Plus: The Supreme Court takes up Trump’s immunity claim.
• Illinois is kicking Trump off the ballot. Is he not corrupt enough?
• Congressional leaders have reached a stopgap deal that may avoid an immediate government shutdown. But the deal may only delay a shutdown by a week. The challenge facing House Speaker Mike Johnson is the same as the one that plagued his predecessor, Kevin McCarthy. Republicans control only one chamber of Congress, by a razor-thin margin, meaning that if Johnson cannot unite his caucus around a bill to fund the government, he will have to rely on Democrats. Doing so could put his leadership at risk, just as it ended McCarthy’s. The sticking point is not overall spending levels, which were hammered out in January. The House Freedom Caucus wants concessions from Biden on immigration, abortion, and environmental regulations. Realistically, House Republicans are not going to transform Joe Biden into a conservative Republican—especially with a Democratic Senate. If Johnson found a way to pass a bill with some Freedom Caucus priorities, it could increase Republicans’ leverage with Senate Democrats. But barring that, he will have to cut the best deal that he can with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and President Joe Biden and rely on Democrats to secure the votes needed for passage. To allow the government to shut down would be yet another indication of dysfunction among House Republicans.
• Primary voters went to the polls on February 24 in South Carolina and on February 27 in Michigan. The message they delivered was the same one we have heard throughout the primary season: The parties are sticking and stuck with Donald Trump and Joe Biden, but a serious undercurrent of discontent runs through each side. Trump, who has won a majority in every state, beat Nikki Haley by 20 points in her home state and by 40 in Michigan. But if he is running like an incumbent, there’s a potentially alarming resistance. After combining with Ron DeSantis for 40.4 percent in Iowa, Haley drew 43.2 percent in New Hampshire, 39.5 percent in South Carolina, and 26.6 percent in Trump-friendly Michigan. Trump will need more party unity than that in November, and if Haley (who seems to be in through Super Tuesday) exits the race, he may stop seeing the symptoms without curing the disease. On the Democratic side, even without a credible opponent, Biden lost 18.8 percent of the vote in Michigan after losing 36.1 percent in New Hampshire (where he was a write-in). We can now look forward to a titanic clash between two weak candidates.
• Ronna McDaniel announced her resignation as chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, effective March 8. Her tenure reflects the thankless, humiliating, and often futile task of Republican leadership under Donald Trump. McDaniel, who was elected to four terms beginning in 2017, owed her position largely to Trump’s support. She even dropped the use of her family name (Romney)—an act of self-abasement remarkable even among those bending to Trump’s will. She presided over sagging Republican electoral fortunes: loss of the White House, the Senate, and House seats, Republican-held governorships, and state legislative chambers (Republicans dropped from 68 to 57 over her tenure). In an area more directly under her purview, the RNC ended 2023 with only $8 million in cash on hand, less than half of what the Democrats have. Critics noted McDaniel’s lavish spending and subsidy of Trump’s legal bills—the latter being the subject of a pending fracas over whether to bar the RNC from paying more of them. Trump has endorsed North Carolina GOP chairman Michael Whatley to lead the RNC alongside his daughter-in-law Lara Trump and senior campaign adviser Chris LaCivita. Not content with running the party, Trump wants to own it, too.
• The Supreme Court drew criticism for taking up Trump’s claim of immunity from criminal prosecution. Democrats say that it is aiding Trump by delaying Jack Smith’s prosecution of him in court until after the election. But Smith’s case raises issues that were bound to draw a review from the justices, and indeed their consideration of the case should not delay a trial any more than was already guaranteed by other cases they had agreed to scrutinize. The Supreme Court is following the normal legal process, rather than trying to speed it up to suit the Democrats’ desire for a pre-election guilty verdict.
• Democrats and the press are trying to convince Americans that Republicans are waging a war on infertile couples who seek to use in vitro fertilization, their chief piece of evidence being a recent Alabama supreme-court decision siding with some of those couples. The parents thought that the clinic had been negligent in letting a patient destroy embryos in which they had invested their hopes. They sued under the state’s wrongful-death law, and the court agreed that it covered embryos even when outside the womb. Some fertility clinics say they cannot operate facing such liability. Democrats are saying that uncertainty about IVF is a product of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. They are pressuring panicky Republicans to pass laws immunizing IVF from challenge in Alabama, and nationally; Alabama Republicans look likely to oblige. The truth is that the court’s decision had almost nothing to do with Dobbs: Nobody, including the dissenting justice in Alabama, doubted that the wrongful-death statute applied to embryos within the womb even when Roe v. Wade was in effect. The further truth is that Republicans have no intention of waging war on IVF: They have differing views, the issue is complex, and the practice is entrenched. Some Republicans have, however, endorsed vaguely written “personhood” bills that have no chance of passage but can be read to impose tight restrictions on IVF. It’s hard to see how, on balance, those bills advance the cause of life. Republicans should clarify that stopping IVF is not on their agenda, but also decline to pass sweeping immunity laws for an industry that should face at least as much scrutiny as those that do not create and destroy human lives.
• Negligent enforcement policies set by the Biden administration, indulgent “sanctuary” given to lawbreakers by our cities, and abusive appropriation of taxpayer resources to aid aliens in their lawbreaking all likely contributed to the killing of Laken Riley, a 22-year-old Georgia nursing student. Her death is a result of United States policy enabling a criminally minded man who came here to press a bogus asylum claim. The illegal immigrant, Jose Antonio Ibarra, was arrested and released on several occasions before murdering Riley. Authorities had ample chances to do what the law of the land required and bounce him back to Venezuela. They deliberately failed to do so. The Biden administration, through its malicious neglect and positive subversion of our immigration law, has made itself in effect, if not by the letter of the law, an accessory to Laken Riley’s murder.
• Standing outside the gates of the Israeli embassy in Washington, Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old U.S. airman, set himself on fire while dressed in his uniform and livestreamed it. “I will no longer be complicit in genocide,” Bushnell declared. “I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest. But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all.” Bushnell then doused himself in a flammable liquid and self-immolated. “Free Palestine!” were his last words. He died hours later. Bushnell’s actions were deranged and tragic—as some of the reactions have also been. Cornel West praised Bushnell’s courage, and activist Aya Hijazi lauded Bushnell as “a hero and a martyr.” Jill Stein heralded Bushnell’s “extraordinary sacrifice.” But his actions weren’t heroic. They were an embrace of nihilism and a demonstration of mental illness’s ravages. May Aaron Bushnell find the peace he could not in life.
• A picture is worth a thousand words. The remarkable images generated by Google’s Gemini, a new AI tool—it notoriously generated multiracial casts when users asked to see Nazis—were not only bizarrely entertaining but unforgettably illustrated how far to the left Google’s corporate ideology skews. AI sorts, sifts, and judges the material it surveys in ways that will necessarily reflect the views of those who program it, an inevitably opaque process. Many users will be content to rely upon, say, an AI chatbot as a sole source of information. A better approach would be to distrust—and verify.
• As he was from 2007 to 2014, Radek Sikorski is the foreign minister of Poland. Earlier in his career, he was a foreign correspondent for National Review. At the United Nations last Friday, February 23, he spent an extraordinary four minutes refuting the Russian ambassador there. A video of Sikorski’s calm, factual response went around the world. One by one, he shredded the Russian’s charges. A brief sample: “He blamed the war on ‘U.S. neocolonialism.’ In fact, Russia tried to exterminate Ukraine in the 19th century, again under the Bolsheviks, and this is the third attempt.” “He even said that Poland attacked Russia during World War II. What is he talking about? It’s the Soviet Union that attacked Poland, together with Nazi Germany, on the 17th of September 1939. They even held a joint victory parade on the 22nd of September.” On it went, coolly and satisfyingly. Truth against lies is a powerful thing.
• Even after killing him, the Kremlin seems afraid of Alexei Navalny. The deceased’s mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, had to fight for a public funeral for him. The authorities wanted him buried in secret. They threatened to “do something” to Navalny’s body, his mother told the press. Navalny’s brother, Oleg, is in exile, on the Kremlin’s “wanted list.” Navalny’s widow, Yulia, is also in exile (with their two children). The Kremlin has started an intense online campaign against her. On state television, Vladimir Solovyov, a leading propagandist, warned proudly that she would be killed if she returned to Russia. He further said that the murder of Alexei Navalny was perfectly justified. But he also planted a doubt as to who killed him. “The West is the only beneficiary of his death! Here, he wasn’t interesting to anyone, unwanted and forgotten—totally gone. They had to revive interest, shake things up, and disrupt the fantastic effect from the interview of our country’s leader with Tucker Carlson.” So it goes in Putin’s Russia.
• Gunmen killed at least 15 worshipers at a Catholic church on Sunday, February 25, in Essakane, a village in northeast Burkina Faso. Neither church nor government officials have identified the perpetrators, who are, however, widely assumed to be Islamist militants, given the barrage of such attacks throughout the Sahel in the past decade. Insurgent militias now control 40 percent of the territory of Burkina Faso, according to the International Rescue Committee. Organized violence against Christians—and Muslims whom the jihadists deem insufficiently orthodox—exacerbates the political instability that has tormented this small West African nation, among the world’s poorest, since its independence from French colonial rule in 1960. The government that took power after the latest coup, in September 2022, ordered the expulsion of French troops, even though the military and local police are overmatched in their fight against terrorist groups affiliated with or descended from ISIS and al-Qaeda. Troops from the Africa Corps, a spinoff of the Wagner Group, deployed to Burkina Faso in January. They deepen Russian footprints in the region as its security ties to Europe fade.