Conservative: IG Report Dices Nadler’s Credibility
The “scathing” Justice Department IG report, notes Paul Sperry at RealClearInvestigations, is devastating to House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler. It proves he “falsely accused a Trump campaign aide [Carter Page] of being a Russian spy who helped Moscow interfere in the 2016 election.” Nadler also “defended the FBI for obtaining a highly invasive FISA warrant” to wiretap Page. When Rep. Devin Nunes reported on major problems with those warrants, Nadler wrote, “I have had the benefit of reading the materials that form the basis for the Nunes memo.” He went on to call the memo “embarrassingly flawed,” a “disgrace” and “deeply misleading.” Yet the IG report — based on the same info Nadler said he’d seen — thoroughly vindicates Nunes and his memo. As one GOP staffer told Sperry: Nadler has “no credibility left.”
Libertarian: Consistency on School Choice
The Supreme Court recently heard arguments in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, in which Montana’s Supreme Court “declared religious schools entirely off-limits” for a tax-credit program because the state Constitution bans “public funds” from going to religious schools or denominations. Yet, observes Reason’s Damon Root, in 2002 the high court “upheld Cleveland’s school-choice program against the charge that it was unconstitutional to provide tuition aid to parents who opted to send their children to religious-affiliated magnet schools.” The Supremes specifically noted that such a program simply gives individuals a chance to “direct government aid to religious schools” and isn’t funding religion. So if the “justices follow their own precedents,” Espinoza “looks to be a winner for the school.”
Impeachment beat: The Kavanaugh Strategy
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s bid to get impeachment “testimony from four witnesses the House did not interview” in the name of “fairness,” scoffs The Washington Examiner’s Byron York, was a clear effort to impose a “Brett Kavanaugh model of impeachment.” The Kavanaugh hearings were nearly over, with confirmation clearly in hand, when Democrats surfaced “a new allegation, the Christine Blasey Ford story,” and “demanded the case be reopened, witnesses be interviewed, evidence be gathered and time be taken for more investigation. Republicans acceded to those demands, and the Kavanaugh confirmation careened off course.” Looking forward to the Senate trial, “Schumer and other party leaders will scramble for new information to throw at the president, and at Republicans, until it is over. The GOP, and the White House, need to be ready.”
Education watch: Connecticut’s Racist Quotas
“A good start to teaching our children that race does not determine their future is to stop making race decide whether or not they are eligible for a good school,” remarks Steven Anderson at Issues & Insights. Yet under Connecticut law, only three-quarters of a magnet-school class can be black or Hispanic. So if whites and Asians don’t enroll to “round things out,” as is often so, “seats are empty.” Good schools turn minority children away, even though there is space, “simply — and solely — because of how they look.” Anderson, whose Pacific Legal Foundation is representing parents in a suit to open these admissions, notes: “These magnet schools, as a result of the previous desegregation litigation, were established to undo discrimination. Yet thanks to the quota policy, they only exacerbate the problem.”
Culture critic: ‘Two Popes’ Is a Smear
The Benedict XVI and Francis portrayed in “The Two Popes” on Netflix bear “no resemblance to the real-life men they were supposed to represent,” complains John Waters at First Things, making it “a dangerous and misguided movie.” The filmmakers regurgitate the media tropes about Benedict as a “dour traditionalist” and Francis as a merciful “man with the common touch.” Which, “if you know anything of the truth of these two men, is almost laughable.” The film’s angry, awkward, Latin-obsessed German pontiff is obviously the villain, belying screenwriter Anthony McCarten’s claim that it’s “a movie about finding the middle ground.” On the contrary, “The Two Popes” does nothing but repeat “the clichés generated for many years by lazy and malevolent journalists.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
