Impeachment: Turley’s Visit to the Lion’s Den
“The most dangerous place for an academic is often between the House and the impeachment of an American president,” Jonathan Turley remarks in The Hill. Yet the law professor accepted Republicans’ invitation to testify at the Judiciary Committee’s first impeachment hearing anyway. “My call for greater civility and dialogue may have been the least successful argument I made,” since “my home and office were inundated with threatening messages and demands that I be fired from George Washington University for arguing” that Democrats haven’t proved President Trump has abused his power. “In the Clinton impeachment, the crime was clearly established and widely recognized,” even by Democrats such as Jerry Nadler — they just didn’t think perjury about an affair mattered. Now, “we are lowering impeachment standards to fit a paucity of evidence and an abundance of anger.”
Education beat: A Dubious ‘1619’ Curriculum
A new K-12 curriculum based on The New York Times’ much-criticized 1619 Project not only encourages teachers to “ignore key elements of the historical record,” seethes the City Journal’s Max Eden — it asks students to “blot them out.” Indeed, the curriculum “openly encourages” historical revisionism, while ensuring that students “don’t miss core partisan talking points.” Those points include the claim that America’s Founders didn’t want “all men are created equal” to apply to blacks. Tellingly, the curriculum ignores the great Frederick Douglass— the ex-slave who became a giant of American intellectual history and, after much study, concluded that the founding was fundamentally antislavery and that “the intentions of the framers of the Constitution were good, not bad.” This “historically dubious” curriculum, says Eden, belongs “in the waste bin.”
From the right: Warren Hugs Islamists
The Coalition for Civil Freedom is a “pay-to-slay” group that uses legal advocacy to serve as a “de facto ‘martyrs fund’ for American jihadists and their families,” Benjamin Baird reports at The Federalist — but that didn’t worry Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s office, which welcomed the group to Capitol Hill on Oct. 28. The coalition is “composed of various Islamist factions that are demonstrably tied to jihadist organizations,” yet activists also met Bernie Sanders in June. Congress last year passed the Taylor Force Act to deny funding to the Palestinian Authority until it stops paying terrorists. “It is time,” sighs Baird, “to demand the same from pay-to-slay groups at home.”
Libertarian: Biden’s ‘Moderate’ Tax Hikes
Has the Democratic Party “lurched too far to the left?” The best way to answer that question, says Reason’s Peter Suderman, is to compare “the current field and the 2016 nominee, Hillary Clinton.” This week, frontrunner Joe Biden released his proposal for tax hikes, mostly on “corporations and high earners,” which would raise “about $3.4 trillion over a decade.” While Biden’s proposal makes him “look like a moderate” compared to his 2020 rivals, his proposed tax hikes are more than double what Hillary Clinton called for during the 2016 campaign. If you’re trying to answer “how far Democrats have moved to the economic left,” the fact “the party’s supposed moderates are proposing double or even quadruple the new taxes she proposed” is a pretty good hint.
Foreign desk: The NATO Summit Was a Success
Yes, President Trump “exchanged some tough words” with his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, and faced some “mild Justin Trudeau-led teasing” — but the “hyperbolic media coverage which suggests the world’s most successful multilateral alliance is dying” is flat-out wrong, says The Washington Examiner’s Tom Rogan. For one thing, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan “backed away from a previous threat to block improved NATO support for the Baltic states and Poland” — a “positive development” that means “Russia faces a new deterrent” against invading those threatened neighbors. Meanwhile, Trump again pushed members to meet their 2% defense spending commitment while taking “a more conciliatory tone” than he has previously. So, “ignore the headlines” — the summit was a “huge success.”
— Compiled by Karl Salzmann & Kelly Jane Torrance