From the left: Dems Should Scrutinize Sanders

Bernie Sanders has received “relatively lax scrutiny” from his rivals — and that, Joe Lockhart frets at CNN, is “a worry to many Democrats.” The media and other candidates have barely touched on “Sanders’ 50-year record” or asked “how he would defend that record against a Republican onslaught.” Sanders, for example, hasn’t just proudly called himself “a socialist,” he has backed the Marxist Socialist Workers Party and its “continued defense of the Cuban revolution.” Democrats may resent the way he has “trashed the party” over the years and also his decades of fervent support for gun rights. Fact is, Bernie has a “long record,” and “sooner or later” he’ll “need to defend it.”

Iconoclast: End the Caucuses

Syndicated columnist Froma Harrop cites the late Christopher Hitchens’ warning that the Iowa caucuses not only breed “open corruption” but are also “flagrantly anti-democratic.” In primaries, she notes, “eligible voters can show up anytime while polls are open, cast anonymous ballots and go home” — while caucuses force Iowans to “show up on a winter night and spend several hours jostling with neighbors and strangers as they show support for one candidate or another.” That favors educated “activists” and puts “working people who must juggle two children and three jobs” at a disadvantage. Caucuses “routinely suppress voter participation” and unfairly benefit “candidates with passionate followers,” like Bernie Sanders. “Only the Democratic Party can end this undemocratic means of choosing its nominees. And it should.”

From the right: How Pelosi Helps Putin

The Federalist’s Benjamin Domenech blasts Democrats’ “sickening” tendency to allege, “without any evidence whatsoever,” that “their Republican opponents are operating in service of Russia.” Media elites see that tendency as “cute,” masking what it really is: an example of “the deepest kind of treachery.” Interviewers won’t ask “a single followup question” about the ­accusation. Sunday on ABC, for example, Nancy Pelosi said she wondered if Mitch McConnell is an “accomplice” in Russian meddling. On the Senate floor, McConnell “branded such efforts ‘modern-day McCarthyism’  ” and Domenech says that’s “being too polite.” Pelosi’s allegations actually help the Kremlin: They polarize Americans and “seed distrust” in the government. It’s “the height of irresponsibility” — and will do “damage to the country.”

Conservative: Britain’s Frail Monarchy

“I am a monarchist,” Peter Hitchens confesses at First Things, but what’s the point anymore? “Mainly these days, the [British] monarchy serves to keep our elected politicians away from the grander, more majestic accoutrements and signs of power.” Queen Elizabeth II, “stripped of all ancient direct power, is now remarkably like the king on a chessboard — almost incapable of offensive action but ­preventing others from occupying a crucial square and those around it.” And what a maddeningly tough job it is: “to be silent when you wish to speak, inactive when you wish to act, polite without exception.” No wonder the younger members of the family are shirking their duties. Hitchens’ solution: “Why not have a monarchy, but no monarch? Why not select an elderly, unambitious, self-effacing Regent, close to the end of his or her days, to preside over ceremonies and hand out medals?” The alternative is “tumbling” into a ­republic.

Libertarian: Three Cheers for US Frackers

Despite Venezuela’s flailing oil production and a turbulent Middle East, “oil and gas prices are holding steady,” Glenn Harlan Reynolds cheers at USA Today. Chalk that up to fracking, which has “turned the United States from a ­nation deeply dependent on imported oil to a net exporter and the world’s single largest producer of oil and gas.” US fracking weakens Iran, Saudi Arabia and Russia, which rely on oil and gas exports for “economic leverage,” and it also cuts US carbon emissions. “Pretty much all” the Democratic presidential candidates oppose fracking, so their policies would make America “weaker and Putin stronger.” In all, Americans should look at their “reasonable energy bills and a booming economy” and thank those who made it possible: “Have you hugged a fracker today?”

— Compiled by Karl Salzmann & Sohrab Ahmari