Liberal: Can Straight White Male Dems Run in 2020?

Of the 10 Democrats who have officially announced for president, notes Politico’s Bill Scher, only two are heterosexual white males. Yet of the 16 still pondering a White House run, all but one are straight white men. “It’s hard to chalk that up to coincidence,” he says. Clearly, “women and minority candidates sensed that the water is warm for them, and the straight white men appear to be worried that this is just not their year.” Yet the two top candidates in every poll are two “geriatric” straight white males, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders — though they will both “have their top-tier status severely put to the test on race and gender issues.” Because like most white men, they “do not exactly have the best track record of dealing with them.”

Law prof: Why Trump Will Win the Wall Fight

Congress has long been putting itself “on the path to institutional irrelevancy, and it has finally arrived,” contends Jonathan Turley at The Hill. Even though there’s no national emergency on the southern border, President Trump “will prevail” — because the current crisis “is the making of Congress,” not the president. For decades, Congress has “yielded more and more power to the executive branch,” giving presidents “largely unchecked authority and undedicated money.” The wall-funding controversy “is a grotesque result” of that failure. By using already appropriated money, Trump “has the power and funds to start construction.” And those challenging his declaration of a national emergency “will fail spectacularly if the case gets to the Supreme Court,” because “the courts were not created to protect Congress from itself.”

Political scribe: William Weld Has No Chance Whatsoever

The Week’s Matthew Walther nominates GOP presidential candidate William Weld as the early favorite for “most annoying” political trend of 2019. The former Massachusetts governor hasn’t held public office since 1997 and was “held in such esteem” by his own party that the GOP-controlled Senate Foreign Relations Committee wouldn’t even hold a hearing on his nomination as ambassador to Mexico. The socially liberal Weld “would be insufferable enough on his own,” even “without the ­approximately 900,000 puff pieces we’re going to read about him” over the next few months. Example: The Washington Post says Weld — who supports abortion, same-sex marriage, gun control and drug legalization — will run on a “traditional Republican agenda.” His constituency, suggests Walther, is “the same one” that voted for Evan McMullin.

Preservationist: Amazon Is Still Coming to NYC

Amazon isn’t “pulling out of New York,” argues Roberta Brandes Gratz at Common Edge. It’s “simply canceling the construction of a physical campus in Long Island City.” But such a “self-contained, university-like setting, replete with its own helipad, does not belong in a city, at least not in this city.” Ironically, companies long created such campuses “when they fled cities” — only to discover that “self-contained campuses are dead and sterile without the messy, crowded, vibrant, artful pulse of the city.” That’s why Google “has grown exponentially in Manhattan without creating a suburban campus.” Indeed, it “so dominates the West 20s that one might say it has created a campus of sorts, but in a more urban-appropriate way.” Amazon, which already is growing in NYC, “is not going to leave the field ­entirely to others, even without a helipad.”

Foreign desk: Confronting Made-in-France Anti-Semitism

More than 120 years after the onset of the Dreyfus Affair, the recent ­actions of France’s yellow-vest protesters are raising the specter of home-grown anti-Semitism there, warns Robert Zaretsky at Real Clear World. ­Indeed, even as the anti-government movement has taken root, “noxious weeds” — racist and anti-Semitic elements — have begun growing alongside it and become increasingly visible. Because, the protesters suggest, “if there is something rotten in the state of France, there must be a guilty party” — and polls show 44 percent of yellow-vesters believe in the existence of a global Zionist conspiracy. No surprise: There has long been “a porous line between conspiratorial and anti-Semitic worldviews.”

— Compiled by Eric Fettmann