Notable Collapses: Dems. China’s Hongqi Bridge. Notion that Men Can Get a Medal for Punching Women at the Olympics. Fun: BBC Folds. Kennedy Scion to Run. Plus, More
Looks like it’s over. The House returns today to take up a Senate-passed bill to end the 42-day partial government shutdown. It then goes back to the Senate. But the end is virtually assured.
Examiner Chief Political Correspondent Byron York poses the key question: “Why did Democrats fight so long – before caving”? York writes:
Why did they stubbornly play a losing hand even as millions of Americans suffered?
The short answer: because Obamacare was at stake. The Affordable Care Act is the Democratic Party’s premier policy achievement of the last half-century, and it is gradually sinking beneath rising costs, making “affordable” health coverage increasingly unaffordable. Without more taxpayer-paid subsidies for recipients, fewer and fewer people will be able to purchase coverage that Democrats once promised would be within everyone’s reach.
So many Democrats have invested so much of their political identity on health care, and on their health care achievement — remember that Obamacare passed the Senate in 2010 without a single Republican vote — that the prospect of its failure is unthinkable for the Democratic Party.
Jon Stewart is distraught that the shutdown is over, ripping Dems for, as he sees it, caving. “Our long national nightmare is over, but the Democratic psychodrama isn’t,” wrote National Review’s Rich Lowry, who called the shutdown “pointless and dumb.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has plans to ride out the calls for his ouster as Minority Leader, but Schumer’s omnipresence in New York state politics appears to be on dimmer. New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin writes that President Trump “stands tall,” having “won” the shutdown:
The collapse of Chuck Schumer’s shutdown gambit when seven fellow Democrats and one independent broke ranks with him serves as a humiliating bookend to the longest government closure ever.
It also simultaneously highlights one of President Trump’s most sweeping and crucial Washington victories over his most toxic opponents.
What the Dems extracted was that there will be a debate in Congress on healthcare insurance. This may be just what President Trump wants. Wouldn’t it be ironic if this debate paved the way to replace the Affordable Care Act with … affordable health insurance and care for all Americans? The Federalist urges the GOP not to bail out Dems on the Affordable Care Act.
The end of the shutdown isn’t the only good news. We were off yesterday, so this is my first chance to note that the International Olympic Committee appears to be on the verge of banning men from participating in women’s and girls’ sports. The Los Angeles Times, which takes it for granted that men should compete in women’s sports, reports:
The International Olympic Committee appears to be near a pivotal decision with wide-ranging consequences in advance of the 2028 Los Angeles Summer Olympics: Should athletes born male be allowed to compete in women’s events?
The debate comes amid a larger societal discussion about transgender athletes that has taken center stage in recent years, fueled in part by President Trump and others who are putting pressure on the IOC for a ban. The decision is being closely watched in California, where officials have tried to establish some protections for transgender athletes and pushed back against Trump.
Meanwhile, “The Olympic Ban on Cheating Men Is Long Overdue” is the Spiked Online headline on a Joanna Williams story, which argues that the IOC owes an apology to the women who had their dreams shattered and safety compromised to appease trans activists. “Too many young women, like American swimmer Riley Gaines, have already had to put up with their sporting careers being prematurely ended because of men who feel entitled to a place on the women’s team,” Williams notes.
Unherd’s Lisa Selin Davis had a piece on the apparently pending IOC ban (“IOC Ban Is a Reckoning for Women’s Sports“) that noted that high-profile legal cases “alerted many people to the fact that ‘trans rights’ weren’t just about protecting people from discrimination; they were also about redefining sex in a way that unfairly impacted women and girls.”
Suzanne Moore at the U.K. Telegraph says that the IOC is “finally turning its back on trans nonsense” and urges others to follow suit. Moore, who hopes she never again will have to see someone who refuses to take a sex eligibility test punch a woman in the face and win a gold medal for it, writes:
Sport is about bodies, not feelings – advantages like male puberty or differences in sex development have no place in women’s competition.
More Folding. The BBC admitted that it had doctored a Trump address from January 6, 2021, and the outgoing Director of the BBC is taking the hit and stepping down. Read his quotes in this story and see if you think he gets it. In the Ain’t We Got Fun Department, President Trump is still threatening to sue the Beeb.
Another Collapse. China’s great, new engineering feat, the 2,487-foot-long Hongqi Bridge, which connects Sichuan Province with Tibet as part of a national highway, has fallen down. Fortunately, no casualties, but PJ Media has intriguing observations about the Commie labor system that produced the former bridge. Perhaps an inopportune day for the New York Times to enthuse that “China is equipping other countries to fight climate change. It’s a role reversal.”
Speaking of Building Bridges …. New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani now says he will call President Trump before he takes office on New Year’s Day because the relationship between City Hall and the White House “will be critical to the success of the city.” The New York Post cover calls the Mamdani administration now taking shape “the socialist network.” Chief of Staff will be “secretive” Democratic Socialist of America strategist Elle Bisgaard-Church, who cut her fangs in the pro-Palestine movement.
Adam Louis-Klein worries at The Free Press about Mamdani and the new racism. “Anti-Jewish libels are a social technology reshaping everything around us,” Louis-Klein argues. The NYPD is preparing for the Mamdani mayoralty. Thomas Horgan writes in City Journal:
The New York City Police Department has to be feeling cursed these days. Having barely recovered from the dark years of Bill de Blasio and still emerging from the chaos of the Eric Adams era, the NYPD now faces the daunting prospect of reporting to democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani. But don’t bet against the men and women in blue. They are remarkably resilient—and they may have a secret weapon in their experienced and savvy commissioner, Jessica Tisch….
An interesting combination would be Tisch as Police Commissioner and Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik as Governor of New York. Another woman for public safety, HHS Secretary Kristi Noem announces that “Operation Dirtbag” has netted more than 150 illegal migrant sexual predators in Florida.
The Berkeley Left is not building bridges. The Department of Justice has launched an investigation into the “unrest” after the campus erupted in response to Turning Point USA, the organization founded by the late Charlie Kirk, having an event there:
“Mob assault and thuggish intimidation of attendees exercising their First Amendment rights are unacceptable,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon wrote in a post announcing the probe on X.
While prestige campuses can rustle up a mob in a moment’s notice, too many college kids at such “good” schools are struggling with—you know—getting educated. “The College Kids Who Can’t Do Basic Math” at The Free Press, by Tanner Nau, observes:
More than 10 percent of new students at a prestigious California university are taking math that covers what they should have learned as far back as elementary school.
“Have American Institutions Become Overly Feminized?” That is the question raised by Helen Andrews in a seminal piece in Compact magazine. Seven women discuss this at TFP.
Run, Jack, Run. Jack Schlossberg, the grandson of JFK, announces that he will run for Rep. Jerrold Nadler’s House seat. Nadler is not seeking re-election. He may be the weirdest Kennedy scion yet.
