From the right: Dems’ Cynical Charges Against Barr
Of all the routes to pursue contempt charges against Attorney General William Barr, warns ex-prosecutor Andrew McCarthy at Fox News, House Democrats will use the one that’s “most political” and “least credible.” Because “the stunt is so nakedly partisan,” they won’t “try to get support from the Senate.” They won’t seek to lock Barr in the Capitol’s jail cell, ask the Justice Department (headed by Barr!) to prosecute him or go to court, where judges would note that Congress itself hasn’t OK’d the release of the redacted grand-jury material from the Mueller report that Congress seeks. No, Dems will just “keep the contempt gambit in its own playpen,” charges McCarthy, “and hope people won’t notice that it’s a cynical game.”
Law prof: House Contempt Action May Backfire
Writing for The Hill “as someone who has represented the House of Representatives,” Jonathan Turley notes that the move to hold Barr in contempt could “seriously undermine” the House’s credibility in ongoing conflicts with the White House. That “violates the legal version of the Hipopocratic oath to ‘first do no harm’ ” because it slams Barr for refusing to release redacted material — when doing so would be breaking the law. President Trump’s assertion of executive privilege over the report makes the contempt claim unlikely to prevail. “In the end, there is utter contempt in this action,” Turley says, “but not in the case of Barr.”
Urban take: An Alternative To Ditching the Elite-HS Test
Given that relatively few black students are admitted to the city’s elite high schools based on their admissions test, suggests John McWhorter at The Atlantic, the main question should be how to help them do better on it. Instead, Mayor de Blasio wants to scrap the test. Others suggest a “massive social shift,” like overhauling the schools. But what about just “helping black kids do better?” McWhorter proposes steps like better publicizing free test-prep classes, offering blacks students more gifted-and-talented classes and holding community meetings where “parents of nonblack students discuss” how they made sure their kids got into the top schools. Ditching the test just because black students do poorly on it, though, “would be antithetical to civic harmony.” These kids “can handle imperfection,” McWhorter insists, as long as they “get dealt in.”
Foreign desk: Iran’s Pullout From Nuke Deal Will Backfire
Iran’s threat to pull out of the nuclear deal in phases rather than in a fell swoop won’t, as Iran hopes, drive a wedge between the US and Europe. Rather, predicts Bobby Ghosh at Bloomberg, it’ll “force them together. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani describes Tehran’s move as “diplomacy with a new language and a new logic.” But, says Ghosh, it will have the same old consequences: “more isolation and sanctions for Iran.” As hope fades for Tehran’s compliance on the nuclear issue, and Europeans see that it again poses a nuclear threat, they “will have little option but to punish” Tehran. Their leaders “may resent Donald Trump’s reckless torching of the deal,” but “they are not about to abandon an alliance for a brutal regime.”
DC beat: No One’s Running the Show
“One of the hardest lessons for young, idealistic and educated people to learn when they come to Washington,” writes Jonah Goldberg at National Review, is that “nobody is running things.” Truth is, “the world is complicated.” In politics and policy, “life — that vast realm of existence governed as much by Murphy’s Law as by Washington’s laws” ) — gets a vote. Goldberg cites the misguided efforts of New Dealers to end the Depression and President Obama’s failure to stimulate the economy with his stimulus plan, adding that the tendency is to blame someone. “When bad things happen,” he says “we look for beneficiaries and then reason backwards that they must have been responsible.” MSNBC’s Chris Hayes even floated the “preposterous” idea that Obama’s failure to boost the economy was a conspiracy: Big business “didn’t want full employment” under a Democratic president. But “there’s nobody behind the curtain pulling the strings,” insists Goldberg. “We’re all on the stage together.”
— Compiled by Adam Brodsky
