of his campaign for the Senate:

Judicial decisions have two uses – first, to absolutely determine the case decided, and secondly, to indicate to the public how other similar cases will be decided when they arise. For the latter use, they are called "precedents” and “authorities.”

We believe, as much as Judge Douglas, (perhaps more) in obedience to, and respect for the judicial department of government. We think its decisions on Constitutional questions, when fully settled, should control, not only the particular cases decided, but the general policy of the country, subject to be disturbed only by amendments of the Constitution as provided in that instrument itself. More than this would be revolution. But we think the Dred Scott decision is erroneous. We know the court that made it, has often over-ruled its own decisions, and we shall do what we can to have it to over-rule this. We offer no resistance to it.

Lincoln was replying specifically to his opponent, Stephen Douglas, who had argued that, once the Supreme Court decides a question, “forc[ing it] upon the country as a political issue” is “a deadly blow at our whole Republican system of government”. Lincoln disagreed.

If this important decision had been made by the unanimous concurrence of the judges, and without any apparent partisan bias, and in accordance with legal public expectation, and with the steady practice of the departments throughout our history, and had been in no part, based on assumed historical facts which are not really true; or, if wanting in some of these, it had been before the court more than once, and had there been affirmed and re-affirmed through a course of years, it then might be, perhaps would be, factious, nay, even revolutionary, to not acquiesce in it as a precedent.

But when, as it is true we find it wanting in all these claims to the public confidence, it is not resistance, it is not factious, it is not even disrespectful, to treat it as not having yet quite established a settled doctrine for the country.

Lincoln could have been speaking for those who believed that Roe v. Wade and the Court’s equivocal pre-SFFA affirmative action jurisprudence were “wanting in all these claims to the public confidence”. Those critics didn’t treat those decisions as “settled doctrine”, but they also didn’t defy them. States enacted laws placing restrictions on abortion, many of which the Court found to be permissible. Congress forbade spending federal funds to procure abortions in most circumstances. That law, too, the Court upheld. With regard to affirmative action, several states, including such liberal bastions as California and Washington, outlawed racial preferences in higher education by the vote of the people. All of those were acts that Lincoln would not have regarded as “factious” or “even disrespectful”.

If Professors Tushnet and Belkin advocated that species of resistance, both sexes of goose are entitled to the same sauce, but their rhetoric makes it clear that they have in mind something more vigorous. Their spirit is more Ross Barnett and Orval Faubus than Abraham Lincoln.

The Next Trump Indictment: Clarity Starts to Emerge

I had been waiting for Andy McCarthy to weigh on Donald Trump’s announcement that he is about to be indicted again by special counsel Jack Smith for something or another. Now he has (behind NRO’s pay wall, unfortunately), and, as usual, he shines light into murky corners. In particular, he suggests a possible basis for the indictment that, unlike charges stemming from the ex-President’s alleged role in the Capitol rioting, makes sense and raises no Constitutional issues.

It is said that the Trump campaign raised tens of millions of dollars on the representations that the money would go to a legal fund that would fight the election fraud by which Trump claimed the election was being stolen. Yet, at least according to the January 6 committee (see, e.g., final report at p. 770 & ff.), there was no such fund and at least some of the money was diverted to other purposes (such as, the New York Times reports, more than $200,000 spent at Trump hotel properties).

If Smith can prove that, then he is in the ballpark of traditional fraud.

“In the ballpark” rather understates the case. If this accusation is true, Mr. Trump’s conduct is unconscionable, a betrayal of his most loyal supporters that was evidently motivated by simple greed. Exposing it and sending the perpetrator to prison would be an act of justice and would also, as Mr. McCarthy goes on to note, have other beneficial effects:

To be sure, if [Smith] has decided to go down that road, the next Republican Justice Department is going to be spending a great deal of time scrutinizing what Democrats and their allied outfits such as Black Lives Matter actually do with the goo-gobs of money they raise for this or that stated cause. But if past is prologue, progressives and other anti-Trumpers do not concern themselves with the unintended consequences. What matters is nailing Trump – especially if you can get Republicans to nominate him in the process.

It’s possible, though, that the special counsel will shy away from taking this clear and direct course and will instead rely on dubious theories of “obstruction of Congress” and “fraud on the government” that have fared poorly in the courts on other occasions. Alleging financial fraud has two potential drawbacks from the Democratic Party’s point of view:

First, the January 6th committee’s claims about Trump’s conduct may be false. Nothing about that body (to call it a “kangaroo court” insults marsupials) inspires confidence in the accuracy of its findings. If Trump really did establish a legal fund and pursue bona fide efforts to expose election fraud, not even the most Javert-like prosecutor in the most favorable of venues will have much chance of securing a conviction.

Second and more important, supposing that the fraud charges are true and their truth becomes manifest, a key element of the Democratic strategy for the 2024 Presidential electinn, namely, ensuring that Donald Trump is the Republican Party’s nominee, is likely to fail. It’s hard to believe that even the most fervent forever-Trumper will retain his admiration for a grifter who tried to cheat him out of his money.

Perhaps the special counsel can maneuver around these pitfalls. Until the trial begins, the existence vel non of the alleged fraud will be uncertain. The accusation can be kept in front of the public, and Trump zealots can continue to portray their hero as a martyr to the Deep State.

What the health of our country’s politics most demands (and, alas, is not too likely to get) is not the imposition of criminal liability but an immediate presentation of the evidence of fraud. If Donald Trump is demonstrably a liar and thief, it is more important that the public know that as soon as possible, so that he can be exiled from political life, than that he undergo legal punishment. The same is true, of course, of the Democratic Party’s prospective 2024 candidate. Both parties’ slates need thorough disinfection.

An Indictment That I Won’t Believe Even After I See It

Donald Trump has announced that he expects to be indicted soon for his role in the Reichstag fire riot at the Capitol Building in January 2021. Per the Epoch Times:

Former President Donald Trump said that he received a letter on July 17 informing him that he is a target of the special counsel investigation of the Jan. 6 Capitol breach.

Mr. Trump said the Sunday letter from special counsel Jack Smith gave him four days to report to a grand jury. In a message posted on his social media platform, Truth Social, the former president suggested that the short deadline may mean he would be arrested and indicted.

Mr. Trump called the letter “HORRIFYING NEWS for our country” and framed it with the backdrop of the two other indictments he is facing amid a heated presidential reelection campaign in which he dominated the GOP field.

Well, maybe special counsel Jack Smith has uncovered evidence, hitherto unknown, that Mr. Trump directed the actions of the cosplay insurrectionists. As Andy McCarthy has pointed out, the seditious conspiracy indictments on which the government won convictions earlier this year rejected that theory.

It is not enough to say that the government did not allege that Trump directed the Proud Boys, and that the government never alleged that Donald Trump was an unindicted coconspirator in the Proud Boys prosecution. In fact, prosecutors fought off the defendants’ self-serving attempts to argue that they were being used as scapegoats for Trump and others wielding power.

All that the then-President did – and it was disgraceful enough – was make a rabble rousing speech and sit idly by when it had consequences that he may or may not have foreseen or intended. Long ago, in Brandenburg v. Ohio, the Supreme Court set very stringent criteria for punishing even the open advocacy of illegal acts. In the words of the Court’s syllabus summarizing its unanimous decision:

Freedoms of speech and press do not permit a State to forbid advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.

To my mind the likelihood is nil that an experienced prosecutor would expect an indictment based on Trump’s speech to the January 6th crowd to lead to a conviction. If one is in fact handed down (again, assuming no newly found evidence of a Trump-led conspiracy), it will be a political rather than a legal document, put forth in the hope of affecting the next election and with the sure knowledge that it has no chance of passing muster with the courts.

As a political act, an indictment would serve the Democratic Party’s purposes well, as it would validate Donald Trump’s claims of martyrdom and all but guarantee his nomination as the Republican Presidential candidate, to be followed by his all but guaranteed defeat. That would be an odious and dangerous game for Mr. Smith to play, though I suppose that we have entered an era in which nothing is unimaginable.

Abortion, the Sacrament of the Left

The House of Representatives has passed a Defense authorization bill that, if enacted, would end the Pentagon’s policy of free abortions for service members and their families. In response, a spokesman for the National Security Council has declared that access to abortion is “a foundational sacred obligation”.

So much for separation of Church and State.

Get Ready for Massive Resistance

Suppose that, on the day after the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education, President Eisenhower had declared that the Court had “walked away from decades of precedent” and that he would not “let this decision be the last word”, had gone on to propose a “new standard” that would keep segregation in place de facto while nominally complying with the Court’s ruling, and had added, in response to a reporter’s question, “This is not a normal court.”

That was the essence of President Biden’s reaction to Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the Court’s latest affirmation of the principles of the Fourteenth Amendment. “We cannot let this decision be the last word. I want to emphasize: We cannot let this decision be the last word.”

What did the President propose as the alternative to the Supreme Court’s “last word”? His tactic for evading the decision is as flimsy as those of the Southern governors in 1954. Here is the Presidential “guidance” for schools that are determined to continue making race a major factor in admissions decisions:

They should not abandon their commitment to ensure student bodies of diverse backgrounds and experience that reflect all of America. What I propose for consideration is a new standard, where colleges take into account the adversity a student has overcome when selecting among qualified applicants. Let’s be clear, under this new standard, just as was true under the earlier standard, students first have to be qualified applicants.

The President defines applicants as “qualified” if they have –

the GPA and test scores to meet the school’s standards. Once that test is met, then adversity should be considered, including students’ lack of financial means, because we know too few students of low-income families, whether in big cities or rural communities, are getting an opportunity to go to college.

That is dim even for a Biden. “Adversity” is a conveniently subjective standard, and there is no obvious reason why those who haven’t been “lucky” enough to experience it ought to be put at a disadvantage. Sometimes obstacles call forth resources of character and lead to extraordinary achievement. (Clarence Thomas, descendant of slaves, born into an impoverished backwater community where English was a foreign language, is a shining example.) But sometimes, sadly, they leave those who undergo them ill-prepared for the challenges of a top-tier university.

A university that gave “adversity” the weight that Harvard gives to membership in a favored minority would make sob stories a valuable asset for applicants. A study of admissions data for Harvard and the University of North Carolina, obtained through discovery in the Students for Fair Admissions case, found that –

At Harvard, the admit rates for typical African American applicants are on average over four times larger than if they had been treated as white. For typical Hispanic applicants the increase is 2.4 times. At UNC, in-state African Americans’ admit rate is over 70% higher. For out-of-state applicants, the increase is more than tenfold.

As a striking example, a student of Asian descent in the top decile academically had a lower chance of admission to Harvard than a black applicant in the fourth-lowest decile.

One may be confident that, were the Biden standard to be adopted, “advisors” of the “Varsity Blues” ilk would soon be helping ambitious parents craft tales of youthful suffering that would make David Copperfield’s childhood seem idyllic.

There would also be an ironic consequence. Another of the cited study’s headline findings was, “At both institutions, racial preferences are larger for those from more advantaged backgrounds.” To the extent that the new regime continued to favor racial minorities, it would push upper- and middle-class children to the back of the admissions queue. The unjustifiable favoritism that they have hitherto enjoyed would turn into an equally unjustifiable handicap.

I presume that college administrators will come up with cleverer work-arounds than Joe Biden’s speech writers. No doubt we are in for a period of “massive resistance” of the kind that greeted Brown. We may hope that the Supreme Court will remain as firm now as it did then.

Note: The original version of this post was written before a transcript of President Biden’s statement was available. I relied on a CBS News report for details. I have now made some not too material revisions.

Further reading: Jonathan Turley, “Biden’s ‘Normal’: The President’s Constitutional Takes are Becoming More Unhinged from History”
Paul Caron, “Legal Education’s Reaction To The Supreme Court's Affirmative Action Decisions”

A Rather Simple Scandal

Is there a “Biden Crime Family”? Two House Oversight Committee staff reports (March 2023 and May 2023) reveal that communist-controlled Chinese companies and other unsavory entities and people paid millions of dollars to close relatives of Joe Biden while he was Vice President and thereafter. Recipients included, among others, Mr. Biden’s son, brother, sister-in-law, and three current or former daughters-in-law. The payments were remitted via a series of limited liability companies whose only apparent reason for existence was to shuffle funds from one Biden to another.

There has so far been no dispute about those facts. The Oversight Committee obtained them from subpoenaed bank records, some of which the May report reproduces (with redactions of sensitive information). The only issue is what to make of them. Are they records of income from innocent business activities or evidence of a large-scale influence peddling scheme or something in between?

The innocent explanation is that the President’s son Hunter and brother Jim rendered valuable services to overseas clients, were paid what their services were worth, and passed some of the proceeds to objects of their bounty. Hunter is a lawyer, as well as a crackhead and putative artist, while Jim –

has cycled over the years from nightclub owner to insurance broker to political consultant and fundraiser to startup investor and construction company executive. But the through line of his resume was his bond with his brother, a Democratic Party stalwart in a position to push legislation or make government contracts happen.

“My sense is that Jim really has been trying to peddle himself on the Biden name for some time,” said Curtis Wilkie, who covered the Bidens as a Delaware political reporter.

(That assessment comes not form Fox News or the Washington Examiner but from the left-wing investigative site ProPublica.)

The likelihood that any of the other recipients has ever done anything that was worth as much as a tiny fraction of a million dollars is vanishingly small.

If the Biden duo was paid fairly for legitimate services, the nature of those services is at this point unknown. Matters could be cleared up quickly through disclosure. If none is forthcoming, it might not be unreasonable to suspect that something is amiss, particularly in view of the opaque channels through which money flowed from the payors to the ultimate beneficiaries.

The semi-innocent explanation is that Hunter and Jim were paid for their perceived political influence but didn’t deliver anything. In brief, they cheated Chinese and other foreigners out of millions of dollars, but the whole escapade was their own frolic and detour; Joe Biden played no role in it. This appears to be the position of pro-Biden commentators, which they support by citing the absence of evidence that Joe Biden himself received any money.

Since the Bidens’ activities continued for years, this explanation assumes that the victims of their scheme were thick-headed dolts. They paid and paid and received nothing and continued paying.

The non-innocent explanation is that Joe Biden was well aware of the “family business” and cooperated in furthering it. Whether he took a share of the profits for himself is irrelevant.

Far be it from me to pass judgment without the benefit of more data, but it seems clear at this point how the balance of probabilities tilts.

Further Reading: Jonathan Turley, “America’s state media: The blackout on Biden corruption is truly ‘Pulitzer-level stuff’”

Getting the Trans to Run on Time

I swiped the idea for this post’s title from Steven Hayward, who reads tweets by people who don’t know X from Y and are proud of it, so that the rest of us don’t have to. Quite remarkably, the transtweeters whom Mr. Hayward cites are mad at the Biden Administration for “legitimizing transphobia”.

What the Administration did was publish a proposed regulation declaring that schools presumptively violate Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972 and thereby lose their eligibility for federal funds unless they allow males and females to play on the same sports teams. The obvious intent is to counter state laws protecting the right of girls and women to play on a level field with competitors of the same sex. Since the whole point of Title IX is to give women greater opportunity in sports, it might seem like like a self-evident violation of the statute to set up a nominal women’s event, then let men enter and dominate it. But we live in strange times. The high priests of wokery believe, with all the fervor of priests of Moloch, that the right worship of the great idol Bostock demands that males who can’t win against other males be granted the right to enter the lists against women.

The document containing the proposed regulation devotes 99.14 percent of its wordage to bowing before Bostock. In the course of their homily, the priests insist that they are taking a reasonable middle ground. The accompanying press release states emolliently:

The proposed rule would establish that policies violate Title IX when they categorically ban transgender students from participating on sports teams consistent with their gender identity just because of who they are. The proposed rule also recognizes that in some instances, particularly in competitive high school and college athletic environments, some schools may adopt policies that limit transgender students’ participation. The proposed rule would provide schools with a framework for developing eligibility criteria that protects students from being denied equal athletic opportunity, while giving schools the flexibility to develop their own participation policies.

The proposed rule consists of a single paragraph, from which schools are to divine “a framework for developing eligibility criteria”:

If a recipient [of federal educational funding] adopts or applies sex-related criteria that would limit or deny a student’s eligibility to participate on a male or female team consistent with their gender identity, such criteria must, for each sport, level of competition, and grade or education level: (i) be substantially related to the achievement of an important educational objective, and (ii) minimize harms to students whose opportunity to participate on a male or female team consistent with their gender identity would be limited or denied.

Is there any way to satisfy those standards? The preamble to the proposal says this about the meaning of “important educational objective”:

The Department recognizes that prevention of sports-related injury is an important educational objective in recipients’ athletic programs and that – as courts have long recognized in cases involving sex-separate athletic teams – fairness in competition may be particularly important for recipients in some sports, grade and education levels, and levels of competition. The Department anticipates that some uses of sex-related eligibility criteria would satisfy the standard in the proposed regulation in some sports, grade and education levels, and levels of competition. [emphasis added]

Whoever wrote that paragraph should be dragooned into a one-on-one basketball game with Stephen Curry. Fairness in competition is the essence of sports. Unfair competition is bullying or war. Deliberately entering a contest against outmatched opponents is the essence of bad sportsmanship, and a man who, unsatisfied with his mediocre skill at swimming or track or tennis, declares himself a woman so that he can collect goat feathers for undeserved triumphs is a cad and a bounder, qualities that educational institutions ought not to be encouraging.

The regulation writers obviously disagree with the idea that sportsmanship is an “important educational objective” of all school sports, for every “sport, level of competition, and grade or education level”. Note, too, the word “recipients”. The standard of an “important education objective” is apparently whether it has value to the entity that is receiving federal largess. The interests of the students have nothing to do with it. I don’t think that it’s too cynical to foresee that the educrats will approve sex-distinct women’s teams that bring in money, as in college women’s basketball, and demand adherence to gender identity ideology for women’s events that are less remunerative, like swimming and track and practically all the rest.

In brief, the proposed regulation is perfectly attuned to the Biden Administration’s trans-extremism. Yet it isn’t enough for at least some of the President’s allies. Once reason is abandoned, impulse and emotion are never content. Bostock is jealous and implacable.

The Great Distraction

During my absence from this blog (occasioned by the demands of paying work), the news has been even more ominous than usual:

• Our Second Cold War adversaries, Communist China and Russia (same as the First Cold War, with the senior and junior adversaries reversed), have shattered the anti-Iran front that has long been a pillar of U.S. Middle East policy by brokering a reconciliation between Saudi Arabia and Tehran.
• Meanwhile, President Biden barged into the politics of America’s other Middle East pillar, Israel. Not only did he announce his opposition to proposed judicial reforms and declare that he would shun Israel’s prime minister for an indefinite period, but the U.S. ambassador to Israel took a leading role in coordinating the anti-reform campaign. I’ll forgo discussion of the merits of the proposals, which now appear to be stalled. John Podhoretz has penned an informed discussion of the political background, showing inter alia how aberrant it is to claim that Israel’s governing coalition is flouting, rather than practicing, democracy.
• Notwithstanding the array of Ukrainian flags on Twitter feeds, the Russo-Ukrainian War has ground to a stalemate, as the Biden Administration continues its dual policies of fervent rhetorical support for Kiev and tardy, desultory action.
• Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, two significant if not gigantic institutions, have collapsed. They were the victims of either inflation or a preference for left-wing politics over sound banking practices. However that may be, the federal government reacted with a de facto extension of insurance coverage to all bank deposits, the equivalent of a fire insurance company’s announcement that it’s fine to scatter oil-soaked rags around your house while smoking cigarettes. Either this is a moral hazard blunder that will lead to more bank failures in the future or</.em> it is a special deal for politically connected bankers that won’t be repeated when community banks in flyover country experience runs. Either alternative is unsettling.
• A mob of thugs who have somehow been admitted to Stanford Law School shouted down a federal judge who had been invited to speak to the campus Federalist Society chapter. The dean in charge of diversity, equity and inclusion (who else would it have been?) sided with the hooligans, warning the judge to consider whether, when it comes to freedom of speech, “the juice is worth the squeeze”. That ought to be the metaphor to be pondered by the “students”: Is the joy of harassing heretics worth the squeeze of expulsion? But, needless to say, none of them will receive any punishment more severe than being required to attend a half day seminar on the First Amendment, at which they will jeer.
• Nashville was the site of what may have been our country’s (and probably the world’s) first incident of “stochastic terrorism”. That’s an idea that has been floating around the Left, to wit, that disagreeing with leftists leads mentally ill individuals to target the persons disagreed with. The theory’s proponents overlook two points: First, there’s no reason why disagreeing with conservatives or moderates wouldn’t have the same effect. Second, the more hysterical the cause, the more plausible the effect. There’s currently no cause more given to hysterical overstatement than “transgender rights”. A few days ago, a psychotic young female who desired to demonstrate that she was really a male (and a toxic male at that) massacred six human beings of both sexes who taught at or attended a Christian school. Thus we see the chain leading from rabid denunciation through mental illness to murder of the denounced. It’s worth noting that the anti-biology zealots have rushed to declare that the “trans community” is the real murder victim. If “stochastic terrorism” is something real, won’t that narrative beget the next slaughter?
• Oh, by the way, the trustees of the Social Security System have released their annual report, which is as gloomy as ever. The time when either benefits will have to be slashed or taxes hiked is a year closer. The somewhat misnamed Center on Budget and Policy Priorities assures us that there’s nothing much to worry about: Full benefits are safe until 2035 (or maybe 2034), and that’s a dozen years away. Something will turn up, as financial wizard Wilkins Micawber used to say.

Well, then, as I emerge from my burrow, what is everyone talking about? Former President Trump has been indicted for what is, to all appearances, conduct that no one even pretends would be criminal if committed by anybody not named Donald John Trump. That’s not good, but Mr. Trump is hardly the first public figure to be subjected to unmerited prosecution. Franklin Roosevelt’s minions devoted thousands of hours of effort and millions of dollars of tax money to trying to jail Andrew Mellon. More recent the farcical indictments of John Connolly, Ray Donovan and Tom DeLay (and Senator Ted Stevens, whose conviction was obtained through prosecutorial misconduct). Before declaring that America’s Constitutional order has broken down, perhaps we see how our judicial system operates under pressure. Mr. Trump isn’t without resources. He can defend himself and doesn’t need for every amateur lawyer in the county to weigh in on his case.

China, Russia, the Middle East, Israel, Ukraine, the banking system, enemies of reasoned discourse, looming financial commitments that our country lacks the resources to meet: Those deserve more attention, I think, than the legal tangles of a billionaire.

What the Student Debt Story Tells Us

Business Insider, an anti-capitalist web site, has posted a screed designed to make what its socialist-leaning editors think is a telling point in favor of President Biden’s attempt to forgive student loans through the exercise of his caudillo authority: “The Supreme Court justices deciding whether to end Biden's student loan relief program paid an average of $42,539 to go to college. Today, they'd have to pay around $320,531.”

Anyone old enough to have been a college student in the 1960’s or 1970’s doesn’t need to be told that higher education costs have inflated at a much faster rate than almost any other expense. In my freshman year at Yale, tuition, room and board cost $2,800. Today, the price is around $70,000. The increase is approximately three times the rise in the cost of living over that period.

Business Insider’s scarcely veiled subtext is that the Justices lack empathy with students who, knowing the prices that their colleges were charging, financed their educations by taking on huge debt burdens. It would be more sensible to ask why education has grown so much more expensive. Has there been vast improvement in the quality of the product that universities deliver? (pause to let the laughter die down)

There are two glaringly obvious reasons for the price spiral. First, the federal government has freely poured vast sums of money into subsidizing higher education, without any regard to what students were getting in return. Because financial aid and low-interest loans have been so widely available, colleges have been able to charge more. The profits have by and large been used to pad endowments and hire phalanxes of administrators, not for any purpose that would improve students’ return on their educational investments.

Second, the drumbeat of propaganda for universal college attendance has increased demand. Adolescents who in an earlier era would have entered the job market, married and started families now spend several years going through the motions of paideia, emerging with a meaningless credential and often without even that.

One doesn’t need a Ph.D. in economics to figure out that meeting increased demand with an expanding supply of dollars leads to escalating prices. That is the moral of the student debt story.

Photo of the Day

A friend sent me this no-doubt-authentic Air Force photograph:

Put Not Your Trust in Serial Liars

Seymour Hersh, whose deceit-filled journalistic career is replete with “bombshell narratives” based on unidentified sources (in D.C. circles, it is generally believed that only the anonymous tell the truth), has a new narrative to bedazzle the gullible: “that Navy divers, operating under the cover of NATO’s annual BALTOPS exercise last June, planted remotely-operated explosives that were detonated months later, last September” and thereby put the Nord Stream pipelines out of operation for an indefinite period.

Right-of-center commentators who ought to blanch at the name “Hersh” have picked this story up with minimal skepticism (e. g., “BOMBSHELL: Yep, It Looks Like Team Biden Blew up Europe’s Nord Stream Pipeline”), presumably because the story makes the Biden Administration look bad (albeit cunning and competent, the first indicator that it’s all make-believe). The post under the headline just cited concludes:

In the reader comments a while ago, I responded to one reader with something like, “This is exactly the kind of stupid move the kids in the White House might think is really clever.”

Hersh is not always the most reliable source, but between Nord Stream and Keystone XL, it’s fair to ask: What does this administration have against energy pipelines, anyway?

Many comments on that post and on an Instapundit item linking to it took it for granted that of course the sabotage must be “Team Biden’s” doing. Some even applauded it.

Now, I yield to no one in my confidence in the ability of the incumbent Administration to act foolishly, but Hersh’s tale stretches credulity beyond the snapping point.

According to Hersh, “the planning took place late in 2021 and into the first months of 2022”, that is, after President Biden had waived sanctions on companies that were constructing Nord Stream 2, thereby making it possible for that pipeline to be completed, and before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Hersh has an elaborate and unbelievable explanation of why, having forgone the easy route to blocking Nord Stream 2, the Biden Administration decided to destroy it secretly. To add to the implausibility, an inter-agency task force – evidently of considerable size, “men and women from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the State and Treasury Departments” – discussed and approved the operation. Some of those in the know were, according again to Hersh, strongly opposed to it. Nonetheless, it remained a deep, dark secret in leak-rampant Washington, D.C. until an unknown person told his story to Seymour Hersh months after the fact.

That putative source is, by the way, well-informed about every aspect of the project’s planning and implementation. There was seemingly no concept of limiting information to those with a need to know. The source knows the details of debates among the planners, of discussions with the Norwegian navy, of the way in which the bombs were planted and detonated, and so on. The Houston Astros had better operational security.

Mr. Hersh has, in short, written the scenario for a thriller rather than a credible account of events that happened in real life. This isn’t his first time. He has not with age become less of a monger of hate-America fiction.

Further Reading: Jim Geraghty, “Joe Biden, the Unilateralist Cowboy Warmonger? Really?”, rounds up more reasons to relegate Hersh’s story to the shelf reserved for fairy tales.

The Crimean Conundrum

Here is an interesting report, dated yesterday:

President Joe Biden announced on Wednesday that the U.S. would for the first time send 31 of the sophisticated [M1 Abrams] tanks to aid Ukraine’s war effort. Speaking anonymously during a press briefing, a senior administration official acknowledged that those tanks could roll on Crimea.

“We want to make sure that [the Ukrainians] have the capabilities to not only defend themselves against the Russian onslaught … but also that they have the ability to retake, to reclaim their sovereign territory, and that means everything that is recognized by international borders,” the official said.

The official was asked to clarify whether they meant retaking territory in Crimea or in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, where Russia purported to annex several areas last year.

“Crimea is Ukraine,” the official responded. “We’ve never recognized the illegal annexation of Crimea. But where the Ukrainians decide to go and how they decide to conduct operations in their country, those are their decisions to make.”

That “senior official” may be an outlier. The Biden Administration’s enthusiasm for Ukrainian victory seems to wax and wane unpredictably. The decision to equip Ukraine with our top-of-the-line armored fighting vehicles followed days of insistence that the country’s armed forces didn’t need and couldn’t effectively use M1’s. Still, the quoted statement raises a question that isn’t often addressed but will need to be answered if the current war is to come to a satisfactory conclusion: What should happen to Crimea?

Neither Ukraine nor Russia has strong historical ties to the peninsula. After the Mongol invasions in the 13th Century, it fell under the rule of the Golden Horde, then of the Ottoman Empire, then, briefly, of an independent Crimean Tatar state. In 1783, Catherine the Great annexed it to the Russian Empire. During the Russian Civil War, it was a White bastion under a democratic Tatar regime. After the Bolshevik triumph, it became the “Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic”. Agriculture was collectivized with the usual communist brutality. The Tatars were subjected to forced Russification. During World War II, they were deported en masse to the Russian far east. After the war, the “autonomous republic” was demoted to an oblast.

In 1954, Nikita Khrushchev transferred Crimea from the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, an action of zero political significance. It wasn’t a recognition of any Ukrainian character. According to the 1959 census, ethnic Ukrainians made up only 22 percent of the population.

In the referendum on Ukrainian independence in December 1991, Crimea had the lowest voter turnout (68 percent versus 84 percent for Ukraine as a whole) and the lowest percentage of “yes” votes (57 percent in Sevastopol, 54 percent in the rest of Crimea; next lowest voting district was 83.9 percent). Those figures suggest tepid enthusiasm for the Ukrainian connection.

In 1992, the Crimean parliament voted to declare independence from Ukraine, then retracted the declaration the next day. In 1994, Yuri A. Meshkov, a supporter of Crimean independence and closer ties with Russia, won the Crimean presidency. A referendum endorsed greater autonomy for Crimea and dual Russian-Ukrainian citizenship for its residents, but the movement fizzled out as the separatists turned to fighting among themselves. The Crimean parliament and presidency were subsequently abolished (ironically, by a Ukrainian president known for his pro-Russian sympathies).

Also in 1994, Russia and Ukraine agreed to the Budapest Memorandum, which recognized Crimea as an integral part of Ukraine in exchange for Ukraine’s surrender of its nuclear weapons. That agreement seemed to settle Crimea’s status – until Russia’s “little green men” invaded in 2014 and, almost bloodlessly, seized control. A referendum in March 2014 supposedly gave 97 percent approval to annexation to Russia, but polls taken shortly before the Russian takeover showed majority opposition to joining Russia, and “a report by Russian human rights experts that was posted on the website of the Russian Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights found that turnout was only 30 to 50 percent, with just 50 to 60 percent of participants voting in favor of annexation”.

Now it is 2023, Ukraine and Russia are at war, and among Ukraine’s overt war aims is the recovery of Crimea. The strongest basis for the Ukrainian claim is the Budapest Memorandum. If this were the 18th Century, when sovereigns exchanged territories like trading cards, that argument would have heavy weight, but the notion has since developed that the inhabitants of a region should have a major say in who rules them. One can hardly say with confidence what the Crimeans, given a free choice, would prefer, and no alternative looks very satisfactory.

The first idea that comes to mind is a referendum. Let Crimeans vote for Ukraine or Russia. That would indeed resolve the issue if one side or the other won decisively, but there’s no good reason to expect that outcome. A close vote would leave the losers discontented and determined to try again, a pattern that we’ve seen in Scotland and Quebec, while nationalists in the losing party’s preferred partner would press their government to work for a reversal (not necessarily peaceful) of the electoral verdict.

Unpromising as a solution via referendum is, annexation without any formal expression of popular consent, or with a phony plebiscite like the farce of 2014, would be worse, for reasons that are too obvious to need stating.

What about independence? In different circumstances, an independent Crimea with its own national identity might obviate the current ethnic divisions. In the world as it exists, there are drawbacks. Eastern Europe doesn’t need a minuscule state (about the size of Houston in population and Vermont in area) in a strategic location, encircled by neighbors (Russia, Ukraine, Turkey) with motives for interfering in its affairs.

All in all, it seems that Crimea is not a “problem”. Problems have solutions. Crimea may have none. If, as somebody in the Biden Administration thinks would be a good idea, Ukraine recovers it by force of arms, that won’t bother me at all, but the event will be just another stage in the conflict, not its end.