From the right: Biden’s Antitrust Power Grab
President Biden last week slammed the “philosophy of people like Robert Bork” and the decline in enforcing “laws to promote competition” — but at The Wall Street Journal, the late judge’s son, Robert Bork Jr. of the Antitrust Education Project, notes his dad explained how laws meant to protect consumers “ended up protecting everyone but consumers.” Now Biden and Federal Trade Commission chairman Lina Khan want to “undo the consumer-welfare standard and replace it with a full-on effort to regulate pharmaceuticals, health care, agriculture, telecom, technology and manufacturing.” And if Biden “can steamroll every industry and protect inefficient, rent-seeking competitors over consumers,” he’ll “succeed in transforming America.” It’ll be a power grab “at least the equal of the New Deal” — but “without its benefits.”
Media watch: Democracy’s Hypocrites
Do legislator walkouts “preserve or endanger democracy? For the press, it depends which party is walking,” snarks National Review’s Isaac Schorr. When Oregon Republicans “started staging walkouts” in 2019 to “deny the Democratic majority the quorum they’d need to pass their legislative priorities,” the media were “outraged.” Vox accused “a handful of white people from the far right” of “holding the state government hostage,” while CNN declared Republicans weren’t following the “Oregon Way.” Now, however, “the script” has “flipped”: The press “is covering Texas Democrats like they’re some kind of righteous traveling circus” after they fled the state to block GOP voting-reform legislation. A Washington Post columnist even pleaded, “Can we stop saying ‘fleeing’ the state, as if they are cowards or victims?”
From the left: Rethink Anti-Child Safety-ism
At New York magazine, David Wallace-Wells declares: “The kids are safe. They always have been.” Epidemiological data have long told us children are at minuscule risk from the coronavirus, and new research from the Centers for Disease Control confirms that “among children the mortality risk from COVID-19 is actually lower than from the flu,” and “the risk of severe disease or hospitalization is about the same” — including for the Delta variant. Yet for 18 months “we have been largely unwilling to fully believe it. Children now wear masks at little-league games, and at the swimming pool, and when school reopens in the fall they will likely wear masks there, too.” This, even though they aren’t at risk, and, “thanks to vaccines, the vast majority of their parents and grandparents aren’t any longer, either.” Bottom line: “The country’s whole risk profile has changed. But our intuitions about risk tolerance haven’t.” They should — for the kids’ sake.
Libertarian: The Real Fix for Election Security
At The Dispatch, Walter Olson contends that addressing the “near-crisis that American government went through between Election Day and Inauguration Day” requires a “focused defense of electoral institutions,” not the total upheaval of our “national institutions” Democrats are demanding. Though “there was a serious challenge to the workings of a democratic transition” post-election, “the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the Electoral College not only withstood the pressure applied to each, but did not come close to failing,” so “why are we asked to see them as the problem in need of urgent repair?” Some suggestions: “ballot-security measures” with “vote counts fully (as opposed to mostly) backed by checkable paper trails” and “real Election Night vote counts.”
Conservative: The One Police Reform We Need
America needs police reform that “improves community safety,” but it “won’t come from the Democrats’ radical proposals like defunding the police,” argues Florida GOP Sen. Rick Scott at Fox News. “The jumble of police reform proposals” out there “won’t solve the one thing that will truly spark and secure lasting change to improve policing: changing police culture in the agencies that need it.” Destroying “the overwhelmingly good policing being carried out by respected law enforcement officers” wouldn’t halt the country’s violent-crime wave. Real accountability could come from professional accreditation, which mandates “best practice standards that agencies are required to follow and encompasses everything from training, to use of force policies, to disciplinary policies.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board