Month: April 2024

The Ohio River tears westward through the Pittsburgh suburbs, whisks into West Virginia, cuts on through Ohio, capstones Kentucky, indexes Indiana, and terminates in Southern Illinois. In the end, it marries the mighty Mississippi. The Ohio River once marked the frontier—a land of second chances and poseur aristocrats. 

Now they just call it Trump country. 

By twofold, Louisville, Kentucky, is the most populous city on the river. Bourbon country’s finest is followed by Pittsburgh, and then ever so closely by Cincinnati. Hunter S. Thompson, a native, declared Louisville “a Southern city, with Northern problems.” A Cincinnatian in the know told me his hometown is the inverse. 

You see it when you’re there. Moving east and south across Ohio, Cincinnati is no Toledo. There is no quick-and-easy explanation of a glass industry gone away, no Detroit-style misery in miniature. Cincinnati is not comparable to Cleveland-Akron, Ohio’s Dallas-Fort Worth. Cincy has never suffered such a collapse in prestige. One hundred years ago, Cleveland was the fifth largest city in the United States—more fearsome than American-ancient Boston or nouveau Los Angeles. 

Cincinnati is also not Columbus. First, Cincinnati is more likely to keep its name. (Roman generals are grandfathered in; explorers of the last six hundred years are not.) Second, unlike Columbus, Cincinnati is not anchored to a benign cult: the Ohio State University.  

John Jeremiah Sullivan wrote that Ohio “has its very blandness and averageness, faintly comical, to cling to.” But these places are not so satirical. After all, there are hipster bars that could have been ripped from Hollywood (or anywhere these days). And there are early 20th-century homes (though often on German-named streets) refurbished by under-40s that could double as S.F. Victorians in a pinch. 

More than anywhere else in the state, Ohio’s capital Columbus (and its more transient population) often seems intent on breaking its Midwest mold in such a fashion. Though such maneuvers all feel very self-aware—which is perhaps even more Midwestern. 

Columbus is the fastest-growing city of significance in the state, though such materialist markers of success haven’t stopped many Ohioans from spouting complaints that could be heard in Northern Virginia, the Atlanta suburbs, and scores of towns across Texas, Florida, and anywhere in 21st century America that’s actually growing. 

Last, and not least, and barely in the state, is Cincinnati and the overlooked Ohio River.

It still bears emphasizing: Eight presidents of the United States have hailed from Ohio. And seven were born in the state—including the seven that occupied the Oval Office from Reconstruction to the Roaring Twenties. Seven in half a century. 

In contrast to the general understanding of American oligarchy, Ohio has been more important on the level of presidents than Harvard. Ohio politics in the Gilded Age was plausibly more important than the Democratic Party’s. And Ohio backrooms were nearly interchangeable with the GOP’s.  

The last representative of this Ohio old guard was Senator Robert Taft, who in the early 1950s substituted “sane analysis for expediency” (his words), argued China not Russia was enemy number one, and exhorted Europe to be vaguely self-reliant. 

Taft was defeated in his bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 1952 by the most plausible heir to George Washington to date: Dwight Eisenhower. Taft’s ideas seemed, for a lifetime, to be settled business, as defeated as the druids.  

Robert Taft’s father had been president of the United States and chief justice of the Supreme Court. Kids from even Southern Appalachia (a land of confusion and confused loyalty), like this writer’s grandfather, were named for the old man. For more than seventy years, to use a 21st century phrase, Robert Taft has been treated like the geopolitical version of a failson.  

Even his father William Howard Taft, that stout figure who served between Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, was seemingly abandoned by history. 

Yet along the Ohio River, up a road in Cincinnati named for the 27th president, there is a man some now think will be the 48th, and possibly the youngest ever.

In 10 years, Ohio has swapped places with Virginia on the political map. Now it is Ohio that is a soft red state a stone’s throw from Washington. 

Sure, Akron is not Arlington-close, but there are portions of Virginia that are further west of Detroit. It’s not Arizona or Wyoming. And Ohio has the arsenal of would-be commanders-in-chief to match this new prestige that comes with being important, safe for the GOP, and an hour flight from power.

Before this shift, but after Taft, Ohio had a generation of usually Democratic grandees that seems strange and supine now. 

There was Democratic Senator John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth and not the last to run a weird and blighted campaign for president. There was Republican Governor and before that Congressman John Kasich, reportedly brilliant and temperamental, but brilliant and temperamental about balanced budgets (fair) and Ukraine aid (much less so). It was a different time; it was certainly a different GOP. 

There was Speaker John Boehner, beloved by the Washington press corps and the maître d’ at the Met Club. His tenure now is set to be lost in the noise of the Newt Gingrich revolution, the Dennis Hastert catastrophe, the Nancy Pelosi stints, the Paul Ryan story, and what could still be the GOP’s Year of Five Speakers.  

There were more. Ted Strickland, Democratic governor in the Noughties and an ordained minister, was on Barack Obama’s vice-presidential search list when the Democratic Party felt the need to strike a middle ground in the culture war. 

Notably absent from the Ohio national profile in these pre-Trump years was anything in the way of an effective punch on the issue of deindustrialization. It all went down, after all. 

At the commanding heights, it was a process. As Charles Bukowski wrote in 1986: “Now in industry, there are vast layoffs (steel mills dead, technical changes in other factors of the work place). They are [laid] off by the hundreds of thousands and their faces are stunned: ‘I put in 35 years…’ ‘It ain’t right…’ ‘I don’t know what to do…’”

Especially after the collapse of communism, most statewide Republicans were tacitly for international laissez-faire. Both Democratic Senators at the time (including Glenn) and 11 of 19 congressmen voted against the North American Free Trade Agreement’s ignoble ratification. Among the Republicans voting in favor were Kasich and Rob Portman, the latter a Bushie U.S. Trade Representative and later U.S. senator.

In the meantime, many Democrats were content to rally support on these issues at the polls while often eliding immigration. They, too, seemingly achieved little. 

By the late 1990s, dissent on these subjects was marginalized to such voices as James Traficant (the “oracle from Youngstown” to some, a convicted racketeer to others) and Dennis Kucinich (more on him a little later). In Britain, these figures would have been written off as “the loony left.”

This line of thought is certain to resurface this year as Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown seeks another term in office. He’s considered a state great, having been in elected office since the Seventies. 

To his most cynical Republican critics, who have possibly been feeding lines to his opponent Bernie Moreno, Sherrod Brown is great like Elizabeth II was great. Like the late monarch, Brown is impossibly long in tenure and has been an overseer of precipitous decline. 

For now, the old statewide consensus—what MAGA populists would now call “the uniparty”—is preserved in amber in the form of current Ohio Governor Mike DeWine. Presently, he is probably best described as an anti-anti-Trump Republican. Like the current president, DeWine’s been running for office since the ’70s. This is his last gig. 

For the establishment, at least: après moi, le déluge.

West of Columbus and Northeast of Dayton, there is Jim Jordan, the congressman who in many ways was first on board with the new tendency. An unremitting presence on cable news, in office since 2001, Jordan’s tradecraft has left him open to the critique that he is agnostic on governing. 

In recent years, Jordan has sought—or been compelled by circumstance—to correct this impression. 

The current chair of the influential House Judiciary Committee, Jordan attempted a bid for speaker in the mad scrum last autumn. If Speaker Mike Johnson’s tenure collapses before the November general election, Jordan may well be the odds-on favorite to succeed him. 

Southwest in the Eighth District is below-the-radar player Warren Davidson. A West Pointer and former Army Ranger, the congressman’s “your word is your bond” personal style may be better suited for whatever comes after the Trump restoration—or the attempt at it that may soon end.  

It is not unimaginable that Davidson could wind up a senior national security official under a President Trump next year. The former president has gone out of his way to show he means business this time, to the delight of both the right and the liberal press who have papers to sell. 

On foreign policy, especially, the ex-president is short on allies and frankly running out of neocons he hasn’t fired. If a Senate vacancy opens up next year, Davidson could run for the upper chamber (he looked but passed on a run this year). 

In the meantime, Davidson could take down a speaker of the House. Like a realist Georges Danton, no single member of Congress has communicated so proudly the imperative to end the old ways. That starts with bringing the war in the east to a close, or at least American sponsorship of it. 

Dashing back to Columbus now is Cincy native and overnight Republican rock star Vivek Ramaswamy. The entrepreneur-turned-politician relocated back to Ohio in recent years. His wife is a physician at OSU. Ramaswamy passed on the 2022 Senate race only to dive headfirst into the 2024 presidential contest. 

Ramaswamy has been compared derisively to Pete Buttigieg, another millennial Ivy League “gunner.” Past the mistiest similarities, it is an inaccurate comparison. 

Buttigieg’s support was often bolstered by voters older than him. Ramaswamy, by contrast, seemed to rattle many establishment Baby Boomer conservative sensibilities while he built a youth fanbase online. 

Buttigieg is taciturn. Ramaswamy is saber-rattling. Buttigieg is the bête noire of the Bernie Sanders wing. Ramaswamy is all in on Trump and Trumpism. 

The Senate nominee this year, Moreno, is perhaps the biggest unknown. 

A Hispanic-American and a career car dealer, Moreno’s background is plainly that of the kind of striver his party both seeks to attract and increasingly has come to represent. In his primary night victory speech, Moreno castigated the U.S. trade deficit with China. 

Moreno has the staunch backing of much of the most populist and nationalist infrastructure in Washington, DC. But he does not have much in the way of an independent brand—it is one he will swiftly have to develop. 

After all, a five-alarm fire, with way more than a whiff of the political dark arts, erupted at the eleventh hour in Moreno’s primary race. A 16-year-old alleged gay dating profile on an adult website. Was it Moreno’s? 

“I reviewed all the available information and it showed that the account had only a single visit, no activity, no profile photo, consistent with a prank or someone just checking out the site. That’s it,” said AdultFriendFinder founder Andrew Cornu, denouncing the story. “It’s important to recognize that even temporary access to an email account is sufficient to create a fake dating profile in someone else’s name.”

For a party and a country seemingly debating abortion and gay rights this year with a fury not seen in decades, the impression of hypocrisy or even pathology could mean Senate control.

Even if one concedes the Republican talking point that Sherrod Brown is not all that he seems, the fact remains he has seemed just fine to voters. They have only once rejected him, in an Ohio secretary of state’s race over thirty years ago. 

Coincidentally, Moreno is also the new father-in-law of Republican Congressman Max Miller. Both are from the Cleveland area. Miller, a 35-year-old freshman representative, is a Trump White House alum, a stalwart ally of Mar-A-Lago, but not generally associated with the party’s reformist wing. 

Indeed, during the battle over Kevin McCarthy’s speakership, Miller broke with Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, the anti-McCarthy ringleader, in furious terms. His critics see him as a grandiose foreign policy hawk. He said shortly after the October 7 Hamas atrocity that Israel should be bound by “no rules of engagement.”

Miller is running for reelection this year—against Kucinich (!), last seen running Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign. Kucinich left the RFK team in mid-October, as the candidate left the Democratic race to run as an independent. 

Some near the Kennedy orbit have commented privately that Kucinich’s exodus lines up with RFK’s foreign policy post–October 7. Remarkably, on the Gaza war, Kennedy is arguably now the most hawkish of the three leading presidential candidates. 

As Trump has urged Jerusalem to “finish up” and Biden has increasingly ceded ground to his progressive left, Kennedy has overtly rejected ceasefires and truces. This has won him plaudits from such arch-hawks as the Wall Street Journal editorial board and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. 

“I don’t even know what that means right now,” Kennedy said in March of a potential stoppage in fighting. Each such cessation “has been used by Hamas to rearm, to rebuild and then launch another surprise attack. So what would be different this time?”

Surely these issues will soon come up on the campaign trail between Miller and Kucinich.

All these tensions, open disagreements and questions of authenticity and how they are settled—or not—will determine how much the Republican Party has really, truly changed. 

No discussion of Ohio, of the Republican Party, or American politics is complete any longer without addressing Senator J.D. Vance. 

For the subject at hand, he’s the 800-pound gorilla. Except what a poor analogy that is: the senator looks to be down about thirty pounds. The question of the hour is if he is, indeed, “central casting” to be Donald Trump’s second running mate. 

At first, Vance might not make all that intuitive sense for the role. Shouldn’t Trump select a woman or a minority? 

That is easier said than done, actually, as President Joe Biden found out in 2020. First Biden committed himself to the selection of a woman—it was a killing stroke to win the primary against Bernie Sanders in the waning normal days of 2020 (mid-March). By summer, the death of Minneapolis man George Floyd compelled Biden to select an African-American, ruling out white Minnesota politicians and former prosecutors such as Amy Klobuchar. 

Trump has shrewdly not hemmed himself in so tightly, but another Biden-style precedent looms. Major party presidential nominees usually don’t select non-politicians or even backbench congressmen for a reason. Statewide politicians—elected senators and governors—are more heavily vetted, and are demonstrated survivors. Yet even selecting a governor of a less populous frontier state is fraught with risk, as John McCain learned with Sarah Palin. 

Under this rubric, and ruling out clear apostates such as former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, the list is winnowed considerably: Vance; South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem; Florida Senator Marco Rubio; North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum. 

With Rubio, the main problem is logistical. Both he and Trump are residents of the same state. Would Trump move his legal residence? Amidst a sprawling dragnet of criminal indictments related to his business and political practices? Would Rubio resign his Senate seat and move to another state for a race he might well lose?

Noem is bedeviled by a whisper campaign about marital infidelity. More significantly, Noem is in a double bind politically on social issues, cutting into her appeal as a feminine complement to Trump. 

On the one hand, social conservatives view Noem as not hardline on the transsexual issue. In 2021, Noem declined to sign a transgender sports ban in college athletics, purposefully avoiding a fight with the NCAA. She cited her small state’s tourism concerns and her duty to her constituents. Conservatives such as Tucker Carlson disagreed, and the matter culminated in a Fox News showdown. 

On the other hand, Noem signed into law an abortion ban that wiped away exceptions for rape and incest. 

Noem gave a striking, inspired answer to Carlson a year later on the subject of Ukraine:

The primary external threat to the United States in Communist China. Our opposition to Russia has heightened this threat… The American people didn’t get us into this war. Joe Biden did. Biden has this fantasy that he can do the same kind of thing to Russia that Ronald Reagan did to the Soviet Union. … We’ve already overextended ourselves in our largesse to Ukraine.

But it’s likely, though not certain, that she’s staked out ground that has bled too many would-be allies. 

Burgum is a dark horse in Vance’s way. It’s difficult to see what Burgum—Midwestern, tall, business experience, brains—brings that Vance doesn’t also while legitimately exciting people. Trump is said to fear anointing a successor. But picking the little-known if probably safe Burgum risks jumping the shark. Trump once also thought highly of Rex Tillerson. 

The other question for Vance: Should he want the number 2 slot?

It is not a secret The American Conservative is a longtime confederate of the junior senator from Ohio. The upside is clear: No politician in America is as staked out as clearly on the stalwart issues of foreign policy realism, trade realism, and immigration restriction. No one. If Vance becomes vice president, he will be the runaway favorite to succeed a reelected Trump.  

There is also the potential extraordinary circumstance that Trump wins but is forced from office by legal or financial issues or poor health (with a presumably corresponding set of pardons solving some of these issues). Vance, who turns forty in August, would become the youngest president in American history. 

Yet, if Trump loses, or if he loses badly, not only does Trump go down but the most credible populist in the country is badly tarnished by a rout. Only one losing vice presidential nominee in over a century has later become president: Franklin Roosevelt. And it took FDR 12 years and the crisis of the Great Depression to recover politically from his loss on the 1920 ticket. 

For Vance, then, this is a vabanque political moment less than two years into his Senate career. 

It is especially so attached to a personality like Trump’s. The former president is the consummate gambler. Untold numbers of individuals have flamed out of his orbit. 

Is this the move?

The personal fealty between Vance and the Trumps seems genuine. Vance is clearly tight with Trump’s eldest son Donald Trump Jr. Few have been able to strike the delicate balance between Trump’s personal affairs and Trump’s political prerogatives. Has Vance found it? It would be a major asset in office. 

Much has been made of Vance’s highly bespoke political call in 2016: enthused and sympathetic about the issues Trump was raising, opposed to his becoming president. 

Five years later, in autumn 2021, Vance (before he was a senator) told me Donald Trump would be reelected and inaugurated in January 2025. Back then, I ferociously disagreed. A major horseshoe political miss that Vance has recovered from could soon be capstoned by powerful prescience very few had. 

It could make Vance the second most powerful person in the country. 

Back when I started in journalism, I worked with the longtime columnist Michael Barone. In vivid contrast with most others I met, those who warned what a tough business media was, Barone reported the industry’s upsides. Barone had predicted Mitt Romney would win 315 electoral votes in the previous election with nary a professional consequence. 

But Barone is hardly out to lunch, even if he joined organized conservatism’s strange sanguinity about the electoral appeal of Mitt Romney. He quickly followed up. 

In his 2013 work Shaping Our Nation: How Surges of Migration Transformed America and Its Politics, Barone put forward the case (which would have huge relevance in 2016) that the Midwest is the most dovish region of the United States. The Midwest was notably settled by immigrants fleeing the wars of Europe. The Germans and even the Irish-Americans in the region were less likely to support any foreign policy perceived as too pro-British, which was increasingly a hallmark of U.S. foreign policy after the Civil War.

“Southernization” has defined U.S. demography and its politics for nearly a century and especially much of the last fifty years. Americans continued (and continue) moving south and west. Between 1976 to 2004, it became conventional wisdom that any Democratic ticket that had a prayer would have to feature a Southerner, probably at the top (Carter, Clinton). 

From 1980 onwards, Republicans always featured a Southerner (and a Bush) except for 1996, an election in which the party was totally swarmed. The 1992 presidential race featured two Texas millionaires against the governor of neighboring Arkansas. The winning Democratic ticket of the 1990s was united by the Hernando de Soto Bridge in Memphis that links Tennessee and the Razorback State.   

And then, all at once, the South disappeared from the big game. 

In 2008, McCain-Palin vs. Obama-Biden skipped the region (unless you’re catching the current president on the occasional day he feels inclined to remind you that Delaware was a slave state). In 2012, Romney and Ryan were two Yankees. Parts of Indiana are arguably the South, but Mike Pence is not from that part. 

And no Southerner is in the top tier of Trump vice presidential aspirants (Miami is not the South). Three Midwesterners (Vance, Noem, Burgum) are. 

Given both the obscene housing crunch now hitting Florida and even Texas and the clear problems of the West Coast, the continued U.S. national move south and west may be no fait accompli. Much like Russia, the Midwest hopes to be a moonshot beneficiary of climate change. 

Demographics could match political reality in the coming decade. For now, political reality is already here. 

Midwest political influence—and Ohio Republican power, particularly—is back on the scene.

The post How Ohio Became the Center of the Republican World appeared first on The American Conservative.

Donald Trump has done more for the pro-life cause than any other president. As promised, he appointed the Supreme Court Justices who overturned Roe v. Wade. Yet abortion opponents are unhappy with the former president, who recently declined to endorse a federal abortion ban. Mike Pence, who served as Trump’s vice-president, called the remarks a “slap in the face.” Lila Rose, the leader of anti-abortion group Live Action, concluded that “President Trump is not a pro-life candidate.”

This conflict reflects a longer-running tension between abortion opponents and the former president. Styling himself as a consummate deal-maker, Trump has a pragmatic way of talking about issues that other politicians discuss in more principled terms. He has repeatedly bragged that he “put the pro-life movement in a strong negotiating position” by appointing the justices who reversed Roe. As one abortion opponent put it, Trump’s message to pro-life Americans is, “I’ve given you leverage now to make a better deal.”

Grateful as pro-lifers are for Trump’s appointments, they find this way of speaking about abortion unsatisfying: A right to life shouldn’t be subject to negotiation. But Trump’s approach accords with what once would have been called democratic habits of mind. When a political debate is framed in terms of rights, the compromises that are natural to democratic life will appear illegitimate.

Trump’s raw rhetoric and deviation from the bipartisan consensus on trade, immigration, and foreign policy have led some to view him as an “extremist.” His refusal to concede defeat in the 2020 election, culminating in the events of Jan. 6, was taken by many to confirm recurring claims that he was a threat to democracy.

Such criticisms obscure the fact that Trump’s policy views on immigration and social issues resemble those of Clinton-era Democrats. His opposition to free trade and nation-building foreign policy, meanwhile, may be closer to the views of the median voter than are the views he rejects.

Even after his remarks on abortion, liberal journalists and anti-Trump Republicans remain reluctant to acknowledge him moderation. Some continued to paint him as an extremist—or at least the leader of an extremist coalition. “Trump and his allies will do everything in their power to ban abortion nationwide, with or without a Republican majority in Congress,” Jamelle Bouie wrote in The New York Times.

A more inventive response came from Bill Kristol, who cited Trump’s abortion moderation as proof that Trump is, yes, a fascist. “This is classic authoritarianism. (See Eco on Ur-Fascism).” Umberto Eco describes fascism as “a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions.” So Trump’s very moderation, his refusal to endorse federal restrictions on abortion, is a sign that he is advancing a nefarious ideology.

When it comes to contradictory political stances, Kristol knows whereof he speaks. The enthusiastic promoter of Sarah Palin and unrelenting critic of Donald Trump, the high-toned opponent of public recognition of homosexuality turned unapologetic advocate for LGBT rights, Kristol himself might be described as a beehive of contradictions.

If Trump’s abortion statement left his critics on the left casting about for a line of criticism, not always convincingly, it raised more serious questions for the right. When Roe v. Wade was in force, abortion opponents eagerly framed their cause in democratic terms. They decried “the judicial usurpation of politics,” as a famous symposium in First Things put it, and hoped that their preferred policies would one day be enacted by a “moral majority.”

This democratic vision of pro-life politics has been weakened by a number of developments. Declining religiosity and rising social liberalism have led many on the right to recognize that they constitute a moral minority—certainly one of the nation’s most important political blocs, one almost completely unrepresented in most elite institutions, but a minority nonetheless.

Meanwhile, the nation’s rapid embrace of gay rights seemed to teach some conservatives a non-democratic lesson in social change. Democratically enacted referenda were knocked down by courts, changing not only the law but—in conjunction with political leaders, business executives, and media properties—public attitudes. “The law is a teacher” became a refrain on certain parts of the right.

The reversal of Roe v. Wade would seem to be an opportunity for this non-democratic idea of social change. But as Darel Paul pointed out in Compact, counter-majoritarian political strategies will be difficult to pursue when the wealthiest and most educated classes—those best positioned to wield legal, economic, and cultural power on behalf of an unpopular view—are opposed.

In this context, Trump’s moderation may be the best the opponents of abortion can hope for. Ryan Williams, president of the Claremont Institute, defended Trump’s statement, saying, “The pro-life movement needs to take its bearings from Lincoln, not William Lloyd Garrison.” It is a wise remark. Lincoln’s statesmanship, not Garrison’s radicalism, led to the triumph of the anti-slavery cause. Lord Charnwood, Lincoln’s great biographer, observed that Lincoln’s approach to slavery involved “watching and waiting while blood flows, suspending judgment, temporizing, making trial of this expedient and of that.” Lincoln’s attitude toward slavery was less radical than Garrison’s; he succeeded by implementing “a policy of deadly moderation towards it.” A little deadly moderation may be just what the pro-life movement needs.

The post A Lesson for Pro-Lifers appeared first on The American Conservative.

The recent death at the age of 101 of Norman Lear, creator of All in the Family and its improbable folk hero, Archie Bunker, set me to musing (always a dangerous thing) over Archie’s voting history and the dirty tricks that politics plays on us all.

I doubt if anyone under the age of 60 grasps the impact of All in the Family when it debuted on CBS in 1971. This wasn’t Punky Brewster or Manimal. Archie Bunker was a malaprop-tripping, outer-borough (Queens), blue-collar union-man paterfamilias given to bigoted asides and (thanks to actor Carroll O’Connor) perfectly timed double-takes. Whatever Lear’s satiric intentions, Archie became a beloved character during the show’s heyday, before it descended into stupid laugh-track moralizing. 

Norman Lear was a thoughtful pro-free speech liberal Democrat, a species rarer than goldfish-swallowers on today’s campuses. Even as a left-sympathizing kid I scorned Archie’s liberal son-in-law and sparring partner, played by Rob Reiner, as a self-righteous ingrate, and my guess is that Lear wanted it that way.

Yet Lear cheated, too. The wistful line in the All in the Family theme song—“Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again”–warbled off-key by Archie and his long-suffering wife Edith, is dishonest even by sitcom standards. The archetypal Archie would have been a pedigreed FDR Democrat. His supposed Protestantism was also ridiculous: Archie—with a different forename—would’ve been Catholic.

Surely he cast his first votes for FDR in 1944 and Truman in 1948 over the prig (and Kitty Carlisle’s boytoy) Thomas E. Dewey, the little man on the wedding cake. Archie (without the Hollywood makeover) liked Ike but voted rotely for egghead Adlai Stevenson in ’52 and ’56. He was JFK all the way in 1960 before facing his first ballot-box temptation: jumping the fence for anti-Civil Rights Act Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964. But…Social Security. Archie was no entitlement-reform wonk, so he pulled the lever, with misgivings, for LBJ.

In 1968 Archie could’ve gone any of three ways. (And here let me recommend Luke Nichter’s perceptive account of that race, The Year that Broke Politics.) George Wallace’s denunciation of “pointy-headed intellectuals” who can’t park their bicycles straight was the summit of Bunker’s hill, but his defense of segregation was its nadir. In any event, Wallace’s Southernness would’ve been too strange. 

Hubert Humphrey’s full-throated endorsement of civil rights would’ve irritated Archie, but the Hump was for whatever the big unions were for—including the manufacture if not necessarily use of weapons of mass destruction—so after a moment’s hesitation in the voting booth Archie chose HHH against Nixon. The Minnesota motormouth would be his last Democrat.

(Thinking on this sent me back to Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, a formative reading experience for the teenaged me. The Aspen assassin wrote, “Any political party that can’t cough up anything better than a treacherous brain-damaged old vulture like Hubert Humphrey deserves every beating it gets. They don’t hardly make ‘em like Hubert any more—but just to be on the safe side, he should be castrated anyway.” It’d be pretty easy to update that passage for 2024.)

In 1972 Archie Bunker, over the Hump, flipped to the GOP for good, turned off by George McGovern—or, rather, the caricatured misrepresentation (abetted by the Democratic candidate’s obnoxious celebrity supporters) of the true patriot McGovern as an acid-dropping, welfare-dispensing commie.

Carroll O’Connor was no more Archie Bunker than Charlton Heston was Moses. In a 1972 Democratic primary race containing two genuine if mottled populists—Oklahoma senator Fred Harris on the “left” and George Wallace on the “right”—the actor stumped for the silk-stocking Republican turned Democrat John Lindsay, whose limousine liberalism would’ve reduced Archie to paroxysmal sputtering.

Long after the laughter has died, the last joke is on Archie—the real one, not the Hoover-voting Protestant. The Bunkeresque tough-talking white Democratic mayors of the 1950s and ‘60s collaborated in the destruction of their cities and the neighborhoods that gave them life via urban renewal and the Interstate Highway System. At the national level, the Trumans and Johnsons that Archie supported shipped working-class boys into the abattoirs of Korea and Vietnam while militarizing the economy. 

Archie turned coat just as the Republicans were taking up the mantle of world policeman from Vietnam-spooked Democrats and as the GOP’s stolid but solid Main Street faction was being bulldozed by Wall Street.

If only the Archie Bunkers had voted for Herbert Hoover—who once said that what America needs is a great poem—and George McGovern, who requested, sensibly and sincerely, that America come home in the spirit of peace and community. I’ll bet Norman Lear would’ve loved that country.

The post Sitcom King Lear appeared first on The American Conservative.

Take a dip in the murky waters of recent Trump Apocalypse journalism—it says there’s gonna be a civil war and dictatorship. But don’t worry, not really—it’s just the politics of fear.

In a scary article subtitled “Donald Trump is warning that 2024 could be America’s last election,” New Republic alerts us that, if Trump wins, America is pretty much done being a democracy. “If we don’t win on November 5, I think our country is going to cease to exist. It could be the last election we ever have. I actually mean that,” Trump said out loud at a recent rally, so it couldn’t possibly be hyperbole, busting the chops of the mass media like a smart-aleck guy from Queens might do, or throwing red meat to his unwashed supporters like a wily candidate might do.

After that, you get the standard list of bad things Trump has said: “He has claimed that he wants to be a dictator, but only on ‘day one,’ and plans to install his legal allies at all levels of government. And his Cabinet? It’s sure to be full of ideologues, immigration hard-liners, and outright fascists. Even conservative judges claim he’ll shred the legal system… It might not be a stretch to suggest that Trump could plan another January 6–type event if he loses. After all, only months prior to the Capitol insurrection, he urged the Proud Boys to ‘stand back and stand by’ on a debate stage.”

In another recent article at the New Republic, one writer imagined possible election outcomes, concluding, “The election cycle either ends in chaos and violence, balkanization, or a descent into a modern theocratic fascist dystopia.” 

And what politics of fear round-up of Trump Terror Titillation would be complete without this out-of-context quote: “Now if I don’t get elected, it’s gonna be a bloodbath for the whole—that’s gonna be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.” Somewhere after that inevitably comes a mention of how our system of bypassing the popular vote in favor of the Electoral College (in place some 230 years) is undemocratic even if it has resulted in a democracy each and every time it has been used.

Then there are the Christian nationalists, who are supposedly increasingly calling for “dual sovereignty” and implementation of “a Scripture-based system of government whereby Christ-ordained ‘civil magistrates’ exercise authority over the American public” according to a manifesto made public. The result is a United States that is one country in name only. “Christian Nationalism” is supposedly a priority for a second Trump term.

This all is quite an ambitious goal for Trump, given that the only lasting social policy he is remembered for (Dobbs) came from the Supreme Court acting in its standard constitutional way, not by any Trump-sponsored legislation or diktat.

Speaking of democracy being used to destroy democracy, Trump-Apocalyptic writers do love less-well-known Constitutional passages like the Twelfth Amendment. This starts with the Speaker of the House refusing to certify election results which show a Biden victory. Then the Twelfth Amendment kicks in to decide the election. This lets the House of Representatives—the one elected in November, which might be majority or even overwhelmingly Republican—determine the outcome, with each state getting one vote. If things don’t work out for Trump this way, then J6 times 100, yadda yadda.

And they do love invoking the Insurrection Act, something Trump actually never did in his four years. “If this results in fatalities and mass detentions,” says the first New Republic article, “it will exacerbate the situation, leading to many people on both the left and right concluding violence is the only viable option for change, resistance, or as a response to resistance.” New Republic further believes that “right-wing elements have long been itching to use violence to put ‘those people’ in their place,” so watch out when you take the dog out for a walk.

And most of that is horror tales if Trump loses, or gerrymanders a win. What if he actually wins outright and overwhelmingly (aka “the will of the people,” but, oh, never mind)?

The New Republic leads again, stating,

Trump will absolutely let his team attempt to implement Christian nationalism across the U.S. and use every means available to achieve its vision of an America with no immigrants, no trans people, no Muslims, no abortion, no birth control, Russian-style ‘Don’t Say Gay’ laws, license to discriminate based on religion, and all government education funding going to religious schools. Blue states will try to resist this and invoke the same states’ rights and ‘dual sovereignty’ arguments, but it’s unlikely they will succeed due to conservative bias on the Supreme Court and the Trump administration’s willingness to blow off court rulings it doesn’t like. If Trump goes straight to a massacre via the Insurrection Act, civil war is on the table. If Trump manages to bring blue states to heel via legal means, and resistance is insufficient to compel blue state governors to refuse to comply, then we end up with fascist, theocratic, hereditary dictatorship.

In short, says the Washington Post, “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.”

Whew. Once you step across the line into writing about Trump dictatorships and Christian nationalism as living, breathing threats, things get pretty crazy pretty fast. Why is this?

Occam’s Razor says this is all hullabaloo, pure malarkey, with tabloid-jealous writers doing it for the most clicks and dopamine hits, trying to outdo one another trying to whip up fear of Trump. It is good for business, and very easy to do. Freed from the old-school journalism restraints of having to muster facts to support opinions, anything—including imagining a civil war—is possible.

A second possibility is the journalists who write articles such as these are an extreme edge of a broader Democratic strategy of scaring people into not voting for Trump. Scare votes have long been a popular strategy, from the racist propaganda in post-bellum South, to the famous Lyndon Johnson “daisy girl” commercial dubbing his opponent a nuclear monster ready to start WWIII, to Willie Horton, and, of course, to 2016’s “Trump is a Russian spy.”

The current spate of articles have all the hallmarks of traditional fear politics, with a particularly heavy dose of “Framing the Opposition.” Political ads often frame opponents as dangerous or unfit for office, playing on fears of what might happen if they were to gain power. This can be seen as a desperate move, given how they contribute to a climate of distrust and polarization within society.

To be fair, it is of course possible that the writers actually believe what they are writing, that we are steps away from the collapse of democracy. But you don’t believe that, do you?

The post Trump Apocalypse Hysteria Is Spiraling Into Madness appeared first on The American Conservative.

The American civil bureaucracy accomplished enormous successes from the time the Constitution was adopted through the Civil War and the early years of Reconstruction. The country incorporated more than half the land mass that comprises the contiguous United States today, including through the Louisiana Purchase. The U.S. undertook and accomplished enormous public works projects, constructing the Erie Canal and the National Road, the nationwide telegram system, and the transcontinental railroad. Americans were victorious in battle, successfully repelling the British invasion in the War of 1812 and winning the Mexican-American War. These were sensational and advanced accomplishments, unrivaled among the rest of the contemporaneous world. 

Today, the civil bureaucracy of that era is derided as the Jacksonian “spoils system,” which its numerous critics describe as a web of political patronage that allowed individuals to purchase positions in the federal bureaucracy with their political donations. A system as crass as that should be rightfully criticized, but the dominant “spoils system” narrative does not accurately portray the historical reality and instead merely parrots the talking points of Jackson’s political opponents to caricature a movement that actually promoted democratic accountability.

In truth, Jackson did not “gut” the federal government, as his critics allege, but replaced approximately 9 percent of its workforce with loyalists who wanted to advance the policies he had been elected to enact. This was not an affront to democracy but rather the embodiment of it, and it was not without precedent. In proportion to the size of the federal government at the time, President Jefferson gutted a larger percentage of the federal workforce when he took office, and other early presidents supported the president’s power to remove any member of the executive branch. Such removal, even at a larger scale, was not anti-democratic but a core feature  of the political accountability of the executive branch.

Today, the civil bureaucracy is not creative, accomplished, or even responsive to the president; it is stagnant and a drag on the country, and it is no wonder. Rather than being staffed with regular Americans chosen for their ideas or leadership capability by a duly enacted president, the bureaucracy of today is composed of credentialed box-checkers insulated from political accountability by undemocratic civil service protections. Of the roughly 2.2 million federal bureaucrats and 10 million federal contractors, only about 4,000 roles are political appointees accountable to the president. What is worse, this unaccountable bureaucracy is an active arm of the Left, and not any reflection of the diversity of political thought among the American people or their elected leaders.

One can judge the bureaucracy by its controversies. IRS bureaucrats targeted “patriot” organizations for their conservative identity; the national security agencies wielded anti-terrorism authorities to investigate a rival presidential campaign and unmask its senior-level political advisors; bureaucrats across numerous agencies applied pressure to social media companies to repress conservative political speech with which they disagreed; and even the Department of Justice, supposedly the paragon of neutrality and the arbiter of the rule of law, has embarrassed itself over its irreconcilable enforcement choices. It executed a pre-dawn raid of Roger Stone, while allowing the statute of limitations to run on most of Hunter Biden’s crimes. It prosecuted Peter Navarro for refusing to answer a congressional subpoena, but when Eric Holder did the same, DOJ declined to bring charges. It raided, arrested, and prosecuted a pro-life protestor who was ultimately acquitted on all charges, while Antifa and BLM rioters were never charged.

Unsurprisingly, a leftist bureaucracy willing to wage war on its political opponents is also unwilling to help them achieve their policy priorities. Today, the key challenge facing a Republican president, in the words of political scientist Clinton Rossiter, is “not to persuade Congress to support a policy dear to his political heart, but to persuade the pertinent bureau or agency—even when headed by men of his own choosing—to follow his direction faithfully and transform the shadow of the policy into the substance of the program.” The reason? Federal civil service laws that protect and insulate the bureaucracy from the president’s control, contrary to the Constitution’s demands. 

Reforming those laws must be a top priority of the next Trump administration, and the centerpiece of that reform cannot be the Schedule F proposal put forward in the first Trump presidency. That idea, which would at most designate a small proportion of the bureaucracy for greater presidential removal authority and control, cannot begin to stand up against the threat of the administrative state writ large. Nor is there any reason for conservatives to be satisfied with such an incremental, technocratic, work-inside-the-system proposal. The facts are apparent to the American people that the weaponization of government has never been on fuller display. There will not be a more convincing record on which to campaign to dismantle the administrative state, nor will there be a second chance to try. If the administrative state survives unscathed and unreformed after the last ten years of abuses, the already bold bureaucrats will grow bolder and and reform will be out of reach. 

Today the Left defends the civil service protections of the federal bureaucracy as if they were handed down on stone tablets, but the reality is that they are an amalgamation of entrenched policies reflecting a progressive worldview, essentially a one-way ratchet that has grown more powerful with every Democrat administration and rarely if ever knocked back when Republicans ascend to power.

The first major attempt at establishing protected status for the civil service was the adoption of the Pendleton Act in 1883. In the years before its passage, the concept of civil service reform was hotly contested and a source of division in electoral politics. Public opinion for the reform coalesced in the aftermath of President James Garfield’s assassination. Garfield was shot and killed by a man named Charles Guiteau, whose professed motivation was having been passed over for a diplomatic position to which he believed he was entitled based on his support for Garfield’s campaign. In reality, Guiteau was mentally ill. He had a history of fraud and dishonest dealings as a lawyer, including pocketing money his clients won in litigation. He was a plagiarist, narcissist, thief, domestic abuser, and a self-professed prophet of God. The idea that Guiteau had any claim to a diplomatic role in the Garfield administration was merely a symptom of his insanity.

Civil service reformers relied on the emotional pull of the Guiteau story to rally support for their cause. The National Civil Service Reform League circulated nationwide a letter relying on “the recent murderous attack” to promote reform legislation. Senator George Pendleton of Ohio was even more explicit when promoting the  reform bill that bore his name: Guiteau’s “desire for office—the belief that he had earned it…made this crime possible…made it possible for the assassin to assert that he thought he was doing his party and his country a service.” In fact, what made Guiteau’s crime possible was his insanity, which was surely no basis on which to enact political reform. But rhetoric like this worked, and the Pendleton Civil Service Act was enacted in 1883.

Despite the swelling support for reform based on the despicable acts of a madman, the Pendleton Act’s actual effect was modest. It charged the Civil Service Commission to institute “open, competitive examinations for testing the fitness of applicants for the public service,” examinations that would “relate to those matters which will fairly test the relative capacity and fitness of the persons examined to discharge the[ir] duties.” Jobs were to be available only to the highest-scoring applicants and also apportioned among the states and territories based on the latest census. New appointees were to be given a period of probation at the outset of their employment.

Perhaps most importantly, this new opportunity for open, merit-based civil-service selection was limited to roughly 10 percent of the federal bureaucracy at the time, essentially customs officials (“clerks and persons employed by the collector, naval officer, surveyor, and appraisers”) and some postal employees. Both categories encompassed positions of trust where political accountability was of little importance. It was important that the individuals inspecting citizens’ goods, assessing customs dues, and handling official mail be competitively selected in open, merit-based hiring, not based on political connections. 

Over time, the Pendleton Act’s modest reforms have metastasized across the federal government, transforming it beyond what even its proponents would recognize.

First, the act’s coverage expanded until, roughly a century after the Pendleton Act took effect, 90 percent of the federal bureaucracy fell under the purview of the Civil Service Commission. This meant that civil service reforms that were once limited to select trust positions far removed from policymaking are today so expansive that they encompass legions of supposedly non-political civil service employees who actually perform policymaking and policy-advocating work.

The greater reach of these reforms is compounded by the enormously expanded reach of the federal government over the same period of time, a longstanding trend but one that grew exponentially out of the New Deal. Because of the ever-expanding federal government, more civil servants doing policy-related work are protected by civil service rules and the policy work they do reaches further into citizens’ lives than ever before. Protected bureaucrats can designate a neighborhood parcel as a protected wetland, eliminate incandescent lightbulbs in homes, and demand that half of cars sold be electric vehicles, infrastructure inadequacies be damned. 

Second, the Carter administration scrapped merit-based examinations, which had been a key feature of civil service hiring beginning with the Pendleton Act. At the start of the Carter administration, the Professional and Administrative Career Examination (PACE) served as a gateway for college graduates seeking top agency positions in the executive branch. The test was a general intelligence exam aimed at assessing and predicting skills in verbal comprehension, judgment, and deductive, inductive, and quantitative reasoning. Studies showed that success on the test was an excellent predictor of success on the job. In the late 1970s, however, other studies emerged that indicated black test-takers performed disproportionately worse on PACE. The data was imperfect, and the Office of Personnel Management believed that the disparate test results had no “bottom line” adverse impact on minorities in PACE occupations because of other equalizing means for entering those jobs, including internal promotion. OPM data showed that 17 percent of the employees in the most populous PACE occupations were minorities, which was higher than the relevant labor market statistics at the time. But activists sued the Carter Administration over the disparate impact of PACE, and in the twilight of his presidency, Carter’s Department of Justice (perhaps without directly consulting the president or his advisors) settled the case with a consent decree that scrapped the test just as the plaintiffs sought and set in place a racial quota system instead: minority applicants must be selected for jobs at a rate proportional to the number who apply.  

Various other aspects of the Pendleton Act’s reforms have been abandoned, too. There are no geographic requirements for apportioning civil service roles. Instead, the bureaucracy is primarily staffed by individuals who spend their careers in and around the District of Columbia. Far from requiring probation periods for new employees to demonstrate their fitness for their roles, in today’s civil service misbehavior is extremely difficult to address and firing nearly impossible. Unable to address misbehavior, the civil service now incentivizes performance with pay bonuses. This has not solved the problem. Even the bureaucracy’s worst performers (for example, the Veterans Administration executives who encouraged false reporting about waiting lists for hospital admissions) receive “outstanding” ratings and qualify for these incentives. The Government Accountability Office has acknowledged that the bureaucracy has no way to stratify employees based on the existing performance evaluation system, under which more than 99 percent of federal employees rate as “successful” or above. The result is that pay raises have become automatic and so-called “incentive pay” serves as “free money” to recipients, untethered from exemplary, metric-tested accomplishments. 

Other reforms have also contributed to changing the character of the federal bureaucracy. John F. Kennedy gave federal employees the right to unionize and collectively bargain in 1962, and Lyndon B. Johnson expanded the right to include binding arbitration of certain disputes beginning in 1969. Every subsequent Democratic president took executive action to further expand the rights of public employee unions. President Carter enjoyed congressional support for additional pro-public-union reforms that were rolled into the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978. Among other things, that law expressed Congress’s view that public-employee unions “safeguard the public interest” because they promote “the highest standards of employee performance and the continued … implementation of modern and progressive work practices to … improve employee performance and the efficient accomplishment of the operations of the Government.” Nothing could be further from the truth today, when public-employee unions insulate low-performing or outright misbehaving federal employees from termination. Federal public employee unions impose greater costs on taxpayers and interpose quintessentially private interests (the preferences of public employees) between the citizenry and their government.

Not content merely with bargaining rights, Democrats also enacted employment protections for the civil service in the same 1978 Act. These reforms imposed for-cause limitations on subjecting covered employees to adverse employment actions and also guaranteed civil service bureaucrats extensive procedural protections before an adverse action is taken. Adverse actions include not only suspension and termination but also a reduction in grade or pay. The procedural protections include advanced notice of any adverse action, an opportunity to respond, the right to be represented, and an appeal, to be heard by the new Merit Service Protection Board, which the 1978 Act also created. These are exactly the kinds of procedural protections that a private sector union might be expected to bargain for; public employees of the federal government, however, enjoy these protections by statute, outside of any collective bargaining.  

The net result of these changes is that our federal bureaucracy reflects neither the ideals of the Founders nor the principles that supposedly justified the growth of the administrative state and accompanying civil service “reform” over the past 150 years. 

The Founders believed in accountable government and rejected proposals that would have insulated executive branch officers, even minor officers, from the president’s sole control. In 1789, the early Congress debated a bill to create a foreign affairs department, including what removal authority should govern it: removal by the President, or authority based in Congress, or blended between the branches? In debating the bill, Madison spoke about the Constitution’s intentions for accountability at all levels of the executive branch and the best protections against maladministration: 

The danger to liberty, the danger of mal-administration has not yet been found to lay so much in the facility of introducing improper persons into office, as in the difficulty of displacing those who are unworthy of the public trust. If it is said that an officer once appointed shall not be displaced without the formality required by impeachment, I shall be glad to know what security we have for the faithful administration of the government. Every individual in the long chain which extends from the highest to the lowest link of the executive magistracy, would find a security in his situation which would relax his fidelity and promptitude in the discharge of his duty.

And he minced no words about where the chain of executive authority should terminate:

If the president should possess alone the power of removal from office, those who are employed in the execution of the law will be in their proper situation, and the chain of dependence be preserved; the lowest officers, the middle grade, and the highest, will depend, as they ought, on the president, and the president on the community. The chain of dependence therefore terminates in the supreme body, namely, in the people, who will possess besides, in aid of their original power, the decisive engine of impeachment.

In his speech, Madison explains that this structure of executive accountability flows from the Constitution itself, its structure and its guarantee of republican government.

Proponents of the burgeoning and protected civil service bureaucracy claim that the structure of the administrative state today serves other goals, goals the Founders could not have envisioned based on the size of the nation and the complexity of today’s economy. They say the demands of modern governance require rule by experts, best achieved through meritocratic bureaucracy. I have previously written about a key originator of these ideas, James Landis, an intellectual whose idea of a three-branches-in-one administrative state provided the theoretical architecture supporting FDR’s radical reconstructions and expansion of the federal government.

The drive to produce a federal bureaucracy of merited experts has been shared by both parties, such that even efforts to “reform” the administrative state have been undertaken with the goal of encouraging merit and expertise. But if the goal of the federal bureaucracy is merit, we do not have a system designed to produce it. Objective criteria, like civil service examinations, have been jettisoned. Employee performance evaluations are inflated and meaningless. Procedural protections insulate federal employees from consequences for poor performance or misbehavior.

Far from producing a meritocratic bureaucracy, the civil service system produces a bloated and lethargic class of unaccountable “experts,” who have been captured by the political Left. In the 2020 election, of those federal employees who donated to a candidate for president, most donated to Biden. In some agencies, the numbers were overwhelming: 91 percent of total dollars donated by Labor Department bureaucrats went to Biden, 85 percent at the Justice Department, and 84 percent at both the Education Department and State Department. It is no surprise, then, that when federal bureaucrats do muster themselves to get something done, it will be a priority of the Left: requiring religious organizations to provide health insurance for abortions and abortifacient drugs; imposing and enforcing vaccine mandates; enacting rules to allow retirement plans to invest based on environmental and social governance; or investigating the tax status of conservative organizations and churches.

It is impossible to understand the Trump presidency, what it accomplished and what it failed to accomplish, without understanding these attributes of the federal bureaucracy.  The President no longer controls the executive branch. He can hire and fire Cabinet heads and some senior positions in each agency, but actually advancing substantive policies requires the participation of bureaucrats who may be happy to act when a Democrat president proposes a reform they support but who are equally happy to sabotage conservative policies through apathy, delay, or open opposition.

In my own experience, executive policy priorities originating from the White House and directed by the president were thwarted by bureaucrats across the federal government who simply refused to provide requested data (“Yes, we keep that data, but no, you can’t see it.”), or threw up flimsy procedural roadblocks (“If you want that information, you’ll have to ask someone else first.”), or dragged their feet for so long that the clock ran out (“Yes, we know we’ve already received two extensions, but we really do need more time”). And that does not account for the ways in which the bureaucracy itself stands as a gatekeeper to policy-making ideas.

In our leviathan federal government, it is impossible to monitor what the government is currently doing without a guide through the system. The only people who know, though, are bureaucrats themselves, little motivated to give an accurate accounting of their operations, thereby making it difficult or impossible to understand what problems exist and devise policies to solve them.  The Trump presidency exposed these problems more than any previous administration had because the bureaucracy had never hated a president as much as it hated him.

After battling administrative state intransigence and sometimes outright revolt for nearly four years, President Trump was well aware that something had to give. In October 2020, he issued an executive order often referred to now as simply “Schedule F.” Schedule F required agencies to designate which of their employees were “in positions of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character.” These employees would then be placed on Schedule F (Schedules A through E already existed), and because the order’s language mirrored the 1978 Act exemption for some federal jobs, Schedule F employees would lose procedural protections against adverse employment actions that originated in the 1978 Act.

The idea was smart and its objective good. But Schedule F will not solve the problems embedded in the modern administrative state, and it cannot be the “centerpiece” of a Republican presidential administration’s deep state reforms. It would be like making the cranberry salad the star of Thanksgiving Dinner; even if it’s good, it’s not the main event. 

First, Schedule F looks good on paper but is virtually impossible to actuate because it asks the agencies to determine which employees should be added to it. Agency leaders do not want this reform because they do not want to lose the procedural protections that they and their colleagues enjoy. This was on display in the immediate response to Schedule F. Although only a short time remained in the Trump administration (more on that in a moment), no agency placed positions into Schedule F before President Biden revoked it. Only the Office of Management and Budget and the U.S. International Boundary and Water Commission took the preliminary steps necessary to designate positions and would have placed 415 and 5 employees, respectively, on Schedule F. Just 13 other agencies bothered to respond at all, seven to say they needed more time to finalize their analysis, and six to say that they would not be adding any positions to Schedule F. 

This exposes some of the problems I’ve already described: If your reform of the federal bureaucracy must be carried out by the federal bureaucracy, then you can be sure that the reform will fail. This is especially true of Schedule F because the determination it asks employees to make (essentially, does a given position make or advocate policy or not) is itself a political question that depends on one’s views of bureaucratic expertise. When officials at the Center for Disease Control recommended COVID responses like lockdowns and masking, were they merely stating expert views on the issues or were they making policy? When Anthony Fauci helped hand out funding for gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Labs, was he making policy or merely stating expert views on meritorious research projects? The answers to these questions likely depend on one’s political views on a variety of topics, including the proper role of government and the fallibility of experts. The Left will say that these bureaucrats are simply charged with “following the Science.”

Second, even if it were possible to fill Schedule F with a meaningfully honest list of policymaking and policy-advocating employees across all agencies, the reform would only address one part of one problem with the administrative state, the inability to take an adverse action against Schedule F employees. It would not recommit the federal government to merit-based hiring through civil service examinations; it would not shrink the bureaucracy or its reach; it would not place the bureaucracy under the president’s direct control or restore the Constitution’s balance of powers. Even the modest reform it does offer—the ability to take adverse action against the small number of newly-designated Schedule F employees more easily, up to and including termination—would be difficult to do in large numbers if an administration were so inclined. For example, the Trump administration never filled all of the political positions it was entitled to fill without the advice and consent of the Senate, sometimes leaving nearly 2,000 such positions open at once. 

Third, Schedule F is not durable. Being created by executive order generally means it can be undone by executive order, and a Democrat president would surely do so (as Biden did). So if a future Trump administration spent years coercing agencies to finally designate Schedule F positions, the effort could be wasted just two years later. Plus, by announcing the reform in what turned out to be the waning days of the Trump administration, Republicans laid their cards on the table, and Democrats memorized them. A future administration should expect legal challenges to Schedule F reforms. Even if unsuccessful, such challenges would mire Schedule F in litigation for years, making it difficult to realize the reforms it promises within the span of a four-year term. 

Fourth, it is also worth asking what the reform is that Schedule F actually promises. Schedule F has often been justified by its leading proponents as a way to ensure that deadbeat, no-show federal employees can finally be fired, a type of house-cleaning that even federal bureaucrats will acknowledge is necessary. If Schedule F is just cleaning up these dumpster fires, it is good but very modest indeed. If instead, the purpose is to inventory the vast network of policymaking bureaucrats operating free of chief executive control and then delete those positions en masse, the measure could go some way toward shrinking the bureaucracy and could be harder for Democrats to undo. But an action of such consequence would not be likely to succeed without my next point.

Fifth, Schedule F is a technocratic proposal. Solving for the problems of the administrative state requires more than tinkering within the system. The administrative state presents a crisis of self-governance, an attack on the Constitution itself because it betrays some of our nation’s founding principles (separation of powers, checks and balances, a republican form of government). A problem of this magnitude cannot be solved without congressional action, which cannot happen without the buy-in of the American people who must want it. And to want it, they must understand it. Otherwise, the stories will write themselves: TRUMP PUTS EMPLOYEES ON LIST JUST TO FIRE THEM; THEIR CHILDREN STARVE. 

If Schedule F is an executive-only sneak attack on the administrative state, then it will be too sneaky to succeed. Big reforms require laying the groundwork that allows the public to follow along. Americans will support big reforms if they know why big reforms are needed, but they will not know if no one tells them. 

Some Republicans are doing this, to their credit, and with so much fodder provided by the bureaucracy in recent memory they have plenty of rhetorical ammunition. J.D. Vance and Vivek Ramaswamy have spoken often about the administrative state as the “deep state.” Due in no small part to their influence, a generation of young Republicans are coming to see administrative state reform as the central issue of the time. Vance has said, “We have a major problem here with administrators and bureaucrats in the government who don’t respond to the elected branches. If those people aren’t following the rules, then, of course, you’ve got to fire them, and, of course, the president has to be able to run the government as he thinks he should.” Ramaswamy has described his “dream,” “that the people who we elect to run the government ought to be the ones who actually run the government. Not the managerial bureaucracy in three letter government agencies.”  Yes and yes.

I understand and applaud the originators of Schedule F who thought of a way to use the president’s existing power to try to make a dent in the administrative state. The idea is creative, and I wish it had not been debuted at such an inopportune time, when its potential could not be realized and the element of surprise was lost. I am skeptical whether it can be resuscitated for a second attempt. 

More importantly, I know that Schedule F is not and cannot be the silver bullet reform that Republicans advance in a second Trump administration. Schedule F is not a solution to the administrative state, and it stands a strong likelihood of becoming a major distraction to achieving more meaningful reforms. Setting Republican sights on Schedule F is like going to the Grand Canyon to see the view from the parking lot. If Republicans focus on Schedule F, Americans will miss the bigger picture, and will also miss their one, best shot at groundswell support for meaningfully diminishing the administrative state.

Now is not the time to tinker with a technical change, moving employees around on lists that are supposed to carry bureaucratic significance. Now is the time to dismantle the administrative state. Shutter an agency (or many); eliminate public employee unions; repeal civil service protections that insulate bureaucrats from presidential control. 

And just downsize. In his recent piece for Tablet magazine titled “Twilight of the Wonks,” Walter Russell Mead describes how “bureaucracy is, from an information point of view, a primitive, costly, and slow method of applying algorithms (rules and regulations) to large masses of data.” With improvements in artificial intelligence and machine learning, Mead predicts that “drastic reductions in the size of both public and private sector bureaucracies will be coming.” If, as the Left says, bureaucrats are opinionless automatons just pushing paper, administering benefit formulas, or keeping planes in the sky, then every effort should be made to replace them with computers and technology that will do the job faster and cheaper.  

The administrative state presents the single greatest crisis facing our county, a crisis of constitutional magnitude. The Left agrees that a crisis exists but believes the problem is the proposal to reform at all. The Left’s reaction to a change as modest as Schedule F is pearl-clutching and “destroying democracy” talk, because even a minor change threatens their citadel of power within the executive branch. That’s not a reason to pull back, it is a reason to push harder.

The idea that 2.2 million unaccountable, unelected bureaucrats should decide for themselves how best to execute the laws is an affront to our Constitutional order and to the millions of Americans who are subjected to their anti-democratic bureaucratic tyranny. This is a moment for bigger changes. If not now, when? If not Trump, then who?

The post Schedule F Won’t Tame the Deep State appeared first on The American Conservative.

Scottie Scheffler

American golfer Scottie Scheffler triumphed at the 2024 Masters Tournament in Augusta on Sunday, but it is his comments about his faith that have also garnered attention in Christian circles.

Scheffler, the favorite going into the tournament and the number-one-ranked golfer in the world, won by an impressive four shots, defeating Sweden’s Ludvig Aberg, England’s Tommy Fleetwood (69) and fellow Americans and Collin Morikawa and Max Homa.

Two green jackets in three years!

Scottie Scheffler is a Masters champion once again. pic.twitter.com/4ClY7EWtx4

— PGA TOUR (@PGATOUR) April 14, 2024

When asked earlier in the week as to whether golf defines him, Schleffer said it did not. “I’m a faithful guy,” he responded. “I believe in a Creator. I believe in Jesus. Ultimately, I think that’s what defines me the most.”

“I believe in Jesus. Ultimately I think that’s what defines me most.”

The number one golfer in the world, Scottie Scheffler, shares what defines him. pic.twitter.com/LoFnoySJY5

— Sports Spectrum (@Sports_Spectrum) April 9, 2024

He continued:

I feel like I’ve been given a platform to compete and show my talent. It’s not anything that I did. I think I sat up here a couple years ago doing the interview after the 2022 Masters, and it’s like, ‘Yeah, I was underprepared for what was about to happen. I didn’t know what was going to happen.’ I was very anxious that morning. I didn’t know what to expect, and it’s hard to describe the feeling.

But I think that’s what defines me the most — is my faith. I believe in one Creator, that I’ve been called to come out here, do my best, compete, and glorify God, and that’s pretty much it.

Scheffler is also awaiting the birth of his first child with his wife Meredith and indicated that he would leave at a “moment’s notice” if necessary.

“As far as her going into labor, I wouldn’t say I’m very concerned,” he said. “We haven’t seen any of the early signs. But pregnancy is weird. It can happen at any time. Yeah, open lines of communication and she can get ahold of me if she needs to.”

Fortunately for Scheffler, his wife did not go into labor and he won his second Masters victory in three years, collecting a cool $3.6 million in the process.

The post Devout Christian Golfer Scottie Scheffler Triumphs at Masters, Says His Mission is to ‘Glorify God’ appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

Screenshot

Controversy erupted at the Stronger Men’s Conference in Springfield, Missouri, organized by James River Church, a notable Pentecostal megachurch, when Pastor Mark Driscoll publicly criticized a ‘strip-show-like performance by Alexandr Magala, a sword swallower and Vegas performer known for his past as a male stripper.

The incident unfolded after Magala, also recognized for his appearances on “Britain’s Got Talent,” performed at the conference with a shirtless act. The outspoken pastor took the stage and expressed his dismay, suggesting that the performance was akin to the seductive acts found in a strip club and indicative of a “Jezebel spirit.”

The term “Jezebel spirit” originates from the Biblical figure Jezebel, the wife of King Ahab, who is mentioned in the Books of Kings in the Old Testament.

In contemporary Christian thought, the “Jezebel spirit” is seen as a demonic spirit or influence that leads individuals, particularly women (though not exclusively), to engage in similar behaviors ascribed to Jezebel, such as manipulation, sexual immorality, and rebellion against God’s ordained order.

Below is the performance from sword swallower Alexandr Magala:

Megachurch has strip-show-like performance at men’s conference. Guest speaker Mark Driscoll spoke out against it and was kicked off stage.

Unbelievable that any church would allow this. Reason #538 not to attend a megachurch.#ChristIsKing @pearlythingz @sovereignbrah @scrowder… pic.twitter.com/Fl2Vd3DDhn

— Caeden (@thecfrazier) April 14, 2024

“The Jezebel spirit opened our event… On it was a pole… The same thing that’s used in the strip club for women who have the Jezebel spirit to seduce men. In front of that was a man who ripped his shirt off like a woman does in front of a pole at a strip club… That man, then, is sinning,” Driscoll said.

John Lindell argued that Driscoll had crossed a line by not bringing his concerns directly to him before addressing the audience.

“If your brother offends you, go to him privately. I talked to Mark for a half hour. There was not one word… If he wanted to say it, he could say it to me first. He didn’t. You may not agree with me. You may not agree with him. But we are brothers in Christ, and there’s a right way to handle this,” Lindell said.

According to social media users, the two pastors later returned to the stage to discuss the proper way to handle such disagreements within the church community.

The social media response has been mixed. One user defended the performance as mere male acrobatics, arguing that seeing it as sexual in nature speaks to the viewer’s own issues. Conversely, Twitter user Caeden, who shared the video, emphasized Magala’s history as a stripper, suggesting that the performance’s intent was indeed sexual.

He added, “This was NOT an issue with the Lindell, this was an issue with a performance that happened in front of the church, therefore it should be addressed publicly. Lindell made it an issue about him, which is even more alarming because he DID allow it.”

The Gateway Pundit has reached out to the Stronger Men’s Conference for a comment.

WATCH:

NEW: Pastor Mark Driscoll gets kicked off stage at a men’s conference after he calls out pastor John Lindell for allowing a demonstration from a male stripper.

The incident happened at the Stronger Men’s Conference in Springfield, MO.

After Vegas stripper and ‘sword swallower’… pic.twitter.com/hlDHqHHriY

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) April 14, 2024

The post Pastor Mark Driscoll Gets Kicked Off Stage for Criticizing ‘Strip-Show-Like Performance’ at Megachurch Event (VIDEO) appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

A frightening video that has gone viral on X shows an organizer with the Anti-War Committee Chicago teaching far-left activists how to chant “death to America” and “death to Israel” during an “anti-war” conference held at Teamster’s Union’s Headquarters in Chicago, Illinois.

The Free Press reported during a breakout session at the “anti-war” conference, Shabbir Rizvi, who serves as an organizer with Anti-War Committee Chicago, began to teach far-left activists how to chant “death to America” and “death to Israel” in the Persian language Farsi.

Rizvi told the radical leftists in attendance to chant “Marg bar Israel,” which in Farsi means “death to” or “down with” Israel.

After the death to Israel chants concluded, one person in attendance at the break-out session asked, “Can we get a marg bar America?”

Rizvi responded to the man’s request, saying, “We can get a ‘marg bar America.”

WATCH:

Anti-war activists in Chicago learn to chant “Death to Israel” and “Death to America” in Farsi.

Read more from The FP’s @Olivia_Reingold: https://t.co/1jMM5ydhpp pic.twitter.com/z7T9AKNrF9

— The Free Press (@TheFP) April 14, 2024

Per The Free Press:

Joe Iosbaker, an organizer with the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, which called October 7 a “good turn of events” in its press release about the terrorist attacks, tells me he supports Iran. His organization has since released a statement backing Iran, where citizens gathered to shout“Death to America” during their nation’s strike against Israel Saturday night.

“We demand hands off Iran,” the statement says. “The people have power, and we will exercise it in the streets.”

Earlier that day, before news of the attack broke, at a “breakout session” on “the anti-war movement,” Shabbir Rizvi, an organizer with Anti-War Committee Chicago, taught participants how to chant “death to Israel” and “death to America” in Farsi.

“Marg bar Israel,” he chanted, leading a group of about 80 attendees along with him. A man draped in a Soviet flag bearing a gold hammer and sickle clapped his hands. A man in a full black denim outfit shouted out behind his N95—“Can we get a ‘marg bar America’?”

“We can get a ‘marg bar America,’ ” Rizvi replied.

First Dearborn, now Chicago. Chants of ‘Death to America’ are becoming recurrent in American universities.

Mass deportations are needed.

pic.twitter.com/YVGNR6bIOi

— Dr. Maalouf ‏ (@realMaalouf) April 14, 2024

Just a week earlier, the Gateway Pundit reported Muslims in Dearborn, Michigan, chanted “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” during an Al-Quds Day rally.

READ:

Muslims Chant “Death to America!” on Al-Quds Day Protest in Dearborn, Michigan – VIDEO

The post Far-Left Activists Chant “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” During Conference in Chicago (VIDEO) appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

Late Saturday Iran fired off missiles and 50-100 drones in an unprecedented attack from Iranian soil on the state of Israel.

Israel later announced that 99% of Iran’s missiles were taken down and did not reach their target. US ships assisted in shooting down the incoming missiles that crossed over Iraqi and Jordanian airspace before they were shot down by Israel.

This was the first time the Iranian regime fired on Israel directly – typically Iran uses its affiliates of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthi rebels in Yemen to do their dirty work.

On Sunday, Iranian leader Ayatollah Khamenei posted a threatening tweet on X in Hebrew.

After Iran’s unprecedented attack on Israel on Saturday-early Sunday morning, Khamenei threatened Israel, “Al-Quds will be in the hands of the Muslims, and the Muslim world will celebrate the liberation of Palestine.”

Obviously, Khamenei taunting the Israelis after his unprecedented strike against Israel just hours earlier.

Whenever Muslims speak about the liberation of Palestine they are talking about the total destruction of Israel.

Israeli Defense Minister Ben Gvir responded to the tweet — “Are you talking about the same holy Al-Quds that you wanted to shell yesterday and the Israeli defense prevented you from doing so?”

אתה מדבר על אותה אל קודס הקדושה שרציתם להפגיז אתמול וההגנה הישראלית מנעה מכם?

— איתמר בן גביר (@itamarbengvir) April 14, 2024

Iran is also threatening a harsh response of Israel strikes back against the regime.

BREAKING

Iran’s Supreme National Security Council has approved a tenfold increase in the magnitude of strikes against Israel if Netanyahu decides to escalate the situation further

Ig, which will be more than 1,000 ballistic missiles pic.twitter.com/XvRrT8ckPQ

— Iran Observer (@IranObserver0) April 14, 2024

The post Iranian Leader Khamenei Posts Tweet in Hebrew Threatening Israel After Missile Attack – Israeli President Responds appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

Screenshot: Groups that are against bill that makes buying a child for sex a felony (KCRA/Youtube)

California’s legislative battle intensifies as far-left ‘social justice’ groups stand in opposition to a bill aiming to strengthen the penalties for purchasing or soliciting a child for sex.

Under current state law, such an act is merely a misdemeanor, punishable by up to one year in county jail, a minimum of two days in jail, and a potential fine of $10,000. Additionally, offenders are required to register as tier-one sex offenders for at least ten years.

Republican State Sen. Shannon Grove is spearheading the push with SB 1414 to elevate the offense to a felony.

Senate Bill 1414 (SB 1414) was introduced last month to increase penalties for child sex trafficking. The bill would make it a felony to solicit or engage in commercial sex with a minor, and criminals could face two to four years in prison and a fine of up to $25,000.

Sen. Grove’s motivation stems from conversations with survivors of sex trafficking, who emphasize the necessity of targeting buyers to effectively combat the issue.

“A lot of the survivors of lived experience have said you’ve gotta go after the buyer, it’s just a misdemeanor and I said there is no way,” Grove told KCRA 3. “I thought they were mistaken.”

The proposed bill also aims to eliminate the requirement that those convicted must have known or should have known the age of the minor. Furthermore, it seeks to extend the sex offender registration requirement to ten years for buyers.

Grove is already facing resistance from fellow lawmakers wary of increasing prison sentences. The Senate Public Safety Committee’s analysis reveals clear opposition from criminal justice reform groups such as Californians for Safety and Justice, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, and the California Public Defenders Association.

According to KCRA 3, this is not the first time a bill of this nature has been brought to the state capitol; similar efforts have faltered since 2014.

The Senate Public Safety Committee is scheduled to hear the bill on Tuesday, with Grove looking to capitalize on the momentum from last year’s successful bipartisan bill which classified child sex trafficking as a serious felony under California’s three strikes law.

WATCH:

The post Far-Left Groups Oppose Effort to Reclassify Purchasing a Child for Sex from Misdemeanor to Felony in California — Current Law Only Allows for Max One Year Jail Time and $10,000 Fine (VIDEO) appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.