Plus Shohei Ohtani’s $700 million contract.
• An age-old mystery solved: We now know what it takes to get Harvard alums to stop saying where they went to school.
• With unanimous support from its narrow Republican majority, the House voted to authorize an impeachment investigation of President Biden. As corrupt as the Biden family’s business appears to have been, conviction by the Democratic Senate seems highly unlikely. Clearly, then, the gambit is designed to have, coterminous with Trump’s criminal prosecution by the Biden Justice Department’s special counsel, a parallel probe of the Bidens. The imperative should be to get as much information as possible to the public so it can impose accountability itself.
• After dragging his feet so long that the statute of limitations had expired on several potential charges, the Department of Justice special counsel David Weiss indicted Hunter Biden on nine tax charges, including three felonies. Weiss acted only after the sweetheart plea deal he tried to grant Hunter imploded when a judge asked a few rudimentary questions. The humiliated prosecutor has now twice indicted the younger Biden (gun charges were filed a few weeks back). But Weiss is still protecting “the big guy.” The president’s name is not mentioned in the 56-page charging document, but his shadow hovers all over it. Not surprisingly, media coverage pored over the salacious details—how Hunter blew millions of dollars on crack, women, and song. Focus on how the money was spent may temporarily have the Justice Department’s desired effect of diverting attention from how it was generated—an eye-popping $24 million over five years from agents of corrupt and anti-American regimes. But the business was Joe Biden: willfully abetting the sale of political influence for years. Weiss can’t hide that.
• Jack Smith should be careful what he wishes for. He has asked the Supreme Court to intervene prematurely in his election-interference case against Donald Trump, who claims he has immunity from criminal prosecution for actions taken as president. Trump may be wrong about that, but the Supreme Court has never ruled on the question. Of more immediate importance: Immunity rulings are appealable pretrial—important because Trump’s strategy is to delay the trial until after the election. When Judge Tanya Chutkan ruled he had no immunity, Trump appealed to the D.C. Circuit. Once a case is on appeal, the trial judge loses jurisdiction over it. If the appeal dragged out, that would jeopardize Smith’s presumed goal of convicting Trump prior to the election. So in an unusual move, the prosecutor asked the Supreme Court to decide the immunity issue now. The justices directed Trump’s counsel to respond to Smith’s gambit—and then announced they would entertain the claim of several January 6 defendants that the criminal-obstruction statute is unconstitutional. That statute is at the heart of Smith’s case against Trump—and his theory is more of a reach than is the application of the statute to rioters. Plus, in a case last term throwing out two corruption convictions of cronies of former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, the justices warned prosecutors not to push the limits of fraud (also central to Smith’s case) and other ambiguous laws. Smith just wants to argue about immunity; the last thing he intended was to invite pretrial Supreme Court scrutiny of his dubious charges.
• Kevin McCarthy is leaving Congress. We can’t blame him for being bitter at how a backbench rebellion by just eight members of his caucus ousted him after nine months from the job to which he had spent his whole career climbing and in which he did his best to play a weak hand. His comportment on the way out, however, has vindicated his critics on all sides. He is abandoning his House seat midterm, leaving his straitened caucus with an even narrower margin and his constituents unrepresented until a special election can be held. What opportunity could be so pressing that he couldn’t wait a year? He gave a speech at Oxford slamming his party for looking like the “most restrictive country club in America,” hardly the tune he used in office to describe Republican voters and the people they chose to represent them. And he endorsed Donald Trump—something he no longer needs to do for caucus unity, but that he combined with openly angling for a job in a Trump cabinet. A coda that reflects poorly on McCarthy’s core beliefs, or lack of them.
• Liz Magill, Claudine Gay, and Sally Kornbluth look to become the Dylan Mulvaneys of woke higher ed. After their clumsy and hypocritical testimony before the House on the storms of antisemitism that have blown on their campuses, Magill, president of Penn, and Scott Bok, chairman of the board of trustees who backed her, resigned their positions. Harvard’s board of governors stuck by President Gay, despite embarrassingly credible allegations that her slight sheaf of academic papers was marred by plagiarism. Harvard has a $51 billion endowment, tax-free, so it can ride out negative alumni reactions, but the smudge on its reputation remains. The House voted, 303 to 126, to condemn the presidents’ testimony as “evasive and dismissive.” (The resolution was moved by two Republicans and two Democrats, though all but one of the nays were Ds.) Further congressional investigation is sure to follow. There can be no thoroughgoing reform until campus diversity-equity-and-inclusion bureaucracies are abolished. Since the racial favoritism that DEI embodies violates the Civil Rights Act, federal pressure could help. But the underlying intellectual paradigm of construing all human interactions as racial, and all history as colonial or anticolonial, will have to give way to some new fashion, probably no more correct but, one hopes, less pernicious.
• Wisconsin assembly speaker Robin Vos has won his fight with the University of Wisconsin system over DEI. Over the summer, Vos said assembly Republicans would not approve funding for capital projects or pay raises unless the UW system made cuts to DEI, which, he says, really stands for “division, exclusion, and indoctrination.” The Democratic governor, Tony Evers, line-item vetoed the DEI cuts that Republicans included in the state budget. After months of negotiations, Vos’s stance materialized into a deal with the university system. In exchange for funding raises and new buildings on campus, the UW system would freeze all DEI hiring, reassign 43 current DEI officials to other positions, and create a position at the flagship campus in Madison for the study of conservative political thought. An affirmative-action hiring program and diversity statements on student applications would be abolished. The deal also says the UW system will adopt a race-blind admissions program in which Wisconsin students who finish in the top 5 percent of their high-school class are guaranteed admission to UW-Madison, and students who finish in the top 10 percent are guaranteed admission to other campuses in the system. The system’s board of regents initially rejected the deal in a 9–8 vote. Vos stood his ground. Realizing he was serious, the board of regents approved the deal five days after the initial vote. A win for Vos, and for Wisconsin’s students.
• Kate Cox’s unborn child was diagnosed with trisomy 18, which, given current U.S. medical practices, usually leads to death in the womb or in the first year after birth. If she carried the baby to term, she would have to have her third C-section. A Texan, she sought a medical exemption from the state’s abortion ban. Her lawyers noted such risks as that 0.9 percent of women need hysterectomies after a third C-section, and she wants to have more children. Texas law, however, allows abortion only in life-threatening conditions. She left the state to have an abortion. Abortion advocates exploited this sad story by misrepresenting it, falsely claiming both that the Texas supreme court, in denying her an exemption, had put her life in danger and that the baby was guaranteed an early death. We can debate whether abortion should be available in cases of major fetal abnormalities, as even some states that generally prohibit abortion have decided—but not if that debate is pervasively dishonest.
• Whatever concerns we have about the White House’s waning support of Israel’s campaign against Hamas, U.S. diplomats at the United Nations have generally held the line. This week, America’s representative on the Security Council vetoed a resolution to demand a cease-fire in Gaza; that was followed up two days later by America’s opposition to a similar General Assembly resolution. There’s no veto power in the General Assembly, so that measure passed easily—after countries voted down amendments to condemn Hamas and the October 7 attack. Some analysts took the opportunity to bash America, as they’re wont to do. But it’s the U.N., not the U.S., that this vote discredits.
• COP28, the U.N.’s latest climate jamboree, is over. The last private jets carrying VIPs home from Dubai have flown off, and memories of King Charles’s bizarre speech to the opening ceremony will mercifully fade. COP28 disappointed the climate fundamentalists who were always going to be disappointed that more was not done to stave off apocalypse. Some were also disappointed that nuclear energy was finally mentioned as part of the solution to climate change. In another, less welcome first, the conference agreed that fossil fuels should be phased out, although no timetable was given, and neither was any explanation of how this could be achieved. Talk of a massive expansion of renewable energy—in advance of technological feasibility—was another reminder that realism plays little part in deliberations such as these. More attacks on cheap, reliable energy in the West will enrich OPEC+, damage Western economies, give a geopolitical boost to Xi and to Putin, and do little or nothing for the climate.
• October’s election saw Poland’s governing PiS (Law and Justice), a party of the Euroskeptic nationalist Right, emerge with the largest number of seats in the lower house of Poland’s parliament but no majority. A coalition led by Donald Tusk, a former prime minister who later served as the president of the European Council, took over this week. Much of the coalition’s efforts will be directed at reversing what its voters saw as a drift toward authoritarianism and away from “Europe,” a term that, in this context, means Brussels. For those outside Poland, the most important question is whether Poland, a strong U.S. ally in the middle of a substantial buildup of its military and, some spats aside, a major supporter of Ukraine, will start to step back from that position. Both Tusk’s track record and some of his statements since retaking power would suggest not. Poland is rapidly establishing itself as the West’s bulwark in the east.
• Alexei Navalny may be Putin’s most dangerous opponent from within the depleted ranks of Russia’s democrats. While he has disavowed some ugly earlier rhetoric, he remains a Russian nationalist, placing him on territory that Putin considers to be his own. And his attacks on Putin’s corruption resonate in a country where justified cynicism about those in charge stretches back to the tsars. An assault in 2017 left Navalny partially blind in one eye, and in 2020 he had to receive treatment in Germany after being poisoned. Even knowing that he faced arrest on trumped-up charges, he flew back to Russia rather than accept exile, a mark of his belief that Putin’s system can be defeated. Since Navalny came back, he has been held in increasingly harsh conditions (his health has suffered as a result) and been handed longer and longer sentences of imprisonment. He is not due for release until 2038. He was set to be transferred to a brutal “special regime colony.” As of now, he has “disappeared” within the system. This secrecy may be a matter of routine cruelty, or it could signal something worse. Either way, he must not be forgotten.
• Each decade or so, professional sports fans need to recalibrate what constitutes excess for player contracts. The Los Angeles Dodgers signed Shohei Ohtani to a ten-year, $700 million contract. Ohtani, the best Japanese import since Ichiro Suzuki, is undoubtedly baseball’s most valuable property when healthy. He is the first player since Babe Ruth to be a star pitcher and a star hitter, and even Ruth was a two-way player for only two seasons before abandoning the mound. In six seasons, Ohtani has won the Rookie of the Year and two MVP awards, led the league in home runs and on-base percentage, finished fourth in Cy Young balloting, and compiled a 38–19 record. But the Dodgers are taking a big risk: Ohtani won’t pitch in 2024, thanks to his second Tommy John elbow surgery; the first cost him almost two full pitching seasons. Shrewdly, Ohtani has deferred all but $2 million a year of his contract, calculating that this will reduce his tax rate, provide for his retirement, and allow the Dodgers to afford better players around him. It shows that Ohtani has given as much attention to his finances as to his craft.
• Juanita Castro was a brave woman. She was a sister of Fidel and Raúl. She fully supported the Cuban revolution—but she was appalled by what her brothers did with power. She helped dissidents escape capture and execution. She even worked for the CIA (as she revealed in a memoir published in 2009). “I didn’t betray him,” she said of Fidel. “He betrayed me.” What’s more, “he betrayed the thousands of us who suffered and fought for the revolution that he had offered, one that was generous and just and would bring peace and democracy to Cuba.” In 1964, the sixth year of the dictatorship, Juanita fled to the United States. “I cannot remain indifferent to what is happening in my country,” she said. “My brothers Fidel and Raúl have made it an enormous prison surrounded by water.” In Miami, Juanita opened a pharmacy (Mini Price). It is not easy to break with family, even when that family is monstrous. Juanita Castro did it. She has died at 90. R.I.P.