Plus: The Russians are flattening Kharkiv.
• Johnnie Cochran’s biggest challenge looms.
• Donald Trump said he thinks abortion policy should be decided state by state: a respectable position in itself, and one taken by many conservatives. But he expressed no view on how states should decide it, except that they should include exceptions for rape and incest. When various pro-lifers disagreed with him, he dug in, slamming them and saying he would veto any federal restriction on abortion. Trump is reflecting a Republican fear of the issue that is out of proportion to any of the evidence of its political impact: No pro-life senator or governor has lost an office during the past two years of a supposedly seismic pro-choice backlash. There are many things Republicans can and should do to protect unborn children in a politically sustainable way. Instead, Republicans are not so much beating a strategic retreat as deciding to call cowardice a strategy.
• The Arizona supreme court upheld an abortion ban that makes an exception only to save the life of the mother. It has been in every version of the Arizona criminal code since first enacted by the territorial legislature in 1864. Arizona voters will likely vote this November on a referendum that would deem abortion a “fundamental right” up to 24 weeks. A hard lesson for pro-lifers since Dobbs: Voters do not endorse philosophical consistency on life, even if they respect that consistency in public officials. The pro-abortion side has won seven straight ballot questions in other states, even as pro-life governors and senators have been roundly reelected. The Arizona law is legally, philosophically, and morally defensible but politically indefensible in a swing state in 2024. It will lose at the ballot box if Republicans cannot convince the state’s voters that rejecting the referendum will result in legislative compromise. At the same time, the referendum will also pass if Republicans do not defend an alternative. That may mean allowing abortion for as long as 15 weeks; it surely means exceptions for rape, incest, and at least some instances of grave physical maternal injury. But finding a sustainable consensus would take leadership. Republicans were decapitated in statewide races in 2022, and the leading loser, Kari Lake, is now the likely nominee for the Senate and running away from the state-level abortion question. Republican legislators have blocked a Democratic effort for wholesale repeal of the current law but have offered no alternative of their own as the spring legislative session winds down. Again, cowardice is not a strategy.
• President Biden’s continued intransigence on student loans is yet again facing legal battles. A Kansas-led lawsuit and a Missouri-led lawsuit are challenging the administration’s SAVE plan to “forgive” student debt. Given that the Supreme Court last time around objected to the executive’s unilateral enactment of policies costing hundreds of billions of dollars, the latest effort, which would be at least as large and likely larger, should also be struck down. The White House announcement repeatedly hedges with phrases such as “if implemented” and “if finalized as proposed,” suggesting that even the administration knows that its plans have little chance of passing legal muster. Biden wants to portray himself as the guardian of democratic norms. If he ever wonders why many voters don’t take that line of argument too seriously, he has nobody to blame but himself.
• Senator Richard Blumenthal (Conn.) and other Senate Democrats are broaching an uncomfortable suggestion: Sonia Sotomayor should retire while the party still has the White House and 51 senators. They have a point, if a coldly calculating one: Sotomayor, who will turn 70 in June, may not be that old, but she requires a nurse to travel with her, and it could be years before Democrats have both the presidency and the Senate majority again. If Republicans were to replace Sotomayor with a conservative, they’d have a seven-justice bloc that could take a very long time to flip back to majority-liberal. But Supreme Court justices do not like to be told what to do, and identity politics is impeding Machiavellianism. Representative Nydia Velázquez (D., N.Y.), for example, railed against “forcing the only Latina on the Court to retire.” Pressure from the White House is unlikely because it would require Joe Biden’s team to acknowledge his vulnerability in this election—and the actuarial tables.
• Donald Trump recently trashed and helped tank the congressional reauthorization of an essential safeguard against anti-American regimes and foreign terrorists by complaining that the Foreign Intelligence Service Act (FISA) was used to spy on his campaign. But the FISA provision at issue is not the one exploited by Obama-era FBI leadership, in collusion with the Hillary Clinton campaign, to smear Trump as a Putin puppet. That statute was the original FISA, which dealt with the communications of suspected agents of foreign powers (whether aliens or Americans) conducting clandestine activities inside the United States. Section 702, the surveillance authority that will lapse if Congress fails to renew it, is different. It allows American intelligence agencies to perform the necessary work of surveilling non-Americans reasonably believed to be outside the U.S. The statute explicitly prohibits targeting Americans for surveillance—including by indirection (i.e., targeting non-Americans only as a pretext to spy on Americans with whom the foreigners are in contact). To the extent Americans are inevitably intercepted in foreign-surveillance operations, these incidental consequences are factored into statutory and court-prescribed “minimization” limitations on their use and retention. Section 702 opponents want to require the FBI to obtain a search warrant anytime they seek to probe the surveillance database for information about an American, claiming that the Fourth Amendment requires it. But a warrant requirement would only delay access to intelligence that should be readily accessible. There have been FBI abuses of the system. But the legislation now up for renewal incorporates reforms made in response to previous abuses, so they are now statutorily required, including significant criminal penalties for transgression. To let expire or to nullify foreign-surveillance powers essential to national security would be the height of recklessness.
• In the immediate aftermath of the Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, in February 2023, politicians and commentators made countless calls to hold the railroad accountable. Since then, less attention has been paid to how much time and money Norfolk Southern has spent cleaning up its mess. It has spent $104 million in community assistance, which includes aid for first responders, direct payments to residents, and improvements to an East Palestine public park. It has spent $4.3 million more on improving drinking-water infrastructure. And now it has reached a $600 million settlement to resolve every class-action lawsuit within a 20-mile radius of the accident. Attorneys for the claimants said, “We believe this is a fair, reasonable and adequate result for the community on a number of levels, not the least of which is the speed of the resolution, and the overall amount of the awards residents can expect, which will be significant for those most impacted by the derailment.” This work won’t get much attention, because no politician can take credit for it, but Norfolk Southern has gone the extra mile, especially given that the accident resulted in no deaths or injuries.
• What Russian forces did in Grozny, and later Aleppo, they are now doing in Kharkiv: flattening it. Obliterating it. As one report said, “Kharkiv has endured almost daily attacks for almost two months, with Russian propagandists calling for the city to be ‘wiped from the face of the earth’ on national television.” Kharkiv is the second-largest city in Ukraine. It is in the northeast of the country, where many Russian-speakers live. The Kremlin sometimes says it is trying to liberate these people from their oppressors in Kyiv. Day after day, night after night, the Russians bomb Kharkiv and other Ukrainian cities, with Iranian drones and other weapons. They target schools, shops, apartment buildings, hospitals—wherever people may be. On hearing about the killing of a 14-year-old girl, one civil-society leader said, “We will never get used to this news.” No one should. And the United States should help the Ukrainians defend themselves against murder and subjugation.
• To Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.), Russia’s war of conquest in Ukraine isn’t about competing claims on territory, cultural distinctions, or even NATO’s overexpansion. “This is a war against Christianity,” she recently said. “The Ukrainian government is attacking Christians; the Ukrainian government is executing priests. Russia is not doing that; they’re not attacking Christianity. As a matter of fact, they seem to be protecting it.” Greene’s outlook is consistent with Moscow’s. “From a spiritual and moral point of view,” Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church recently declared, “the special military operation is a Holy War.” His church is not a bystander in Russia’s war. It has been implicated in efforts to recruit Russian fighters and arm anti-Kyiv insurgents inside Ukraine. It has long sought the destruction of Ukraine’s independent Orthodox church and persecutes Christians of other denominations in Ukraine. If Greene is interested in the question of which side is killing Christians, and wantonly, the answer is not hard to find.
• In Dignitas Infinita, a declaration released by the Vatican on Monday, the Catholic Church reasserts the natural rights and inherent dignity of the human person. Human dignity, the church insists, is neither based on a person’s “gifts or qualities” nor granted by others. The authors invoke Dignitatis Humanae, the Vatican II document on religious freedom, and quote Pope Francis as recommending “the simple yet clear formulation contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, whose seventy-fifth anniversary we recently celebrated.” Even if unintended, echoes of the preamble to the United States Declaration of Independence also abound in Dignitas Infinita. Some commentators have expressed surprise that gender theory and sex-change interventions are included in its list of “grave violations of human dignity,” as if the church’s affirmation of sexual complementarity were news. Much of the public has misread Francis’s emphasis that the church also teaches that those whose sexual identity or desires conflict with the Catholic understanding of natural law are, in the words of the Catechism, due “respect” and “sensitivity.” Dignitas Infinita serves to correct popular misperceptions as it illustrates the fullness of Catholic social teaching.
• Over the past 15 years, the number of children seen annually at the gender-identity development service (GIDS) of NHS England has increased from 50 to 5,000. In the past, most of the patients were boys. In recent years, most have been girls. A new clinical approach of “gender affirmation” started a conveyor belt of treatment, placing gender-distressed young people on a medical pathway of irreversible hormone treatments and surgeries. In 2020, in response to mounting controversy, NHS England commissioned an independent review by Hilary Cass, a senior pediatrician. On Wednesday she submitted her final report, a damning blow to the “gender affirmation” model. Cass concluded that “there is not a reliable evidence base” for medically altering the sex characteristics of gender-confused youth and that, “for most young people, a medical pathway will not be the best way to manage their gender-related distress.” She also noted that “social transition” (treating children as if they really were the sex with which they identify) is “not a neutral act” but an “active intervention” that school personnel “without appropriate clinical training” have no business doing. This is good news for British children, and an example for American medicine.
• At Pomona College in California, students rushed into an administrative building, to “occupy” it. The building houses the office of the president, who since 2017 has been Gabrielle Starr. She made an announcement to the crowd: “If you do not leave within the next ten minutes, every student in this building is immediately suspended from this institution—if you are from Pomona. If you are from elsewhere, you immediately will be banned from this campus. Is that clear? Ten minutes.” And she followed through. Mirabile dictu, as WFB would say.
• Ralph Puckett Jr., of Tifton, Ga., graduated from West Point in 1949. He was then sent to Korea, where he was the commander of the Eighth Army Ranger Company. On November 25, 1950, his unit took a hill and then defeated five Chinese counterattacks in four hours, outnumbered ten to one, but was overrun by the sixth. Severely wounded, Puckett was rescued by fellow Rangers despite their having been ordered to leave him. He refused a medical discharge and was deployed again in Vietnam in 1967. “He feared no man, he feared no situation and he feared no enemy,” said retired general Jay Hendrix of Puckett. Dead at 97, Puckett was the last surviving Medal of Honor recipient from the Korean War. R.I.P.
• Orenthal James Simpson, a.k.a. O.J., a.k.a. Juice, overcame a childhood case of rickets and a youthful stint in a street gang to become a star running back for USC and the Buffalo Bills, and an engaging star of movies and television commercials (he ran to pick up his car from Hertz). So it came as a shock when, in 1994, he was arrested for brutally stabbing to death his second wife, Nicole Brown, and her friend Ron Goldman. There followed an eleven-month-long circus of a trial, marred by prosecutorial errors and racialist appeals by the defense. Many blacks greeted Simpson’s acquittal like Juneteenth. Yet nemesis pursued him. In 1997, a civil jury found him liable for the wrongful death of Goldman and ordered him to pay $33.5 million; although he auctioned his football trophies, he paid only a fraction of what he owed. In 2007, Simpson and a group of thugs broke into a hotel room in Las Vegas to grab his old memorabilia. He was convicted of kidnapping, assault, and robbery and served almost nine years before being paroled. Props to comic Norm Macdonald for his relentless pursuit of the man on Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update. Simpson all but confessed to his murders when he collaborated on a grotesque book titled “If I Did It.” Dead at 76.