Politics is tearing our country apart. And you don’t have to be a pundit to see it. Whether you’re watching the news or scrolling through social media, it’s clear that politics has invaded every space and brought with it tension and division. In our politically tense world, we must look to God’s Word for perspective and guidance. Romans 13 is one of the key passages in Scripture on politics, and while it’s deep and complex, three simple points can be drawn from it for our context today: leaders are necessary, laws are good, and love is better. Leaders Are Necessary Romans 13:1 makes a bold claim: “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.” In an age of corrupt politicians, this command feels strange. Are we really called to submit to government leaders, even when they’re driven by greed and partisan gain? Affirming God’s sovereignty over governing authorities and the call for Christians to submit to them doesn’t mean those authorities won’t be held accountable for their actions or that we owe them unconditional obedience. The point is that all human authority is derived from God’s authority. And since it comes from God, the authority of government leaders is a delegated, not absolute, authority. This doesn’t mean God endorses everything done by a political leader. God-given authority can be misused and abused. As Jesus said to Pilate before the crucifixion, “You would have no authority over me at all unless it had been given you from above” (John 19:11). Pilate misused his authority to condemn and kill Jesus, yet the authority he used to do this was delegated to him by God. The authority of government leaders is a delegated, not absolute, authority. The apostle Peter could write “Honor the emperor” (1 Pet. 2:17) even though the emperor at the time was a psychopath named Nero who terrorized Christians and eventually killed Peter. Submitting to the authorities that God has established is about respecting the function of the office, not the character of the one in the office. For this reason, while it’s fine to disagree with a political ruler, Christians are called to do so with respect and love, acknowledging the image of God in that leader even as we hold them accountable to their God-given authority. Leaders are always flawed, yet they’re an essential part of God’s design for government. Laws Are Good Government leaders are called to create and uphold laws that protect people’s basic rights and create space for their flourishing. And we can all agree, in general, that laws are good. It’s good that 10-year-olds can’t drive. It’s to everyone’s benefit that stealing isn’t allowed. But while laws are meant to be good, we have to acknowledge two important qualifications to how Christians relate to the laws of their land. First, we must recognize the distinction between biblical principles and government policies. For Christians, our biblical principles must shape the way we approach government policies. But we cannot confuse the two. The Bible doesn’t give us policies on international trade, carbon dioxide emissions, or public education. If we don’t recognize this difference, there’s a danger of reading our policy preferences into Scripture and then claiming to have the only biblical position. Take immigration, for example. Scripture gives clear principles about God’s heart for the immigrant and how God’s people are to love the immigrant. Deuteronomy 10:18–19 says, “[The LORD] loves the foreigner residing among you, giving them food and clothing. And you are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt” (NIV). However, while this biblical principle regarding love for the immigrant is clear, Scripture doesn’t prescribe policies regarding how many immigrants should be allowed in a country or how long visas should last. Biblical principles must inform our approach to government policies. Second, while laws are good, there’s a time for Christians to resist the laws of the land. We’re obligated to resist the law when the government forbids what God commands or commands what God forbids. Scripture is filled with examples of God’s people resisting the government. The Egyptian Pharaoh ordered Hebrew midwives to kill newborn boys, but the women refused to obey (Ex. 1:15–17). The Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar issued an edict that his subjects must bow down and worship his golden image, but three Israelites—Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego—resisted (Dan. 3:4–6, 12). When the Persian king Darius made a decree that for 30 days nobody could pray “to any god or man” except himself, Daniel refused (6:7–10). After the governing authorities commanded the apostles to stop preaching the gospel, Peter and John replied, “We cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard” (Acts 4:20). In Acts 5:29, they say, “We must obey God rather than man.” We have an obligation to the government, but our ultimate allegiance is to God. When Christians do resist the government, however, they must do so not in violence but in peace, driven not by hate but by love, and aiming not for conquest but for reconciliation. Love Is Better While many people look to Romans 13:1–7 for principles about government, they often miss its connection to the next three verses, which are about love. Immediately after discussing leaders and laws, the apostle Paul says, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” for “love is the fulfilling of the law” (vv. 9, 10). We have an obligation to the government, but our ultimate allegiance is to God. We must remember that while Scripture speaks to the legitimacy of government, it also makes clear the limits of government. The government can’t change the heart, but love can. Politicians can’t make you a new person, but love can. Laws can’t give purpose to your life, but love can. This isn’t to minimize legislation: it’s important. But you can’t legislate internal transformation. The people of God are called to be a people of love: Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. (Col. 3:12–14) Love is the social glue of Christ’s community. We’re bound together by love for one another and for our city. Leaders are necessary. Laws are good. Love is better.

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Politics Will Speaker Johnson Eat His Words on a December Omnibus? The Republicans’ political future is precarious—a Christmas funding bonanza may be their best bet. “We don’t want any buses,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters in a Tuesday press conference. “We’re not going to do any buses, OK?” Johnson’s comments came a day before Congress punted on fiscal year 2025 appropriations until December. But might there be a scenario come December in which an omnibus or minibus is the best path forward for Republicans? On Wednesday, the House and Senate approved a government funding stopgap measure called a continuing resolution, averting a government shutdown on the eve of the November 5 election.  The Senate, led by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, seemed content from the start to circumvent the statutorily mandated appropriations process. Unsurprisingly, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, the lame-duck leader of the Senate GOP, once again found common cause with his Democratic counterpart to spend more of the American people’s money and concentrate power in congressional leadership. Johnson, meanwhile, attempted to get one major concession for conservatives while funding the government through March. The speaker initially tried to pass a six-month continuing resolution with the SAVE Act attached, which would have protected American elections from illegal immigrant votes. Voting on that plan was delayed and failed because 14 Republicans joined Democrats in voting no. It wasn’t a bad legislative strategy, per se. The March deadline would have ensured that Schumer and McConnell could not hogtie Trump via omnibus. The SAVE Act combined Republican voters’ two top priorities—immigration and election integrity.  Johnson made his hand as strong as possible. He created a massive liability for Democrats by getting them on record voting against protecting the election from illegal migrants. And why Johnson wasn’t screaming from the rooftops that Democrats refuse to fund the government through March because they know they deserve to lose the election and that the “momentum” behind their hand-picked nominee in Harris is completely fake, I’ll never know. For House Republicans seeking reelection, the threat should have been clear: If you vote against this package, you’re telling your constituents you want Trump to lose. It seems Johnson simply wasn’t aggressive enough to get his plan through. Now he’s promised no Christmas-time omnibus or minibuses. “We have broken the Christmas omni, and I have no intention of going back to that terrible tradition,” Johnson claimed.  But what if that’s the best thing Republicans could do come December? For Republicans to consider a December omnibus, November 5 has to be a disaster: President-elect Kamala Harris will have a Democratic House and Senate when inaugurated in January—which, frankly, is a very real possibility just over a month away from Election Day. In this case, the most influence conservatives will have in the first two years of the incoming Harris administration would be in the lame duck session of 2024. Sure, Johnson would be going back on promises made to his own conference. It wouldn’t be the first time.  Not long ago, Johnson promised the House would not provide supplemental military aid to Ukraine without real border security. Then Israel was attacked and Republicans in the House demonstrated through their actions—by passing a supplemental military aid bill for Ukraine and Israel—that the war in Israel was a higher priority than securing the southern border. I’ve yet to meet a Republican voter who thinks that Israel funding was a bargaining chip equal to the border. Johnson should go back on his word again if the political realities change so much that the best way for Republicans to get a victory is to pass a December omnibus. Yes, the continuing resolution passed Wednesday prolongs the establishment’s chosen spending plan. But whatever Democrats would cook up next conference with Harris at the helm could be a heck of a lot worse. The post Will Speaker Johnson Eat His Words on a December Omnibus? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics Trump Ripens in the Sun Belt The 2024 race swings precariously back to Trump in the South. Credit: image via Shutterstock The former President Donald Trump got some much-needed good news out of the Sun Belt states this week.  The latest NYT/Sienna polling of the southern region that extends from North Carolina to California finds Trump leading Democratic nominee Kamala Harris by comfortable margins only a month after the same poll found Harris holding a sizable advantage in parts of the region. According to the latest figures, Trump has opened leads in Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina. In Arizona, Trump now leads Harris by 5 points according to the NYT/Siena figures as voters raise concerns over the porous border. A Fox News poll released Thursday also found Trump ahead by a shorter margin of 3 percent. Immigration is the key issue for voters in Arizona. More than 1 million illegal immigrants are estimated to have crossed through the Yuma sector alone during Biden’s presidency and Trump’s campaign has repeatedly sought to attach escalating tensions along the border to Harris. Owing to the importance of the three states, and Arizona specifically, Harris is scheduled to visit the Southwest this weekend as her campaign attempts to pitch her as tough on crime, citing the vice president’s time prosecuting transnational gangs when she served as California’s attorney general.  Whether that message plays is another question altogether. Harris has struggled to shore up what many voters see as her weakest issue; immigration. And although Harris enjoyed a summer surge in popularity that has assuaged the worries of many of her Democrat critics, she still trails Trump by 14 percentage points on the issue. Trump appears to have made significant inroads with the Hispanic voting base as well. A shocking, newly-released Quinnipiac poll finds Trump ahead of Harris by eight points. That number has been disputed, however, by Pew Research Group, which found Harris leading by 18. Other critics have pointed to an Economist poll which finds Harris holding a 28-point advantage over Trump with Hispanics. Even Trump’s worst-case scenario with the Latino voter block finds him polling stronger than most Republican presidential candidates of the past. The last GOP standard-bearer who even came close with the demographic was then-President George W. Bush, who lost the bloc to John Kerry by 18 points in 2004. More troubling for Harris, the Arizona Police Association, who represents over 12,000 members of local and statewide law enforcement, endorsed Trump for president in late August. The Association split its endorsement down ballot, choosing to back the Democratic candidate for Senate, Ruben Gallego, over the MAGA firebrand Kari Lake. Lake’s poor polling numbers and inability to resonate with centrist voters have yet to drag down Trump’s numbers in the state.  “Donald Trump creates his own weather,” noted former Arizona Republican lawmaker Stan Barnes. Trump’s ability to escape the controversies of his down ballot counterparts will play a significant part in the North Carolina race where Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson is under fire for salacious comments he allegedly made on a pornography forum in the early 2000s. Many of Robinson’s staff have abandoned his campaign, and the MAGA flamethrower is down double digits and falling as he combatively claims the disturbing posts were “manufactured” by artificial intelligence despite strong evidence to the contrary. Since the allegations broke, Trump has steered clear of the man he once dubbed “Martin Luther King on steroids” and both his and vice president nominee JD Vance’s teams have barred Robinson from further campaign events.  According to the NYT/Sienna poll, which was conducted before the Robinson scandal hit the wires, North Carolina is the tightest race of the three. The state, which went for Trump in 2020 by less than 75,000 votes, is essentially a toss up and the Harris campaign has spent considerable time and money in Tar Heel country. Whether that down payment pays off in a state that has consistently voted Republican for president over the years is yet to be determined. Trump is also showing strength in Georgia, a state President Biden narrowly and controversially carried in 2020. Not only is Trump ahead in the most recent selection from NYT/Sienna but the former president is also leading by 2 points according to the latest polling from CBS News. Fox News countered the bullish narrative in a poll released late on Thursday, which found Harris up 3 points in the state.  Voters in the region list rising housing costs as their top concern and that’s good news for Trump who has consistently polled ahead of Harris on the economy. Harris has attempted to pitch herself as a pro-labor capitalist who can reinvigorate the middle class but voters remain skeptical of her ability after four years of rising costs under the Biden-Harris administration. One area in the Sun Belt that could surprisingly spell trouble for the Trump campaign is in his home state of Florida, a region that no Democratic presidential candidate has captured since Barack Obama did it back-to-back in 2008 and 2012. Harris is polling better than expected in the Sunshine State and a just-released survey from The Independent Center and The Bullfinch Group finds the 59-year-old only down by one. That poll comes on the heels of a Florida Atlantic University poll published last week which found Harris leading Trump by slim margins. Harris’s startling strength in the state is likely owed, in part, to Amendment 4, a November-ballot initiative to protect abortion rights that could prompt Democrat voters to turn out in big numbers. Florida currently has a six-week abortion ban that Trump has waffled about, first saying he would vote yes on the ballot initiative before quickly amending his answer after facing backlash from conservative voters. Similar abortion measures have won approval in politically red areas throughout the country, and the Florida initiative could help Harris pull the sort of numbers that Obama used to defeat John McCain and Mitt Romney. On Thursday, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee announced it would spend millions in Florida and Texas in an effort to snatch an upset in the reliably red states. Although the incumbent Sen. Rick Scott looks headed for a comfortable reelection in Florida, Sen. Ted Cruz appears vulnerable in Texas. New polling from Emerson, who correctly called a narrow victory for Cruz over Beto O’Rourke in 2018, finds Democratic Rep. Colin Allred down only 4 points to Cruz with 6 percent of respondents undecided. Trump, who defeated Clinton by 9 and Biden by 6 in the Longhorn State, safely holds a 5-point advantage over Harris for the time being. Nevada and its seven electoral votes are in toss-up territory according to polling aggregator FiveThirtyEight. The latest Emerson poll from the region finds the two candidates locked in a statistical dead heat. Trump, who lost the state by nearly 3 percentage points in 2020, has attempted to make inroads with service workers by promising “no tax on tips.” Harris is scheduled to campaign in Las Vegas this weekend following her visit to Arizona.  But even if Trump wins every contested Sun Belt state, he would still need to pick off a Rust Belt state to win reelection, a task that grows more daunting by the day. Harris, who selected Wisconsin’s Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, has shown surprising strength in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin since entering the race in late July.  Trump’s stunning 2016 upset victory over Hillary Clinton was largely in part due to his performance in the Blue Wall states. His sincere message to those struggling to make ends meet in the bombed-out husk of what was once America’s palatial manufacturing hub rang true in a way that no other politician on the left or right could enunciate.  Michigan-born filmmaker Michael Moore, whose brilliant 1989 film Roger and Me depicted the economic devastation wrought by the exodus of car manufacturers in Michigan cities such as Flint, understood better than anyone Trump’s appeal to those abandoned by America’s wealthiest: Donald Trump came to the Detroit economic club, and stood there in front of the Ford Motor executives and said, ‘If you close these factories as you’re planning to do in Detroit and build them in Mexico, I’m going to put a 35% tariff on those cars when you send them back and nobody is going to buy them. It was an amazing thing to see. No politician, Republican or Democrat, had ever said anything like that to these executives. And it was music to the ears of people in Michigan, and Ohio, and Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The Brexit States. Trump’s 35 percent tariff threat never materialized. In 2019, Trump unexpectedly levied a 5 percent tariff on all goods imported from Mexico. The decision was heavily criticized by Trump’s own administration and was quickly scuttled, although Trump claimed the measure had abated illegal immigration.  In a throwback to the 2016 campaign, Trump said on Tuesday that he will impose a 100 percent tariff on all cars imported from Mexico if he is reelected president. “The only way they’ll get rid of that tariff is if they want to build a plant right here in the United States, with you people operating that plant,” Trump told a crowd in Georgia.  The 100 percent tariff proposal came only a day after Trump, flanked by John Deere equipment, threatened the company with a 200 percent tariff if they go through with a plan to move a significant part of its manufacturing base to Mexico. A spokesperson for the company refuted Trump’s claims, noting that John Deere has had a presence in Mexico since 1952. “We are not moving to Mexico,” read a tersely-worded missive released in response to Trump’s remarks.  Whether Trump’s tough talk on tariffs resonates with voters remains to be seen. Voters in the Rust Belt have certainly watched the former president fail to deliver on such promises in the past and his numbers in the Rust Belt aren’t nearly as positive as the Sun Belt figures show, although Pennsylvania appears to be in play heading into the final stretch.  The shifting nature of the 2024 election is indicative of the sublimely chaotic and rare air Americans find themselves in today. Late Thursday night, a new poll from Bloomberg/Morning Consult put Harris ahead thinly in all of the swing states. If one thing is certain, this race can shift on a dime. For Trump, the hope is he lands heads up at the right moment. The post Trump Ripens in the Sun Belt appeared first on The American Conservative.

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