Jun
20
2025

As the Prophet Foretold…

[Amazon Link]
(paid link)

George Will notes a newfound devotion to Constitutional checks and balances among the enlightened: Progressives suddenly remember presidents shouldn’t act monarchically. (WaPo gifted link)

Last weekend, many Americans — mostly progressives, surely — staged “No Kings” protests against what progressivism has done much to produce: today’s rampant presidency. Their chief concerns were domestic — unilateral spending cuts, deportations, etc. A week is, however, forever in today’s politics. Today, progressives, those occasional constitutionalists, are fretting about uninhibited presidential warmaking.

On Tuesday, Barack Obama descended from Olympus in his usual lecture mode, solemnly sharing his worries about Washington tendencies “consistent with autocracies.” Obama is and was a situational Madisonian. He rewrote immigration law after repeatedly and correctly insisting he had no legitimate power to do so. And he intervened in Libya’s civil war by waging war there for almost eight months without seeking congressional authorization or complying with the law (the War Powers Resolution). Obama argued, through his lawyers, that the thousands of airstrikes that killed thousands did not constitute “hostilities.” Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith termed Obama “a matchless war-powers unilateralist.”

As I was looking for appropriate Eye Candy at Amazon, I noted there is a lot of "No Kings" merch already available, no doubt from the very same people that will be happy to sell you MAGA merch as well. I went with something more festive instead, welcoming the latest newcomers to belief in the non-Living Constitution.

I don't know how long they'll stay at the party, but I'll be nicer to them while they're in attendance.

Also of note:

  • I question the headline's hypothesis. Robert Corn-Revere has some suggestions: If Brendan Carr Cares About Free Speech, He Should Make These Changes at the FCC.

    Brendan Carr used to talk a big game on free speech. In 2021, when members of Congress urged the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to block the sale of a Miami radio station over its perceived political slant, Carr—one of the agency's commissioners—called that move "a deeply troubling transgression of free speech and the FCC's status as an independent agency." He urged his colleagues to push back and assured the public that the FCC's review of the transaction would be "free from political pressure."

    These days, Carr has little credibility
on freedom of speech. Now the chair of the Commission, he has been busy reopening
investigations against broadcast networks
because of their editorial policies, threatening public broadcasters ostensibly about how they raise sponsorship funds (but really about their editorial positions), threatening media companies over their hiring practices, and strong-arming technology companies about issues well beyond the FCC's limited statutory mission.

    Robert has a number of excellent recommendations, and I fear that not a single one of them will be followed.

  • “Like the feather pillow, he bears the marks of the last person who has sat on him.” Kevin D. Williamson analyzes Trump's shifting policy on illegal immigrants: TACO, Loco.

    Donald Trump is a remarkably weak man. Consider his administration’s constant immigration flip-flopping.

    Immigration—illegal immigration most specifically and urgently, but immigration in general, too—is the reason Donald J. Trump, game-show host and cameo performer in porn films, is president of these United States. In a world in which the immigration issue had been treated seriously by Republicans (or—ho, ho!—by Democrats), Trump never would have been the 2016 nominee and never would have been president. Trade has long been Trump’s No. 1 issue, but immigration has been a close No. 2 for about a decade. Ironic, then, that his trade and immigration policies change every 15 minutes.

    Sometimes, we get TACO Trump—TACO being Wall Street’s reassuring acronym: Trump Always Chickens Out. He has done that a lot with tariffs, but he also did it (for a few hours, at least) with the recent immigration crackdown, presumably after someone explained to him that his policies were creating problems for farmers, restaurateurs, and hoteliers, all of whom rely heavily on immigrant workforces and some of whom employ a non-trivial number of illegal immigrants. “Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” Trump wrote last week. So—TACO?

    Not so fast. Trump un-TACO’d his own TACO—or at least he tried to.

    If you, dear reader, were hoping to get consistency and clarity on this matter from DJT, well… how does it feel to hope?

  • "… But were afraid to find out". I would imagine that most readers of this blog have known about this for a long time, but Charles Blahous summarizes:

    Just the first two (of seven) takeaways:

    1. Social Security is going insolvent. According to the trustees, Social Security now faces a financing shortfall equal to roughly 22% of its scheduled benefit obligations (which include future scheduled payments for individuals who are already receiving benefits today).

    2. The financing shortfall is massive and growing increasingly difficult to correct. Although press reports tend to focus on the trust funds’ projected date of depletion, the specific date is not really what matters. What matters is the size of the shortfall and whether it still remains practicable to close it. This is increasingly open to question as lawmakers procrastinate and the shortfall grows. Already, the shortfall is of such a size that closing it now would require generating savings equal to an across-the-board benefit cut of roughly 27% in the benefits going forward from this year indefinitely into the future. Because lawmakers would likely never enact such sudden benefit cuts and would instead gradually phase in any changes, the eventual percentage reductions would almost certainly need to be even larger. If lawmakers were to delay action to the point that Social Security trust fund depletion became imminent, even complete elimination of all new benefit claims would be insufficient to prevent program insolvency.

    There are too many demagogues and cowards in Congress. And we have a President that (somehow) manages to be both.

  • Missing him all over again. Itxu Diaz predicts, with hope: The Second Coming of America’s Funniest Writer.

    Though P. J. O’Rourke passed away three years ago, his sharp wit and defense of freedom continue to resonate in a world still tempted by interventionist solutions. Reclaiming his work is more vital now than ever. What he told us through laughs and jabs in recent decades has proven to be one of the sharpest diagnoses of the dangers of postmodern left-wing ideology—and one of the most inspired reflections on why we must root our societies in individual liberty, private property, the free market, and the Judeo-Christian values that shaped the West for centuries.

    Progressives want bigger government, and often conservatives don’t want it as small as we ought to like. O’Rourke knew all too well that the larger the state grows, the smaller individuals become. He devoted much of his work to explaining this in a way anyone could understand—even those not particularly interested in politics. His words resonate today in a new light, and fortunately, they remain easy to access: the Internet is full of O’Rourke’s articles, and all his books are still in print. The ideas, the jokes—the profound, the outdated, and even the ones that haven’t aged all that well—are still out there, waiting to be discovered by any digital wanderer with a sense of humor and a thirst for sharp thinking. It’s almost frightening to realize that some of O’Rourke’s tech-related jokes would go completely over a millennial or zoomer’s head today. And it’s even more pitiful to think that some of his old comments would be cancelled in today’s dull, hypersensitive postmodern world. Perhaps it’s because, as he once said, “One of the problems with being a writer is that all of your idiocies are still in print somewhere.” Incidentally, that’s where O’Rourke found his only point of agreement with environmentalists: “I strongly support paper recycling.”

    Itxu Diaz, his bio reveals, is Spanish. I recommend he immigrate, we need him.