Conservative: Thanks for the Judges, Harry!
With Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s help, President Trump has appointed federal judges at “about twice the rate of his three predecessors,” notes The Washington Examiner’s editorial board. But Trump should be thanking “McConnell’s predecessor, former Democratic Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada.” In 2013, with President Barack Obama “in the White House and Democrats controlling the Senate,” Reid made the “fateful” and “short-sighted” decision to change Senate rules so that “a bare majority” was enough to confirm a judge, instead of 60 votes, as before. During his campaign, Trump “regularly and energetically” promised to appoint “well-credentialed conservatives” with “excellent character and scholarship” to judgeships — a promise he has kept, “much to his credit.”
Culture critic: From Woodstock to Populism
“Middle class” in Britain was once defined by “a safe, lifelong career,” “allegiance to the Conservative Party” and defending “tradition” — but now, Jonathan Rutherford sighs at The New Statesman, it has “lost its role and the authority invested in it” and has been “overtaken by a new middle class fraction forged in the cultural revolution and university expansion of the 1960s.” The Woodstock generation went into politics, eschewing traditionally left-wing “populist economic democracy” in favor of a libertarian “identity politics of gender, race and sexuality.” Left-wing parties became “parties of the new liberal middle class,” increasingly contemptuous of “lives and experience of mainstream working-class voters.” Yet working-class voters pushed back — and voted for Brexit and “their historic class enemy: the Tories.” Back in 1969, “no one could have believed it would turn out like this,” but liberal elites have only themselves to blame.
Foreign desk: Hurrah for the US-UK Marriage
Among elite opinion-makers, Brexit is destined to turn Britain into an isolated backwater. Not so, says Brandon J. Weichert at American Greatness. The island nation had “extraordinary power” on its own, and “subordinating British national sovereignty to the supranational government in Brussels” was always a mistake. Now that it��s almost out, Britain should forge a stronger relationship with the United States, an “Anglo-American marriage” that would ensure that Brexit is “meaningful and real and not at all damaging to Britain.” The good news is that President Trump has already promised a “new free-trade agreement with London” — which will allow Britain to shake off the “sclerotic superstate” that is the European Union.
Libertarian: A Year of Peak Entitlement
If you listen to “many politicians and pundits,” you would think the United States is “doing terribly” while “the government isn’t spending a dime” — yet the truth is the exact opposite, argues Reason’s Veronique de Rugy. Among other things, the economy is “entering its 11th year of expansion,” while poverty is “at an all-time low,” and the unemployment rate hasn’t been so low since 1969. Meanwhile, the government is racking up “gargantuan budget deficits,” largely because both political parties are “spending on a whim” and condemning our free-market economy — the very system that has “produced the wealth that everyone takes for granted.” The problem,” she insists, “isn’t that free markets don’t work,” but that “we may have reached peak entitlement mentality.”
Urban beat: Cali’s Homelessness Hopelessness
Despite California’s homelessness crisis, Sacramento and city halls across the Golden State are “mired in the ‘we-need-more-money’ mindset” — a mindset, sighs Issues and Insights’ editorial board, that has never worked. In fact, despite “all the spending, and the pleas and plans for additional money,” homelessness has spiked 30% since 2017 in San Francisco, 16% in Los Angeles and a whopping 43% in San Jose. As a result, “nearly half of the nation’s homeless who sleep on the streets” today do so in California. Instead of “feeding government bureaucracies with taxpayers’ money,” government officials should follow the example of San Diego, where the city took a tough-love approach that rejected widespread street camping — and watched its homeless population fall. “The shift in thinking and in acting is paying off.”
— Compiled by Karl Salzmann