Tag Archives: The National Review

A Definite Step In The Right Direction

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On Thursday, Ed Morrissey at Hot Air posted an article about Health and Human Services using the rule-making process to prevent the federal government from directly funding sex-altering procedures on minors. Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), National Review currently fund these procedures.

The article quotes The National Review:

The Department of Health and Human Services will soon begin the rule-making process to prohibit the federal government from directly funding sex-trait modifications for minors through Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), National Review has learned.

The White House is in “the final stage of review for a new rule that would make it a condition of hospitals participating in Medicare or Medicaid that they not provide sex trait modifications to minors,” according to an administration official. The prohibition will apply to hospitals that provide puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and gender-transition surgeries to minors.

The groundbreaking decision by the White House to use the power of the executive to ban federally funded gender-transition services for minors follows an unsuccessful attempt by congressional Republicans to ban federal funding for such practices through the budget reconciliation process. The Senate parliamentarian ruled that the legislative language included in the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” did not clear the Byrd rule, prompting GOP lawmakers to spike the language from the final bill that passed earlier this month.

The article explains the significance of using the rules process for this item:

How do we know this will happen? Using the rules process practically ensures it. Most administrations make the mistake of skipping over these steps in haste to make their point, but courts take the Administrative Procedure Act very seriously. An executive order does not overcome the APA in matters such as these. The use of the rulemaking process will slow this down, but it will also ensure that the changes will be legally bulletproof, or as bulletproof as activist district courts allow them to be. 

The article concludes:

…If providers are defrauding Medicare and Medicaid to get paid directly for pediatric sex-change therapies, their CMS funding can stop immediately. HHS has the authority to enforce its rules by suspending or excluding providers engaged in fraud from federal repayments, and the DoJ can and often does take up those cases on a criminal basis as well. 

The best part of this will be the rethinking it will require. The UK has already cut its support for pediatric sex-change therapies after the Cass Review determined that puberty blockers did nothing to address pediatric gender dysphoria while essentially sterilizing children. Another major study on the issue here in the US got suppressed last year for allegedly coming to the same conclusion. Both HHS and the DoJ are already investigating several cases of detransitioners who claim now to have gotten pressured into life-changing surgeries and therapies by providers who also receive CMS funding.

HHS sent a warning signal in May over the lack of sound scientific or medical evidence for pediatric sex-change therapies. This is just the next shoe dropping on radicalized providers pushing fad medicine and maiming children for virtue signaling. It won’t be the last. 

This is child abuse and needs to be stopped. Cutting off the federal funding is a good first step in that direction.

Changing The Funding Of Abortions

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On Thursday, The National Review posted an article about a Supreme Court decision that will impact the funding of abortion.

The article reports:

The Supreme Court is allowing South Carolina to cut off Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood, a win for pro-lifers that will likely clear the way for red states across the country to stop taxpayer dollars from funding abortion.

The justices ruled 6-3 along ideological lines Thursday to permit South Carolina to cut off Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood. Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion for the Court, siding with the state against a private challenge brought by the abortion provider and a patient.

The plaintiffs in Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic argued that Medicaid patients should be free to sue in order to choose their own health-care providers, while the state claimed they lacked the right to sue.

…South Carolina stopped allowing Planned Parenthood to participate in its Medicaid program in 2018 because of state law barring the public funding of abortion. The move was immediately blocked in court in response to a challenge brought by Julie Edwards, a South Carolina woman who claimed she preferred Planned Parenthood for gynecological care and needed Medicaid coverage.

The article concludes:

Planned Parenthood has claimed that cutting off taxpayer funds would lead to the closure of up to a third of its brick-and-mortar clinics, potentially making it more difficult for low income women to receive healthcare.

But for every Planned Parenthood clinic in the U.S., there are 15 federally funded clinics offering women’s healthcare, according to a report from the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute. If Medicaid does not reimburse Planned Parenthood clinics anymore, patients can go elsewhere to receive reimbursements for treatment.

Abortion is not healthcare–it is the killing of an unborn baby. Americans who do not believe in killing babies should not be forced to subsidize it with their tax dollars.

Actions Have Consequences

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On Thursday, The National Review posted an article about the impact of the increase in wages for fast-food employees in California.

The article reports:

California’s fast food industry shed more than 6,000 jobs after Democratic lawmakers passed a bill mandating a $20 minimum wage for most fast food and counter service restaurants in the state, according to a new analysis of labor data.

The article includes the following chart:

The article explains:

The fast food minimum wage hike — a 25 percent jump over the $16 minimum wage in place for virtually every other sector of the California economy — was the result of a years-long campaign by Big Labor leaders and their Democratic allies to target an industry they’ve long struggled to organize.

In 2022, California Democrats passed the Fast Food Accountability and Standards Recovery Act, or FAST Act, which would have created an unelected fast food council that could have hiked the industry’s minimum wage to $22 an hour. The restaurant industry fought back, gathering enough signatures for a ballot initiative to challenge the act. But Democrats had a fallback plan of their own; last year, for the first time in two decades, they funded what is known as the Industrial Welfare Commission, which has the authority to regulate wages, hours, and working conditions for industries across the state.

The minimum wage was established to give new workers (generally young workers) a chance to enter the workforce. The idea was that these workers would learn the basic skills needed to keep a job and advance in their careers–showing up on time, paying attention to what they were doing, developing a solid work ethic, etc. The minimum wage was never intended as a permanent state of employment. In raising the minimum wage to a supposed ‘living wage,’ politicians are keeping new workers out of the workforce because companies cannot afford to hire them. Theoretically, a worker ads value to a company–a worker is expected to create more value than the salary he receives. Artificially raising the minimum wage negates that principle.

The Supreme Court Upheld The U.S. Constitution

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On Wednesday, The Supreme Court ruled that Virginia will be allowed to remove non-citizens from its voter rolls.

The National Review reported:

The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that Virginia is entitled to remove noncitizen aliens from its voter rolls, siding with the commonwealth over lower courts less than a week out from the election.

The order comes two days after Virginia attorney general Jason Miyares filed an emergency application, requesting that the Court stay an injunction that ordered Virginia to restore some 1,600 suspected noncitizens who are ineligible to vote to the state’s voter rolls. A federal appeals court upheld the injunction on Sunday, quickly prompting the attorney general to appeal to the Supreme Court.

The Court released the one-page order Wednesday morning, noting that liberal-leaning Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson would have denied Virginia’s emergency request for an appeal.

Governor Youngkin noted:

“This is a victory for commonsense and election fairness,” Youngkin said in a statement. “I am grateful for the work of Attorney General Jason Miyares on this critical fight to protect the fundamental rights of U.S. citizens. Clean voter rolls are one important part of a comprehensive approach we are taking to ensure the fairness of our elections.”

Our Constitution states that the right to vote in federal elections is reserved for citizens. To deny a state the right to remove non citizens from its voter rolls is contrary to that concept. This case should not have had to go to the Supreme Court, but it did, and it was ruled on correctly.

Cross The Border And Get A Free House

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On Saturday, The National Review posted an article about a bill recently passed by the California legislature that would allow illegal immigrants to receive up to $150,000 in taxpayer-backed home loans. As of the time I am writing this, Governor Newsom has not yet signed the legislation.

The article reports:

“I didn’t know it was possible to make a border crisis and the housing crisis worse with just one vote, but Democrats found a way,” California Assembly Republican leader James Gallagher said on X on Thursday.

Republican assemblyman Bill Essayli called the bill “offensive,” writing on X that “California democrats love illegal immigration so much they offer many incentives for them to come here.”

But it’s unclear that Governor Gavin Newsom will sign the legislation, which could provide ammunition to Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, a border hawk who has consistently blamed Democrats — including Vice President Kamala Harris, a California native — for the border crisis.

And even if Newsom does sign the legislation, it’s unlikely that any illegal immigrants will receive money from the program anytime soon: the program is broke, and lawmakers haven’t approved new funding.

Democrats, who have a supermajority in the California legislature, passed Assembly Bill 1840 on Wednesday. The aim of the legislation is to prohibit discrimination for the California Dream For All home loan program on the basis of immigration status, according to a bill analysis.

The program offers prospective first-time homebuyers loans of up to $150,000 for down payments or closing costs. At least one borrower must be a first-generation homebuyer. Eligible prospective homebuyers are selected for vouchers via a random lottery.

The obvious question is, “What kind of a house can you buy in California for $150,000? Can you even buy a garage in California for that? What about all of the veterans living on the streets in California? Is anyone going to offer them free housing?

Overshadowed By The Trump Indictment

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On Tuesday, The National Review reported that America’s long-term foreign-currency-issuer default rating has been downgraded. You may have missed this news because the media was focused on the Trump indictment. However, this news will impact more Americans and needs to be heard.

The article reports:

Fitch Ratings on Tuesday downgraded America’s long-term foreign-currency-issuer default rating, citing ongoing and projected future fiscal instability, an increasingly long and disruptive governance process, and rising debt and deficits.

The tumultuous negotiations and gridlock between Republicans and Democrats in June over raising the debt ceiling were evidence that “there has been a steady deterioration in standards of governance over the last 20 years,” Fitch, one of the “big three” U.S. credit-ratings agencies alongside S&P and Moody’s, said in a statement. That episode put the U.S. at risk of payment default and threatened to plunge it into a debt crisis. After weeks of back-and-forth, the parties agreed to suspend the debt limit for two years until January 2025, with a number of conditions and concessions made to both sides.

The government as of late has been operating under modern monetary theory.

Business Insider describes modern monetary theory as follows:

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is an economic theory that suggests that the government could simply create more money without consequence as it’s the issuer of the currency, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. As part of this theory, the thinking is that government deficits and national debt don’t matter nearly as much as we think they do. 

This is the equivalent of the person who says, “How can I be overdrawn–I still have checks?” It is an avoidance of responsible spending and has gotten us into the mess we are currently in. Excessive printing of money creates inflation and hurts most Americans.

The article at The National Review notes:

Among the others factors the agency said were making the U.S. less reliable to honor its obligations are the Federal Reserve tightening monetary conditions via interest-rate increases to combat inflation. The central bank also continues to shed its massive balance sheet of mortgage-backed securities and U.S. Treasuries, furthering fostering an environment of tighter credit, Fitch said. The economy, the agency noted, is expected to slip into a “mild recession” in the fourth quarter of 2023.

Hang on to your hats. We may be in for a rough ride.

A Summary Of The Story

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On Friday, The National Review posted an article about some of the information that has been revealed about the Biden family during the Congressional hearings.

The article reports:

The compelling congressional testimony of two IRS whistleblower agents has established three things.

First, the investigation into Biden corruption — millions of dollars pouring into the family coffers from apparatchiks of corrupt and anti-American regimes seeking to buy Joe Biden’s political influence — is real and has been thwarted by the Biden Justice Department. Second, the president’s son Hunter Biden received preferential treatment, and, next week, a federal judge should reject the sweetheart plea deal he was given by the Justice Department. Third, Attorney General Merrick Garland owes the country an explanation for why the Biden investigation has been sabotaged from within, even as he maintains publicly that it was conducted with independence and integrity.

…Garland and congressional Democrats never tire of branding Weiss a Trump-appointee — it’s Garland’s rationalization for not appointing a special counsel. Conveniently omitted from this story is the fact that Weiss could not have been confirmed absent the support of Delaware’s two Democratic senators, Biden allies Tom Carper and Chris Coons. More to the point, Weiss reports to Garland and, because the Hunter Biden matter is a tax case, DOJ rules dictate that any tax charges must be approved by the Tax Division at Main Justice — run by Biden appointees. Most obviously, Weiss’s appointment by Trump does nothing to eradicate the conflict of interest inherent in the Biden Justice Department’s investigation of the president’s son over conduct in which the president himself is implicated.

Please follow the link to read the entire article. The information is out there for anyone who wants to hear it. I truly believe that if the Biden family is allowed to walk free after all of this evidence has been revealed, our republic is over. The first question that should have been asked years ago is how did Joe Biden maintain his lifestyle on his government salary. Senators and Vice-Presidents are not paid millions.

In 2021, The U.S. Sun reported:

In 2017, Jill and Joe purchased another property in Delaware for $2.7million.

The home is a short walk from the beach and has six bedrooms and outdoor amenities for entertaining guests. 

Why wasn’t that questioned at the time?

When The Cancel Culture Doesn’t Pay

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On Wednesday, The National Review posted an article about the San Francisco Board of Supervisors’ vote to end the boycott they began in 2016.

The article reports:

The board voted 7-4 to repeal a 2016 law that prohibited city employees from traveling to or doing business with companies in states that passed conservative laws. The board of supervisors first enacted the law in an effort to punish states that had enacted what it viewed as restrictions on LGBT rights after the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. Since 2015, the board had amended the law to include states that, in its view, had limited voting rights and abortion access.

“It’s not achieving the goal we want to achieve,” said Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, the sponsor of the legislation to repeal the boycott. “It is making our government less efficient.”

The article notes the effect of the boycott:

The rollback comes after a report by the city administrator’s office found that no states ever appeared to change their own laws in response to the city’s boycott. A budget and legislative analyst’s report also found the city had done business with the states on the boycott list. A one-year period between mid-2021 and mid-2022 saw waivers for contracts and purchase orders totaling $791 million. Meanwhile, the budget and legislative analyst also found that the city had spent nearly $475,000 in staffing expenses to carry out the boycott.

The law “has created additional administrative burden for City staff and vendors and unintended consequences for San Francisco citizens, such as limiting enrichment and developmental opportunities,” according to the city administrator’s report. “Few, if any, other jurisdictions implement travel or contracting bans as expansive as the City’s.”

The article concludes:

Supervisors Shamann Walton, who previously told National Review that the San Francisco advisory committee’s recommendation that the city pay out hefty reparations to the city’s longtime black residents does not go far enough toward making things right, warned there could be “many unintended consequences of the repeal” and said as states are doubling down on their conservative laws he does not want to make it seem that the city is “not still fighting against these discriminatory practices and laws.”

You have to admire their chutzpah. Just for the record, requiring voter ID and cleaning up voting rights does not qualify as limiting voting unless you mean that it limits the votes of those not legally qualified to vote.

There Are Many Forms Of Gun Control–None Of Them Constitutional

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The Second Amendment to the U. S. Constitution states:

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

Let’s put this in context. This is part of the Bill of Rights–a document that protects the God-given rights espoused in the U.S. Constitution. The Constitution is a document that limits the rights of government and protects the God-given rights of citizens. The right to bear arms was inserted to keep the people armed to prevent another tyranny like the one they had just escaped. The Second Amendment limits the government–not the citizens.

On Thursday, Breitbart reported:

Beginning in April 2023, Discover will become the first credit card issuer to track gun purchases made by their cardholders.

On September 11, 2022, Breitbart News noted that Visa caved to pressure from gun control groups and New York Democrats, agreeing to flag gun and ammo purchases via a new sales categorization. The Associated Press observed that Mastercard and other major credit cards also agreed to flag gun sales.

On March 2, 2023, the Independent Journal Review (IJR) reported that Discover will be first among credit card companies to track gun sales, inasmuch as the company will begin doing so in April.

Make no mistake–this is not a good thing. First of all, criminals who commit gun crimes do not generally purchase their guns legally using a credit card. This will only track legal gun owners, who are highly unlikely to commit gun crimes.

In 2016, The National Review reported:

In the study, led by epidemiologist Anthony Fabio of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public Health, researchers partnered with the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police to trace the origins of all 893 firearms that police recovered from crime scenes in the year 2008.

They found that in approximately 8 out of 10 cases, the perpetrator was not a lawful gun owner but rather in illegal possession of a weapon that belonged to someone else. The researchers were primarily interested in how these guns made their way from a legal purchase — at a firearm dealer or via a private sale — to the scene of the crime.

So what is the usefulness of tracking legal gun sales? Why would anyone want to do that? That is a very good question.

There Are A Few Strings Attached To This Deal

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On Monday, The National Review reported that Vladimir Putin has granted Russian citizenship to Edward Snowden. Nine years ago Edward Snowden fled to Russia after leaking information about secret wide-ranging information-gathering programs conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA). I have no idea whether or not that leaking was good or bad–I simply don’t know enough about it, but in view of what we have learned about government spying in the recent past, I am not sure who the good guys are here.

The article reports:

“After years of separation from our parents, my wife and I have no desire to be separated from our son. That’s why, in this era of pandemics and closed borders, we’re applying for dual US-Russian citizenship,” Snowden wrote on Twitter.

“Lindsay and I will remain Americans, raising our son with all the values of the America we love, including the freedom to speak his mind. And I look forward to the day I can return to the States, so the whole family can be reunited. Our greatest wish is that, wherever our son lives, he feels at home,” he added.

The former intelligence contractor leaked classified information from the National Security Agency in 2013, revealing the extent of mass surveillance in the country. The Department of Justice charged him with violating the Espionage Act of 1917, and he fled to Russia to avoid the charges.

The article concludes:

Snowden’s approval comes as Putin has eased the citizenship process for Ukrainians and those who serve in the Russian military amid the war on Ukraine.

On Saturday, Putin signed a law granting Russian citizenship to foreigners who serve for one year in the Russian Armed Forces.

My understanding is that when Snowden becomes a Russian citizen, he is eligible to be drafted into the Russian army. This could get interesting.

Whose Debt Is It Anyway?

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Today, The National Review reported that President Biden announced that he would be forgiving the student loans of many Americans.

The article reports:

President Joe Biden is set to “forgive” up to $10,000 in federal student debt for those making under $125,000 annually, and $20,000 for Pell grant recipients, transferring the cost of the loans to the American public, the White House announced Wednesday.

…Biden is also set to extend the federal student loan freeze for a final time until December 31.

Lawmakers, including Nancy Pelosi, have argued that Biden’s executive order, is unconstitutional and goes outside the rights of the executive branch.

Congress, not the president, is the only body that can cancel student debt, Pelosi said in July of 2021, arguing that “the president can’t do it.”

“Not everybody realizes that, but the president can only postpone, delay but not forgive” student loans, she added.

The Department of Education came to the same decision, arguing that the executive branch “does not have the statutory authority to cancel, compromise, discharge, or forgive, on a blanket or mass basis, principal balances of student loans, and/or to materially modify the repayment amounts or terms thereof.”

The article concludes:

The total estimated cost for Biden’s one-time cancellation is $300 billion, according to a study released Tuesday by the Wharton School of business at the University of Pennsylvania. The cost would increase to $330 billion if the program continues over the standard ten-year window, the study showed.

Republican lawmakers have sounded the alarm over Biden’s decision, saying that it will lead to inflation.

Payments for most student loan borrowers have been stalled since March of 2020, when Congress, and then former president Donald Trump, paused the payments due to predicted financial hardships stemming from the Covid-19 pandemic. Biden has extended the pause four times, and the freeze was expected to expire on August 31.

For once I agree with Nancy Pelosi. The President does not have the power to forgive student loans.

In December 2016, The Wall Street Journal reported the following:

To help pay for ObamaCare, Democrats simultaneously federalized the student loan market and projected fictitious savings, all while adding more than $1.2 trillion to the federal balance sheet. The amount keeps increasing like the debt clock. Liberals then cited the government “savings” to peddle the fallacy that the feds make money off student loans—a pretext they then used to sweeten debt forgiveness plans that have helped keep default rates artificially low.

The Education Department claims the national student loan default rate is 11.3%, yet only half of all debt is in repayment. Borrowers can seek forbearance or deferment if they are unemployed, return to school or claim financial difficulties. Or they can enroll in income-based repayment plans that let them discharge the debt after making payments equal to 10% of their discretionary income for 20 years. Those who work in “public service”—government or a nonprofit—can wipe out their debt in 10 years without a tax penalty.

Initially, only students who borrowed in 2014 or later were eligible for these generous loan forgiveness plans. Then President Obama retroactively extended the benefits to buy millennial votes. Over the last three years the share of outstanding federal direct loan dollars in income-based repayment plans has doubled to 40%. Costs have exploded.

Students signed a contract to repay those laws. By switching the college loans from private lenders to the government, the government acquired the power to interfere in that contract. However, the House of Representatives has the ‘power of the purse’–not the President.

I wonder if the people whose loans are forgiven will see through this effort to buy votes or if they will simply vote for Democrats because their loans were forgiven.

When Your Power Grab Gets Slowed

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Yesterday National Review posted an article about a recent ruling by the Senate parliamentarian that will put a crimp in the plans of Democrats to use the reconciliation process to pass their radical agenda without Republican support.

The article reports:

The Senate parliamentarian issued a new ruling that would effectively allow Democrats to use automatic budget reconciliation just one more time this year to bypass Republicans to advance President Biden’s progressive agenda. 

Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough ruled that a revision to the 2021 budget resolution cannot be automatically discharged from the Senate Budget Committee, according to The Hill. This means that Democrats would need at least one Republican on the 11-11 panel to vote with them if they want to use reconciliation on more than one occasion before the legislative session ends in October.

The bi-partisan talk during the presidential campaign was simply talk. There never was any plan to work with Republicans unless the Republicans agreed to everything the Democrats wanted. To Democrats the definition of unity is “when everyone agrees with me.”

The article notes:

The ruling makes it more likely that Democrats will pursue a fresh fiscal 2022 budget to bypass Republicans if infrastructure negotiations fail, according to Bloomberg.

The news comes as Biden said on Tuesday that June “should be a month of action on Capitol Hill” and that while pundits on TV may ask why he has not done more to pass his legislative priorities that it is because he “only has a majority of effectively four votes in the house and a tie in the Senate with two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends,” likely referring to Senators Joe Manchin (D., W. Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D., Ariz.).

During a press briefing on Wednesday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki attempted to rewrite Biden’s remarks, claiming that the president was only commenting on TV punditry.

“I can tell you that sometimes these conversations can be oversimplified. TV isn’t always made for complex conversations about policymaking,” she said. “What the president was simply conveying was that his threshold, his litmus test is not to see eye-to-eye on every single detail of every issue and he doesn’t with Senator Sinema and Senator Manchin.”

“He believes there’s an opportunity to work together to make progress to find areas of common ground even if you have areas of disagreement,” Psaki said.

However, Republicans have criticized Biden and his party for doing little to work with the GOP to find common ground. Democrats used budget reconciliation earlier this year to pass the president’s COVID-19 response package with a simple majority and without Republican support.

“He knows well having served 36 years in the Senate that sometimes it’s not a straight line to victory or success, sometimes it takes more time and he’s open to many paths forward,” she said. “I don’t think he was intending to convey anything more than a little bit of commentary on TV punditry.” 

Keep your eye on the filibuster. If the filibuster survives, we may get through the Biden administration without bankrupting the country.

The Proposal To End Single-Family Housing In America

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One of the great things about America is that many Americans are homeowners. As homeowners, they create individual homes that reflect their personalities. That is the reason driving through many of our cities can be a fascinating study of architecture and how it changed through our history. Well, if the Biden administration gets its way, single-family housing will be a thing of the past.

The National Review posted an article today detailing how the Biden administration is planning to eliminate single-family housing:

The article reports:

How, exactly, does Biden plan to end single-family zoning? According to the fact sheet released by the White House, “Biden is calling on Congress to enact an innovative new competitive grant program that awards flexible and attractive funding to jurisdictions that take concrete steps to eliminate [‘exclusionary zoning’].” In other words, Biden wants to use a big pot of federal grant money as bait. If a county or municipality agrees to weaken or eliminate its single-family zoning, it gets the federal bucks.

The wildly overreaching Obama-Biden era Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) regulation — which Biden has pledged to revive — works in a similar fashion. The difference is that by adding another gigantic pot of federal money to the Community Development Block Grants that are the lure of AFFH, Biden makes it that much harder for suburbs to resist applying — and that much more punishing to jurisdictions that forgo a share of the federal taxes they’ve already paid so as to protect their right to self-rule.

Are federal carrots enough, however? Prosperous suburbs may forgo the grants in an effort to secure their independence. The success of Biden’s initiative depends in part on exactly how much money gets allocated to grants tied to zoning reform. The details of that ask haven’t yet been released, but the $213 billion allocated to Biden’s total affordable housing initiative leave room for an awfully big pot for the anti-zoning portion.

I don’t think our Founding Fathers envisioned a country where the government could tell you what kind of a house you could live in.

The article concludes:

Last summer, when California floated a measure to kill single-family zoning, there was powerful opposition from residents who objected to a law that would make their neighborhoods denser, noisier, and more filled with traffic. Predominantly minority residents in South Los Angeles saw the bill as an “affront to how hard Black Americans fought to join single-family neighborhoods, battling redlining, racist covenants and even targeted violence. And they worried that suddenly relaxing zoning rules would not only ruin the low density they enjoyed, but also unleash an investment flood that would accelerate displacement of the Black community as developers scooped up old homes and built new ones unaffordable to most in the community.”

The zoning issue is tough and complex. It balances principled libertarian objections to zoning and the interests of developers, on the one hand, against core principles of federalism and local control, on the other. Massive spending and taxation are fundamental to the federal effort to override local zoning laws. Neighborhood preservation vies with “creative destruction.” There are plenty of complex, conflicting, and legitimate considerations in the balance. But reducing the zoning issue to bogus charges of “racism” is the way Democrats play the game nowadays.

If Republicans find the courage to stand up to the usual nonsense and oppose this big-government attempt to kill off the federalist system itself, they will find not only the vast majority of Republicans, but a great many independents and Democrats in their corner.

This is something to watch. If the infrastructure bill passes the Senate, it will not only kill our wallets, it will also end a lot of our freedom to choose where and how we live.

Denying The Value Of All Human Life

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Yesterday The National Review posted an article about a bill that just passed the House of Commons in Canada.

The article reports:

…A bill just passed the House of Commons that — barring shockingly unforeseen resistance in the Senate, which already voted to loosen the rules — will radically expand eligibility for euthanasia in Canada, including the following provisions:

    • Reasonably foreseeable death will no longer be required. That opens the door to euthanizing people with disabilities, patients diagnosed with dementia but still competent, as well as the mentally ill.
    • After a further time for studying the issue of creating protective guidelines (!!), people whose sole medical problem is mental illness will explicitly qualify for euthanasia.
    • There will be no waiting period required between request for death and termination for people whose deaths are reasonably foreseeable — a very lax term. This means a patient with, say, two years of life expectancy could theoretically be killed immediately upon request.

The expansion will eventually continue to allowing people diagnosed with dementia to order themselves killed in an advance directive when they become mentally incompetent and to pediatric euthanasia of “mature minors” — both among the subjects likely to be “studied” by a committee of “experts” over the next two years, meaning they are coming next.

Disability-rights activists fought back furiously and backed a filibuster over the bill that succeeded for a time. But it was eventually broken by the ruling minority Liberals and Bloc Québécois.

The despair of people with disabilities on Twitter after the vote was visceral, with some noting that Canada does not guarantee life with dignity — with say, independent living services — but will guarantee “death with dignity” when the paucity of services leads to a suicidal desire. They feel, rationally, like targets rather than beneficiaries.

It is also worth noting that only 15 percent of Canadians have access to quality palliative care. Not to worry, the panel of experts will “study” that too. Good grief.

This is frightening. It should also be taken as a warning to America–if healthcare is ever run by the government, not only will the quality of care decrease, the availability of care will also decrease. There will come a time when disabled or elderly Americans will not be able to obtain even the minimal care that they need, and there will be attempts made to persuade them to take advantage of assisted suicide. That has been happening for years in the Netherlands. We don’t need to bring it here.

Does The Truth Matter?

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The death of Breonna Taylor is tragic. The fact that there is rioting by people who either don’t know the truth or don’t care about the truth is even more tragic.

Andrew McCarthy posted an article at The National Review today that illustrates some of the facts of the Breonna Taylor case.

The article notes:

The criminal law is not designed to address every human tragedy. That is the lesson of the tragic death of Breonna Taylor. It was also the theme repeatedly struck by Kentucky attorney general Daniel Cameron on Wednesday, in announcing the indictment of one of the three officers involved in the raid that lead to her death.

The article provides some background of the incident:

Much of what we’ve been told about the case turns out not to be true — another “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” urban legend of police brutality. Most prominently, Attorney General Cameron explained that the police did not execute a “no knock” warrant before entering Ms. Taylor’s apartment. They knocked and announced themselves as police before forcing entry shortly after midnight.

How they came to be at Ms. Taylor’s home, with a search warrant based on probable cause that evidence of narcotics crimes would be found, is the part of the story the social-justice warriors would have us omit. It needs telling.

When she was killed, Breonna Taylor was 26, a hospital emergency-room technician who hoped to become a nurse. But over the years, she had gotten involved with Glover, a 30-year-old twice-convicted drug dealer. Though she was never a targeted suspect, the New York Times reports that Ms. Taylor was entangled in the frequent police investigations of Glover. Taylor remained romantically involved with him though he had spent years in prison.

The article concludes:

Meantime, Hankison [Brett Hankison, then a detective (since fired)], who was in the parking lot outside the apartment, began firing when the commotion he could not have seen began. He sprayed the patio and a window with ten bullets — irresponsibly, to be sure, but fortunately without harming anyone. Hankison, who had a spotty disciplinary record in almost 20 years as a cop, was terminated when police officials judged that his conduct during the raid shocked the conscience.

And now he has been charged, which seems appropriate. What the mob wants, though, is murder charges against the two cops who shot Ms. Taylor. There is no conceivable legal justification for that. The police were properly executing a lawful warrant. There appears to have been more than adequate probable cause for the search in light of Glover’s ties to the apartment. Even if there were any doubt about that, the warrant had been duly authorized and therefore police were entitled to rely on it. And they were fired upon before reasonably responding with lethal force.

What happened to Breonna Taylor was a calamity. That is why the city of Louisville just paid $12 million dollars to settle the wrongful death lawsuit her family filed, rather than trying to fight it. Obviously, the money cannot bring her back to life, and will never be adequate compensation for her loved ones’ loss. But that could also have been said for the politicized filing of unprovable homicide charges. The legal system can only do the best it can; it cannot fully compensate for tragic loss, and its criminal processes are not equipped to address catastrophes that are not crimes.

The state of Kentucky was right not to opt for mob justice. Unfortunately, the mob has a different conception of “justice,” and it is ripping the country apart.

The shooting of this young woman is a tragedy. So are the lies and violence currently surrounding her death.