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The Supreme Court and the ‘Duty to Sit’ Decisions about recusal are up to the justices, who have an obligation not to disqualify themselves without a good reason. By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey

Posted By on September 16th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-supreme-court-and-the-duty-to-sit-recusal-standards-ethics-durbin-alito-93c4dbb6?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Justice Samuel Alito has refused a demand from Senate Democrats that he disqualify himself from a pending case because of an interview in this newspaper. One of us (Mr. Rivkin) is on the legal team representing the appellants in Moore v. U.S. and conducted the interview jointly with a Journal editor.

In a four-page statement Sept. 8, Justice Alito noted that other justices had previously sat on cases argued by lawyers who had interviewed or written books with them. “We have no control over the attorneys whom parties select to represent them,” he wrote. “We are required to put favorable or unfavorable comments and any personal connections with an attorney out of our minds and judge the cases based solely on the law and the facts. And that is what we do.”

The recusal demand came in an Aug. 3 letter to Chief Justice John Roberts signed by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin and the committee’s other Democrats, excluding Georgia’s Sen. Jon Ossoff. It is part of a campaign against the court’s conservatives by Democratic politicians, left-wing advocacy groups and journalists whose goals include imposing a congressionally enacted code of ethics on the high court.

Although there already is a judicial ethics code, propounded by the U.S. Judicial Conference, it applies only to the lower federal courts, which Congress established. Proposals to create a Supreme Court code of conduct—including onerous and enforceable recusal requirements—raise fundamental issues of judicial independence and separation of powers. Chief Justice Roberts noted in NFIB v. Sebelius (2012) that the justices have a “responsibility to declare unconstitutional those laws that undermine the structure of government established by the Constitution.”

BOOKS Comments turned off

Kay S. Hymowitz The Indispensable Institution A new book may relax the taboo in policy circles on discussing the importance of two-parent families.

Posted By on September 16th, 2023

https://www.city-journal.org/article/review-of-the-two-parent-privilege-by-melissa-kearney

The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind, by Melissa Kearney (University of Chicago Press, 240 pp., $25)

The publication of Melissa Kearney’s book The Two-Parent Privilege is something of an event in policy circles. The economist and polymathic bibliophile Tyler Cowen surmised that it “could be the most important economics and policy book of this year.” Other blurbs from star economists David Autor and Larry Summers are no less admiring. It helps that Kearney is an MIT-educated economist, a chaired professor at the University of Maryland, and an affiliate scholar at the Brookings Institution with the kind of overflowing CV of which most graduate students can only dream. 

Cowen calls The Two-Parent Privilege “a great book.” If that’s true, it’s not because it breaks new ground. Kearney’s book is a summary and synthesis—first-rate summary and synthesis, to be sure—of decades of research on the benefits of a childhood spent with both parents. 

The gist of the book will be familiar to many well-informed readers: on a wide variety of measures, the average child growing up in single-parent homes is at a disadvantage compared with their two-parent peers. On the most concrete level, single mothers have less money and time to devote to their children, and they are at higher risk of poverty and welfare dependence. On a societal level, the rise of single-parent homes has increased and entrenched both economic and social inequality. 

Growing up apart from a father carries considerable risks for children aside from economic hardship. Boys, in particular, are more likely to have academic and behavioral problems without their fathers in the house, and, statistically speaking, the presence of a stepfather doesn’t make their futures look any rosier. Growing up in a single-mother household is associated with poorer college completion, even after controlling for a host of other variables, as well as with diminished likelihood of marrying or staying married upon reaching adulthood. 

These well-researched facts have evidently failed to impress Americans. Since the 1960s, the percentage of the nation’s children living with a single mother has only gone up. Today, 40 percent of children are born to unmarried mothers; that’s double the share in 1980. In many subgroups, the all-but-universal tie between marriage and childbearing has been completely severed. In the early decades of the transformation of the family, single mothers were likely to have been divorced, but by the 1980s, the majority of single mothers had never married in the first place.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

MAGA Dog for Trump? by Lawrence Kadish

Posted By on September 16th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19974/trump-maga-dog

If he wants to return to the White House, Donald Trump needs a dog.

That is not an idle observation.

White House history suggests that those presidents who enjoyed canine company in the Oval Office were better able to connect with their national constituency. No surprise when you consider that some 65 million American households report that they own a dog. Demographers also find that, as of 2021, the United States had the most dogs in the world per capita, 274 dogs for every 1000 people.

Dogs cannot but make you laugh, compel you to embrace their unconditional love and loyalty, and allow you to be a better person by simply being in the presence of a wagging tail and a wet nose. A candidate with a dog at his side sends a message that they share a unique insight into these qualities celebrated by dog owners across the country.

The importance of dogs in the White House has long been recognized to the point that in 1999, a Presidential Pet Museum was opened. Its mission remains to preserve the artifacts and legacy of Presidential pooches along with other White House pets.

Unfortunately, Donald Trump never had a pet in the White House and he is the poorer for it. It is easily corrected.

George Washington set the precedent. He is reported to have had 20 dogs, and visited the kennels daily to ensure some quality time with the brood when not guiding the new nation through its multiple challenges.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Syria on the Verge of Collapse? by Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi

Posted By on September 15th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19973/syria-on-verge-of-collapse

The country’s southern province of al-Suwayda’, whose population primarily comes from the Druze minority, is currently witnessing protests on an unprecedented scale.

There has also been a definite paradigm shift in these protests: … Calls for the government to resign, for the departure of President Bashar al-Assad and a political transition are now stronger and more prevalent.

However much one might sympathise with the protests, they are probably unlikely to shift the situation in a significant way. The protestors, although immensely courageous, are too few, and have little leverage.

The current status quo means that Syria is effectively divided into three major zones: the majority of the country that is held by the Damascus-based government backed by Russia and Iran; the northeast held by the American-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (the second largest zone of control); and parts of the northwest and north of the country on and near the border with Turkey, controlled by an assortment of insurgent factions that are backed by Turkey to varying degrees.

There is much debate about the causes of Syria’s economic downturn, but it seems clear that the decline can be attributed in significant part to the Syrian government’s economic isolation and its shortage of hard currency.

In the meantime, the Syrian government has no real solutions to its economic woes. It has been offering up measures such as increasing the salaries of state employees and military personnel while also raising the price for fuel.

Some impugn government corruption but consider criticism of Assad himself to be a red line: they seem to think that he is doing all he can to try to help the country — while being surrounded by corrupt officials.

It is nonetheless important to be realistic about what these protests can achieve. The protestors remain committed for now to sustaining a civil disobedience movement that is peaceful…. Moreover, the Syrian government is adopting a non-confrontational stance towards the protests. The government seems to have issued general directives to its security forces in the province to lie low and avoid opening fire or any repressive measures unless they are attacked.

There are really only two ways in which Assad can be brought down: either by being militarily overthrown (not being contemplated by any international power) or if the elites propping up his rule decide that his presidency is no longer worth preserving…[I]t seems that those closest to Assad who could bring about his removal from within are either largely unaffected by the situation or possibly even benefitting from it.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Fifth Circuit Rebukes FDA for Banning Ivermectin for Covid-19 By Jerome R. Corsi

Posted By on September 15th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/09/fifth_circuit_rebukes_fda_for_banning_ivermectin_for_covid19.html

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit issued a unanimous three-judge decision on September 1, 2023, holding that the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) overstepped its statutory authority by attempting to ban using ivermectin to treat COVID-19. In Apter v. Department of Health and Human Services, court concluded, “FDA is not a physician. It has authority to inform, announce, and apprise—but not to endorse, denounce, or advise.”

Writing for the three-judge panel, Circuit Judge Don R. Willett began the court’s opinion by citing the strident nature of the FDA’s opposition to ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment. Willett opened his opinion as follows:

“You are not a horse.”

Or so the Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”) alerted millions of Americans via social media, midway through the COVID-19 pandemic. The agency had discerned that some people were treating their symptoms using the animal version of a drug called ivermectin. FDA decided to target the practice via the “horse” message—and others like it. The messaging traveled widely across legacy and online media. Left unmentioned in most of that messaging: ivermectin also comes in a human version. And while the human version of ivermectin is not FDA-approved to treat the coronavirus, some people were using it off-label for that purpose.

The case involved three physicians, Robert L. Apter, Mary Talley Bowden, and Paul E. Marik, each of whom jeopardized his or her professional career by prescribing ivermectin for COVID-19 in defiance of the FDA warnings. Apter and Bowden claim to have treated or consulted more than 9,000 COVID-19 patients, with each experiencing a 99 percent survival rate, despite regularly prescribing them ivermectin off-label as a treatment.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Biden and China-Appeasement “I want to see China succeed economically.” by Joseph Klein

Posted By on September 15th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/biden-and-china-appeasement/

While Joe Biden was a U.S. senator from Delaware, he became one of the leading advocates for admitting China to the World Trade Organization and expanding trade between China and the United States. “The United States welcomes the emergence of a prosperous, integrated China on the global stage, because we expect this is going to be a China that plays by the rules,” then-Senator Biden declared in 2001 during his visit to China. While Joe Biden was serving as the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he helped enable China’s rapid economic ascent at America’s expense.

A decade later, while serving as vice president during the Obama administration, Joe Biden again spoke in favor of a rising China during a state visit in August 2011: “Let me be clear: I believed in 1979 and said so then, and I believe now that a rising China is a positive development not only for the people of China but for the United States and the world as a whole.”

Now Joe Biden is the president of the United States and the leader of the free world. Despite all the evidence of the Communist Chinese regime’s exploitation of its “rising” power to the detriment of the United States and its allies in the Asia-Pacific region, Biden remains a cheerleader for China’s economic wellbeing. He is as wrong-headed about the Communist Chinese regime today as he has been for his entire career in government.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

John Steinbeck and the Fall and Rise of Israel’s ‘Mount Hope’ How a 19th century massacre of Americans in Israel shaped a writer and changed two nations. by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on September 15th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/john-steinbeck-and-the-fall-and-rise-of-israels-mount-hope/

In 1966, a year before the war that would fundamentally change the country and the region, John Steinbeck arrived.

“I want to see everything in Israel,” he told the press.

Outraged novels of class warfare like ‘Grapes of Wrath’ had once made the author a favorite of the leftist establishment, but Steinbeck had turned to other topics. He considered his life’s work to be ‘East of Eden’, a retelling of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel in California, which touched on his own dark family history that he had followed all the way back to Israel.

Steinbeck’s support for the Vietnam War had infuriated the literary establishment and even though he had won the Nobel Prize and his acceptance speech became one of the most famous of its kind, he continued to be dismissed as an outdated fossil. And the author, prone to an old school literary machismo, who never much liked parties and crowds, dismissed them.

After facing the establishment’s fury over the Vietnam War, Steinbeck was not worried about the leftist reaction to his visit to Israel. And he looked at Israel through the lens of a writer who had chronicled pioneers and messianists, but also a man who had come to see the world caught in a struggle between good and evil, the forces of democracy against those of Communism.

BOOKS Comments turned off

A Compendium of Everything Wrong With Barack Obama’s Legacy A new book reveals how – and why – our nation has been brought to its present dire straits. by Kenneth Levin

Posted By on September 15th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-compendium-of-everything-wrong-with-barack-obamas-legacy-2/

Perhaps the greatest service of Barack Obama’s True Legacy, the recently published collection of penetrating essays on the Obama presidency by a number of knowledgeable and trenchant authors, edited by Jamie Glazov, is its contribution to collective memory.

President Obama’s assault on Americans’ constitutional rights and protections as well as on the nation’s constitutionally defined governmental institutions and their respective authority entailed myriad particulars.  It included undermining of First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and religious freedom.  It extended to usurpation of the legislative authority of Congress and disregard for the constitutional authority of the Supreme Court.

In addition, Obama compromised the rule of law and protection of rights more broadly.  He ignored the findings of lower federal courts.  He subverted federal agencies, including the Department of Justice, the FBI, the CIA, the IRS, and other departments of the federal government, to illegal politicization and lawless attacks on perceived political enemies.  He promoted federal intrusion in and subversion of state and local law enforcement, also in the service of political ends.

The collective impact of Obama’s abuses of power, the “transformation” of America that he so often promised, was the creation of a less democratic, post-constitutional, authoritarian nation.  Consistent with his pursuit of this transformed America, Obama, throughout his presidency, lent his support to and openly advocated for groups and individuals, domestic and foreign, associated with anti-American, anti-democratic, authoritarian ideologies, particularly of the pro-communist and Islamist variety.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Is Civic Decline an Existential Threat?John O. McGinnis

Posted By on September 15th, 2023

https://lawliberty.org/is-civic-decline-an-existential-threat/

Several factors combine to make our discordant times more perilous than most of those in America’s past.

The United States is going through one of the most politically divisive times in its history. Karl Rove, the Republican strategist, reminded us last month that sharp and seemingly intractable disagreements are the familiar grist of our national experience. Americans faced them around the election of 1800, in the leadup to the Civil War, in the Gilded Age, around the New Deal, and in the tumultuous 1960s. Yet we resolved all but one of those periods peacefully and emerged from these conflicts on a continued trajectory of ever-greater prosperity and global dominance.

Rove tells a hopeful tale, but past results are no guarantee of future performance. Four new factors combine to make our times more perilous than most past flareups of disunion. First, never have we had an educational establishment so hostile to the story of American exceptionalism, and as a result, never have the young been so willing to think America was bad from the beginning. Second, our cross-political associations have radically declined and with them the bonds that draw Americans together across partisan divides. Instead, we sort ourselves by geography and employment into blue and red bubbles. Third, traditional religious belief has dissipated. People still worship but ever more at the altar of politics. These comprehensive ideological views may give meaning to citizens’ lives but they make compromise hard. And fourth, the stakes (with the exception of those around the Civil War) are generally higher. Government is bigger and thus its control brings greater rewards. Even more importantly, many people claim—sometimes with not implausible reasons—that humanity faces existential crises, like those from climate change and AI. It is hard to feel goodwill to opponents who you think are bent on destroying the human race.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Post-Postmodern America-Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on September 15th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/09/14/post-postmodern-america/

When the progressive woke revolution took over traditional America, matters soon reached the level of the ridiculous.

Take the following examples of woke craziness and hypocrisy, perhaps last best witnessed during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution.

The Biden administration from its outset wished to neuter immigration law. It sought to alter radically the demography of the U.S. by stopping the border wall and allowing into the United States anyone who could walk across the southern border.

Over seven million did just that. Meanwhile, Biden ignored the role of the Mexican cartels in causing nearly 100,000 ANNUAL American fentanyl deaths.

Then border states finally wised up.

They grasped that the entire open-borders, “new Democratic majority” leftwing braggadocio was predicated on its hypocritical architects staying as far away as possible from their new constituents.

So cash strapped border states started busing their illegal aliens to sanctuary blue-state jurisdictions.

Almost immediately, once magnanimous liberals, whether in Martha’s Vineyard, Chicago, or Manhattan, stopped virtue-signaling their support for open borders.

Instead, soon they went berserk over the influx.

So now an embarrassed Biden administration still wishes illegal aliens to keep coming but to stay far away from their advocates—by forcing them to remain in Texas.

That means the president has redefined the US. border. It rests now apparently north of Texas, as Biden cedes sovereignty to Mexico.

Precivilizational greens in California prefer blowing up dams to building them.