Garden sprinklers (temporarily) dispersed the pro-Hamas revolutionaries camped on Harvard’s lawn. ¡Viva la irrigación!
It wasn’t pretty, and he had to rely on Democratic votes, but Speaker Mike Johnson finally got a $95 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan through the House, and it then won Senate approval. President Biden signed it into law. The best argument against Ukraine aid is that it is costly and depleting U.S. armaments. But it would be just as costly to bolster front-line states—as we almost certainly would feel compelled to do—if Russia were to vanquish Ukraine. As for U.S. weapons stocks, about $23 billion of the roughly $60 billion in the Ukraine portion of the bill is devoted to replenishing them, although much more needs to be done to revitalize the U.S. military–industrial base. Now, Johnson’s reward for doing the right thing is a potential challenge to his speakership led by the MAGA agitator and noted conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.). If she goes through with it, Johnson might have to rely on Democratic votes to survive. That this could be the only way to avoid another chaotic, pointless speaker fight is a commentary on the quality of a fraction of the GOP backbench, not of the leadership.
As part of the aid package, the Senate finally passed the so-called TikTok bill, a measure passed by the House of Representatives last month after TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, had the platform’s users flood the Capitol’s phone banks in protest. Under China’s National Intelligence Law of 2017, the massive fund of user data surreptitiously collected by ByteDance is the property of the Chinese Communist Party. The TikTok bill forces ByteDance to either sell the company to a neutral third party or have the app blocked in the American market. Despite attempts by lobbyists on both sides of the aisle to prevent it from reaching the floor, it passed overwhelmingly. President Biden has signed it into law, and now legal challenges await. America’s avowed foreign enemies should not be allowed to stockpile personally valuable and sometimes compromising information on some 150 million U.S. citizens.
It was perhaps inevitable that the anti-Israel demonstrations roiling college campuses across the country since the October 7 massacre would devolve into incoherent, menacing displays of hostility toward Jews, the West, and the United States. That’s what became of the protests on Columbia University’s campus this week. There, student agitators erected a makeshift tent city to protest not only Israel’s defensive war in the Gaza Strip but also, seemingly, the presence of Jews on campus. Demonstrators chanted “Burn Tel Aviv to the ground” and “Go Hamas, we love you, we support your rockets, too” as they physically pushed dissenters and visibly Jewish matriculants out of the spaces the protesters sought to “occupy.” Videos feature protesters going so far as to advise the Jews in their presence to “go back to Poland,” which Senator Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) rightly called a slogan for a “nascent pogrom.” Columbia administrators tasked New York City police with rousting the protests, but the students quickly reconstituted their encampment after the city declined to prosecute arrestees. The gauntlet has been thrown, not just at Columbia but on campuses all over the country. The remedy must include suspensions, expulsions—and more homework.
The Biden administration told the Supreme Court that Idaho’s law against abortion results in emergency rooms’ denying abortions that women need to preserve their health—and that the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act of 1986 (EMTALA) overrides the state’s law. This is part of the administration’s broader effort to federalize the abortion question by litigation and administrative fiat. Its position is bizarre. EMTALA says nothing about abortion and, indeed, requires emergency treatment for unborn children. It is a condition of state receipt of funding for Medicare, even though that program provides health care for the elderly. Justice Elena Kagan claimed at oral arguments that EMTALA allows the “medical community” to set evolving nationwide standards for emergency care that override the work of state legislatures and medical boards. In her view, then, the mandates of federal law should change over time, without approval even by an agency, let alone by Congress. The breadth of the administration’s theory was revealed when the solicitor general conceded that it would allow Congress, through spending conditions, to pass a national ban on abortion and gender-reassignment surgery. The Court should pause at such sweeping assertions.
Speaking of the Biden administration’s seizing any fig leaf in the law to claim vast authority never contemplated by Congress, the Federal Trade Commission—which, last we checked, is not the primary regulator of terms of employment—has banned most noncompete clauses, covering the contracts of some 30 million workers nationwide. Perhaps most alarmingly, the FTC claims the power to retroactively rewrite millions of existing contracts, a prospect that deprives companies of the benefits of bargains they struck by paying employees to accept such contractual terms.
There are fair policy debates over noncompete clauses, which serve the legitimate business purpose of allowing companies to recoup their investment in training employees and providing them with proprietary information but can also restrict the free movement of labor and the formation of new businesses.
Common law and the 13th Amendment’s ban on involuntary servitude have long placed outer limits on such agreements, and some states go further. But the FTC has broken from its long-standing case-by-case enforcement policy and busted the limits of its statutory powers, which is why two of the five commissioners voted against the rule, and why the Chamber of Commerce has sued to enjoin it.
