Politics Hogan Is Blowing the Maryland Senate Race A Republican can’t win by being Democrat Lite. The forces of Maryland politics are conspiring to make a jackass out of your humble correspondent, which he doesn’t appreciate—he has that base covered all by himself.  First we argued that Rep. David Trone, a grotesquely wealthy arriviste with bog-standard liberal politics, had it sewn up for the Democratic nomination for senate against Angela Alsobrooks. Trone’s polls were sagging as the primary approached, but Alsobrooks’s highest title to date is executive of Prince George’s County (not a name synonymous with good government in the Old Line State). Even Spiro Agnew, erstwhile Baltimore County executive, spent some time in the Governor’s Mansion before leaping into national politics. Alsobrooks walked away with it, 53 percent to 42—Trone didn’t even cover the spread. So be it. Every gambler loses some, for better or worse. We wrote about it. We then predicted that the solidly popular former governor, Larry Hogan, would be in good shape to capture the seat for the Republicans in the general election. Preliminary polling had shown him in a dead heat or edging out both Trone and Alsobrooks. Hogan was a recognizable character in American politics, the red governor of a blue state. You wouldn’t want him for president, but he was probably a cut better than your Parris Glendenningses and Martin O’Malleys. He had run a budget surplus while actually improving services like the Motor Vehicles Administration and beating cancer, which is (we are told) a big sympathy-winner. The right wing of Maryland Republicans regarded him as a bit of a squish, especially after some high-profile differences with President Donald Trump, but it didn’t seem insurmountable in a cycle that has seen the 45th president dance away from social issues and endorse whatever centrists are willing to smoke the peace pipe. It is now a month and a half later. The latest polling shows Hogan’s support in the mid-30s, more than 10 points behind Alsobrooks. So far from fielding a competitive showing against a weak candidate, Hogan is wandering into the realm of pain where people use words like “blowout” and “landslide” and (our favorite, watch for this one here when he loses) “massacre.” Alsobrooks is still a weak candidate; the same poll that showed Hogan 11 points behind pegged her support at an anemic 48 percent. (This is in a state where there are more than twice as many registered Democrats as Republicans.) So what happened? A couple things. First, Hogan in mid-May vowed that he would be a pro-choice senator, coming out in favor of codifying Roe v. Wade at the federal level. The play here is obvious. The prevailing theory of Republican defeat in 2022 is that the Dobbs decision freaked out fiscally conservative (or at any rate, anti-tax) but socially liberal suburbanites. The first problem is that he had previously touted himself as a pro-life Catholic and as governor made marginal moves to restrict abortion access in the state. The Maryland Democrats have not forgotten. The second problem is that this disavows one of the GOP’s greatest victories at the federal level, and cuts against the party’s current states’ rights approach to the issue. Gratuitously, too—nobody is very worried that abortion is about to be banned in Maryland.  Second, Hogan vocally repudiated Trump’s peace overtures, saying that he has “no interest” in an endorsement after the former president had said he would like to see Hogan win his race. The reasoning is analogous—the theory is that the Trump name is poison in the suburbs, so running away from it is the thing to do. This is a penny-wise and pound-foolish approach. Trump is at the top of the party’s ticket, whether you like it or not; while the Maryland GOP relies on swinging suburbanites, the party’s rural bloc is all in on Trump. Your humble correspondent lives in the country. Outside the teeming college-town metropole of our county seat, the political (and physical) landscape is indistinguishable from the Pennsylvania exurbs that carried Trump to the presidency. These voters are the reason the GOP gubernatorial candidate in 2020 was a hardline lawyer involved in the former president’s election-fraud suits rather than Hogan’s anointed successor; they are a plurality of the state’s actual Republican base, such as it is. With a Trump endorsement, we suspect they would have held their nose to vote for Hogan (“the bald freak,” in local parlance). Without it—well, spite is a powerful thing. For the GOP to win statewide office, you need all those voters, as well as a share of the suburbs.  Hogan has tacked to the center and overshot. A voter may reasonably ask, If the Republican candidate is at war with the party leadership and has repudiated a huge part of the national party’s successes and current program, why not just vote for the Democrat?  Why not, indeed. A Republican cannot win by being Democrat Lite; there is a difference between moderating and pandering. The modal American voter isn’t infinitely wise, but he isn’t hopelessly dumb, either. He would rather vote for the real McCoy than a red carbon copy of the other guy—or sit it out. Trump’s 2024 campaign has been a canny, almost Nixonian study in balancing moderation and differentiation. On the other hand, Hogan appears to be making a beeline for the ash-heap with John Lindsay and Nelson Rockefeller. The post Hogan Is Blowing the Maryland Senate Race appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics Overturning Chevron May Prove Pyrrhic Does Loper bring the administrative state to heel, or just empower lawyers? Credit: Konstantin L The Supreme Court’s term has ended, as it often does, with a bang—or series of bangs. The Court set off legal fireworks on many fronts, but the most enduringly significant decision handed down is probably Loper v. Raimondo. In that case, the Court overruled its 1984 decision in Chevron U.S.A. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, which had established the legal doctrine that came to be known as “Chevron deference.” Under this doctrine, courts were required to defer to a federal administrative agency’s interpretation of the statutory law it enforces whenever a statute is sufficiently ambiguous—even if a court might have interpreted the statute differently.  This effectively ceded enormous amounts of power to the administrative state, leaving ordinary citizens with little recourse to challenge the legal interpretations of the countless agencies that wield enormous power over their lives and livelihoods. Given the size and scope of the modern administrative state, this directly undermines the fundamental principle of republican government: consent of the governed.  At issue in Loper was whether or not the Commerce Department’s National Marine Fisheries Service had overstepped its legal authority in imposing significant monitoring costs on fishermen. The Biden administration defended deference to the regulating agency on the basis of the agency’s purported expertise. The fishermen, by contrast, argued that Congress has been incentivized by Chevron deference to do far less than is constitutionally required, instead delegating to administrative agencies the power to rule by fiat rather than law. The Court accepted this argument and overturned Chevron. It did so partly on the basis of the inherent judicial authority to interpret laws in the “Cases” and “Controversies” explicitly contemplated by the Constitution, and partly on the basis of the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act (APA), which was passed to check the “zeal” of New Deal administrative agencies that led them to “excesses” beyond the four corners of the laws that gave them life. Chevron deference, the Court said in Loper, was directly contrary to the APA. Statutory ambiguities can no longer be read as implicit and broad delegations to administrative agencies. According to Chief Justice John Roberts, “Courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority….courts need not and under the APA may not defer to an agency interpretation of the law simply because a statute is ambiguous.”  In dissent, Associate Justice Elena Kagan asked, “Who should give content to a statute when Congress’s instructions have run out? Should it be a court? Or should it be the agency Congress has charged with administering the statute? The answer Chevron gives is that it should usually be the agency, within the bounds of reasonableness.” In hemming in the relatively unchecked power of federal bureaucrats, the decision in Loper has long been on the wish list of conservatives, classical liberals, and libertarians alike. And, indeed, it’s not hard to imagine benefits flowing directly from the decision, in the form of heightened judicial oversight of the administrative state. But it’s equally easy to imagine the decision delivering far less than many hope, and even masking and ultimately accelerating progressivism’s long march through our institutions. Conservatives must be careful what they wish for.  Few know the story of how we got to Chevron and why many conservatives, including the likes of the late Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, initially embraced it. Since the advent of the modern administrative state, presidents, Congress, the courts, and agencies themselves have tussled over who controls it, and the extent to which it must be accountable to the American people. FDR himself, contrary to many early progressives, came to have doubts about the independence of “the headless fourth branch of government.”  As the 20th century wore on, both liberals and conservatives increasingly agreed on the necessity to control this fourth branch, albeit for different reasons. By the 1960s, liberals became suspicious of what they saw as a captured technocratic state operating without popular or judicial controls. They sought to enable interest groups, acting through courts, to control the levers of administrative power in pursuit of a variety of newly-fashioned social, political, economic, and environmental objectives. They often sued not simply to stop government action, but to demand it, in accordance with what they claimed were statutory objectives or constitutional mandates. In this endeavor, they relied on increasingly sympathetic federal courts staffed by progressive jurists to do their bidding. Through a variety of mechanisms, including loosened standing requirements and novel due process rulings, courts began to direct the organs of the administrative state to pursue progressive policy objectives.  Meanwhile, the Nixon administration, equally suspicious of administrative independence, sought to re-politicize the massive New Deal/Great Society federal Leviathan. Nixon’s goal was to hold it accountable, through the office of the president, to the wishes of the American people. He was often stymied by the shift in the balance of power away from executive agencies to even more unaccountable federal courts. In a sense, both liberals and conservatives attempted to affect what they understood to be a “democratization” of the administrative state, each having lost the early progressives’ faith in apolitical “expertise.” By the time the Chevron case was decided during the Reagan administration, many conservatives were fully on board with having courts step back from meddling in what they understood to be executive affairs. Progressive courts had hardly proved to be allies in reining in non-consensual administrative power.  As Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch points out in a footnote to Loper,  It should be recalled that, when Justice Scalia launched the Chevron revolution, there were many judges who “abhor[red] . . . ‘plain meaning’” and preferred instead to elevate “legislative history” and their own curated accounts of a law’s “purpose[s]” over enacted statutory text…Chevron, he predicted, would provide a new guardrail against that practice…As the Justice’s later writings show, he had the right diagnosis, just the wrong cure. The answer for judges eliding statutory terms is not deference to agencies that may seek to do the same, but a demand that all return to a more faithful adherence to the written law. That was, of course, another project Justice Scalia championed. And as we like to say, “we’re all textualists now.” But are we all textualists now? Conservatives should be cautious about embracing the shift to judicial superintendence over administration that Loper demands. It might well have the effect of preventing salutary politicization of such decision making by future conservative administrations confronting an even more progressive judiciary. One of the effects of overturning Chevron will be to shift even more power toward lawyers within the administrative state, rather than political officers. Over much of the last century, courts have routinely proved to be as non-deferential to conservative preferences as they have to the text of the Constitution itself. As conservatives should know—though many have forgotten the lesson—the most important question is not who wields power, but how much power is wielded. The goal of conservatives should be to reduce the size and scope of unaccountable bureaucracy, not celebrate who or what controls it. The fat lady that is the administrative state has not yet begun to sing. The post Overturning Chevron May Prove Pyrrhic appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics Democrats Flee A Ship Named Democracy Debate debacle rattles the left. Under President Joe Biden’s leadership, the Democrats have cast the presidential election as a fight for democracy. How fitting then that a critical mass of Democrats are now contemplating jettisoning Biden, the winner of all the Democratic primaries, as the nominee and replacing him with someone who did not run and received as few as zero votes. All because they fear he will lose a democratic election in four months to former President Donald Trump. Biden himself professes to be upset that the Supreme Court made it more likely that the voters determine Trump’s fitness to serve another term rather than another court proceeding, despite saying that the events of Jan. 6, 2021 were apparent to anyone watching. Now Biden himself could be denied an opportunity to face the voters by the same Democratic bigwigs who helped clear the primary field for him, if they can persuade him to drop out or incite a big enough mutiny among the Democratic convention delegates, more than 90 percent of whom are committed to him. The runner-up in the Democratic primaries was “uncommitted.” The modern primary process is a relatively recent phenomenon, to be sure. Plenty of great presidents, from George Washington to Dwight Eisenhower, preceded it. But none of them were pushing for the abolition of the Electoral College, the legislative filibuster, or the Senate itself on democratic grounds, as can be said of many Democrats pushing for a return to the smoke-filled room. If Democrats have their druthers, they would also dislodge Vice President Kamala Harris, who at least won the 2020 election alongside Biden, and replace her with a swing state-friendly ticket. But James Clyburn, the South Carolina Democrat and Congressional Black Caucus grandee who rescued Biden’s candidacy four years ago, has already signaled that is a nonstarter. It is not clear that anyone else could directly inherit and control Biden’s campaign cash, which is imperative now that Trump has picked up the fundraising pace. As Democrats try to gently escort Biden into the good night now that he has apparently outlived his usefulness, leaked polling data from the Democratic firm OpenLabs purportedly shows Trump leading in the battlegrounds and gaining ground rapidly in the toss-up and heretofore reach states. This is consistent with what the post-debate national polling is showing and would endanger down-ballot Democrats. Thus the Democrats are starting to flee the sinking ship. For the good of democracy, of course. Which suddenly might be fine after all!  “Donald Trump is going to win. And I’m OK with that,” Trump-district Rep. Jared Golden (D-ME) wrote in a remarkable op-ed. “Unlike Biden and many others, I refuse to participate in a campaign to scare voters with the idea that Trump will end our democratic system.” Democrats lost Golden’s district, good for one electoral vote, in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. Polls now show Biden could possibly lose Maine statewide.  In the days leading up to the Biden debate disaster that suddenly made presidential decrepitude noticeable in polite company again, Democrats were focused on their other core issue for the 2024 election: the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, handed down two years ago. The court’s majority decided that abortion policy should be decided democratically rather than by judicial fiat for the first time in nearly a half century, without imposing its own preferences on the whole country. The Democrats’ anti-Dobbs fervor sits uneasily alongside their democracy push.  Of course, you can object to human rights issues being settled by majority vote, whether nationally or in the states, even if we disagree about the precise human rights question at stake. The Supreme Court’s junking of Chevron deference is really primarily about restoring power to the elected legislative branch that had gradually been taken by unelected bureaucrats. As was the case with Dobbs, it is not always clear that the legislators will use this power wisely or that Republicans in particular are prepared to grapple with all the thorny issues involved. But it is their duty and one of the reasons Congress has devolved into a clown show in the first place is that for the rank-and-file, lawmaking is now a secondary concern to lawmaking. The Constitution gives them better things to do. It’s true that there is more to a free and democratic society, much less a constitutional republic, than conducting elections. We learned that, or at least should have, with the folly of Iraq and Hamas’ participation in that supposed tidal wave of democracy in Gaza during that time period. But non-Democrats can be forgiven for wondering if the party’s commitment to the small-d variety is contingent upon the outcome. As one Joe Biden once put it, “You can’t love your country only when you win.” The post Democrats Flee A Ship Named Democracy appeared first on The American Conservative.

A sound that's all too familiar. The post The British band John Lydon never liked: “I like them as chaps, I hate their music” first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

Joe Biden just suffered through, politically speaking, the worst stretch of his presidency. The silver lining? Unlike most Democrats, he quickly forgets that terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week. Yesterday, reporters salted their questions to White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre with such words as “disabled,” “Alzheimer’s,” and “dementia.” Jean-Pierre’s rote response to the barrage? “We all have bad nights.” (READ MORE: The Fall of Biden Portends Real Danger) Also on Tuesday, Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Texas became the first Democratic Party officeholder of note to call on Joe Biden to withdraw from the race. Given donor unrest and the New York Times and other media outlets issuing the same demand, one imagines the pressure is building. Democrats Don’t Like Presidential Immunity On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court upended the lawfare strategy intended to prevent Donald Trump from winning back the presidency. The 6-3 Trump v. the United States decision favored the former president over the government. Just as the president cannot arrest members of Congress or the Supreme Court for decisions within the context of their jobs that displease, the executive branch cannot do the same to a former president — or maybe in Venezuela they can, but not in the United States. (READ MORE: Beware of AI’s Influence on the Election) “Although Presidential immunity is required for official actions to ensure that the President’s decisionmaking is not distorted by the threat of future litigation stemming from those actions,” the court ruled, “that concern does not support immunity for unofficial conduct.” It outraged the court’s most partisan member. Sonia Sotomayor carted out such words as “mockery,” “baseless” “nonsensical,” “illogical,” “misguided,” “draconian,” “troubling,” “unjustifiable,” and “ahistorical” to describe the decision supported by a majority of her colleagues. The level of vitriol suggests that Sotomayor, whose retirement plans perhaps become accelerated by the prospect of a Trump presidency, took it all very personally. The Supreme Court Defends Its Turf A decision receiving less attention from partisans likely impacts policy to a far greater degree came down on Friday. In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the high court decided — again in a 6-3 decision authored by the chief justice — that the domain of interpreting law belongs to the courts and not unelected administrators within the executive branch. This overturned the Chevron doctrine, which, as Friday’s majority opinion pointed out, “the Court did not at first treat … as the watershed decision it was fated to become.” Unlike Congress, The Supreme Court generally dislikes when other branches usurp its role. When conservatives established a quasi-court to combat Communism in the postwar years called the Subversive Activities Control Board, the Supreme Court, for reasons beyond those articulated in Loper, eventually stripped it of its power. So, Friday’s decision seems less an ideological fusillade than a defensive turf-war maneuver undertaken by one branch against the encroachment of another. As Chief Justice Roberts says in the court’s opinion, “Chevron was a judicial invention that required judges to disregard their statutory duties.” (READ MORE: Dr. Jill Biden: Perfect Wife Amid the Panic of 2024) Just as Trump v. United States cuts off the left’s end-around on elections, Loper cuts off the left’s end-around on unfriendly legislatures and courts. What is the court’s message common to both decisions? Respect the process of representative democracy. That seems something beyond not Joe Biden but the panel of relatives and flunkeys who are really the president. According to a CBS News poll, nearly three-fourths of the country does not believe Joe Biden possesses the mental and cognitive health to serve as president. He nevertheless continues his run for a second term that ends with him as an 86-year-old man. The soundbite of the president putting a “Look, if we finally beat Medicare” exclamation point on a nonsensical, disjointed rant, the image of him staring glassy-eyed, almost catatonically, at the floor as his opponent spoke, and so much more from last Thursday amounts to undoable damage. When the president spoke energetically in North Carolina on Friday, everybody watching grasped that he read from a teleprompter. When he delivered a four-minute speech sans questions on Monday night, everyone watching understood they glimpsed a human marionette. The news may keep getting worse. The DEI mentality that compelled Biden to choose Kamala Harris hamstrings Democrats should they seek to leapfrog her in replacing Biden. Doing so possibly further demoralizes key Democratic Party constituencies. Not doing so replaces one unpopular old politician with another, possibly less popular, younger one. Joe Biden’s presidency implodes. Does he even know it? The post The Worst Week in Memory for Democrats Who Can Remember appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

You’re likely to hear a great deal more about the 25th Amendment as the political maneuvering builds around the addled-but-stubbornly-hanging-on Joe Biden and his increasingly futile efforts at re-election. The 25th (25A) is the constitutional amendment governing the disposition of a president who is no longer physically able to discharge his duties. Here’s what it says: Section 1 In case of the removal of the President from office or of his death or resignation, the Vice President shall become President. Section 2 Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress. Section 3 Whenever the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that he is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, and until he transmits to them a written declaration to the contrary, such powers and duties shall be discharged by the Vice President as Acting President. Section 4 Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President. Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office. Should you get familiar with the 25th Amendment (we’ll call it 25A from here on in the interest of brevity) as much more than an academic foray into American civics? Perhaps not. But it’s going to become relevant, likely after the Fourth of July. We Should Use 25A to Declare Biden Unfit. But Democrats Won’t. That’s because Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) dropped a resolution on the floor of the House of Representatives on Friday calling upon Vice President Kamala Harris to convene the Biden administration cabinet for a vote to declare Biden unfit. BREAKING Rep. Roy files resolution to urge VP Harris to convene the Cabinet and declare President Biden unable to carry out his duties as Commander-in-Chief pic.twitter.com/vuJJU8iKsD — Rep. Chip Roy Press Office (@RepChipRoy) June 28, 2024 In this, Roy has the full support of House Speaker Mike Johnson: Speaker Mike Johnson said Friday that President Joe Biden’s Cabinet should discuss invoking the 25th Amendment in the wake of a politically disastrous debate that compounded age and acuity questions. Johnson, asked about calls from within his own conference for the amendment to be invoked, said that “there’s a lot of people asking about” it, but that it was up to members of Biden’s Cabinet. “I would ask the Cabinet members to search their hearts. … And we hope that they will do their duty, as we all seek to do our duty to do best by the American people. These are fateful moments,” Johnson told reporters. Pressed if he was saying he believed the 25th Amendment should be invoked, he added: “If I were in the Cabinet … I would be having that discussion with my colleagues at the Cabinet level. I would. … We’ll see what action they take. It’s a serious situation.” Will the Biden cabinet depose their president? No. They won’t do it over the Fourth of July holiday, they won’t do it next week, they won’t do it this month. They won’t do it. (READ MORE: Biden Voters Get the Red Pill) You will not get anywhere asking Jennifer Granholm, Pete Buttigieg, Alejandro Mayorkas, Lloyd Austin, Antony Blinken, Xavier Becerra, and the rest of Biden’s collection of otherwise unwanted accomplices to depose the man who made them cabinet secretaries. In truth, these people have been central to maintaining the fraud of Biden’s mental competence for the last four years. For them to turn on Biden now is not going to be in their interests. Especially when to do so would be to make Kamala Harris the acting president and, most likely, Biden’s successor as the Democrats’ presidential nominee. Nobody in the Democrat Party, save for its black female voters without which the Democrats can’t win elections, wants Harris atop the ticket. It might be horrifically dangerous to shut Harris out of the 2024 electoral equation, but virtually everyone in that party admits it’s even worse with her as the standard bearer. Does anybody think this is sellable to the American public? Kamala Harris: “Yeah girl, I’m out here in these streets… The majority of us believe in freedom and equality, but these extremists, as they say, they not like us.” This is so bad…. pic.twitter.com/1PNrigFmof — ALX (@alx) July 1, 2024 So no, they’re not going to move a 25A process to get rid of Biden. This is precisely why Johnson and Roy shouldn’t let this go. 25A should be all the House talks about between now and Labor Day. It should be holding hearing after hearing on Biden’s mental competence, every member of that cabinet ought to be dragged in front of House committees and grilled about Biden’s fitness, and vote after vote should be taken on resolution after resolution demanding that Biden be given the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, the standard test for dementia. Make the 25A question the only one of any importance in Washington, D.C., from now until September. Democrats Should Pay for the Grand Fraud They Subjected Us To By establishing that backdrop, Johnson and the House can and should lean in, as heavily as possible, to the question of Attorney General Merrick Garland’s “inherent contempt” of Congress for having refused to provide the tapes of Biden’s deposition by special counsel Robert Hur. That’s the deposition after which Hur said Biden was essentially unfit to stand trial on charges of misuse of classified documents, and a transcript of it was released which many believe was sanitized for public consumption (even though it contained many damaging insights into Biden’s less-than-standard cognition). (READ MORE: Democrats Are Publicly Defecting) Garland’s resistance to releasing the transcript is purely political — in light of Thursday’s debate debacle, it paints the attorney general as part of the cabal gaslighting the American people over Biden’s cognition. That debate performance strengthens the case for the House to send its sergeant-at-arms to fetch the Attorney General and stash him in the Capitol basement until he turns loose the Hur audio. Let’s be blunt here: Garland and the rest of the Biden cabinet have to be held to account for their role in hiding the truth about Joe Biden from the American people. Thanks to Biden’s clear mental decline, which he isn’t going to recover from and which his campaign co-chair, failed New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu, stupidly insists on continuing to aggressively showcase to the American people, the grand fraud they’ve subjected us to will make congressional action and oversight increasingly relevant and urgent. Maybe it’s political, but it’s also a pristine example of Congress fulfilling its function of oversight of the executive branch, something Congress has done a lousy job of for a very long time. Perhaps the House ought to be subpoenaing all recordings and transcripts of Biden’s meetings with cabinet secretaries and others, and then subpoenaing all of those officials to testify at House hearings as to the information contained in those recordings. Make them defend Joe Biden’s performance with specificity. And if any of them are caught in lies, vote them in contempt of Congress. Perhaps even inherent contempt, complete with a trip to the Capitol basement. Let Jennifer Rubin lose what’s left of her mind over that. (READ MORE from Scott McKay: That Debate Might Be the End of the Road for … Barack Obama) Let’s remember that Joe Biden isn’t the disease. He’s merely a symptom. Biden is a puppet of a cabal, probably headed by Barack Obama, which has been vigorously attacking America as founded for at least the past 16 years. They go on about “Our Democracy,” but they’ve corrupted and destroyed practically every significant cultural, political, and even to an extent economic, institution they’ve touched. Clearly, there has been a conspiracy within the Biden White House and administration to hide his cognitive condition from the American people. So let’s smoke this conspiracy out. Let’s put the Biden cabinet on the grill and watch them cook. It’s the least they deserve after what they’ve put us through. The post 25A All Of A Sudden Becomes Very Good Politics appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

In the Democrat’s nonstop quest to expand and make abortion as plentiful as dandelions in spring, the Supreme Court’s case FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine unanimously rejected a recent dispute by pro-life doctors against the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for illegally expanding access to the drug mifepristone used in chemical abortions.  The ruling should put to rest the zealous and enduring chants of “Christian Nationalism” for those conservatives on the court. But, as sure as the sun will rise tomorrow morning, the Left will never cease using anything to advance their agenda, regardless of its truth. (READ MORE: Victory or Defeat? The Supreme Court’s Abortion Pill Ruling Is Neither.) Since Roe v. Wade was overturned, chemical abortions now account for over half of all American abortions.  What appears to be a convenient procedure is anything but.  Chemical Abortions Are Hardly Safe According to the FDA, besides killing the most innocent among us, chemical abortions pose significant health risks to the mother, including heavy bleeding, incomplete abortion, and infection. According to one report, mifepristone “has been tied to 24 deaths and more than 4,000 adverse events” including a 44 percent increase in breast cancer risk, a significant increase in future preterm births, and a substantial increase in the risk of suicide. Complications include sepsis, hemorrhage, and undiagnosed ectopic pregnancies rupturing. The FDA also warns that one in 25 women who take abortion drugs will end up in the emergency room.  According to the Alliance Defending Freedom, the FDA has “endangered women and girls by abandoning safeguards for abortion drugs, including in-person visits with a doctor to check for ectopic pregnancies, severe bleeding, and life-threatening infections.”  These dangers are undeniable evidence to end the FDA’s authorization of mifepristone and to enforce the Comstock Act that prohibits its distribution via U.S. mail. However, the Comstock Act is another relic of the past and like many other laws — never enforced — unless one is defacing a gay pride symbol.   Activists make the ludicrous claim that access to chemical abortion drugs is a matter of women’s “healthcare” and is safe. Abortion is supposed to motivate turnout in November’s election for Democrats. Provided that ardent Catholic Joe Biden remains the Democrats,’ presidential nominee and provided he is reelected, he has pledged to push hard for abortion to become another constitutional amendment.  Christians Should Be More Active in Opposing Abortion Given the plethora of problems facing the nation that ironically includes a record-low birthrate, making sure the choice to kill the unborn is an option for all women has always been, and continues to be, a top Democrat political objective. (READ MORE: The Demographic Winter of Our Discontent) There is no denying that pro-abortion groups are always on the offensive. To date, pro-aborts have won a series of referendums in conservative states. So much for the canard of “threats to democracy.” More states this November, including political battlegrounds in Arizona, Montana, and Florida will have referendums on the left’s most egregious sacrament in an attempt to make their states’ abortion sanctuaries.  Believing abortion will help drive the left to the polls in November, Donald Trump has warned Republicans that abortion is a perilous campaign issue. A Gallup poll revealed that 32 percent of voters will only vote for candidates who share their views on abortion, which includes 23 percent who support abortion and 8 percent who oppose it.  Abortion is an American industry where chemicals now lead its crusade in a government-sanctioned culture of death. The Supreme Court did not settle chemical abortions any more than it settled the issue of abortion in the recent Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade.  Christians must be much more active in supporting life. Moreover, those politicians who claim to be followers of Christ must be courageous enough to do what is necessary to end all abortions. Not only do millions of lives weigh in the balance, but their immortal souls. For those politicians who are indifferent, spare Christians the insult and your blasphemy of asking God to “Bless America.”   When inconvenience is more important than the life of a child, we have lost our way as we annihilate our own. Our hands are bloody and our souls are corrupted by our own choosing. Abortion concerns everyone because allowing someone’s life to be decided upon the capricious whims of another is pure tyranny.  The poisonous pills may remain, but the legal and political fight over abortion for the soul of a contentious nation continues.  The post Chemical Abortion Enables Democrat Anti-Life Agenda appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

WASHINGTON — The Biden White House put gender politics over children when a bureaucrat intervened in what was supposed to be a scientifically based process to determine standards of care for treating gender-dysphoric minors. I don’t understand why the judgment-impaired Levine even has this job. As the Daily Caller first reported, Admiral Rachel Levine, who is a transgender woman and assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services, pushed an international panel to remove age-related recommendations for teens who want to undergo hormonal treatments or have their breasts removed, a procedure commonly known as “top surgery.” (READ MORE from Debra J. Saunders: Not Debatable: Biden Fumbled in Faceoff With Trump) Draft guidelines for the World Professional Association for Transgender Health released in 2021, The New York Times reported, had recommended lowering the minimum age to 14 for hormonal treatments, 15 for mastectomies, 16 for breast augmentation, and 17 for genital surgeries or hysterectomies. But after Levine chimed in, the age-limit recommendations were dropped. We only know about this because of litigation involving psychologist James Cantor, who warned that WPATH saw “evidence-based” medicine as a threat to its “policy goals,” as the Daily Caller reported. “It’s clear that Levine asked them to drop the age requirements for explicitly political reasons,” Jay Richards, research fellow and director for the Heritage Foundation’s DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society, told me. The good news: The phenomenon is rare. According to Reuters, 282 American teens had top surgery paid for by insurance in 2021 — even as the number of diagnoses for gender dysphoria among children ages 6 to 17 nearly tripled from 2017 to 2021. If the same procedures were happening in Third World countries, Washington policy wonks would refer to the practice as “mutilation.” Here, advocates call it “gender-affirming care” — a classic example of doublespeak. Gender Experiments According to The New York Times, most transgender adolescents who receive medical interventions are prescribed puberty-blocking drugs or hormones, not surgeries. So there’s that. But it’s still an experiment — a medical experiment that is being performed on teenagers. For that reason, the U.K., Sweden, and Norway are among the countries that have backtracked on allowing minors to receive puberty blockers. Where’s the science? While the left prides itself on being pro-science, Team Biden acted without any serious research or reliable data. “The radical activists have been allowed to run the show while Biden’s been sleeping,” Richards observed. It shouldn’t be this way. Hilary Cass, a pediatrician commissioned by the National Health Service of England to review treatments, told the British Medical Journal, “I can’t think of another area of pediatric care where we give young people a potentially irreversible treatment and have no idea what happens to them in adulthood.” “Things feel really urgent in your teens, but actually, when you get older, you realize they weren’t as urgent” as you thought they were, she added. We all know this. We also know, as Richards said, that “they are willing to change their guidelines based on politics.” I don’t understand why the judgment-impaired Levine even has this job. (READ MORE: Two Big Media Mistakes This Week Already) “What I hope happens next is there are congressional hearings and Rachel Levine is asked under oath how the age guidelines disappeared,” Richards added. Contact Review-Journal Washington columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X. COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM The post Transgender Politics Shouldn’t Trump Science appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Joe Biden is not — how should I put it — up for participating in the next Olympics. Everyone knows that, but now he knows it too, and it seems to be changing his character (if he was ever the lovable grandfather that the Democratic press has been trying to sell us for years). The president crumbled in the debate, and he was left naked as a baboon’s ass before the whole world. And now the rats, aware of the sinking ship, have started jumping overboard. Where are all the cats when we need them? They have started by jumping on Político because the report that the magazine published on Tuesday is a political earthquake of infinite magnitude. What is so serious about the collaborators’ report is not that the president, like any boss in a private enterprise, gets angry when things are not done the way he wants them to be. What is serious is that someone who is not mentally capable of deciding how things should be done gets angry. (READ MORE: The Summer 2024 Presidential Succession Crisis Explodes) Those who criticize from inside the Democratic Party that the president was poorly prepared to debate with Trump, describe a situation that we have seen a thousand times before in the processes of decline in any organization. The core around the leader is getting smaller and smaller; that is, fewer and fewer people are advising him, fewer and fewer advisors have access to the president’s decision-making, and the few who remain around him, well you can guess why they are still there: because they do and say what the boss wants to hear. ‘I Play by Ear and I Don’t Listen to Advice’ An old Spanish comedian once had a funny monologue. He would appear with a violin case announcing that he was about to put on an extraordinary concert for the audience. But in the end, the violin case was empty: he had forgotten the violin at home. So the whole monologue is him talking on the phone to his family and his maid trying to locate the instrument. It doesn’t show up and he says goodbye to the audience with a sentence that could also be signed by Joe Biden: “Well, there will be no concert. Anyway, you haven’t missed anything either, because I play by ear and I don’t listen to advice.” I worked for years as an advisor to the Minister of Culture and Education of the Spanish Government. I have had the opportunity to see how the nucleus of power works, both as a journalist and as a political consultant, and I can assure you that there is only one thing more dangerous than a crazed high official, and that is an advisor who is incapable of saying something that his boss does not want to hear. (READ MORE: Dr. Jill Biden: Perfect Wife Amid the Panic of 2024) On one occasion, I was accompanying my minister to an event at a well-known Spanish institution. There he was to deliver some words that we had previously prepared together the day before. However, when the minister entered the hall with the folder carrying his speech under his arm, I was forced to change his folder for one that I had prepared last minute without being able to say a word. My boss at the time was a prudent man who liked to have every T crossed, and if anything could upset him, it was a change like that, unable even to read the new speech. Yes, I put my job on the line. And I remember his irritated look when he saw me walking away to get lost in the audience with his original speech under my arm. He went up to the speakers’ atrium and delivered the lecture I had given him and we were saved from certain disaster. On the one hand, the original speech contained two serious errors that could have made him look ridiculous. On the other hand, during the day, there had been news that needed to be mentioned. Biden’s Collapse Should Make American History My boss was irritated at first, and he was right, but at the end of the conference he understood what had happened and congratulated me, and he was also right. I think I did the right thing. The job of a political advisor is to do the best you can, even if it angers the person you are advising. No one would trust a doctor who played down the diagnoses of patients who had bad tempers just so that they didn’t get too angry during the surgery. What Biden is promoting is the opposite of what my boss did. Surrounding himself only with sycophants in a very narrow circle commanded by someone who, even in his right mind, was incapable of successfully directing the destiny of the United States. (READ MORE: Biden Slouches Toward November) Biden’s collapse can — and should — mark a before and after in American history. And, frankly, in the history of the world as well. His current weakness is a danger to us all. Although I now experience an almost erotic pleasure watching his sycophants in the leftist press throw themselves overboard from the Biden-boat to the cry of “every man for himself!” The post Joe Biden Plays by Ear, Does Not Take Advice, and Has a Bad Temper appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.