Feminist: Why Dems Should Confirm Judge Kavanaugh
Lisa Blatt, a liberal Democratic lawyer who’s argued more cases before the US Supreme Court than any other woman, suggests at Politico that the left should have no qualms about supporting Justice-designate Brett Kavanaugh. He’s “smart, qualified and engaged” — a “superstar,” in fact. And critics should “stop pretending that Kavanaugh or his record is the issue.” Even when it comes to abortion, whatever he decides “will be because the Constitution requires that result.” After all, 41 Republicans supported Ruth Bader Ginsburg, even though they knew “she was a solid vote in favor” of Roe v. Wade. They did so “because of her overwhelming qualifications.” So “Democrats should quit attacking Kavanaugh — full stop.” He’ll “do the job with dignity, intelligence, empathy and integrity.”
From the right: Bob Menendez’s Medicare Blind Spot
New Jersey Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez this week joined a press conference attacking Republicans on health care. He’s not wrong, agrees the Star-Ledger’s Paul Mulshine; critics have long “lamented the lack of mechanisms to keep costs under control, particularly in Medicare,” where “an unscrupulous doctor can exploit its many loopholes to receive payments far out of proportion to any care patients receive.” Problem is, “the most prominent such example” is eye doctor Salomon Melgen, who showered Menendez “with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of luxury travel and other favors” and was convicted of overbilling Medicare by $73 million. Menendez also “ran interference for Melgen” with Medicare officials. So if he “truly cared about Medicare, he’d be proposing reforms to prevent people like his friend from bankrupting the system.”
Conservative: Colleges Stick With Obama Title IX Rules
It’s been nearly a year since Education Secretary Betsy DeVos rescinded the Obama-era Title IX guidance that pressured colleges and universities to handle sexual-misconduct claims internally and, as was increasingly apparent in the years that followed, too often inefficiently and unfairly. But as Alice Lloyd reports at The Weekly Standard, “the vast majority of campuses have declined to improve their processes. And they say they don’t plan to.” Moreover, only 8 percent “viewed her proposed changes positively.” Part of it is political resistance to the Trump administration by universities that “are drawing a battle line,” according to one Title IX attorney, adding that any “mandatory reform enforced by administrative diktat would lead to a revolt.” The only hope for greater transparency: integral improvements, school by school.
From the left: Sanders Strategist’s Deep Cynicism
As chief strategist for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, Tad Devine echoed his boss’s broadsides against the corrupting influence of money in politics. Now, as Dana Milbank notes at The Washington Post, we’re learning from the Paul Manafort trial that during the run-up to Sanders’ campaign, Devine “was making gobs of money to secure the election of one of the world’s most corrupt political figures and then his allies”: Ukraine’s “crooked pro-Putin autocrat” Viktor Yanukovych. Devine’s “seamless pivot from advocate for an anti-democratic thug to champion of a principled democratic reformer shows extraordinary flexibility.” His fee: $100,000 a month, plus lavish expenses and “success” bonuses. Says Milbank: “There is no hint Devine did anything illegal — only cynical.”
Urban critic: NYC To Honor Advocate of Racial Murder
On Monday, a City Council committee voted to co-name part of Rogers Avenue in Brooklyn after Jean-Jacques Dessalines, first emperor of an independent Haiti. But as Seth Barron notes at City Journal, Dessalines “ordered the murder of virtually every white man, followed soon afterward by all white women and children, in the new nation. Between 3,000 and 5,000 people were butchered in a few months.” This comes, of course, amid a politically charged debate in New York about which historical figures should — and should not — be commemorated. As far as Dessalines is concerned, his barbarism followed a revolutionary war “attended by savage acts against a slave population fighting for its liberty.” So perhaps it’s “not for us to condemn the early Haitian leaders.” Still, asks Barron, “do we need to honor them?”
— Compiled by Eric Fettmann
