A Bipartisan House?

And Other Sunday Complaints

Correction: In my last dispatch, I described the Speaker of the House Mike Johnson as looking like an overmatched pharmacist. Well, he still looks like a pharmacist—but his mildness of affect has brought forth mighty victories in recent days, not just on aid to Ukraine, but also on surveillance funding (the FISA court) and various other spending bills, including the national security appropriation (which passed thanks to pressure from my friends in the bipartisan military caucus, For Country). So I was wrong to call him overmatched.

Johnson will be challenged by Marjorie Greene and the Putin Caucus, and he may be overthrown—but not if the Democrats come to his defense—as they should, though they should only do so with a price: Dems should support Johnson’s continued Speakership only if he agrees to bring the bipartisan Senate border security bill to the floor for a vote. That bill, crushed by Trump (who did a last minute chicken-shuffle on Ukraine), would pass the House easily with a bipartisan majority, although some Dem votes on the left might join the right-wingers yet again. (Did you notice that members of the Squad voted against the military appropriation, alongside the so-called Freedom Caucus?)

Still, we could be approaching an effective House….and we’re seeing a slow-motion devolution from the dreadful Hastert Rule, which held that a Republican Speaker could not bring a bill to the floor unless majority of the GOP caucus supported it. I’m not a big fan of wasting energy on structural reforms—too much energy, too little result. Structures like the Electoral College have been embedded since 1787; they are the contingency for our nationhood. But I really love the idea floated by Brookings scholars Elaine Kamarck and William Galston ten years ago: that House Speakership should require a 60% vote in the House, which would pretty much ensure a moderate, bipartisan leader.

David Frum thinks that this was a bad week for Trump, but before I agree with David, as usual, and perhaps amplify a bit, I should note the following: David and his wife Danielle Crittenden recently lost their beautiful daughter to cancer. Both have written extraordinary things about this terrible event—I suspect that I’d be paralyzed in similar circumstances—and now David presses on, providing us with some of the best political commentary out there. (He predicted that Trumpers would not accept the results of future elections in his book Trumpocalypse well before November, 2020.) With deepest condolences, thank you for your continuing wisdom and for sharing your extravagant humanity, David and Danielle.

Meanwhile, it wasn’t just a bad week for Agent Orange because his party abandoned him on Ukraine, as Frum writes, but also because he had to spend the week in a freezing, decrepit New York courtroom, standing trial as an accused criminal. (The Old Wollman Rink Trump might have offered to remodel the place.) I remain skeptical about the Alvin Bragg case, turning hush money into election fraud, but I applaud Trump’s diminution. He looks terrible sitting there in the dock. His hair was mussed. And napping? He’s certainly lost the bite of his “Sleepy Joe” slur. These will not be a pleasant six weeks for him.

It should also be noted that Trump has now turned tail on two big issues in recent weeks: abortion and, as mentioned above, Ukraine. These are transparently political maneuvers, something he rarely does. Usually there’s the patina of aggrieved principle to his rants. (Though he did grudgingly concede in 2016 that Barack Obama was Born in the U.S.A.) He is showing weakness; flip-floperoos don’t lend themselves to the anger that is the coin of his realm. I would guess his agita is compounding. Another sign: Today’s NBC poll which has him losing to Biden, 39-37, in a five-way race, with Bobby Kennedy tallying 13%. This should be taken with a grain of salt—as should all national polls at this point—but I hope that grain, that salt, finds its way into the orange grifter’s wounds…and brings him closer to a Wicked Witch meltdown.

Iran and U.S. Protests

I have been particularly annoyed by the leftoid sillies who’ve been rooting for Iran in the Middle East conflict. They should take a gander at this, from the New York Times:

Determined to head off a recurrence, the government began an offensive at home, Iranians say. It sent its security forces out to crack down on women not observing the hijab law, officials said.

Hours after launching its strike against Israel to retaliate for the Damascus attack, the Iranian government deployed battalions of security forces to swarm the streets of Tehran and many other cities. It violently cracked down on women defying the hijab rule, shuttered dozens of businesses for accommodating women without hijabs and threatened to punish anyone who dared to criticize or question its attacks on Israel.

The Hamas-lovers should be constantly reminded that they are supporting violent, brutal, anti-feminist thugs.

At the same time, here at home, let me say that I support the right of the pro-Palestinian protesters to get themselves arrested for their cause. (Sanity Goddess took a felony bust in the 1968 Columbia strike.) Indeed, the creepy reaction of university presidents to limit free speech, at the behest wealthy alumni, is as dishonorable as their previous willingness to limit free speech at the behest of the Woketariat. They’re not entirely wrong, these pro-Palestinian protesters—so long as they remain pro-Pal and not anti-Zionist (which is, almost always, a fig leaf for Jew-hatred…or an act of useful idiocy by the few Jews who share it). I’m pro-Pal, too, though vehemently anti-Hamas. And I’m a Zionist, too, of course. I balk at calling the protesters’ imprecations anti-Semitism because our Arab brothers and sisters are Semites, too. In fact, I believe the protesters have the right to publicly speak their swill. It is a necessary part of higher education for Jewish students to learn that these bigots exist and to figure out how to deal with them. But there is a bright line: the Jew-hatred must remain just words. Not a push, a punch, a gob of spit, a broken window, a drop of spray paint can be expended against pro-Israel students. Those who transgress should be punished.

Abortion

Too many Democrats believe that abortion alone can beat Trump in 2024. This election is more complicated than that. Abortion may beat Trump in some crucial precincts and may even tip a few states, but immigration will beat Biden in other precincts and may tip a few states the other way, and Gaza may tip Michigan.

Still, abortion will be a powerful issue in 2024 and the protean Elaine Kamarck of Brookings—mentioned above—makes a strong case against the simple-minded cruelty of the fetuphiles and provides a list of states that may have abortion referendums this November. Valuable stuff.

NPR

Beware Andrew Sullivan when he’s on the warpath and he’s on the warpath against Katherine Maher, the new CEO of NPR:

She is not, in fact, a liberal of any kind. She is — as the tweets and the record prove — a near-parody of an illiberal leftist, dedicated to replacing open and free debate with benign censorship, and to constructing a journalistic regime rooted not in the pursuit of truth but in the urgent task of dismantling “white supremacy.”

She tweeted “white silence is complicity” in June 2020. She went after James Bennet for “platforming” Tom Cotton. She’s frustrated by the robustness of the First Amendment. She refers to her “cis white mobility privilege.” She chided Hillary for saying “‘boy and girl’ — it’s erasing language for non-binary people.” She even self-flagellates over her own “trans-erasure.” She is Titania McGrath — Andrew Doyles’ comic Twitter parody of a deranged SJW. Literally. Matt Taibbi — peace be upon him — has a delicious side-by-side comparison.

To be sure, the essay by (now former) NPR producer Uri Berliner in The Free Press that precipitated this controversy was not bullet-proof, and there has been reasonable criticism of it. He chided NPR for pushing the Russia-collusion story, which many other outlets did (Looking at you, Rachel Maddow), when the network’s real crime was not emphasizing that collusion was peripheral to the big story: that Russia was acting aggressively to elect Trump, with or without Donald’s witting support. Berliner also chided NPR for downplaying the Hunter Biden laptop kerfuffle which, in truth, isn’t much of a story. And for dismissing the notion that Covid-19 emanated from a lab in Wuhan, which was—and remains—a very real matter of controversy. It should have been reported as such.

But NPR’s real crime, as Sullivan points out, is its constant, intellectually deadening support for wokery. Its inability to report honestly on left-extremism, like Black Lives Matter and Democratic Socialists of America, and violent queerists—and a consequent inability to report accurately, in subtle ways, about those who believe affirmative action was a form of black privilege or those who believe abortion is murder. When was the last time you heard an NPR reporter raise the question of whether it was moral for a pregnant woman to abort a six-month old fetus with Down Syndrome? Or whether it was fair for a black daughter of a Harvard alumnus to be counted among the affirmative action group and not merely among the legacies? The bias of the mainstream media is not usually overt; it is ingrained. And it is sensed, and resented, by an awful lot of people who are not right-wingers—and those people include Asians and Latinos and other working folks, including many blacks, who wince whenever they’re lumped in among “people of color.” (Trump is a person of color; his is Orange.) Or when Ibram X. Kendi is celebrated—and Thomas Sowell isn’t. This is the soft bigotry of knee-jerk myopia and low reporting standards. It needs to be monitored and minimized, especially when We the People are paying for it.

Asking For It…

Yeah, the cup’s out. I use the funds we raise from paid subscriptions for research and podcast production costs—but I’d also like to send some of it to service programs like the American Exchange Project and to bipartisan efforts like With Honor, which funds the For Country caucus. So chip in, if you can. And if you can’t, keep on reading. The Sanity Squad appreciates your eyes and minds.