Dems Pretty Much Okay with Socialist Takeover. Abolishing the Senate: Julius Caesar Did It First. Mamdani’s Secret Influencer Comrades. Waiting for Clancy Jury. Gloria Steinem Dies at 92. More
As Karl Marx might put it, a specter is haunting the Democratic Party. In the oft-quoted opening sentence of Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, the busy specter is communism, aka socialism.
“Handful of House Democrats Vote to Denounce Murderous Marxism” is the arresting headline on James Freeman’s Best of the Web column. Freeman begins:
On Tuesday this column noted the four House Democrats who didn’t want to endorse the voter ID legislation known as the SAVE Act but were willing to offer an amendment condemning the socialists staging a takeover of their party.
Their outstanding amendment detailed the bloody history of Marxist cruelty. Though it did not receive a floor vote, it’s nice to see signs of life for the spirit of liberty within a party that often seems to have resigned itself to serving as a vehicle for Sandernista revolution.
Now the number of House Democrats willing to go on record against this horror has risen to at least 12, counting the eight Democrats who voted yesterday for a resolution from Rep. Jeff Crank (R., Colo.) that both called for voter ID requirements and also stated that “socialism has repeatedly led to famine and mass murders, and the killing of over 100,000,000 people worldwide.”
Yes, the fact that just 12 out of 213 House Democrats were willing to stand up and condemn history’s most murderous ideology is still pathetic.
Here is the CBS report on the vote. A procedural vote was required to allow the Jeff Crank resolution to be voted on. Two Democrats defected and voted to get the resolution on the floor. They are Jared Goldman of Maine, who cited the needs of fishermen in his district, and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington, who was hailed as a model for winning back blue-collar workers. But now the consensus in their party seems to be: Off with their heads (not literally yet)!
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries slammed the Blue Dog duo, and Dems demand to know what he intends to do. In “House Democrats Erupt into Infighting Over Leadership Power Play,” Axios has an interesting angle:
Why it matters: The blowup offers a preview of the chaos that party leaders could face in January if they take back the House majority.
In other words, they’ll have to contend with obstreperous DSA members, who want to remake the United States, substituting their ideas for those of the Founding Fathers. For example, they would abolish the Senate. This has been tried before, writes historian Thomas Madden, author of the acclaimed “The Fall of Republics“:
The idea is radical—but not new. The proposal resembles the earliest forms of simple democracy as practiced in ancient Greece. Unlike modern Americans, the framers of the Constitution were deeply familiar with the governments of the ancient world and conversant in how they had collapsed. John Adams, who served as ambassador to England during the Constitutional Convention in 1787, was writing a book surveying history’s republics. The deliberations of the Philadelphia Convention echoed with the lessons of history, all of which warned against simple democracy….
The framers knew how the Roman Republic had been undone by democracy. Riding a populist wave to redistribute wealth, Tiberius Gracchus appealed to the democratic concilium plebis, cutting out the deliberative Senate. He wasn’t the last Roman politician to sideline the Senate in a bid to obtain extraordinary powers. It ended with Julius Caesar, who was proclaimed dictator for life to the cheers of the people. In that democratic way, the Roman Republic died.
Even before Caesar, it was known that unrestrained democracy leads to tyranny. Hungry for more, the people are drawn to a charismatic ruler promising to deliver. It doesn’t matter how enlightened the people are. As James Madison put it, “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”
Also blocked by Dems yesterday was a constitutional amendment to keep the number of Supreme Court Justices to nine:
“Democrats are very clear. They want to pack the court,” Rep. Brad Knott said. “We want to maintain the normalcy and stick with the process that we’ve done for a long time.”
Comrades. “Mamdani’s influencer army includes teachers, TikTokkers, a self-proclaimed ‘dandy’ — and some don’t even live here,” is a New York Post headline. Ms. Must was pleasantly surprised that a liberal outfit broke the original story:
A bombshell Columbia Journalism Review study found that Mamdani’s administration maintains a secret Signal chat with roughly 200 influencers, where the terminally online creators get the inside scoop — or marching orders — from City Hall.
Don’t miss the mini profiles of the influencers.
Near and dear to the hearts of socialists is that guys must be able to play against girls and women in competitive sports. The latest wrinkle in that issue: A federal judge has dismissed a DOJ lawsuit challenging California policy allowing biological males in girls’ sports.
Meanwhile, Iran is retaliating for U.S. strikes by firing at U.S. ally Kuwait. President Trump is making a “cryptic” call for the Iranian people to rise up against the tyrannical regime. Not so cryptic to Barton Swaim, who examines the return of the calls for regime change:
…. despite all his boasts and threats and migraine-inducing equivocations, he hasn’t done what everybody thought he would do: let Iran keep its bogus sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz and call the whole thing a win because its military and nuclear program lie in ruins. You can credit the regime’s incorrigibility for that outcome, too, but the fact remains: Mr. Trump might have settled for a de facto loss and hasn’t.
When the government didn’t collapse, the ever-undisciplined Mr. Trump indulged his appetite for showmanship and big-shot deal-making. That almost certainly discouraged any attempt to revolt. That almost certainly discouraged any attempt to revolt. Anyway all the flirtations and memoranda came to nothing, as foreseen in these pages and elsewhere. Now, with an angry population and a government deprived of money, a bit of Reaganesque rhetoric might have a powerful effect.
And shelve the objection that Iran aggressively censors what its citizens can view online. If Ronald Reagan’s anticommunist speeches found their way into the dark cells of Siberian gulags, Mr. Trump can speak to the Islamic Republic’s domestic foes and know he’ll be heard.
We’re all wondering if the Lindsay Clancy jury will break its deadlock. The Judge issued the “Tuey-Rodriguez” charge, a last-ditch attempt to get the jury to reach a verdict. If a mistrial is declared, there could be a second trial. Clancy admitted killing her three children, but the defense argues that her mental condition made it impossible for her to know right from wrong. The response to the trial has been alarming. Here are several worthy pieces on it: “TikTok feminists hijacked Lindsay Clancy’s trial — their circus act risks adding injustice to the suffering her kids endured,” by Miranda Devine; “From Iryna Zarutska to Lindsay Clancy, The Left Only Likes Women If They’re Politically Useful,” by Brianna Lyman, and Chris Bray’s Federalist piece on the deeper roots of the alleged victimhood of Lindsay Clancy.
Powerline’s John Hinderaker writes about another crime, the Times Square stabbing earlier this week by a woman with obvious mental problems. The headline is “Time to Lock Up the Psychotic.” He quotes a social media post from the great Heather Mac Donald:
How many more people have to die before liberal politicians give up their determination to keep patent psychotics loose on the streets? Every politician and activist who has fought the institutionalization of the seriously mentally ill is the but-for cause of Monday’s fatal stabbing in Times Square.
That stabbing, like every other such enormity, was a statistical certainty, given the condition of New York’s public spaces. …
We learn this morning of the death of Gloria Steinem, at the age of 92. We absolutely disagreed with Ms. Steinem, the co-founder of Ms. Magazine, but we recognize her achievements:
Gloria Steinem, the journalist, activist and organizer who became the most recognizable face of the U.S. women’s movement, died Wednesday at 92.
The big picture: Steinem resisted being cast as feminism’s singular face, but for six decades she carried its ideas into mainstream America across its second and third waves.
The New York Post tribute hails Ms. Steinem as “pioneer of women’s liberation movement.” She launched her journalistic career in a very plucky fashion—she donned a bunny outfit to go undercover and investigate the Playboy Bunny Club. The NY Post profile is a good summary of the life of an icon.
