Plus: Texas vs. the Feds.
• Well, at least Trump has proven that he’s not just a sore loser.
• Ron DeSantis finished second in the Iowa caucuses, pulled out, and endorsed the victor, Donald Trump. Trump was gracious. Said everyone, Gracious Trump! (Is this something new?) Nikki Haley finished second in the New Hampshire primary and vowed to keep fighting. Was Trump’s victory speech gracious? Arguably, for him it was—he didn’t call Haley “Nimbra” or “Birdbrain” (though he summoned the latter in a post-primary social-media post). He did call her an “impostor” (for claiming to have beaten the expectations game) and suggested that if she won in November she would be investigated for unnamed scandals, which he declines for the present to reveal. For good measure he said that Governor Chris Sununu, who endorsed Haley, was high on drugs. Politics is a contact sport; in ongoing contests, even winners take shots at rivals. But this winner accepts only converts, smiling behind him on the podium like bobblehead dolls. Anything less he consigns to perdition or, since defeat is unacceptable, nonexistence (hence Biden did not beat him in 2020). Voters will get to see a lot more of this until November.
• Reacting to the Biden administration’s refusal to detain or expel illegal migrants, Texas put up coiled razor wire on state and private land. This is controversial because it is effective. The federal government has treated Texas, not the migrants, as the problem. Border Patrol agents were caught on video destroying sections of wire to wave migrants through. Texas filed suit, alleging trespassing and destruction of state property. This raised complex issues of federalism and judicial remedies. In December, the Fifth Circuit issued a temporary injunction to prevent the Border Patrol from destroying more wire while the appeal was pending. The Supreme Court ruled 5–4 to lift the injunction, with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett voting with the liberals. Neither the Court nor the dissenters wrote opinions explaining their reasoning. This triggered an explosion of anger at Roberts and Barrett, but an emergency appeal was a poor vehicle by which to resolve dueling facts and reconsider precedents. The Fifth Circuit will hear arguments soon for a permanent injunction. This may offer the Supreme Court a fuller record. Texas is taking further steps to force Biden’s hand, with the support of other states and now also Trump. Liberals are accusing Texas of defying the Supreme Court, a peculiar charge given that the justices issued no order to the state. Meanwhile, Congress and the voters hold better remedies for a rogue president’s refusal to do his job.
• With a strong bipartisan vote, the House committee for tax policy approved a deal that extends some tax cuts for business investment that were due to expire and expands the child tax credit in various ways. The most valuable change to the tax credit is to protect it from future inflation. (The deal does not, unfortunately, protect it from past inflation, which has already eliminated most of the increase that Congress legislated as part of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.) Another point in the deal’s favor: It is paid for by reforming a Covid-era tax break that has become notorious for abuse. Some conservatives oppose the deal on the ground that one of its provisions—allowing low-income people to use a previous year’s income to qualify for the child credit—would reduce their incentive to work. But some people might respond by working more, since one year’s work would earn a longer-lasting reward. In any case, reasonable debate over that provision should not obstruct passage of a bill that is in the main worthwhile. Congress works well every once in a while, and this is one such case.
• Never mind that manufacturing employment had been growing steadily since the Great Recession and had recovered to trend after Covid, and never mind that the U.S. manufacturing sector is already larger than Italy’s entire economy: Politicians decided manufacturing needed help. So they passed several pieces of legislation, most notably the CHIPS Act and the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, that included subsidies for manufacturing in preferred industries such as semiconductors and green energy. Total construction spending on manufacturing has skyrocketed since those bills became law, and the Biden administration is celebrating, as though spending money were a success in itself. Meanwhile, in the EU, construction spending on manufacturing is flat. Is it really the case that businesses were simply missing profitable investment opportunities for years when interest rates were near zero, and that these opportunities exist only in the U.S. and not in the peer economy of Europe? Or is it more likely that U.S. politicians are engineering a politically popular bubble?
• Last year was supposed to be a big one for unions. Organized labor received wall-to-wall positive press coverage through the UAW strike, the Kaiser Permanente strike, a threatened Teamsters strike at UPS, and more. Last year did see more labor actions than normal. But the media’s coverage frequently became cheerleading. Headlines announced a “resurgence” in organized labor, with journalists frequently describing the strikes as a trend that was sweeping the nation’s workforce. That was all undercut by one inconvenient fact, reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in January: The unionization rate for 2023 declined to a record low of 10 percent. The total number of unionized workers hardly changed last year. Americans still don’t want what organized labor is selling, and the media have beclowned themselves with the massive number of stories covering a “resurgence” that is not happening.
• There are four major airlines in the U.S., each of which accounts for 15 to 18 percent of the domestic market: American, Delta, United, and Southwest. There are several smaller airlines that split the roughly 30 percent that remains. Two of those, JetBlue and Spirit, wanted to merge. The merged airline would have accounted for about 10 percent of the market, giving it a chance to compete against the four major airlines in a way each company couldn’t do on its own. But a federal judge, at the urging of the Biden administration, blocked the merger on antitrust grounds. JetBlue and Spirit are appealing the decision. Spirit might go out of business anyway. If it does, its assets could be purchased by one of the larger airlines, increasing market concentration relative to the status quo. (Spirit had been entertaining a merger offer from Frontier before JetBlue made a better offer.) If the Biden administration really wants to increase competition in domestic air travel, it should urge Congress to open the market to carriers from other countries. As it stands, the four largest airlines are breathing a sigh of relief at not having to face a larger competitor.
• It now seems highly likely that the Biden administration will freeze reviews of applications for permits needed for new facilities to export liquefied natural gas. The reason? Reportedly to allow officials more time to ponder the climate effect of the additional exports from these terminals. It is uncertain how long any such process would take and what would eventually be decided. At best, a number of projects would be delayed. Even if that would make no short-term difference to the level of LNG exports, the decision to attach more weight to climate issues in this area would reveal sorely misplaced priorities and would only damage national security. One reason that Western Europe has remained (unexpectedly) steadfast in its support for Ukraine is that a huge increase in LNG imports from the U.S. has enabled it to weather the loss of almost all its supply of Russian fossil fuels. For the U.S. to do anything that could undermine Europe’s belief in the reliability of this lifeline (and by extension in America’s reliability as an ally) would be a massive geopolitical blunder for minimal climate return.
• Turkey’s decision to ratify Sweden’s NATO application is good news. But the remaining holdout, Hungary, still seems in no hurry to follow suit, whether because it wants to squeeze some additional political or financial price out of its supposed allies, because of its government’s disturbingly close links to the Kremlin, or both. To be sure, Sweden is increasingly being integrated with NATO (and, even more closely, with the armed forces of its Nordic neighbors), but falling short of the formal protection of full membership leaves a gap in the defense of northeastern Europe. The position of the vulnerable Baltic trio would be considerably strengthened if Gotland, a strategically located Swedish island, were unequivocally under NATO’s umbrella. Sweden would not be a free rider. It has one of the strongest air forces in Europe, and its impressive defense sector sits within the country’s technologically advanced manufacturing base. After years of dawdling, Sweden is rapidly increasing its defense spending, which should cross the NATO target of 2 percent of GDP this year. The “incentives” it takes to win Budapest over will be worth it.
• The show trial of Jimmy Lai is under way. Lai, 76, is the great entrepreneur and democracy advocate in Hong Kong who has been a political prisoner since 2020. What is his show trial showing? That the authorities are scared of criticism and contemptuous of the truth. In a new development, they have named “co-conspirators”—foreigners who advocate democracy and human rights in China and elsewhere. Two of them live in London: Bill Browder, the founder of the Global Magnitsky Justice Campaign, and Benedict Rogers, the founder of Hong Kong Watch. The Chinese authorities are trying to scare off anyone who would help Jimmy Lai, or any other dissident. “Hang in there!” a supporter called out to Lai in the courtroom. So should we all, until this man is free.
• The Oscar nominations for 2023 are out. The “Barbenheimer” duo of Barbie and Oppenheimer that dominated the summer box office was well represented. Christopher Nolan’s biopic of the Manhattan Project nuclear scientist led the pack with 13 nods, while Greta Gerwig’s arch pink fantasia is up for eight. Controversy has emerged, however, over two perceived snubs for the latter. Though Barbie has been nominated for Best Picture, Gerwig is not in the running for Best Director. And though Ryan Gosling is up for Best Supporting Actor for his role in Barbie as Ken, Margot Robbie’s portrayal of the primary eponymous Barbie is not up for Best Actress. The film’s perceived cultural status as a girl-power statement has helped give rise to accusations of sexism on the part of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which announces and ultimately selects nominees. The case for Robbie’s having been snubbed is absurd on its face, given that a woman will win the Best Actress award regardless. As for Gerwig’s exclusion from the Best Director contest, the level of directorial competition—from the likes of Nolan, Martin Scorsese, and (the female) Justine Triet—suffices as an explanation. Gerwig and her husband, Noah Baumbach, can take consolation from knowing that they remain contenders for another category: Best Adapted Screenplay. Though why Barbie fits that category and not Best Original Screenplay is a mystery whose answer would require knowledge of the arcane inner workings of the Academy.
• “Words like generosity and mercy sound foreign to them,” Lev Rubinstein said of the Russian government under Putin. “They regard any sign of goodwill, any concession as weakness.” A young librarian at his alma mater in Moscow in the 1970s, Rubinstein grew to love card catalogues and found in them a format for the avant-garde poetry he’d begun to write. Who needs paper when a stack of the small cardboard rectangles will do, each one good for a line or two? “We go our separate ways, do not forget me,” read the last four of the 97 cards of “Here I Am.” Rubinstein was a founder of Russian conceptualism, a pie-in-your-face response to the socialist realism favored by the Soviet regime. He wrote for mainstream Russian publications after the Soviet Union fell and in 1999 was awarded the Andrei Bely Prize, dedicated to writers who defy censorship. He advocated for causes at odds with Putin’s crusade to suppress freedom of expression. Crossing a street in Moscow on January 8, he was hit by a car. He died of his injuries six days later, age 76. “We go our separate ways, do not forget me.” R.I.P.