Impeachment watch: Nancy Pelosi’s ‘Waterloo’
Thursday’s 232-196 House vote for an impeachment inquiry was “technically a ‘win’ for Democrats” but “falls disastrously short of [Speaker Nancy] Pelosi’s insistence” that it be bipartisan, observes Charles Hurt at the Washington Times. And that says more about her speakership than about Trump’s presidency. “This is Nancy Pelosi’s Waterloo, and she knows it,” snarks Hurt. And one Dem who voted no, Collin Peterson (Minn.), also knows it. Peterson voted in favor of impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton but against actually impeaching him. “What does it say that a guy like Mr. Peterson saw a case at least worth pursuing against the president of his own party back in 1998, yet he doesn’t see such a case worth pursuing against the president of his opposing party today?”
Libertarian: Warren’s Non-Tax Tax
For months, Elizabeth Warren “has hedged” about whether she would “raise middle-class taxes to pay for Medicare for All,” notes Peter Suderman at Reason. And though she now claims her $52 trillion plan, which she finally released this week, doesn’t require such taxes, it does include “what is effectively a new tax on employers that would undoubtedly hit middle-class Americans.” Under the plan, large employers who currently pay for health coverage would be required to cough up comparable amounts for Medicare for All. Plus, the scheme relies on “fantastical, assumptions” about revenue and costs. Apparently, Warren’s been refusing to say if she’d foist new taxes on the middle class not “because the answer was complex or hard to explain,” but because it “was so simple it could be expressed in a single word: yes.”
2020 watch: Kamala’s California
Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) is “laying off dozens of campaign staffers and redirecting most of her dwindling resources to Iowa” — an act, National Review’s Michael Brendan Doughterty comments, that reflects the “dysfunctional political culture” of her state. Harris was born and raised when “much of California was considered a middle-class paradise.” No longer: It’s “one of the most unequal states in our society,” where Democratic elites insulate the rich from the “homelessness, unaffordability, congestion, declining quality of life and now environmental rationing, blackouts, and seemingly untamable wildfires.” But those elites can’t keep cosseting the rich forever — and the moment “Silicon Valley stops being a gusher of money for Sacramento,” the rigged California system will go the way of its junior senator’s campaign.
Religion desk: A Cardinal for All Seasons
Pope Francis “showed real emotion” and “seemed to shed a tear or two” when he made Lithuanian archbishop emeritus and fellow Jesuit Sigitas Tamkevičius a cardinal on Oct. 5, George Weigel chronicles at First Things. Tamkevičius had spent time in the Soviet gulag camps and was later freed through a diplomatic effort led by two congressmen, with Weigel’s help. Francis’ selection of Tamkevičius for the cardinalate was a “papal tribute to a brave man who exemplifies the best the Society of Jesus offers the Church and the world” — as well as to “the fidelity and courage of hundreds of thousands of Lithuanian Catholics during the Soviet occupation of their country.” Based on such tales, Weigel insists, “hope is sustained in a wintry ecclesiastical season.”
Judicial watch: Unfair Deal for Trump Nominee
At Real Clear Politics, Susan Crabtree reports that Democrats relied on “derogatory statements” by a Montana official, Michael Black, to justify opposition to President Trump’s Ninth Circuit nominee, Lawrence VanDyke, without noting that Black donated $30,000 to Dems and harbors personal “disdain” for VanDyke. At a hearing Wednesday, Sen. Chris Coons cited emails from Black questioning VanDyke’s “judicial temperament” yet said nothing about Black’s biases. Similarly, the American Bar Association failed to disclose that the lead evaluator behind its “not qualified” rating for VanDyke donated to a Montana judge he tried to unseat years earlier and also relied on Black’s emails. For that, Judicial Crisis Network’s Carrie Severino at National Review blasted the ABA, arguing it discriminates against conservatives but had now “outdone itself.” Fact is, huffed Severino, “it is difficult to envision a more principled, highly qualified nominee” than VanDyke.
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
