Plus: Mike Pence bows out and Mike Johnson takes over the House.
• Gone are the old antisemitic WASPs who once ran the Ivy League. The new antisemites are much more diverse.
• Mike Pence bowed out of the presidential race. The former vice president was doomed by doing his constitutional duty on January 6, 2021. His rating among Republicans slid after that day until, despite being a rock-ribbed conservative who was smack in the middle of the consensus on the right for almost the entirety of his career, he had become radioactive in his own party. This was perverse, but Pence can take comfort in knowing that his faithfulness to the Constitution will be long remembered and that if he had bowed to Donald Trump’s pressure, the president’s campaign to overturn the election results would have become a genuine constitutional crisis. Having concluded that his presidential campaign couldn’t win, Pence got out rather than take any of the vote share from other non-Trump alternatives. Several remaining candidates should prayerfully consider his example.
• Nikki Haley is having a moment. She has pulled into second place in the polls in New Hampshire and in her home state of South Carolina, and a recent Des Moines Register poll shows her tied for second in Iowa with Florida governor Ron DeSantis, heretofore the clear leader of the non-Trump Republican candidates. The first two Republican debates made all the difference, elevating Haley’s cash- and publicity-strapped candidacy and all but burying her in-state rival, Tim Scott. Haley has earned it. The debates played to her strength on national security and her clarity in differentiating herself from the party’s populists. She won fans by calling out the inexperience and glib overconfidence of Vivek Ramaswamy. Haley’s challenge, however, remains: Even if she were to corner the market on voters who have already soured on Trump, she needs some plan to win over those who are also open to Trump—and to find a message that will peel them away from him. This is the same task that has bedeviled DeSantis for months. Worse, she and DeSantis may end up preventing each other from waging a one-on-one fight against Trump. But for now, Haley deserves to outlast the marginal candidates on the wings of the stage.
• During the 2008 election cycle, aiming to stop Hillary Clinton from becoming president, a right-leaning group led by David Bossie produced Hillary: The Movie and took to court its challenge to rules preventing it from advertising the film in advance of a primary election. The resulting Supreme Court decision, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, ruled that groups do not lose their free-speech rights if organized as corporations. Ever since, the likes of Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have made Citizens United their bête noire, introducing futile bills to repeal it or amend the Constitution to roll back free speech. Conspiracy theorists such as Senator Sheldon Whitehouse made it a centerpiece of their libels of the Supreme Court as the puppet of right-wing money. Now Senator Josh Hawley has joined them, proposing his own going-nowhere bill. He thus picked a fight, which perhaps was the purpose, with Mitch McConnell, who noted that Citizens United helped McConnell’s Senate Leadership Fund bankroll Hawley’s own campaign. Scant weeks before, Hawley had reversed himself by coming out in opposition to the right to work. It is beginning to look as though opposition to freedom is his default position.
• Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee are abusing their investigatory powers simply to campaign against Leonard Leo and Harlan Crow. Dick Durbin, Sheldon Whitehouse, and their committee will reportedly vote within the next two weeks to subpoena Leo and Crow, as well as Robin Arkley II, who is targeted over a fishing trip with Justice Samuel Alito 15 years ago. The topic is their friendships with Alito and, primarily, Justice Clarence Thomas. They are not casting any similar net for friends of the liberal justices who bankroll their travel. The pretext is that the committee needs this information to draft legislation imposing a code of ethics on the Supreme Court. The reality is that the committee already drafted that legislation, voted on it, and declared it a “comprehensive” solution; that it has no prospect of becoming law; and that it is flagrantly unconstitutional because it interferes with the inner workings of the judiciary and allows lower-court judges to supervise the Supreme Court—indeed, to do so in ways that may intimidate the justices from exercising their own constitutional duty to supervise the lower courts. But the subpoenas will please the senators’ donors, which is apparently all that matters.
• It’s good to have an ally in the White House. The United Auto Workers has consistently failed to unionize workplaces in right-to-work states and has suffered as more car production has shifted to those states. The union was the subject of a yearslong Department of Justice investigation for fraud and corruption that ended with a consent decree in 2020. Twelve top officials, including two former presidents, were convicted on fraud charges and sentenced to federal prison. The UAW operates under the jurisdiction of a court-appointed monitor. In a 2022 report, the monitor noted that the UAW’s cooperativeness had “veered sharply in the wrong direction” and that there were still 19 ongoing investigations. The failing and corrupt union has nonetheless earned the support of President Biden, who joined striking workers and endorsed their demands for a 32-hour work week, the return of defined-benefit pensions, and a wage increase of over 40 percent. The deals the UAW actually struck with Ford, Stellantis, and GM don’t include the shortened work week, do establish higher 401(k) contributions instead of defined-benefit pensions, and provide a wage increase of 25 percent, with cost-of-living adjustments on top of that. The UAW also won the right to strike if any automaker shuts down a plant, and it got Ford to promise to recognize it at new plants in Michigan and Tennessee without a union election. This contract will widen the gap in competitiveness between the Big Three and foreign carmakers doing business in the U.S. But as the Great Recession demonstrated, if the Big Three play along with the federal government, especially on labor and environmentalism, it will bail them out if necessary.
• New York City mayor Eric Adams says, “Every year, my relatives show up for Thanksgiving, and they want to all sleep at my house. There’s no more room. That’s where we are right now.” And so an office in Manhattan has been effectively turned into a travel agency that provides one-way tickets out of town—not for the mayor’s many kin but for the more than 100,000 illegal immigrants who over the past year have tried to claim asylum in the sanctuary city, so called because its local law enforcement will cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in only limited ways. “When you are out of room, that means you’re out of room,” the mayor insists with tautological simplicity. By the same token, he must realize that the country’s woes did not, in fact, begin with “a madman down in Texas,” as Adams claimed in September. That was a reference to Greg Abbott, the Republican governor there, who had sent immigrants northeast. The madmen responsible for the straits of New York City belong instead to Adams’s own party.
• At Cornell, anonymous threats of violence against Jews appeared on an online message board. Jewish students were advised to avoid the school’s kosher dining hall; campus police were called in. Law enforcement traced the posts to a Cornell junior, Patrick Dai. On Tuesday, New York State Police arrested him. Reports indicated that Dai had suffered from mental illness. Notably, his threats used language that has become frighteningly common and blatant on college campuses since the October 7 Hamas massacre in Israel—e.g., he said he would shoot Jews supporting the “zionist globalist genocidal apartheid dictatorial entity known as ‘israel.’” Elsewhere in the Ivy League, Sahar Tartak, a Yale sophomore and former NR intern, wrote an op-ed for the Yale Daily News calling out the group Yalies4Palestine, who blamed the Hamas slaughter on the “Israeli Zionist regime.” In the column, she described some of the atrocities that had been committed. After publication, an editor’s note was appended to the piece: “This column has been edited to remove unsubstantiated claims that Hamas raped women and beheaded men.” After an uproar, the editor of the Yale paper retracted the note, restored Tartak’s original language, and apologized. If you ever wondered how Holocaust denial took root, you can now watch it happen in real time.
• What do a coupla guys in Queens and Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29 have to do with each other? It’s like this: Last Friday a video posted on X showed a man on a street in Forest Hills tearing down posters of Hamas’s kidnapping victims—but said guys were having none of it. “This is New York City, you’ve got no f***ing right to touch that sh**!” the main guy, an unwitting folk hero, starts shouting. “This is a free country, you can wave your Palestine flag and say ‘Death to the Jews’ or ‘America’ whenever you want, but we can put up f***ing signs!” You could practically hear cheers erupting from the internet. Also last Friday, another video caught fire, this one of the famed English actress Judi Dench reciting Shakespeare, impromptu, on a BBC comedy/talk show. This time, you could almost hear the internet hold its breath: Haply I think on thee, and then my state / Like to the lark at break of day arising / From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate. From this odd couple of viral videos, one raw, one fine, comes an inkling: There is a collective yearning for moral clarity, and a collective yearning for something high, beautiful, and true.
• Olga Nazarenko lived in Ivanovo, Russia. She was an anti-war and pro-freedom protester. She put a Ukrainian flag on her balcony. She put ribbons in blue and yellow—the Ukrainian colors—on her backpack. Police repeatedly removed the flag and the ribbons. She replaced them. At a protest, she held up a sign that said, “All but very bad people want to live in peace.” Underneath that sentence was “God save Ukraine.” Earlier this year, she told Novaya Gazeta Europe (the Russian paper in exile), “What’s happening in Russia and Ukraine now is much worse than what’s happening to me. I can’t stay silent or I wouldn’t be able to look at myself in the mirror.” She has died at 48. “Doctors say the injuries she suffered suggested a severe beating and falling from a great height,” reported NGE. Olga Nazarenko leaves a husband and two children. The courage of some Russians, as throughout the Soviet period, is almost unfathomable.
• If you looked up “old-school basketball coach” in the dictionary, you might find a picture of Bobby Knight, glowering at you over his red sweater. Underneath his relentless driving of his players and the notorious outbursts of temper that eventually cost him his job, he was also an innovator who did for basketball what Bill Walsh did for football. Knight’s creation, the motion offense, choreographed passing and screening to overwhelm defenses’ capacity to react, changing the sport. An NCAA head coach for 43 years, highlighted by three decades at the helm of the Indiana Hoosiers, Knight retired as the winningest coach in college-basketball history. As a head coach, he won three NCAA titles (one of them capping an undefeated season), an NIT title, and an Olympic gold medal in 1984. Knight had an eye for talent: After coaching Michael Jordan in the Olympics, he declared Jordan—still years from establishing his legend—the best basketball player he had ever seen. He also recruited Larry Bird. Knight passed on his legacy by coaching other influential figures including Mike Krzyzewski, Isiah Thomas, Quinn Buckner, Steve Alford, and Randy Wittman. He died in Bloomington at 83. R.I.P.
Fund Our Allies
C ongress is debating how to go about passing aid to Ukraine and Israel. Yet the path here isn’t nearly as important as that, one way or the other, Congress pass the funding for both allies expeditiously. If Congress doesn’t act, America will have abandoned Ukraine and Israel in their hour of need as our enemies escalate their war against the West.
We have a great many problems with the Biden administration’s approach to each of these theaters, including its failure to deter Iran and Russia, its halting provision of weapons systems to Ukraine, and its pressure on Israel to pause its military operations in Gaza. But the administration is correct to push for funding both. It’s the best way to resist a two-pronged offensive against our allies by hostile actors who are providing aid to one another.
The president’s initial proposal, which includes about $14 billion for Israel and $60 billion for Ukraine, is anathema to the House leadership. Under Speaker Mike Johnson, Republicans are seeking separate legislation for each country. Republicans who support funding for Israel but not Ukraine could thus vote their conscience on each measure. That’s fine, so long as leadership guarantees that both bills get to the floor. Ukraine aid should not be bottled up even if there are bipartisan majorities in each chamber for another tranche of support.
House Republicans are also proposing that the Israel bill slash funding for the IRS. That bill passed the House with all but two Republicans plus twelve Democrats voting in favor, but it is still dead on arrival in the Senate, and the White House has said President Biden would veto it if it got to his desk.
Senators of both parties support a package that includes funds for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, as well as tacked-on border funding. House Republicans will probably be best served by negotiating over the substance of the proposal rather than the process: insisting on the enforcement of tougher rules at the border rather than simply on more funding for the current failure, and pushing for whatever accountability and transparency provisions might satisfy some Ukraine skeptics in their ranks.
Most important, though, is that Congress not stalemate over the funding at this moment. Israeli forces fighting in Gaza are also seeking to deter the entry of Iran’s other proxies into the war, and they need help quickly. Ukraine is struggling to keep up the pressure on the Russian military, and while time may seem less essential in a 21-month-old war nearing the end of the fighting season, stopping the flow of weapons to Kyiv could lead to strategic collapse. Communist China is also taking advantage of the chaos, holding unexpected military exercises near Taiwan.
Our enemies know what they are about. Congress needs to show the same purpose and resolve.