◼ “Pardon me” has a whole different meaning in the Biden household.
◼ So relentless has been the release of Donald Trump’s first-week executive orders that it has been tough to keep pace. Once, presidencies were judged after a year. Later, this became “One Hundred Days.” Now, our newly inaugurated executives operate in hours. All told, Trump’s edicts fall into three categories: clearly legal, probably legal but deserving scrutiny, and presumptively illegal. Among the clearly legal changes that Trump has made are the declaration of an emergency at the southern border; the return of the “Remain in Mexico” policy; a freeze on the acquisition of new bureaucrats; the destruction of federal DEI programs; the ending of government efforts to censor or shape social media; the reversal of the electric vehicle mandate; the restoration of military personnel whom Joe Biden fired for refusing the Covid-19 vaccine; the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris climate agreement; and the establishment of a policy “to recognize two sexes, male and female.” Excellent all. Among the decisions that are probably legal are the invocation of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act and the designation of Mexican drug cartels as “terrorists,” as well as the declaration that the energy sector is in “emergency.” Among the bad are the announcement of a 75-day pause on the enforcement of Congress’s ban on TikTok—which, by the plain terms of the law, grants Trump no such authority—and a directive to reinterpret the Constitution so that the 14th Amendment does not confer automatic citizenship on the children born on U.S. soil to illegal immigrants or holders of temporary visas. As with Joe Biden and Barack Obama before him, Trump’s flurry of orders is ultimately the product of a legislative branch that has been content to leave the spadework to the president, and to a presidency that has begun to take cynical advantage of that trend.
◼ In 2021, Shahram Poursafi, a member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, attempted to arrange the assassination of Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton. The Department of Justice’s indictment documented that he was willing to pay $300,000 and provided the would-be-assassin Bolton’s work address and “specifics regarding the former National Security Advisor’s schedule that do not appear to have been publicly available.” Bolton was marked for death “likely in retaliation for the January 2020 death of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—Qods Force (IRGC-QF) commander Qasem Soleimani”—a strike on a notorious Iranian supporter of terrorism against Americans, ordered by President Trump. Poursafi is on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. Now Trump has taken away Bolton’s security detail, right after pledging in his inaugural address, “I have no higher responsibility than to defend our country from threats.” In addition to Bolton, Trump revoked the security protection of two other first-term officials facing threats from Iran who got on his bad side—former secretary of state Mike Pompeo and his aide Brian Hook. Trump has deliberately, and grotesquely, chosen to make his former staffers more vulnerable to potential assassination by a foreign adversary.
◼ The riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, was a national disgrace. It was also a crime. Police were assaulted. There was theft and $2.88 million in property damage. Criminal prosecutions, rightly, followed. Some 600 participants, including almost 200 rioters who carried weapons, were charged with assaulting, resisting, or impeding police. But the extraordinary and disproportionate resources deployed to charge them could not have contrasted more strongly with how Democratic prosecutors dealt with other riots and political disorders. In one of his first official acts, Trump terminated all the remaining January 6 prosecutions and pardoned over 1,500 people previously convicted, exempting only 14 of the worst defendants, who were given commutations of their sentences. Trump took political cover from Joe Biden’s abusive last-minute pardons, but he went too far. The real scandal is not that violent rioters were charged on this occasion but that they were let off on so many other occasions. While some individual cases may have warranted a pardon or commutation after a thorough review of the facts, Trump should have drawn the line there. Pardons of those convicted of nonviolent offenses are less damaging—many of them have been punished enough after four years—but should still have been done on a case-by-case basis. This is a poor start for an administration that has pledged to end the partisanship of law enforcement and restore public order.
◼ In his final minutes in office, Biden pardoned his siblings and their spouses, led by his brother Jim, his son Hunter’s principal partner in the Biden family business of selling access to Joe’s political influence. The finale was set in motion last month when the former president pardoned Hunter, after insisting prior to the election that he would not. Hunter’s pardon extinguished his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, so that he could now be forced to testify against other members of the scheme. Hence the additional pardons. Biden also preemptively pardoned public officials who had crossed swords with Trump—Anthony Fauci, General Mark Milley, and the House January 6 Committee. These were gratuitous since such officials have immunity for their official actions, but Biden framed them as necessary protection against a vindictive Trump, calculating that this would justify pardons of his family members. No one should be fooled.
◼ On their way out the door, Biden and Harris also expressed their opinion that the Equal Rights Amendment had been ratified as part of the Constitution when the Virginia legislature voted for it in 2020. Evidently it had escaped their attention during the first 208 weeks of their administration. The theory here is that, when Congress sent the amendment to the states in 1972, the action was valid but the time limit it set for ratification was not; and that, when states rescinded their ratifications, their actions were invalid. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, not prepared to get quite that creative, said that the amendment process would have to start over. Adding to the absurdity, Biden did not direct the national archivist to publish a newly amended Constitution, something she had earlier said she would not do. The only good news here is that an official almost nobody has ever heard of turned out to be a sterner defender of the Constitution than the country’s top two elected officials.
◼ Five Republican House members—Tom Kean (N.J.), Young Kim (Calif.), Mike Lawler (N.Y.), Andrew Garbarino (N.Y.), and Nick LaLota (N.Y.)—have banded together to demand the removal of the $10,000 cap on the deduction for state and local taxes. The cap was included in the 2017 tax reform, the individual provisions of which expire at the end of this year. The deduction is bad federal tax policy that shields elected Democrats (note that all five representatives are from high-tax states) from facing the consequences of their fiscal irresponsibility. Capping it, or removing it entirely, would further tax competition between states—competition that Republican states are winning by cutting their income taxes and attracting new residents in the years since the reform was enacted. With the GOP’s House majority as small as it is, these five—or any other small group of members who unite for any purpose—will have to be heard to get a tax bill passed this year, even though the cap significantly affects only relatively high earners for whose benefit national tax policy should not be manipulated.
◼ When House Republicans passed the Laken Riley Act last March, it was more a messaging bill—a way to force Democrats to confront the consequences of Joe Biden’s lax immigration enforcement regime—than legislation destined for the president’s desk. Opposing the Laken Riley Act was “the reason why we lost,” Pennsylvania’s Democratic senator John Fetterman, one of the bill’s original co-sponsors, told Fox News. “If you’re here illegally and you’re committing crimes, I don’t know why anybody thinks that it’s controversial that they all need to go.” All of a sudden, Fetterman’s colleagues agreed. After Trump’s reelection, erstwhile opponents of the bill raced to co-sponsor it. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer dropped his objection to negotiating amendments to the bill ahead of a floor vote. In the end, the legislation passed with the support of 64 votes in the upper chamber. What a difference an election makes.
◼ Israel and Hamas struck a deal for an initial cease-fire that will pause hostilities for six weeks and lead to the release of 33 hostages. The first three were released on January 19. It is the first step in a process that could see the war in Gaza come to an end, with all hostages returned to Israel. The deal gave both Biden and Trump something to take credit for, but came at a significant cost. Israelis will be required to withdraw from parts of Gaza that they wrested from terrorists after months of deadly urban warfare. Israel will also be required to release dozens of Palestinian prisoners for each hostage set free. In another cruel twist, the 33 hostages (some living, some dead, and including two U.S. citizens) will be released only gradually over the course of the 42-day initial phase. Furthermore, at the end of the first phase, Hamas will retain more than 60 hostages, including one American thought to be alive and the bodies of several others. Securing their release will require additional concessions from Israelis. No matter how great the temptation will be to get the war over and done with, the new Trump administration must hold firm on assurances made by his incoming national security team and allow Israel the latitude to resume military operations in Gaza if necessary.
◼ Members of the American Historical Association voted, 428–88, in favor of a resolution to condemn Israel’s alleged “scholasticide” in Gaza. Intellects at the United Nations define the term as “the systemic obliteration of education through the arrest, detention or killing of teachers, students and staff, and the destruction of educational infrastructure” (which better describes, say, Iran’s domestic policy). War involves the destruction of infrastructure of all sorts as a matter of course. To accuse Israel of specifically targeting Gaza’s educational infrastructure, such as it is, to hamper Gazans’ education, is risible—especially when a real education might be the only thing capable of disillusioning more young people about the Hamas death cult. A few days after the AHA’s vote, its governing council vetoed the resolution, sparing the country’s oldest professional scholarly association—which represents more than 10,000 historians—from historic ignominy. It also did its part to dispel the conceit that those who study history can stand outside it.
◼ Arlene Croce was one of the outstanding critics in America—of dance, in particular. She wrote about film and other matters as well. Her chief home was the New Yorker. Early in her career, she wrote for NR, along with Garry Wills, Joan Didion, Renata Adler, John Leonard, et al. WFB had an eye for talent, even if that talent went on to more liberal pastures. An extraordinary man, he wanted good cultural criticism for the sake of such criticism. Arlene Croce has died at 90. R.I.P.
◼ Now and then, a political consultant becomes legendary, and Stuart Spencer has been legendary for most of our lives. He was a Republican, advising Rockefeller, Ford, and Reagan. He was smart and he was good. Did he luck out having Reagan as a client? Yes, but the luck ran both ways. Stu Spencer has died at 97. R.I.P.
◼ For two decades David Lodge taught literature at the University of Birmingham (England), publishing solid scholarship and original criticism. He wrote novels on the side. Their plots he built from vignettes of academic culture, Great Britain, the Catholic Church, and their intersection in his comic imagination. In his early fiction he fondly satirized the “gloomy, grubby ornateness” of English Catholicism between the Second World War and the Second Vatican Council. With Changing Places (1975), the first installment of what became his Campus Trilogy, he revived and expanded a genre that had fallen out of fashion. Disenchanted by trends in higher education, he retired early, in 1987, and devoted the rest of his career to writing what he pleased. He wrote plays and TV scripts in addition to seven volumes of literary criticism, 16 novels, and three memoirs. Droll and reserved, his narrations shone with understated generosity. “What Lodge lacks in this book,” the campus novel Nice Work, “is a necessary edge of cruelty,” a critic complained. “He is too nice to his characters.” Strike too. Dead at 89. R.I.P.
◼ Among the many wide windows into the historical event that was the Sixties in America, the life of Peter Yarrow stands out for its spectacular view of so much happening all at once. The aspiring folk singer fresh out of Cornell and bouncing around the cafés of Greenwich Village joined with two peers to form the trio Peter, Paul and Mary, picking up where the Weavers had left off but including enough ear candy to win over audiences for whom protest songs were not the main draw. Within two years, Yarrow had written “Puff the Magic Dragon,” a poignant riff on the transition from childhood to adolescence, and rode the wave after the trio’s recording of it made them famous overnight. As if on schedule, they disbanded in 1970, leaving behind a trove of classics, including covers of “If I Had a Hammer” and “Blowin’ in the Wind,” which they had performed at MLK’s March on Washington. Convicted of taking indecent liberties with a minor, Yarrow served a prison sentence, expressed remorse in public repeatedly, and was pardoned by President Carter but chastised anew decades later in the wake of the Me Too movement. Dead at 86. R.I.P. Day is done.
◼ Last November, when former president Joe Biden was just beginning perhaps the lamest of all lame-duck periods, he awarded Cecile Richards the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He congratulated her, the former head of Planned Parenthood, for leading us “with absolute courage” and “fearlessly” toward “the America we say we are—a nation of freedom.” He also euphemistically praised her work to “defend and advance women’s reproductive rights and equality.” Richards herself disdained such euphemism: She was the first speaker to use the word “abortion” at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. It was just one sign of how she succeeded in normalizing abortion on the left. When she left her post in 2018, Time magazine praised her for strengthening an organization that didn’t even have a “centralized website” in 2006. Now, what was once the party of “safe, legal, and rare” abortion moved aggressively toward a position of taxpayer-funded abortion without limit. In her life, Richards gave no indication that she was anything but proud of this accomplishment. Dead at 67. R.I.P.
