From the left: On Mueller, the Republicans Have a Point
At Slate, Ben Mathis-Lilley doesn’t quite buy the GOP claim that the Mueller investigation was “pointless” because “guidelines made it impossible for Mueller’s work to lead to an indictment of the president,” since Mueller’s report clearly points to impeachment as the way to handle a sitting president’s wrongdoing. Problem is, “The House’s Democratic leaders don’t want to impeach Trump because they’re afraid that swing voters won’t support it and will punish them, in 2020, for overreaching.” Instead they’ve done little but stall and posture since the report dropped. Which leaves a situation where “Mueller and the Democrats pass the buck back-and-forth to each other to no apparent end.” Which does support a GOP point: If neither the special counsel nor House Democrats will make a formal accusation months after Mueller’s report landed, “then why are we still talking about it?”
Libertarian: Tech Anti-trust Probe Is Empty Theater
Reason’s Eric Boehm is skeptical that the Justice Department anti-trust investigation of big tech firms is more than a way to appease “the conservative-led media backlash.” The Federal Trade Commission and multiple congressional hearings have already investigated “many of the same issues,” making it “unclear what the Justice Department thinks it can add to the show.” Worse, the “seemingly open-ended nature of the review creates the opportunity for the Justice Department’s anti-trust enforcement powers to be used for obviously political purposes” to limit online speech President Trump disapproves of. Most important, “there’s little indication that government action is necessary to ‘break up’ or regulate tech firms” that actually face “constant competition” from smaller companies. With new technologies always emerging, it won’t be the feds who end the reigns of Facebook and Google, but the natural impact of “something you haven’t heard about yet.”
Watchdog: Kick Millionaires Off Foodstamps!
The Trump administration has finally proposed a rule to close a loophole that “allows millionaires to collect welfare,” cheers Kristina Rasmussen at the Washington Examiner. A Clinton administration regulatory move has allowed “more than 5 million people that don’t meet eligibility requirements for assets or income” to enroll in the food-stamp program, including millionaires and lottery winners. Now an Agriculture Department proposal would “restore the food stamp program to its original mission: to serve the truly needy, not millionaires.” The move should receive bipartisan support “for working to protect tax-payer funded resources for those who truly need them.”
Conservative: Lara Trump’s Bid To Win Back Women
Lara Trump traveled to suburban Philadelphia last week “to kick off the 2020 Women for Trump coalition, planting a flag, or at least an olive branch, in some of the least Trump-friendly terrain in the Keystone State,” reports Salena Zito at RealClearPolitics. The president’s daughter-in-law has the “simple and complicated” challenge of “winning the votes of women who didn’t vote for him but now find they like his policies while disliking his comportment.” Victory lies in persuading married suburban women who have historically “gravitated toward Republican presidential candidates” and know “the struggles of maintaining a career and raising a family.” Lara will focus on the impact of Trump’s flourishing economy: “If the Trump team can successfully make that argument, then perhaps these women will overlook the president’s foibles and their disparities with him.”
Campus watch: The High Priest of Heterodoxy
David Mikics at Tablet profiles New York University prof Jonathan Haidt, who by 2015 had grown worried that US universities were becoming like East Germany, “with the woke students playing the role of the Stasi.” That year, Haidt co-founded a Web site, Heterodox Academy, to help “promote intellectual diversity on college campuses and challenge the enforced orthodoxies of academia.” Haidt, a social psychologist, wanted to “use the organization to foster viewpoint diversity . . . by providing a supportive outlet to academics with beliefs that stray from the enforced political biases of their field.” Mikics reports that the “Heterodox Academy approach is gaining ground, as shown by the growing number of colleges that have adopted the University of Chicago free speech principles, which commit them to ensure ‘free, robust and uninhibited debate.’ ”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
