◼ In fairness, they did say if Trump won there’d be martial law.
◼ President Biden repeatedly vowed, and his White House indignantly insisted, that he would never pardon his adult son Hunter, then claimed he had changed his mind out of fatherly love. But Hunter’s legal strategy made sense only on the assumption that a pardon would occur. It was the political calendar that temporarily stayed his hand. A pre-election pardon would have wounded his and, ultimately, Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign; so Hunter was charged and, when the Department of Justice failed in its efforts to make the case disappear with a sweetheart plea deal, he was prosecuted for his tax and gun offenses. The defense strategy—admit nothing, allow Hunter to be found guilty on every charge with no concern about mounting prison exposure—presumed a pardon. And so the pardon came . . . with Biden already out to pasture and Harris having lost. Judge Mark Scarsi, who presided over the tax case, acknowledged Biden’s power to erase the charges but ripped the president’s attempt to pretend that Hunter had been selectively prosecuted by Biden’s own DOJ. The opposite was true: The pardon continues a pattern of coddling and advantage no normal defendant would have received.
◼ Now Biden’s aides are reportedly considering blanket preemptive pardons to “a range of current and former public officials” whom the Trump administration might prosecute. The list is expected to include figures like former public health official Anthony Fauci and California senator-elect Adam Schiff. These individuals have not yet been charged with any crimes, and the Biden team does not know what crimes they might be charged with (or, for that matter, might have committed). Didn’t pay all your taxes? Don’t worry, you’re covered. Hired a nanny who’s not a legal immigrant? No sweat, you can’t be prosecuted. Committed perjury before Congress by insisting that the U.S. was not funding gain-of-function research? Just point to the pardon. Get-out-of-jail free cards apparently do exist, and some in the White House want to hand them out the way Oprah used to give out cars.
◼ The nomination of Pete Hegseth to be the next secretary of defense appears to be on shaky ground. Besides his relative inexperience in managing large organizations, the nominee has been beset by allegations of womanizing, frequent drunkenness, and misuse of funds while serving as the president of Concerned Veterans for America from 2013 until 2016. His mother, Penelope Hegseth, in a furious note to him in 2018, declared: “I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man.” She told the New York Times that she had fired off the original email “in anger, with emotion,” that she had quickly apologized, and that she now fully supports her son’s nomination. Finally, according to anonymous claims sourced to Fox News employees, Hegseth’s problematic drinking continued during his years there. Yet plenty of Hegseth’s former co-workers state, on the record, that they saw no such thing. As of this writing, no Republican senator has stated an intention to oppose the nomination, but at least six have expressed concerns. Perhaps the biggest indicator that the nomination may sink is the report that President-elect Trump and his team are looking at other options to run the Pentagon, including Florida governor Ron DeSantis, Iowa senator Joni Ernst, and Tennessee senator Bill Hagerty. Hegseth says he has no intention of withdrawing from consideration and has reportedly told Republican senators that, if he is confirmed to the job, he won’t drink at all. Whether senators find that pledge reassuring or disconcerting is not yet clear.
◼ The president-elect’s nominee for secretary of labor is a co-sponsor of the PRO Act, supported legislation that would require every state and local government to collectively bargain with left-wing public-employee unions, was endorsed in her last election by the American Federation of Government Employees, and has received praise from Senator Elizabeth Warren and from Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. No, you aren’t in an alternative reality where Kamala Harris won the election. Trump’s intent to nominate Representative Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R., Ore.) as secretary of labor traduces conservative principles and undermines his own agenda. Unions stand in the way of policies Trump supports, such as school choice and civil service reform. Trump romped through the Sunbelt states that are growing in part because they don’t have powerful government unions demanding the tax-and-spend policies that blue-state residents are fleeing. Chavez-DeRemer could have been the token “Republican” in a Harris cabinet. A Republican administration needs a pro-worker, not pro-union, secretary of labor.
◼ In United States v. Skrmetti, the Supreme Court is asked to decide whether a Tennessee law that restricts the use of puberty blockers and hormones by minors violates the 14th Amendment. To begin with the obvious, the 14th Amendment says nothing of the sort; under its original public meaning, this case is no contest. The Court’s decision to treat workplace transgender discrimination as “sex discrimination” in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020) was an error, but it also read different statutory language in a different context. The equal protection clause says nothing about sex discrimination; the ultimate question is whether distinctions make sense. The Court has long and rightly ruled that racial classifications don’t. It has long used “intermediate scrutiny” for sex distinctions because sex differences obviously matter in many contexts. The challengers to the Tennessee law argue that it is sex discrimination to restrict gender transition treatments but not identically restrict every other treatment using the same hormones or puberty blockers. But if boys becoming men is different from boys trying to become women, or if testosterone has a different effect on the bodies of boys than it does on the bodies of girls, then the Tennessee law draws a rational distinction. The rest is semantics.
