Libertarian: How Harry Reid Broke the Senate
The late Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) “was one of the most influential Democratic politicians of the last four decades,” admits James Wallner at Reason, but his “outsized impact” was “not for the better.” His “lasting, and tragic, legacy”: His “skill as a leader allowed him to essentially eliminate genuine deliberation on the Senate floor while ensuring that the Senate still legislated, a balancing act that his successors have struggled to perform.” He made the Senate appear “bitterly divided between Democrats and Republicans” while hiding “Democrats’ policy disagreements.” Now “senators understand the majority leader’s primary responsibility to be protecting senators from taking votes they want to avoid.” In short, today’s Senate neither debates nor deliberates. We have Harry Reid to thank for that.”
Pandemic journal: Sacrificing Our Kids
“American children are starting 2022 in crisis,” declares The New York Times’ David Leonhardt. They “fell far behind in school during the first year of the pandemic and have not caught up,” with the worst shortfalls among blacks and Hispanics. “Suicide attempts have risen, slightly among adolescent boys and sharply among adolescent girls,” while three “medical groups, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, recently declared a national state of emergency in children’s mental health.” Omicron, as low risk to children as other variants, has led some schools to close, “despite evidence that most children struggle to learn remotely.” For two years, “Americans have accepted more harm to children” — “learning loss and social isolation” — “in exchange for less harm to adults.”
From the Right: If COVID’s Here To Stay . . .
“What if COVID-19 is as ineradicable and endemic as influenza?” asks Dan Hannan at the Washington Examiner. “What if it comes and goes seasonally, leaving its victims with a dollop of immunity that wanes over time?” Omicron “makes pitilessly clear that the virus will carry on mutating and that no country can keep new variants at bay.” But if we’re dealing “with a recurrent respiratory virus, then almost all the measures that we have put in place around the world are pointless.” Even if COVID “does not evolve to lower virulence, even if we are left to rely on vaccines, treatments, and other medical interventions, we know that we can get by.” So, do we accept that COVID “will be always with us?” After all, “the alternative, as is now clear, is to shut down in response to each new variant.”
Poll watch: Not Asking If You Fear the Answer
Every year since 1946 (except 1976), Gallup has polled to find “the ‘most admired man’ in America which is typically announced a few days before New Year’s,” Brad Wilmouth notes at NewBusters. But most media lost interest last year “after Donald Trump started edging out Barack Obama for first place.” Now, “conspicuously,” no Google search indicates that Gallup did the poll this past year. Did the pollsters blink “because they couldn’t stand that thought having to report what likely would have been Trump coming in first again this year — after the January 6 riot”? It would say a lot if researchers at “one of the most prominent polling firms” chose to “break a 74-year-old tradition” because they feared they wouldn’t “approve of the results politically.”
Culture critic: Left’s Dominance Rests Uneasy
“The progressive Left has successfully fulfilled Antonio Gramsci’s famed admonition of a ‘long march through the institutions,’ ” dominating “the education system, media, cultural institutions, and financial behemoths,” declares Joel Kotkin at UnHerd. Yet there’s “every chance” this won’t lead to “enduring political victory.” Trust in these institutions has fallen dramatically along with the takeover, which has also spurred considerable pushback from “the rational Right to the traditional liberal-left.” Society may never “regain the feistiness of previous eras, and our new elites might continue marching through our institutions. But as they become increasingly discredited, they would be unwise to forget that all long marches one day come to an end.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
