Big ObamaCare Check to End Shutdown? Biden Legacy Items. Conversion Therapy Ban Before Supreme Court. ‘Descent into Barbarism’ & More
Are Republicans going wobbly over enhanced subsidies to prop up the Affordable Care Act? These subsidies are at the heart of the partial government shutdown.
An editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal indicates that the editors sense wobbliness:
Democrats should be losing the government shutdown fight, since they’re denying the votes needed to pass a funding bill. But they could end up winning this showdown in the end, because President Trump and Republicans are showing signs that sooner or later they’ll cut a big check for ObamaCare. That’s a shame because the GOP needn’t be afraid of the politics….
What American voters are looking for from Republicans on healthcare is an alternative. “ObamaCare is a failure,” President Trump said at the White House the other day, and he’s right. But he and other Republicans are already saying they’ll negotiate over the subsidies once the shutdown is over. That means they’re already conceding there’s a problem.
You may have heard that an editorial in the Washington Post (“The Shutdown Conversation No One Wants“) admitted what most of us already know about the Affordable Care Act:
The real problem is that the Affordable Care Act was never actually affordable. President Barack Obama’s signature achievement allowed people to buy insurance on marketplaces with subsidies based on their income. The architects of the program assumed that risk pools would be bigger than they turned out to be. As a result, policies cost more than expected.
Healthcare expert Michael Cannon says that the shutdown has “exposed the ObamaCare fraud.” Meanwhile, The Federalist has an excellent piece on what Republicans could do to fix health care rather than bailing out the misnamed Affordable Care Act. The partial shutdown is causing flight delays because of air traffic controller staffing issues. A White House memo says that furloughed government employees aren’t entitled to back pay. And the GOP has lost Marjorie Taylor Greene on the issue of health subsidies. A giftie for you, Hakeem. Deal with it.
We have two Biden Legacy Items today. First, then-Vice President Biden put the kibosh on an embarrassing CIA document concerning Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine, which was tactlessly declassified by current CIA Director John Ratcliffe:
Biden had traveled to Kyiv in December 2015, ostensibly to meet with leaders of that fledgling democracy and to deliver a warning against “the cancer of corruption.” And during an address to the Ukrainian parliament, he did condemn the “pervasive poison of cronyism, corruption, and kleptocracy.”
But behind the scenes, Ukrainian officials expressed “bewilderment and disappointment” that the vice president had crossed the Atlantic “almost exclusively to deliver a generic speech.” Officials close to then-President Petro Poroshenko had hoped for guidance “in support of or against specific officials within the Ukrainian government.” They discovered instead that Biden “had no intention of discussing substantive matters.”
Biden did do one thing on the trip—he threatened to withhold a billion dollars in aid unless a prosecutor looking into Burisma, the company employing Hunter Biden for $80,000 a month, was fired. Biden buried the document.
The second Biden Legacy Item: Former Special Counsel Jack Smith obtained telephone records of nearly a dozen Republican Republicans. An editorial in the Wall Street Journal reacts:
Former special counsel Jack Smith has some explaining to do, and let’s hear from Democrats and media grandees who (now) want to stop the lawfare spiral.
The Supreme Court yesterday heard arguments on a Colorado law that bans “conversion therapy” for minors experiencing sexual identity issues. Thirty states have similar bans. The Free Press has an interesting but middle-of-the-road piece on the issue. A tidbit (remember, no paywall at TFP this week—so go wild):
I’m struck by something Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett wrote when responding to the original petition. Conversion therapy, her 2015 statement read, is often “used on minors, who lack the legal authority to make their own medical and mental health decisions.” Yet, somehow, these same minors can consent to double mastectomies or cross-sex hormones, decisions that will affect them for the rest of their lives. Indeed, those in favor of bans on conversion therapy often rail against bans on gender-affirming care.
Chicago columnist John Kass dubs the lawlessness in Chicago, where members of the Texas National Guard are arriving to protect ICE agents, “Confederate chaos“:
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (6 percent approval rating) and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker continue to demonize federal law enforcement officers. And the Chicago Police Department shamed itself by telling officers to stand down rather than come to the aid of Immigration and Customs enforcement agents being swarmed by leftist mobs on the Southwest Side and nearby suburbs.
Johnson and Pritzker shamed themselves, but their constant screaming against ICE agents put pressure on police to turn their backs on ICE agents calling for help on Saturday. Their vehicle was rammed by rioters. They were surrounded by the angry crowd whipped to a frenzy by Pritzker and Johnson.
Rich Lowry writes that Democrats have only themselves to blame for President Trump’s sending the National Guard to patrol Chicago.
“Yes, Virginia, Jay Jones Is Evil” is the American Spectator headline about Virginia’s Democratic establishment rallying to support Jones for state AG, despite his vile, repugnant, and specific assassination fantasies. The Jones story suggests that we should all be concerned about lefty advocates of French Revolution-level bloodthirstiness towards their political opponents. The usual word is “violence,” but that word is becoming vapid. The headline on Martin Gurri’s City Journal article better captures what we are experiencing: “The Progressive Left’s Descent into Barbarism.” Gurri writes:
Possibly, the Left’s belief system made its descent into barbarism inevitable. Progressives long ago cast aside God, religion, and other transcendental restraints. The moral order and conventional rules of a supposedly oppressive society mean less than nothing to them. What remains is hedonism and the will to power.
In the Internet age, both find expression in rituals of demonization—destroying those whose opinions offend them, whether through harassment by a digital lynch mob, coerced confessions and firings, or, as in the cold-blooded killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, outright political assassination. It is the same principle aimed at the same end: hate the haters more brutally than they hate you.
Kirk’s murder can be blamed on an unstable individual. The reaction is harder to explain. Many progressives seemed blind to the horror of the crime; many more rushed to strip the victim of his humanity, cheering the extermination of a 31-year-old father of two as if it were a touchdown for the home team.
An absolutely stunning piece in the Daily Caller on what the Left’s labeling Kirk “an extremist” means for all of us. The piece, by Geoffrey Ingersoll, is well worth reading. Here’s a snippet:
In direct terms: They’re not calling us extremists because it’s true — they’re calling us extremists so they can justify acts of violence. So they can assault, menace, and even murder us.
It’s therefore no surprise the ADL characterized “Anti-ANTIFA symbols” as indicators of “hate” in its hate glossary, just as it’s no surprise the ADL left TPUSA and Charlie himself on its list of “extremists.”
Unlike Charlie Kirk, there’s one group always exempt from the Left’s opprobrium. “For European Elites, It’s Still See No (Islamist) Evil” is the headline on Heather Mac Donald’s latest City Journal offering.
From the Cocoon: “From Dan Rather—to Bari Weiss. How Far CBS News Has Fallen” is a headline in the lefty site Salon. How isolated do you have to be not to know that it was with Rather, whose bogus stories about George W. Bush’s National Guard service started the decline of CBS and forced Rather—who’s been ra-ther pathetic since—into early retirement.
Reality-Based: A NYPD Cop explains why he will quit his job if Zohran Mamdani is elected mayor. Free Press tease: “Morale is sagging, the number of officers is shrinking, and the candidate who once said ‘defund the NYPD’ now wants to slash their overtime.”
Feisty. AG Pam Bondi appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday. She “gave no quarter.”
