It’s President Trump’s success in restoring conservative principles that most infuriates the left.
October 24, 2019
ITEM #1: The eminent historian Victor Davis Hanson penned a great piece this week that grapples with the question of why President Trump elicits such deep hatred from so many of his political enemies.
It’s no secret that Democrats have been gunning to take down the President since before he even took office. Indeed, as Hanson reminds us, “The House Democrats simply want him impeached first, and later will fill in the blanks with the necessary high crimes and misdemeanors.”
But where exactly does this hatred come from? Ultimately, Hanson concludes that the chief driving force behind this persistent, scathing enmity is actually policy-based. As Hanson puts it, “the real source of their antipathy is his agenda.”
Hanson writes:
"Had Donald Trump in his first month as president declared that he was a centrist Republican — as many suspicious Never Trumpers predicted that he would, true to past form — and promoted cap-and-trade and solar and wind federal subsidies, tabled pipeline construction and abated federal leasing for gas and oil production, stayed in the Iran nuclear deal and Paris Climate Accord, appointed judges in the tradition of John Paul Stevens and David Souter, praised the 'responsible' Palestinian leaders, pursued 'comprehensive immigration reform' as a euphemism for blanket amnesties, then Trump would be treated largely as a George H.W. Bush or George W. Bush: hated, of course, but not obsessively so. ...
"But Trump did none of that. So, the hatred of the media, the Left, the swamp, and the celebrity industry is predicated more on the successful Trump agenda. He is systematically undoing what Barack Obama wrought, in the manner Obama sought to undo with his eight years the prior eight years of George W. Bush."
And here's the kicker:
“The Left detests Trump for a lot of reasons besides winning the 2016 election and aborting the progressive project. But mostly they hate his guts because he is trying and often succeeding to restore a conservative America at a time when his opponents thought that the mere idea was not just impossible but unhinged.”
It's well worth reading the full piece, which you can do here.
ITEM #2: Elizabeth Warren refuses to admit that her “Medicare for All” scheme would result in a tax hike on the middle class. Her hidden argument is that the money most people pay now for private health insurance is higher than the tax hike you’d pay for government health insurance.
But here’s the catch …
If you don’t like your private health insurance policy from Company A, you can always switch to another private health insurance policy from Company B … or Company C … or Company D.
With WarrenCare, you’d no longer have that choice. You’d be stuck with whatever the government decides is best. And, inevitably, the cost will go up … and up … and up … and up. It’s a metaphysical certainty.
ITEM #3: One of the main reasons government tends to be so inefficient and unresponsive is the built-in bias in favor of the status quo. Politicians and bureaucrats tend to assume that the way things are done today is the way they must be done tomorrow. This means any efforts to reform or innovate start out by facing some strong head winds.
That’s why it’s encouraging to see Senator Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) taking a fresh approach to how the federal government is organized, by introducing legislation that “would move the majority of the federal bureaucracy out of Washington D.C. to economically depressed areas.”
Per National Review:
“The ‘Helping Infrastructure Restore the Economy (HIRE) Act,’ which is cosponsored by Senator Marsha Blackburn (R., Tenn.), would move 90 percent of the positions within ten executive agencies to economically distressed regions that have a stake in the work of those respective agencies.”
Combined with steps by the Department of the Interior to move most of the Bureau of Land Management’s D.C. staff out West, this is providing a valuable lesson — that our central government need not be centralized to be effective.
ITEM #4: President Trump’s success in reining in our unwieldy federal bureaucracy remains one of his most significant achievements, and he recently produced another example that isn’t getting as much attention as it deserves.
Fortunately, the National Association of Scholars did take note, and offered strong praise of the President’s recent signing of two executive orders that, in the NAS’s words, “significantly curb our current rule by bureaucracy — now also known as the Administrative State.”
NAS explains:
The Orders will have implications for colleges and universities and in particular for campus Title IX offices, which have mushroomed alongside expanding governmental agencies.
Title IX refers to the 1972 federal law banning sex discrimination in schools receiving federal funds. Title IX also served as the pretext for vast administrative expansions under the Clinton and Obama administrations. The Clinton administration announced that “nondiscrimination” meant parity in funding for female and male athletics; Obama declared that sexual violence should be treated as sex discrimination. In both instances, these Presidents introduced significant policy changes by administrative fiat, sidestepping the legislature and skirting the formal rule-making process required by the Administrative Procedure Act (the APA ) — ultimately avoiding democratic input and accountability.
The Obama Title IX directive was especially egregious: Through a 2011 Dear Colleague Letter, the Obama Education Department effectively ordered campus Title IX Offices to investigate and punish alleged sex offenders without due process protections for the accused. As a result, nearly 500 students denied justice are now filing lawsuits against their colleges and universities, claiming they were wrongly accused and denied their due process rights. President Trump’s Education Secretary Betsy DeVos rescinded the Letter in 2017 and is expected next month to issue new regulations, which did receive public comment and input.
President Trump’s Executive Orders take direct aim at this practice of law by Dear Colleague Letter — or law by any such informal document that skips the steps necessary for democratic legitimacy.
Keep it coming, Mr. President. (Hat tip: Daniel Honchariw, Nevada Policy Research Institute.)
ITEM #5: The city of Ban — sorry, San Francisco has “added 22 states with ‘restrictive abortion laws’” to its blacklist, “forbidding city employees from traveling to those places and making deals with businesses headquartered in those places,” reports the San Francisco Chronicle.
Nevada is on the list of “banned’ states, which is pretty confusing, since Nevada’s current abortion laws are already very liberal. Let’s hope Silver State Democrats don’t cater to San Francisco’s extremists by pushing us even further to the left than we already are.
ITEM #6: As the Las Vegas Review-Journal noted in a recent editorial, “the average American household” spends $18,600 a year in taxes while spending an average of $14,800 on food, health care and clothing.
Keep that in mind as you watch and hear all these Democrat candidates for president try to buy votes with taxpayer dollars by promising things like “Medicare for All,” free college tuition and free child care.
If Democrats win and get their way, you’re going to be paying a lot more for government and have a lot less to spend on yourself and your family.
ITEM #7: In a Sunday op-ed published by the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Robert Fellner of the Nevada Policy Research Institute pointed to a “700 percent growth in administration and other non-teaching staff at public schools nationwide, a rate seven times greater than student enrollment.”
And yet the quality of education in government-run schools, especially in Nevada, continues to deteriorate.
“With spending at $10,197 per student,” Fellner notes, “the real problem facing Nevada’s public schools stems from a lack of accountability, not insufficient funding.”
And yet left-wing politicians continue to throw more of your money at the problem. Will they ever learn?
INSANITY IN AMERICA: Proving again that no one is safe and nothing is sacred when it comes to the current insanity running rampant in the progressive movement in America, University of Washington Prof. Holly Barker has put poor SpongeBob SquarePants in her sights.
Barker accuses SpongeBob and fellow denizens of Bikini Bottom of “cultural approbation,” citing "buildings shaped like pineapples, Easter Island statues, and tikis,” along with "Hawaiian-shirt motifs" and steel guitar music.
She also accuses the popular kids cartoon of anti-woman bias, and characterizes the lovable yellow sponge as "violent," "racist" and "insidious." These people need help
NOTABLE QUOTE
“Much attention has been paid to judicial activism, where judges read their preferred policies into statutes or the Constitution, resulting in law by judicial fiat. But law by bureaucracy is just as pernicious and perhaps more insidious.” — National Association of Scholars