RUTHFULLY YOURS

It is an article of faith among the president’s most ardent supporters: The Trump dossier is a completely discredited piece of garbage. Hence, its relevance is limited to one matter and one matter alone: The dossier’s suspected use by the Obama administration (specifically, the Justice Department and the FBI) as a pretext to spy on the opposition party’s presidential campaign — a ruse that included cribbing the dossier’s sensational allegations in secret court applications for wiretap warrants.

It appears that this Trumpist tenet is going to be tested. The dossier that did so much to fuel the collusion controversy is assuming center stage once more.

The dispute over the 2016 election has stalemated. The Trump-deranged are convinced that the president is a Putin puppet; Trump boosters are just as certain that “collusion” is a fictional narrative dreamt up to delegitimize their man and explain away Hillary Clinton’s defeat. For a long time, I’ve thought the latter camp had the better argument. President Trump and the FBI director he fired, James Comey, may not agree on much, but they both say Comey provided repeated assurances that Trump was not a suspect in the FBI’s probe of Russia’s 2016 campaign meddling. It makes no sense that Comey would do that if there had been solid evidence of collusion between Trump and Putin.

That still seems incontestable. But neither do I believe Director Comey would have countenanced an investigation based on nothing — a “collusion” investigation conducted solely to camouflage political spying. Something is not right here. If we’re ever going to figure it out, the dossier is the roadmap.

So, is the article of faith true? If the Trump dossier is just a tissue of lies, why are the Justice Department and FBI, now controlled by Trump appointees, concealing information about it rather than anxiously volunteering disclosure?

If I had to bet on it, I’d wager that the dossier is like many reports compiled by investigative bodies whose motives are dubious and whose sources are of varying levels of credibility — similar to what you get after investigations by politicized congressional committees, law-enforcement agents who are less than first-rate, or private detectives who, lacking subpoena power, often rely on multiple hearsay. That is, I think the dossier will turn out to be a mixed bag of the true, the false, and the shades of gray in between.

Questions about the dossier are pressing for two reasons.

First, it was leaked this week that investigators working with Special Counsel Robert Mueller have interviewed Christopher Steele. He is the former British spy who composed the so-called dossier during and after the 2016 campaign. At the time, Steele was a private contractor conducting political opposition research on behalf of Trump’s adversaries. The dossier, formatted to resemble official spy-agency intelligence reports, is a set of investigative summaries, based on Steele’s interviews with sources.

We don’t know the whole story at this point, but claims from Trump supporters that the dossier is a Clinton campaign project are overstated. Steele runs a private intelligence firm in London (Orbis Business Intelligence, Ltd.) and was retained to dig up dirt on Trump by the Washington-based opposition-research firm, Fusion GPS. Fusion does a lot of work for the political Left, but it was originally hired by anti-Trump Republicans, not the Clinton campaign. Only later, when it was apparent that Trump would win the nomination, was the project handed off to Clinton backers.

Just two or three generations ago, most Americans understood that George Orwell’s classics Animal Farm and 1984 were written to explain how freedom is lost to totalitarianism and the intolerance that accompanies it. “Big Brother,” a term still casually used to describe an all-knowing governing authority, comes right out of 1984. In the state that Orwell describes, all subjects are continually reminded that “Big Brother is watching you,” by way of constant surveillance through the pervasive use of “telescreens” by the ruling class.

Orwell’s warnings about totalitarianism written in novel form in Animal Farm and 1984 came shortly after Freidrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom was published at the end of World War II. But it took the shocking revelations from books on Nazism and Soviet Communism, by scholars like William Shirer and Robert Conquest in the 1960s, to really make Orwell relevant for teaching to the masses educated in American public schools. And it was not just an academic exercise insofar as Stalin’s successors Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin were at that time rolling tanks into Czechoslovakia to crush all resistance — enforcing the “Iron Curtain” over eight countries in Eastern Europe — the Soviet model of totalitarian control and subservience to Moscow.

Reading Orwell, it was thought, would help American students appreciate their freedoms and gain perspective and critical faculties so as to understand socialist totalitarianism and its defining features: 1) the institutionalization of propaganda designed to warp and destroy people’s grasp on reality, and 2) the fostering of group think, conformity and collectivism designed to eliminate critical and independent thinking.

Orwell described the scope of the totalitarian enterprise, noting in one section of 1984 that “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, and every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

In 1984, Orwell said, “Who controls the past controls the future.” Orwell’s coining of the concepts and terms of “newspeak, doublethink and thought police” are what we now experience as political correctness. Newspeak is the distorted reality accomplished by manipulating the meaning of language and words, while doublethink is the conditioned mental attitude to ignore reality and common sense and substitute and embrace a distorted or false narrative. The analogs of “thought police” in 1984 are now the enforcers of political correctness seen in the mainstream media and college campuses across the country.

As Orwell notes, “the whole aim of newspeak and doublethink is to narrow the range of thought.” Political correctness has the same goal and that’s why its adherents are so intolerant — seeking to shut down and silence people with whom they disagree on college campuses, clamoring for removal of historic statues and monuments so they can rewrite history and control the future, and demanding that people with opposing views on such subjects as climate change and gay marriage be silenced, fined or arrested.

Many assume that because the press is not state-controlled in the U.S. there is a long way to go before the American government has the power of Orwell’s Big Brother.

If Secretary of State Rex Tillerson resigned, how would anyone know?

He has become the nation’s least influential top diplomat in recent memory. His relationship with the president of the United States is strained at best, he has no philosophy or signature initiative, he has barely staffed his own department, and he’s alienated the foreign service. The former CEO of ExxonMobil has taken one of the power positions in the U.S. government and made it an afterthought.

Who knows the truth of the NBC story that he was close to quitting last summer over clashes with President Donald Trump? But Tillerson’s strange press availability swearing his loyalty to the president is not the sort of thing loyalists usually have to do.

The secretary of state dodged questions about whether he had, indeed, as NBC reported, called Trump a “moron” — almost certainly the first time in U.S. history a cabinet official has been asked about personally insulting the president he works for and apparently been unable, in good conscience, to deny it.

Tillerson doesn’t have an easy job. He works for a mercurial and bombastic boss who has a well-developed skill for humiliating his underlings. Even a practiced and slick diplomat — even Henry Kissinger; heck, even Cardinal Richelieu — would find the circumstances trying. But Tillerson is at sea.

He’s an accomplished man who ascended to the leadership of a quasi-state as CEO of ExxonMobil. As such, he had done plenty of work abroad. It was in business, though, not government. Making him secretary of state turns out to have been like selecting the head of the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs to run a Fortune 500 company.

Usually establishmentarians have the advantage, if nothing else, of a great store of government experience. Brent Scowcroft devoted most of his adult life to public service; Tillerson devoted most of his adult life to ExxonMobil.

Unlike, say, James Mattis advising Trump on defense matters, this is not a professional guiding an amateur; it’s another amateur trying to school an amateur. Is it any wonder that it hasn’t gone well?

Recent Republican secretaries of state provide two models. There’s the Colin Powell approach of attending to the needs of “the building,” i.e., the civil service, and neglecting your relationship with the president. Then there’s the Condi Rice approach of tending to your relationship with the president and ignoring the building. Tillerson has done neither.

In a nationalist administration, he is a man without a country. He doesn’t have a constituency in the foreign-policy establishment, in the media, in Congress, or in the bureaucracy. He and his top aides are a thin layer spread atop the org chart to little effect.

Neither of the opposing dispensations in American foreign policy should feel vested in Tillerson. If you’re a liberal internationalist who wants Trump checked, you’d prefer someone better suited to the task. If you’re a Trumpist who wants Trump empowered to transform American foreign policy, you want someone who is in sympathy with that goal.

Las Vegas authorities now acknowledge mass murderer Stephen Paddock may have been “radicalized” before his bloody rampage Sunday at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival but they won’t say what species of radicalism the shooter may have embraced.

The deadliest mass shooting in modern American history has been cravenly transformed into anti-American propaganda by the Left, as Democrat commentators race to ghoulishly disparage white men, gun rights and the NRA, Republicans, and President Trump, blaming them for what otherwise looks like a Muslim terrorist atrocity. Islamic State continues to claim responsibility for the massacre. The terrorist group also claims Paddock converted to Islam six months ago and refers to him by a nom de guerre, Abu Abdul Barr al-Amriki. In Las Vegas Wednesday FBI Special Agent in Charge Aaron Rouse said, “We have found no evidence to this point to indicate terrorism, but this is an ongoing investigation. We’re going to look at all avenues, not close any.”

Paddock may have been “radicalized unbeknownst to us,” Clark County, Nevada, Sheriff Joe Lombardo said at a presser without elaborating. The reporters present for the statement did not bother to follow up. For much of the mainstream media, the fact that Paddock was a white male explained his violent rampage.

So what kind of radicalism could Lombardo have been thinking of?

The word radicalized “is quite often used to refer to Muslims who wage jihad,” Robert Spencer notes. So the sheriff “may be tacitly acknowledging that the Islamic State’s claims to be behind this attack are accurate.”

Muslim terrorists are increasingly targeting concert venues, as Paddock did on the weekend. There was the bombing of the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, on May 22 that killed 22. On November 13, 2015, Muslim terrorists attacked the Bataclan concert hall in Paris, France, leaving 89 dead during a performance by Eagles of Death Metal.

Or Sheriff Lombardo may be implying Paddock was supportive of Antifa or the KKK. “In any case, [radicalized is] a strange word to throw out there and leave hanging,” Spencer adds.

It’s possible Paddock was a right-winger, but if so, he had an odd way of showing it. Targeting country music fans, who are largely Republican and conservative, seems like a strange way to advance a right-of-center cause.

Besides, in the United States, political violence is almost the exclusive province of the Left and Islamists.

Trump-hating Bernie Sanders supporter James T. Hodgkinson came close to assassinating House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) at a baseball practice in June. A little before then, Sanders supporter Jeremy Christian stabbed three men on a train in Oregon, killing two of them. Egged on by the Southern Poverty Law Center, left-wing gay rights supporter Floyd Lee Corkins II shot up the headquarters of the conservative Family Research Council in 2012.

For all we know at this point, Paddock may actually have been an angry left-winger lashing out at conservatives and Trump supporters. Some evidence does seem to point in that direction, and in the current atmosphere of visceral left-wing hatred towards anything and death threats being hurled at everything Republican or conservative, left-wing violence is becoming commonplace.

West Point knew that they had an anti-American “commie cadet” on their hands back in 2015 and went ahead and graduated him in May of 2016 anyway, according to new reports.

Spenser Rapone, now a 2nd lieutenant in the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, became the subject of an Army investigation after several of his pro-communism messages on social media were publicized last month, spurring a firestorm of disapproval in the conservative media.

Rapone, who goes by @punkproletarian on his now private Twitter account, has indicated in posts online that he is a “socialist organizer” for the Democratic Socialists of America, an antifa supporter, and a Che Guevara fan who has contempt for the United States military.

Retired Army Lt. Col. Robert Heffington, who taught history at the academy, wrote in a sworn statement in November of 2015 that Rapone’s disrespectful attitude and social media activity were reason for grave concern. The purpose of the statement was to “document potential criminal activity involving the U.S. military and to allow Army officials to maintain discipline, law and order through investigation of complaints and incidents.”

“From his various online rantings and posts, it appears that CDT Rapone is an avowed Marxist, which is completely out of line with the values of this nation and its Army,” Heffington wrote. “Moreover, CDT Rapone’s posts indicate that he hates West Point, the U.S. Army and indeed this country. One post date 16, November states ‘…f*ck this country and its false freedom.'”

Heffington went on to say that Rapone labeled a guest lecturer at West Point a “fascist” and even implicitly justified the actions of ISIS and blamed the United States for terrorist attacks.

“I cannot reconcile the image of a first class cadet at West Point with the things he has posted online for the world to see,” Heffington wrote. “To me, these are red flags that cannot be ignored, and I fail to see how this individual can possibly graduate and become a commissioned officer in six months.”

In his statement, Heffington described a disturbing incident that occurred on November 17, 2015. He said that he was in his office trying to work when he heard yelling and vulgar language coming from Professor Rasheed Hosein’s office. He said he heard several voices loudly arguing about what to do about “a certain colonel.”

Hosein, a professor of Middle East history at West Point, was reportedly Rapone’s mentor and is currently on administrative leave and under investigation for engaging in political activity while in uniform.

Heffington said he entered the office and asked who was doing all the yelling. There were four cadets in the room and only one of them wasn’t wearing his uniform — Rapone. One of the cadets immediately admitted to yelling and apologized. Heffington demanded an answer from the rest.

“We’re in a private conversation here,” Rapone sneered, according to Heffington, who demanded that the disrespectful cadet stand up.

The lt. colonel stated that Rapone snapped back in a loud and disrespectful voice, “Sir, you don’t have the right to use my honor against me!” CONTINUE AT SITE

Many were elated and approved of President Trump’s July speech in Warsaw, Poland acknowledging the central role Western civilization plays in defining who we are and what we believe. Our freedom and survival depend on defending it, he said. Beyond that, he celebrated Western civilization as something extraordinary: “What we’ve inherited from our ancestors has never existed to this extent before.”

A vocal few, popular in left-wing opinion circles, condemned Mr. Trump’s remarks as an affront to multiculturalism, labeling his linkage of us with Western civilization, and our pride in it, as “tribalism, white nationalism, and racism”, claiming that references to Western civilization and ancestors are code words for the above-mentioned vices. For some, even the broad term “Western civilization” is offensive and prejudicial since, as with all definitions, it necessarily conveys something distinctive and thus circumscribed.

The question we should answer is: does a country or nation need an identity, a unique identity with salient features that distinguish it from other countries and nations? In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville gave a resounding affirmation to the need for a specific identity. He wrote that a corporate entity remains what it is as long as it operates by the principles upon which it was founded. When it changes those principles, it becomes something entirely different, and the success it had, based on its original formula, becomes uncertain and imperiled. It atrophies and declines. He spoke not against periodic tinkering but warned against fundamental transformation.

According to the wise and prescient de Tocqueville, we define an entity by its original principles and the values that created its success. These are the seeds that animate it and supply its people with special spirit. What, then, is America’s identity?

Some say it lies in our Constitution and Bill of Rights, which delineate the liberties that enshrine our peoplehood and, on a functional level, make possible a daily life open to achievement, aspirations, and human potential. Our way of life and the blessings that have come to us depend on everyone living within this Constitutional framework and by precluding its replacement or abridgement with another set of laws claiming to be a “higher morality” or temporarily more important, or by enacting waivers or special accommodation in the name of multiculturalism.

There are those today wishing to sideline the Constitution and our historic way of life by invalidating the men, and thus the ideas, behind it. Using charges of racism as the singular and only important lens in which to judge a person’s value, they nullify the totality, the overwhelming contributions, and extraordinary sacrifices of great men and women of a different era. Meanwhile, they grant themselves unassailable superiority and rigid final judgment simply because of their claims to victimhood or for espousing one of the many isms in today’s pantheon for self-righteous virtue signaling. A nation’s historic identity is being replaced by identity politics, culminating frequently in automatic indictment of historical figures simply because their race or moral values are now out of fashion.

There are those in America wishing to define us strictly as a nation of tolerance and inclusivity, this deification resulting often, as in Europe, in tolerating the intolerable and including everyone and everything to the point of endangering those in society not ensconced within rarified and protective gates. They think the best identity is no identity. But this vacuum and void, as witnessed in Europe, allows for other assertive or aggressive identities and mores to creep within and replace, zone by zone; for surely, strong and energized identities will replace the mushy identity of No Identity.

Though tolerance is a laudable theme, it is found elsewhere and is not an exclusive element of Americanism. The President was correct in underscoring the importance of Western civilization and how it connects and ties America and Europe. But America moved Western civilization beyond its previous European contours. It fashioned something more grand, a majestic idea, something that not only preceded the Constitution, but from the time of Plymouth Rock distinguished America from other Western polities, unfolding into the American civilization. It is the Judeo-Christian ethos.

Although Donald J. Trump lacked political experience when he became president, the gods of politics have not given him a soft transition into the job. The most active American hurricane season in 12 years, rocket-launching North Korea, horrific acts of terror from London to Las Vegas – the latter being the worst mass shooting in American history — have tested the mettle of our nation’s first neophyte commander-in-chief.

Recently Puerto Rico was ravaged by two consecutive hurricanes, Irma and Maria. The very practice of naming hurricanes seems strange to me and, in this case, they have ironically wonderful sounding Latina titles … but the devastation unleashed has been anything but mellifluous. Puerto Rico was, sadly, as Carl Cannon of RealClearPolitics wrote, “underwater before it was underwater.” The island is $74 billion in debt and its infrastructure was in shambles before the storms — and young people were already fleeing en masse for job opportunities on the mainland, especially Florida.

How, then, have local leaders responded to this epic crisis, and how has President Trump? The mainstream media commenced on a rather predictable, yet ghoulish, mission to fashion this Puerto Rican tragedy as “Trump’s Katrina.” Instead of assessing the actual challenges of delivering massive humanitarian aid at rapid pace to an island that already lacks basic road and electrical infrastructure commensurate with an American territory, the anti-Trump media blame-game found a poster woman in Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz of San Juan.

Never mind her 24 percent approval rating among constituents or her obnoxious support for convicted anti-American terrorist Oscar Lopez Rivera, Mayor Cruz’s anti-Trump tirades and strange T-shirts claiming Puerto Ricans are literally dying because of our president were enough to endear her to most media. My own home city’s congressman, Luis Gutierrez, similarly played the press with teary-eyed condemnations of Trump. Gutierrez represents the worst kind of political huckster, as evidenced by his own shameful validation of Lopez Rivera.

The reality on the ground belies such shameful grandstanding. Despite a calamitous storm, over two-thirds of all gas stations are operational on the island, along with the majority of grocery stores and big box retailers. More than 12,000 federal employees are providing aid, more than half of it from the U.S. military. Things are far from normal in Puerto Rico, but the response from the Trump administration has been massive and swift. Don’t take my word for it. As the Democratic Gov. Ricardo Rossello told Fox Business Channel host Maria Bartiromo, “The president and the administration, every time we’ve asked them to execute, they’ve executed quickly.” Similar praise emanated from U.S. Virgin Islands Gov. Kenneth Mapp, who told Trump directly: “Because of your commitment, Mr. President, we’re talking about opening schools and welcoming cruise ships back.”

Finally, the well-worn, tired idea that Donald Trump somehow neglects Puerto Rico because he’s only worried about white Americans flies in the face of massive aid to storm-ravaged Houston, perhaps mainland America’s most diverse major city, which is 25 percent African-American and 37 percent Latino.

The truth is that Mother Nature can be cruel, and she’s been most unkind this season. Those, like Congressman Gutierrez and Mayor Cruz, who seek to take political advantage of such poor fortune should be ashamed. President Trump and his team should be highly praised for an impressive response to historic challenges so early on in the game.

Steve Cortes, a contributor to RealClearPolitics and Fox News, is the national spokesman for the Hispanic 100, an organization that promotes Latino leadership by advancing free enterprise principles. His Twitter handle is @CortesSteve.

More non-news on the Russia-collusion front came Wednesday, when the Senate Intelligence Committee said it has now verified what everyone knew nine months ago: Russia worked to sow chaos during the 2016 election; vote totals weren’t affected; and no evidence has emerged that Donald Trump was in cahoots with Moscow.

But in the more distant, less camera-filled corners of Washington, there actually is some interesting new information. It centers on the document that increasingly looks central to the “chaos” Russia sowed: the Trump dossier.

That was the infamous list of accusations compiled starting in the summer of 2016 by a former British spook, Christopher Steele, who had been hired by the liberal opposition-research firm Fusion GPS. The discredited rumors about Mr. Trump came from anonymous Russian sources. This is notable, since it turns out Fusion was separately—or maybe not so separately—working with entities tied to the Kremlin.

How close was Fusion’s leader, Glenn Simpson, to Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Kremlin-linked lawyer? Did the Russians know about the dossier all along and help plant the information in it? Were American law-enforcement agencies relying on Russian-directed disinformation when they obtained secret warrants against Trump associates? Chaos, indeed.

Witness how hard the Federal Bureau of Investigation is fighting to avoid divulging any information about the dossier. More than a month ago the House Intelligence Committee issued subpoenas to the FBI and the Justice Department, asking for dossier-related documents. Lawmakers were told to go swivel.

A little more than a week ago, the committee’s frustrated chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes, took the case all the way to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who finally offered to make an FBI official available for a briefing. But the bureau is still withholding all documents. To date, Sen. Chuck Grassley’s Judiciary Committee has not received any paper from the FBI on Russia matters, despite numerous requests, some countersigned by the Democratic ranking member, Dianne Feinstein.

Increasingly, one name is popping up: Gregory Brower, who leads the FBI’s Office of Congressional Affairs. Mr. Brower is an odd man for the job. These gigs tend to go to more-junior people, since they involve the drudgery of answering calls from grumpy congressional staffers. Yet Mr. Brower is a former U.S. attorney—a job that requires Senate confirmation—and a former Nevada state senator.

Before his latest role, he was the deputy general counsel of the FBI. In that post he was described as a confidant of former FBI Director James Comey. It was Mr. Comey who installed Mr. Brower in the congressional affairs job, just a few days before President Trump fired the director.

Mr. Brower has been shutting down congressional requests and stonewalling ever since. He has even tried appealing directly to House Speaker Paul Ryan’s office to squelch committee demands for documents. The FBI keeps justifying its intransigence by saying it doesn’t want to interfere with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. But Mr. Grassley recently announced that Mr. Mueller’s separate inquiry would no longer be considered a legitimate reason for the FBI to withhold information from Congress.

Now here’s the surprise: Reuters reported Wednesday that Mr. Mueller “has taken over FBI inquiries into a former British spy’s dossier” against Mr. Trump. How very convenient. The Mueller team has leaked all manner of details from its probe, even as it had avoided the dossier. But just as Congress is ratcheting up pressure on the FBI, anonymous sources say that it’s out of the bureau’s hands. CONTINUE AT SITE

(1) Everything Kills — “Guns are uniquely lethal.”

Last year, a Muslim terrorist with a truck killed 86 people and wounded another 458.

Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, the Tunisian Muslim killer, had brought along a gun, but it proved largely ineffective. The deadliest weapon of the delivery driver was a truck. Mohammed, who was no genius, used it to kill more people than Stephen Paddock would with all his meticulous planning in Vegas.

Do we need truck control?

Deadlier than the truck is the jet plane. Nearly 3,000 people were killed on September 11 by terrorists with a plan and some box cutters. And then there are always the bombs.

The Boston Marathon bomber wounded 264, a suicide bomber at the Manchester Arena last year wounded 250 and the Oklahoma City Bombing (the only non-Islamic terror attack on the list) killed 168 and wounded 680. Paddock was also stockpiling explosive compounds. If he hadn’t been able to get his hands on firearms, he would have deployed bombs. And potentially killed even more people.

We know how many people Paddock was able to kill with firearms. We don’t know how many people he would have been able to murder with a truck or with explosives.

The mass killer who most ominously resembles Paddock was Francisco Gonzales: a Filipino with financial problems who shot the pilot and co-pilot on a gambler’s special flight from Reno. Back in Reno, Gonzales had told a casino worker that it wouldn’t matter how much he lost. The plane went down with everyone on board. Gonzales had a gun, but his actual murder weapon was a plane.

Guns are not uniquely lethal. We live in a world filled with extremely lethal objects from chemical compounds to big trucks. We can license and regulate some things. But we can’t regulate everything.

(2) America Isn’t Unique — “This is the only country where this happens.”

That’s the leftist meme deployed after the Vegas shooting. But Paddock’s death toll narrowly edges out that of South Korea’s rampage killer Woo Bum-kon who murdered 56 people. America is not the only country where rampage killers operate. And their attacks have nothing to do with the racist construct of “white privilege”. It’s the leftist conviction that America is uniquely evil that accounts for the myth.

Seung-Hui Cho, one of this country’s worst rampage killers who murdered 32 people at Virginia Tech, was South Korean.

But the worst rampage killer in South Korea didn’t use a gun. He set a train on fire.

Kim Dae-han, a paralyzed middle aged man, started a subway fire that killed 192 people and wounded 150 others.

Republican senators Mike Lee (R., Utah) and John McCain (R., Ariz.) have introduced legislation to permanently exempt Puerto Rico from the Jones Act. This is a common-sense decision on the merits that will help the island recover from Hurricane Maria. It might also be a way for Republicans, who have so far been an inert governing party, to refresh their legislative agenda.

The Jones Act, passed after World War I, requires that shipping between U.S. ports be conducted with American-made ships that are staffed by American crews. The Jones Act prevented foreign vessels from delivering aid to Puerto Rico in the wake of the hurricane. Waiving it was an obvious move, and after hesitating, the Trump administration granted a waiver last week. That was a good decision at the time, but the legislation of Lee and McCain is a warranted next step.

On the merits, the Jones Act is a bad law. It cost Puerto Rico $17 billion in economic growth between 1990 and 2010, according to one economist’s estimate, and costs Hawaii and Alaska, too. It raises the cost of consumer goods, which particularly hurts poor consumers. All of this is to protect the interests of the American shipping industry, which lobbies ferociously. A full repeal of the act would be best, but McCain and Lee are right to try to pass a permanent exemption for Puerto Rico.

But the law could also chart a path forward for the Republican party, which is currently wedded to a stale agenda. In a Washington Monthly article titled “Why the Jones Act Is Robin Hood in Reverse,” political scientists Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles describe the legislation as an example of “regressive regulation” and rent-seeking:

The people who benefit from the regulation have big economic stakes on the line, while those who pay the costs may not even notice the effect on their individual well-being. This is true even though those costs may add up, across the whole economy, to billions of dollars, well in excess of what the beneficiaries take home.

According to Lindsey and Teles, authors of the forthcoming The Captured Economy, such regulations “generate economic inefficiency” and also “exacerbate the trends in the economy” that generate income inequality. Poor consumers in Puerto Rico and Hawaii lose; politically connected shipping interests win. Lee and McCain’s bill, then, is the kind of regulatory reform that will help regular consumers.

Regular consumers in Puerto Rico, that is. The natural disaster occasioned the Republican proposal, but it might be wishful thinking to cast this bill as a first step toward enacting a broader middle-class agenda. Yet increasingly, it’s middle-class Americans who vote Republican; Republicans could better serve their interests.

So far, they haven’t. House Republicans first passed a health-care plan that financed tax cuts for the wealthy with cuts to Medicaid, then Senate Republicans failed to shepherd through more modest health-care reforms, and now the GOP is tinkering with a tax-reform framework that doesn’t do enough to help middle-class families, as Ramesh Ponnuru has argued. It’s worth asking how long this can go on, especially given the schism, laid bare by Trump, between the party’s donor class and its base. Party leadership has remained studiously opposed to fresh thinking, but if Republicans want to maintain power, they will eventually have to pass legislation and govern.