Issue: Politics

God was a guest at a “prayer festival” that drew thousands to the National Mall yesterday. Well, as usual, wherever He goeth, He stirreth up controversy. Specifically, what kind of nation is the U.S.? Did we leave the religion stuff back with the Pilgrims?

“Trump-backed prayer festival on National Mall draws thousands: ‘We welcome Jesus!’” the Washington Post headline (linked above) declared. Called “Rededicate 250,” the event, to no one’s surprise, drew critics: The beef is that the eight-hour event was “explicitly Christian”—also explicitly joyful and, yes, backed by President Trump. President Trump’s appearance, by video, was more admonitory than joyful. He read from the Old Testament.

One of the speakers was Bishop Robert, perhaps the country’s leading Roman Catholic evangelist. Bishop Baron told the DC Examiner before his talk that for “free exercise of religion” to thrive, the United States must continuously affirm and bolster its explicitly Christian identity. I’ll sneak in Roger Kimball’s highly germane American Greatness piece on “The Golden Thread and the Defense of the West” as chock-full of related ideas up for discussion as our country’s 250^th birthday approaches.  

From the sublime to the grime … of politics. Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana lost his primary, vanquished by President Trump, who endorsed an opponent. Trump has never forgiven Cassidy for voting to convict him in his second impeachment trial. Cassidy’s defeat shows again how Trump dominates the Republican Party. Cassidy took swipes at Trump, without mentioning him by name, in his concession speech. President Trump took a victory lap.

An editorial in the Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, is headlined “Holding the Senate Matters More Than Defeating Bill Cassidy”: 

President Trump proved again Saturday that he can crush Republican dissenters by helping to defeat Sen. Bill Cassidy in a Louisiana primary. The question is to what end? …

Louisiana is a conservative state, so whoever wins the GOP runoff between Rep. Julia Letlow (Mr. Trump’s favorite) and state treasurer John Fleming is likely to hold the seat in November. But Mr. Trump may find he’s now liberated Mr. Cassidy, who can vote as he pleases this year without fear of further retribution. Watch what happens if Mr. Trump tries to nominate Jeanine Pirro as Attorney General.

Mr. Trump is desperate to hold off the day when he is seen is a lame duck, but what matters more than his sway over the GOP is his overall approval rating. At 40.1% in the RealClearPolitics polling average, that rating puts Republican control of the House and Senate in serious jeopardy.

Mr. Trump’s revenge campaign has already made the Senate harder to hold. He drove incumbent Thom Tillis into retirement in North Carolina, and Democrats have a strong candidate who is now the favorite.

Flexing Muscles. MAHA put enough money into defeating Cassidy that The Free Press suggests that it may have sunk him.

Next Up: Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, another thorn in President Trump’s side (and rather less accommodating than Senator Cassidy), has a primary tomorrow. National Review says that Massie deserves to lose:

We have a lot of time for quirky, go-it-alone libertarians, but prefer if they aren’t conspiracy theorists or noxious critics of Israel.

Representative Thomas Massie, the maverick libertarian from Kentucky in the Ron Paul tradition, is in a titanic primary fight with a Trump-backed opponent, and deserves to lose.

Rep. Lauren Boebert, who campaigned with Massie, better look out.

Guess who’s back … or never went away. “Kamala Harris Is at It Again” is the headline on Byron York’s latest. York addresses Kamala’s recent claim that there are “no bad ideas.” Oh, yes, there are:

“And in that no bad ideas brainstorm, we talk about what we need to do, and think about doing, around the Electoral College,” she continued. “We talk about the idea of Supreme Court reform, which includes expanding the Supreme Court. … [And] let’s talk about statehood for Puerto Rico and D.C.”

There’s an obvious flaw in Harris’s premise. There most certainly are bad ideas. One way to know if an idea is bad is to see what Kamala Harris thinks about it. If she thinks it’s good, it’s probably bad.

York explains that Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign was beset by bad ideas. One, for example, was taxpayer funding for sex change operations for illegals and incarcerated people, which Harris espoused in an ACLU interview. For some reason, when it resurfaced, this idea proved unpopular.

You know who else might be accused of having bad ideas? Yes, you’re right—AOC. Matthew Continetti writes in the Wall Street Journal that the source of AOC’s bad ideas might be … ignorance:

Try listening to Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, for example. “You can’t earn a billion dollars,” she said recently. AOC graduated from Boston University in 2011 with a double major in international relations and—wait for it—economics.

Large fortunes, she went on to explain, are the result of exploitation—of cheating, abuse and miserliness. Hence billionaires mask their ill-gotten gains with lies. “You have to create a myth of earning it,” she said. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez believes she has exploded the myth. And because no billionaire has earned his wealth, the state is justified in taking it from him. It’s about fairness, you see.

The comments caused a stir. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has little, if any, awareness of where money comes from—no knowledge of finance, of savings and investment, of creating a product or conceiving an invention that adds value to the economy. She operates in a stark and static universe without consequences and trade-offs, without growth or mobility. There are only victims and victimizers. And according to the RealClearPolitics polling average, she’s in fourth place in the 2028 Democratic primary.

Sometimes bad ideas kill people. “Worst Prosecutor in America Struggles to Explain Why Democrats Keep Protecting Illegal Alien Murderers” is a Federalist story on Steve Descano, the George Soros-backed Fairfax County, Virginia, Commonwealth’s Attorney, who keeps freeing people who should be detained. This is an astonishing exchange:

In a heated exchange with Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, regarding Descano’s preferential treatment of illegals in sentencing — requiring that their immigration status be considered in a way that will protect them from deportation — Descano claimed the promise to shield illegals was merely an empty campaign promise.

“I didn’t realize people were so obtuse that they could not realize what the difference between a campaign statement and an actual office policy is,” Descano said. “We’re not protecting undocumented individuals, we prosecute people who commit crimes in Fairfax County regardless of their status.”

Inscrutable. That’s how Ms. Must found the recent superpower summit. China authority Gordon Chang wasn’t so baffled. Chang’s assessment: “‘Round One Goes To China’ But Trump Is Taking China’s Proxies ‘Off The Board’“:

Columnist and China hawk Gordon Chang said President Trump did not achieve much during his trip to China, in an interview with Forbes, saying it made the U.S. look weak for the president not to walk out when Xi Jinping mentioned the “Thucydides Trap” at the welcoming ceremony….

I think Trump just should have stopped the summit right there and said: If Xi Jinping, if you can’t respect me, if you can’t do this, then there’s no point in talking,” Chang said. “Xi Jinping needs the U.S. far more than we need him.”

However:

“This is only one round of a 15-round match, which won’t be decided until September 24, when Xi Jinping is scheduled to come to Washington,” he said. “But you have to look at this and say round one goes to China.”

Meanwhile, John Bolton—whom President Trump likes about as much as he likes Cassidy and Massie—accuses Trump of playing a dangerous game with Taiwan. “Does the US president really think he reduces the chances of a war with China by undercutting Taipei’s defences?” asks the U.K. Telegraph.

I hope this is true: “From Sleeper Cells to Liberation Army: Trump’s Genius Plan to Free Iran and Secure America” at American Greatness.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio reaped praise for a polished presidential tryout yesterday in the press briefing room, proving himself “a man of many parts.” Rubio’s boss received some good news too. USA TODAY’s Susan Page reports:

He’s still the boss.

President Donald Trump is beset by rising gas prices, falling approval ratings and an unpopular war in Iran. But in the Indiana primary May 5 he demonstrated his continued grip on the Republican Party by delivering a thumping to a half-dozen state senators who defied his demands to redraw congressional lines.

Of seven GOP senators who earned his ire, five lost their party’s nominations to challengers the president had endorsed, with one race still too close to call.

A Wall Street Journal headline announces that “Trump’s hold on the Republican base” held firm. Aside from the presidential pummeling of rebellious Hoosiers, Vivek Ramaswamy got the nod from Ohio Republicans in his bid to be Governor. Doesn’t the Trump-endorsed entrepreneur seem to have been running for governor forever? More on yesterday’s election results.

That’s not the only good news for the president. “Oil Plunge Quickens on Mideast Optimism” is a Wall Street Journal headline. The president has paused Project Freedom (escorting ships through the Strait of Hormuz). Pakistan’s Prime Minister praises the pause, cites “progress” towards a deal with whoever is running Iran these days. Hmmmm…

Among former President Joe Biden’s gifts to the republic are the appointment of two DEI women to positions of prominence. One, Kamala Harris is subject to the will of the voters. Not so Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. Jackson is forever (or for life). Justice Jackson has emerged as possibly the most outspoken member of the Court—and not in a good way. George Washington law professor and Fox Contributor Jonathan Turley writes about Justice Jackson’s latest foray, legal eccentric and insult (her dissent in an order finalizing the Court’s ruling in the Louisiana gerrymandering case):

Since her appointment by President Joe Biden, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has quickly developed a radical and chilling jurisprudence. Her often sole dissents and accusatory rhetoric have drawn not just the ire of her conservative colleagues but her liberal colleagues. This week, that tension deepened with a stinging rebuke from Justice Samuel Alito (joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch).

… it was Justice Jackson’s language again that drew the attention of her colleagues.

Justice Jackson lambasted the court’s ruling “has spawned chaos in the State of Louisiana.” In an Orwellian twist, Jackson suggested that others were playing politics as she sought to effectively protect unconstitutional Democratic districts. She suggested that the case exposed “a strong political undercurrent.”

In a post headlined “Alito vs. Jackson,” Powerline characterized Justice Jackson’s dissent as “vituperative” and “impugning” the motives of her colleagues. An editorial in the Wall Street Journal took note of Justice Alito’s “intriguing footnote” in the Louisiana case:

The footnote suggests some pique by Justice Alito about the Court’s long gestation on Callais, and understandably so since Justice Jackson is accusing the majority of playing politics.

With apologies to Rogers and Hammerstein, How Do You Solve a problem like Ketanji?

Unlike Justice Jackson, Jason Riley of the Wall Street Journal says, “Good Riddance to Racial Gerrymandering“:

Under segregation, black Americans generally shared a common experience of being second-class citizens. That’s no longer the case, but the supporters of segregated voting districts and racial preferences in hiring and college admissions would have us believe that nothing has really changed. Racial-gerrymandering advocates today assume that black voters are essentially fungible and share identical political preferences. That’s not only false but insulting, and this Supreme Court corrective couldn’t come soon enough.

We now know the name of the suspect in the 2025 fires that ravaged Los Angeles County. The suspect is not somebody who accidentally forgot Smoky Bear’s injunction to snuff out campfires. Jonathan Rinderknecht, 30, the alleged firebug, is a full-fledged anti-capitalist admirer of CEO murder suspect Luigi Mangione. National Review’s Noah Rothman places Rinderknecht firmly in the elite Left’s tradition of espousing the destruction of other people’s property: 

“Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence,” wrote Nikole Hannah-Jones, the author of the New York Times’ 1619 Project. “To use the same language to describe those two things is not moral.” The New Yorker editor David Remnick agreed. “We don’t have time to finger-wag at protesters about property,” he wrote of the big-box and mom-and-pop stores alike that were put to the torch. “That can be rebuilt. Target will reopen.” Sure, “looting is counterproductive,” NPR CEO Katherine Maher conceded. “But it’s hard to be mad about protests not prioritizing the private property of a system of oppression founded on treating people’s ancestors as private property.”

Then there’s other people’s money. The New York Post cover features New York Governor Kathy Hochul squeezing the Statue of Liberty for more taxes. “Hochul STILL pushes more taxes and a $260 B budget” is the caption. Meanwhile, in Washington state, voters will have no say on a referendum on a new 9.9% levy. Billionaire Ken Griffin says that New York under Mayor Mamdani doesn’t welcome success, so he might take some of his money elsewhere.

Welfare fraud has cost voters untold billions of dollars, but some blue-state leaders are closing ranks … to protect the fraudsters, according to the New York Post. Reason’s Robby Soave observes at The Hill that Medicaid fraud in Ohio is almost exclusively from the Somali community, but that both parties have turned a blind eye to it. He has a radical (in a good way) solution:

Here’s what I’m calling for: Since politicians aren’t going to do anything about fraud, can we get an AI on this? Maybe Claude, or ChatGPT? Let’s ask the computer where the fraud is and how we can get the money back, or at least shut off the fraudsters’ access to it. We need to restore faith in this system and end the stealing.  

Meanwhile, an editorial at the Washington Examiner proposes that Trump’s food stamp reforms are working. Apparently, it was the work requirement that did it.

The Pulitzer Prize winners were announced earlier this week. Or, as Powerline has it, “The Pulitzers Strike Again.” The New York Times, according to Ira Stoll at the Washington Free Beacon, “is scrambling to defend the integrity of its Gaza-based photographer and his work, which won a Pulitzer Prize on Monday, after a press watchdog organization accused him of ‘staged scenes’ that were closely coordinated with the Hamas terrorist organization.”

Stoll sums up the winning entries:

The prizes largely honored articles that bashed Trump—his alleged abuses of power, his destruction of the federal workforce, his venality—or Israel.

“The Economic Lesson from Weight-Loss Drugs,” by David Goldhill, at City Journal, reveals that selling directly to consumers makes health care more affordable:

Why are GLP-1s getting cheaper while health care remains expensive? The answer lies in what makes GLP-1 drugs different: actual consumers have to pay actual prices.

Writing at The Free Press, Ruy Teixeira tells us, “How the Far Left Tapped into a Money Machine.” It’s radical candidates such as Graham Platner, who is running for the Senate against incumbent GOP Senator Susan Collins, who attract the biggest Democratic donors. Teixeira explains how this happened.

Just Indulge Me. Please. Matthew Gadsa of Unherd put his finger on what so bothered me so much about the Met Gala:

At the heart of the Met Gala is a deep cynicism. It takes a premise with which it is hard to disagree — a world-class museum needs more money — and manages to turn the resulting attention and money on the world’s most banal people. All the while, this obscures the immense handicraft of the designers themselves and the larger cultural significance of the Met as an institution. The event further reifies the hold that celebrity has over the American psyche, while conflating fashion as craft or art with fashion as spectacle.

… The Diana Vreeland-era of the Gala during the Seventies and Eighties was at least worthy of envy: tasteful, aristocratic, and actually interested in the museum’s collections and exhibitions. It was a gatekept event, but it wasn’t a circus.

Seattle’s socialist Mayor Katie Wilson says that reports that the rich are fleeing Seattle’s high taxes are “super overblown,” but even if so, Wilson has a super dismissive message for them: “Bye.”

Wilson was “slammed” for her “wave to tax weary residents” (also known as the tax base) of Seattle. In her self-satisfied remarks, which evoked approving titters from the audience, Wilson “waved good-bye to prosperity,” according to a devastating editorial in the Washington Post. 

The editors noted that Seattle’s most iconic business, Starbucks, already had fled after being targeted by Wilson:

Nine days after winning Seattle’s November mayoral election, Katie Wilson joined Starbucks baristas on a picket line and pledged to boycott the coffee conglomerate until their union got its way. The socialist will need to wait a while longer for her caffeine fix.

In March, after Wilson took office, the chain said it would close five additional stores in Seattle, including four that had unionized. Starbucks said they were selected because of poor financial performance and bad customer experiences.

Then, last week, Starbucks announced it will establish a new corporate hub in Nashville, investing $100 million and bringing up to 2,000 jobs.

The 43-year-old Wilson, who received a $10,000 allowance from her parents last year, is defiant about the consequences of her antagonism toward successful people who create value for society.

The Washington Post goes on to note that such arrogance is increasingly typical of the state’s elites. More details on Wilson’s background. On the drive to eliminate those annoying rich people, another Washington Post editorial (I’m telling you—the WaPo’s editorial pages are getting better by the day) says that California stands to lose revenue if the 5% billionaire tax goes into effect. 

Meanwhile, the other famous socialist Mayor, New York’s Zohran Mamdani, was elected on the false promise that he would “immediately” freeze rent on rent-controlled apartments for four years—easier said than done:

Since taking office, however, he has been forced to recognize what the law has made clear from the start: He cannot set rents himself, and overt interference with the independent RGB could expose a rent freeze to a legal challenge.

So Mamdani has found another way.

His Office of Mass Engagement will soon recruit so-called volunteers to fan out across selected neighborhoods and encourage rent-stabilized tenants to attend the hearings.

In other words, City Hall is mobilizing the constituency most likely to support the mayor’s preferred outcome while insisting it is merely promoting civic participation.

He’s paying lip service to the RGB’s independence while directing a government office to organize a campaign ensuring the board “answers to the people it serves” — an ominous phrase that gives away Organize NYC’s actual purpose.

The mayor insists the effort aims to educate, not advocate. According to Mass Engagement Commissioner and DSA veteran Tascha Van Auken, the volunteers are “not advocating for any specific outcome or position.”

Don’t be fooled. …

Not an Escort Service. In an arm’s-length effort to unblock the vital supply waterway that doesn’t involve escorts by U.S. warships, President Trump says the U.S. will “guide” stranded ships through the Strait of Hormuz. The U.S. denies Iran’s claim to have hit a warship in the Strait. Is the blockade the U.S. strategy that finally makes a difference? A news story in the Wall Street Journal suggests as much:

For almost five decades, Iran’s Islamic government has survived financial pressure from the U.S. by selling oil to China. It confronted American military might with guerrilla tactics. But with the U.S. Navy’s blockade, that strategy might have met its match, analysts said.

Epic Brilliance. According to Rich Lowry, Operation Epic Fury is highlighting the utter brilliance of “Drill, baby, drill”:

“Drill, baby, drill” is arguably the most successful public policy of the last 20 years.

On top of sweeping innovations forged by private industry, President Donald Trump has driven a stake through the heart of Joe Biden’s “net zero” energy policy — based the delusion that we could phase out fossil fuels — and has pursued US “energy dominance” instead.

The Western hemisphere stands to gain from the Iran crisis, as the closure of the Strait of Hormuz underlines the inherent risks of reliance on Middle Eastern suppliers. 

Meanwhile, an editorial in the Wall Street Journal explains how Russia helps Iran by providing intel to help target Americans:

President Trump is clear-eyed about the threat from Iran, but he seems to view Russia with Kremlin-colored glasses. Perhaps he needs an intelligence briefing on the extent of Russian aid for Iran. Vladimir Putin hosted Iran’s foreign minister in St. Petersburg recently, and evidence is accumulating that the Kremlin has been helping Iran with intelligence to target Americans.

While trying to shoo off rich people—who provide tax revenue—our friends on the left welcome illegal aliens, who too often don’t stop doing illegal things just because they are here. The New York Post cover today features an illegal alien who butchered two Long Island women. The newspaper reports:

An illegal migrant on Long Island fatally butchered a beloved mom of three and another woman in separate savage attacks — before calling cops and calmly confessing he “killed somebody,’’ police said.

Rony Yahir Alvarenga Rivera, 22, of El Salvador — who entered the US as an unaccompanied 12-year-old in 2016 — knifed a 42-year-old coworker and mom to death at an Island Park Wendy’s around 12:30 a.m. Friday, authorities said.

Three hours earlier, around 9 p.m. Thursday, Rivera had hacked his 32-year-old roommate to death at their Valley Stream apartment, according to Nassau County police.The tragic woman was identified by cops as Eddy Raquel Hernandez Castillo.

Rivera later went to his job at Wendy’s and killed de Aguila, cops said.

Advocates of illegal immigration are particularly sympathetic to unaccompanied minors such as Rivera. California Governor Gavin Newsom, in particular, has been on an illegal alien funding spree. 

“Hasan Piker is left’s Nick Fuentes. Why do they embrace him?” is the headline on an Ingrid Jaques column at USA TODAY. Good question:

The New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg has called Fuentes, a 27-year-old online influencer, a “Hitler-loving white nationalist.” The Times has run ominous headlines like “Nick Fuentes’s Rise Puts MAGA Movement in a ‘Time of Choosing’ ” and “Nick Fuentes: A White Nationalist Problem for the Right.”

Meanwhile, the news media largely ignores the rise of a similarly repugnant force on the left: Hasan Piker. Piker, 34, has more than 3 million followers and streams hours of political content each day on Twitch.

Piker is an anti-Zionist, capitalist-hating Marxist who appears far too comfortable with political violence, so long as it serves the “right” cause.

Piker’s growing popularity among progressives has coincided with a broader and deeply disturbing rise in left-wing tolerance for political violence.

In a Politico story headlined “Inside the Quiet Republican Effort to Flip Fetterman,” Jonathan Martin raises a chilling specter: What if the maverick Democrat from Pennsylvania did switch? The Dems could help themselves by listening to Fetterman, but that is a bridge too far. Another rich guy: Andy Kessler of the Wall Street Journal says, “We’re going to miss Tim Cook,” the Apple CEO who is retiring. And an editorial at the same esteemed outlet on the end of Spirit Airlines starts this way:

The demise of Spirit Airlines is a tragedy for its 15,000 or so employees, though at least taxpayers weren’t forced to pay for a bailout. But the airline’s closure shouldn’t pass without giving dubious credit to the main culprits: The antitrust theorists of the Biden Administration.

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, NOT a socialist but known as “America’s Mayor for his stewardship of the city after 9/11, is in critical but stable condition in a Florida hospital. The increasingly ghoulish Jimmy Kimmel made an ill-timed quip about Giuliani, 81, “calling [him] from the grave.” President Trump weighed in, decrying “radical left lunatics” for their treatment of Giuliani. Thoughts and prayers for the former Mayor.

Enquiring Minds Want to Know: Are there any “very fine people” at the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in Mobile, Alabama?

The SPLC is alleged to have hoodwinked its own donors by funneling millions of dollars into the “hate” groups the SPLC supposedly hates. Donors include George Clooney, who gave a million dollars, George Soros, JPMorgan, and ex-Apple CEO Tim Cook. 

The indictment alleges that tax-deductible donations made to SPLC ended up in the hands of Ku Kluxers and other charmers. The SPLC insists that this was for informers to keep themselves safe from all the haters. Another explanation: Recipients of SPLC largesse egged on violent protests, thus churning up business for the SPLC. In other words, the SPLC manufactured racism for financial gain.

Spreading fear of the elusive white supremacist was big business for the SPLC:

The Southern Poverty Law Center more than doubled its revenue in the months following the deadly 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally — a surge now drawing renewed scrutiny after a Department of Justice indictment alleged the group paid an informant tied to the event’s organizers.

The 2017 rally, which left one woman dead, became a cultural flashpoint over white nationalism and political violence, driving widespread condemnation and a surge in donations to civil rights groups, including the SPLC. The fallout also shaped the 2020 presidential election, as President Donald Trump’s response — including his remarks about “very fine people” on both sides — was hammered by the left, with former President Joe Biden later citing Charlottesville as a reason he entered the race.

As a southern conservative who grew up in a famously liberal enclave, where liberal self-congratulation was not in short supply, I can’t suppress a soupcon (okay, a big bucketful of) schadenfreude. The SPLC targeted as “hate groups” worthy organizations and individuals such as Focus on the Family, Turning Point, USA, and Moms for Liberty. (I’m willing to bet they didn’t pay a Moms for Liberty “informant”!) PJ Media’s Robert Spencer writes about this in “Hey SPLC, Where’s My Check?” Brendan O’Neill writes at Spiked Online:

Every now and then, there’s a news event that feels simultaneously insane and entirely logical. The stink swirling around the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is just such an event. At first blush, the suggestion that the centre has been ‘fund[ing] the extremism that it claimed to be fighting’ seems wild. But then it hits you – such duplicitous antics, if true, would be wholly in keeping with an activist class that continually inflates the far-right threat in order to make itself feel purposeful and virtuous….

The possibility that the turbo-smug coastal elites were unwittingly giving money to literal Nazis is almost too good to be true. These are people who look down on the ‘rednecks’ who voted for Trump as dim minions of the new fascism. Yet it’s now alleged that one of their own beloved organisations pumped $3million into groups with names like Aryan Nations. I don’t know much about Aryan Nations but it doesn’t sound nice.

The Free Press’s Jed Rubenfeld suggests that, while the SPLC has undoubtedly spread hatred, it might not be guilty of a crime.

No, Virginia. Virginia’s controversial Democratic redistricting plan, which narrowly was passed by voters, is being blocked by a judge. I am amused that CNN describes the judge “as judge in rural southern Virginia.” Yes, Virginia, rural judges rule things unconstitutional, too. An editorial in the Wall Street Journal is headlined “Virginia’s Race to the Gerrymander Bottom“:

The gerrymander race to the bottom escalated on Tuesday as Democrats in Virginia won a narrow victory to redraw their state map to add as many as four Democratic House seats. This is bad news for GOP control of the House in November, but Republicans can also blame President Trump for starting this rolling rock that has now come down on their heads.

The narrow 51.4%-48.6% margin attests to how brazenly partisan this exercise was. …

Barack Obama on Tuesday hailed Virginia for “stand[ing] up for our democracy,” but the vote effectively ends competitive elections for Congress in most of the state. This is why voters don’t take seriously Democratic complaints about GOP threats to democracy.

In “Virginia Failed the Basic Test of Our Democracy” at The Free Press Charles Lane argues: “A liberal society can’t work if both sides seize every advantage they can. But the latest gerrymander suggests we’ve gone awfully far down that road.”

We’re Starting Without You. Senate Republicans have rammed through a blueprint to bankroll ICE and the Border Patrol through the end of the Trump administration:

Senate Republicans adopted their budget resolution, which tees up funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol, and effectively cuts congressional Democrats out of the process entirely.

It’s the first major step toward unlocking the budget reconciliation process, which Republicans are diving into once again after Democrats refused to fund ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) without stringent reforms. …

Is there more hope that we’re led to believe for the GOP in the midterms? “Democrats in Peril, From Barcelona to Boise” is the headline on Karl Rove’s column today. Rove writes that the Democratic party is “a mess, notwithstanding the GOP’s problems.” An interesting feature of the modern Dems is increasing opposition to the state of Isael. Matthew Continetti describes this in a column headlined “The Democrats Unify Against Israel“:

Israel is the Democratic Party’s new litmus test, and Senator Bernie Sanders is leading the turn against the Jewish state. In 2024, 19 Democrats voted with him to deny military aid to a U.S. ally at war. In 2025, 24 did the same. This year, as the U.S. and Israel fought side by side against the Iranian theocracy, 40 of 47 Democratic senators were with Mr. Sanders.

Democratic elites follow the polls. Anti-Israel sentiment runs through every level of the party, from former presidents to insurgent candidates. The woolly fringe is now mainstream. Barack Obama was all smiles in a recent photo-op with New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a socialist for whom anti-Zionism is a calling card. The Democrats’ newest congresswoman, Analilia Mejia of New Jersey, is a former Sanders delegate who omitted Israeli terror victims from an Oct. 10, 2023, social-media post condemning violence in Gaza.

The front-runner in Maine’s Democratic Senate primary, Graham Platner, says he plans to remove the Nazi-associated tattoo on his chest. …

Get Me Rewrite. Not without poignance, it’s time to rewrite “Rule, Britania.” Because guess what country comes closest to ruling the seas? “How U.S. Ship Boardings Have Kicked Off a New Phase of the Iran War” is a news headline in the Wall Street Journal. The U.S. has boarded an Iran-linked tanker in the Indian Ocean. Most of the legacy media has focused on Secretary Hegseth’s firing of the Secretary of the Navy, whose name you probably don’t remember.

More meaningfully, Victor Davis Hanson writes at American Greatness about “How Iran Committed Suicide.” The subhead:

Iran’s decades-long bluff—built on terror proxies, nuclear brinkmanship, and Western appeasement—collapsed the moment it faced direct force and a changed geopolitical landscape.

Meanwhile, Eli Lake at The Free Press compares former President Obama’s JCPOA with Iran and Trump’s nuclear deal.

Writing at City Journal, Heather Mac Donald shines light on “The Climate Litigation Swindle.” The greenies rely on lawsuits utilizing junk science to bankrupt energy companies, which undermine the basis of American power.

Another shocking revelation from Mollie Hemingway’s new book on Justice Alito: Justice Kagan is not a sweetie pie! No!

According to the book, Kagan—widely regarded as the intellectual leader of the Court’s liberal bloc—is admired for her sharp legal mind, strategic skill in oral arguments, and ability to build coalitions with conservative justices. But that reputation is paired with repeated accounts from clerks and court insiders describing her as emotionally abusive and demoralizing inside chambers….

“‘Kagan’s clerks had fear in their eyes,’ recalls someone who clerked for a different justice,” Hemingway wrote in the book. “Other clerks compared her to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, moving from extremely kind to extremely angry.”

President Donald Trump will not have fear in his eyes as he attends the White House Correspondents Dinner this weekend, even though the trendy Daily Beast, and other beasts, will be lying in wait for him.