Liberals Choose Racial Catharsis Over Progress for Blacks
What happened in Tulsa 100 years ago matters far less than what’s happening in Chicago today.
By Jason L. Riley
President Biden traveled to Tulsa, Okla., Tuesday to mark the 100th anniversary of a race riot that destroyed a prosperous black community and is estimated to have left hundreds of people dead. The trip recalls President Obama’s 2015 trip to Selma, Ala., where police had beaten and tear-gassed peaceful civil-rights protesters 50 years earlier.
These historical milestones are certainly worthy of commemoration. Properly understood, they demonstrate how much racial progress has been made in this country in a relatively short time. Yet for progressives and their friends in the media, the events are also an opportunity to push for racial preferences and bigger government. The goal is to link today’s racial disparities to past wrongs and to play down or ignore the far more significant role that contemporary black behavior plays in social inequality.
When a National Public Radio reporter asked George Patrick Evans, Selma’s mayor, how events of 50 years ago fit into the “current conversation about race relations,” he balked at the question. “I’m not sure how it fits,” Mr. Evans, who is black, replied. “We have a lot more crime going on in 2015 all over this country than we had in 1965. Segregation existed but we didn’t have the crime.” Asked about the city’s high black unemployment rate, he still refused to racialize the issue: “Well, from the standpoint of jobs, we have lots of jobs. It’s just that a lot of people do not have the skill level to man these jobs. And that’s the biggest problem we have.”
In the run-up to Mr. Biden’s Tuesday address, the White House announced several new initiatives to “combat housing discrimination” and increase the amount of federal contracting with minority-owned small businesses. Putting aside the dubious legality of race-based government assistance, it’s worth noting that the black residents of Tulsa 100 years ago didn’t wait around for the federal government to come to their rescue. Within two decades of the riots, homes and churches had been rebuilt, and black-owned businesses again anchored the community.
The political left is much more interested in black suffering than in black accomplishment, but black history is about more than victimization at the hands of whites. It’s also about what blacks have achieved notwithstanding that victimization. And in the first half of the 20th century, long before an expanded welfare state supposedly came to the rescue, blacks accomplished quite a lot. Incomes rose, poverty fell dramatically, and education gaps narrowed. Blacks entered the skilled professions—medicine, law, accounting, engineering, social work—at faster rates in the years preceding the 1960s civil-rights legislation than they did in the years afterward. Among racial and ethnic groups rising from similar circumstances, historians have described the rapidity of these gains as unprecedented.
Black Tulsa residents of a century ago would also be shocked to learn that it is no longer racist white vigilantes but black criminals who pose the bigger threat to safety in black communities. Liberals blame today’s disproportionately high black criminality on the “legacy” of slavery and Jim Crow. But violent crime among blacks declined in the 1940s, then dropped even further in the 1950s, while remaining relatively stable among whites. In other words, blacks living during Jim Crow segregation, and much closer to the era of slavery, experienced significantly lower rates of violent crime and incarceration both in absolute terms and relative to whites.
The Biden administration would much rather discuss white criminal behavior in Tulsa 100 years ago than black criminal behavior in Chicago, Baltimore or St. Louis today. Likewise in his Selma address, Mr. Obama invoked high-profile police shootings, “unfair sentencing” and “voter suppression,” giving the impression that little had changed in the past 50 years, his own election and re-election notwithstanding. Liberals focus on this history of black suffering rather than success because it helps Democrats get elected and activists raise money. What’s less clear is how any of this helps the black underclass improve its situation.
This country’s racist past should never be forgotten or sugarcoated, but neither should it be used as a blanket explanation for present disparities. History teaches us that the progress of blacks and other minorities in the U.S. is not conditioned on racial tolerance. Asian-Americans are one of any number of groups that have faced racism and mob violence. One of the largest mass lynchings in U.S. history targeted Chinese immigrants in Los Angeles, and Japanese-Americans were put in internment camps during World War II. Today, both groups outperform whites academically and economically and have for decades.
The left’s focus on the past behavior of whites, while ignoring the present behavior of blacks, might offer some people catharsis, and it might help groups like the NAACP or Black Lives Matter stay relevant. But where is the evidence that such an approach facilitates black upward mobility?
And:
My second, perhaps more controversial belief, is were it not for the fact Republicans currently have no political power they would be in a position, based on his own misdeeds, to impeach Biden for failing to protect and defend our nation.
In my view, there are five distinct basis for bringing such action:
a) Failure to protect and defend our borders.
b) Knowingly allowing criminal elements to invade our nation, to gain billions from increasing drug availability, increasing crime and dangerous health conditions.
c) Failure to work with and lend government support to the private sector to fend against cyberattacks from foreign sources.
d) An accumulated number of other actions which have purposefully increased racial discord and which involve unconstitutional acts of preferential treatment in defiance of citizen equality.
e) Conducting a foreign policy which has all the over tones of being driven by potential actions on the part of the president's son which the president denied knowing anything about yet took place during mutual travel.
f) Finally, the continued pursuit of assisting Iran to benefit from negotiations of a document that was sought to evade Senate advise and consent approval.
And:
H.R.1 Would Steamroll the Constitution
Democrats want the feds to run elections, usurping authority the framers assigned to the states.
By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Jason Snead
President Biden and his media partisans are stepping up the pressure campaign on Joe Manchin. The West Virginia senator is the only Democrat in the upper chamber who hasn’t signed on to H.R.1, styled the For the People Act, an unprecedented federal takeover of U.S. election laws that the House passed in March and that the Senate plans to consider this month. The bill’s supporters describe it as a vital safeguard of democracy, but it’s the opposite: If enacted it would destroy the Constitution’s careful balance of federal and state powers, taking common election safeguards along with it.
H.R.1 plainly exceeds Congress’s power to regulate presidential elections, as we argued in these pages in February. That’s only the start of its constitutional infirmities.
The primary asserted constitutional basis of H.R.1 is Article I’s Elections Clause, which authorizes state legislatures to establish the “times, places and manner” of congressional elections, while providing that “Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations.” In Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona (2013), the Supreme Court held that several state election-integrity measures were invalid because federal law pre-empted them.
Yet H.R.1’s sponsors fail to recognize that the Elections Clause limits Congress’s authority to time, place and manner. “Prescribing voting qualifications,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the court in 2013, “forms no part of the power to be conferred upon the national government by the Elections Clause.” Article I’s Qualifications Clause provides that “the electors”—that is, voters—“in each state shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the state legislature.” Determining those qualifications is up to the states, except where the Constitution says otherwise—for instance in the 19th and 26th amendment, enfranchising women and 18-year-olds, respectively.
Yet H.R.1 purports to establish federal voter qualifications for congressional elections. A prime example is the section mandating “democracy restoration”—a euphemism for enfranchising felons except during imprisonment, a decision the Constitution leaves to the states. The bill’s provisions governing internet voter registration, automatic registration and same-day registration are also suspect. Justice Clarence Thomas, dissenting in Inter Tribal Council, argued that registration is a matter of qualifications, not manner. Scalia and the majority didn’t disagree, so that issue remains open for adjudication.
Other provisions would intrude into states’ efforts to ensure the integrity of elections—such a fundamental aspect of sovereignty that erasing it extinguishes states’ status as coequal sovereigns. H.R.1 would require states to accept a voter’s sworn statement attesting to his identity and eligibility in lieu of any other identification requirement. The Inter Tribal Council majority held that “the power to establish voting requirements is of little value without the power to enforce those requirements” and stated that a statute precluding “a State from obtaining the information necessary to enforce its voter qualifications” would “raise serious constitutional doubts.”
The constitutional problems with H.R.1 are more fundamental than its specific provisions. One arises from their sheer magnitude, which would effectively create a comprehensive federal elections code. The Constitution’s framers and early commentators were united in their rejection of a congressional takeover of federal elections.
Federalist 59 affirmed that the Elections Clause granted power, “in the first instance, to the local administrations” and merely “reserved to the national authority a right to interpose, whenever extraordinary circumstances might render that interposition necessary to its safety.” Justice Joseph Story’s “Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States” (1833) noted that Congress would pass election legislation only if “there has been some extraordinary abuse” and would provide merely “a check upon state legislation.”
H.R.1’s supporters claim the bill provides such a check against a supposed rash of “voter suppression” measures. That claim is flimsy given historic turnout and diversity in recent elections, as well as data showing that voter-ID laws don’t depress turnout. H.R.1 features provisions Democrats have long favored—further evidence that it isn’t a response to a new crisis.
H.R.1’s extreme federal election takeover raises the question of how far Congress can go to oust states from the entire field. Federalist 59 describes Congress’s role as regulating elections “in the last resort”; H.R.1 does so as the first resort. The Supreme Court has never had to address the outer limits of Congress’s power because nothing like H.R.1 has ever passed. But if it does, its comprehensiveness should be its undoing.
There’s another problem. H.R.1 would also compel states to administer and fund the new election regime through state-established and funded redistricting commissions and online registration schemes. Such requirements violate the Supreme Court’s anticommandeering and anticoercion doctrines, which prohibit Congress from mandating that states do its bidding or unduly burdening those that refuse.
Some courts have found the anticommandeering doctrine inapplicable to election laws, reasoning that Congress’s Elections Clause power authorizes it to regulate federal elections. That’s a non sequitur. The doctrine applies when Congress has constitutional authority to regulate the matter directly; it condemns the indirect manner of dictating “what a state legislature may and may not do,” as Justice Samuel Alito put it for the court in Murphy v. NCAA (2018). The high court has never endorsed a different view, and in Inter Tribal Council, it stated that the Elections Clause “is none other than the power to pre-empt”—implying it is not the power to commandeer.
The anticoercion doctrine also prohibits H.R.1’s proposed federal takeover of state authority, and no court has denied that it applies in the electoral context. As Chief Justice John Roberts stated in NFIB v. Sebelius (2012), the anticoercion doctrine requires Congress to afford states “a legitimate choice whether to accept . . . federal conditions” in choosing whether to administer a federal program.
H.R.1 would leave no choice at all. It isn’t a cooperative federalism program giving states benefits in exchange for implementing federal laws. Instead, it would force states to do what Congress can’t: administer national elections in every state.
The constitutional problems with H.R.1 are legion, and no new federal election legislation is necessary. States are exercising their constitutional authority, revising election laws to balance the imperatives of voter access and election integrity. Mr. Manchin should stick to his guns.
Mr. Rivkin practices appellate and constitutional law in Washington. He served in the White House Counsel’s Office and Justice Department under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Mr. Snead is executive director of the Honest Elections Project.
And:
Has Biden's budget and infrastructure stupidity hit a wall?
The parliamentarian nixes Schumer’s plan to evade the filibuster via ‘reconciliation.’
By Kimberley A. Strassel Opinion:
Democratic centrists keep warning the Biden administration about the political risk of untethered progressive governance. It might have taken a quiet Senate lawyer to drive their point home.
A recent straightforward ruling by Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough unraveled Democratic plans to use a procedural maneuver to whisk through Joe Biden’s multitrillion-dollar expansion of government. A furious left is now calling on senators to ignore her decision on budget reconciliation—or to fire her outright. But don’t blame Ms. MacDonough for reiterating the rules, thereby exposing how tenuous Mr. Biden’s strategy was from the start.
The president has repeatedly claimed a mandate for action despite knowing better. Even with the Democratic Party’s twin Georgia runoff victories in January, it ended the election with a 50-50 Senate and the narrowest Democratic House majority since before the New Deal. The prudent course would have been to govern from the middle, working with Republicans on incremental change.
Democrats instead decided to “go big” with a strategy that had no margin for error and relied on two big bets. First, that they could juke or blow up the Senate rules to get around the 60-vote filibuster. Second, that they could force or cajole every member of their razor-thin majority to adopt one of the most progressive agendas in U.S. history.
The first bet bombed late last week with the MacDonough ruling. Sens. Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D., Ariz.) haven’t wavered in their support for the filibuster rule, so Majority Leader Chuck Schumer in March concocted an unprecedented scheme to pass the Biden agenda via a series of budget-reconciliation bills, which require only a simple majority. Reconciliation is meant to be used only once a fiscal year, so Mr. Schumer claimed that the 1974 budget law gave him the power to keep “revising” the annual bill, providing him endless 51-vote vehicles. The plan was to divvy up the rest of the Biden agenda into smaller, more palatable chunks.
Ms. MacDonough said that while revision is possible, the budget law’s framers made clear revision should be used only in situations of sharply changed economic conditions—not to avoid the filibuster. (Surprise.) More important, she ruled the Budget Committee must hold a vote to pass a revision to the floor. The budget panel is split 11-11. While the full Senate could vote to break a tie, the GOP budget members could simply boycott proceedings and prevent a committee vote in the first place.
This means Democrats likely have only one vehicle this year (the fiscal 2022 reconciliation) left to pass Mr. Biden’s flotilla of proposals. It could mean lumping together a $2.3 trillion infrastructure bill, a $1.8 trillion “families” plan, Medicare expansion, prescription-drug changes, and potentially parts of Mr. Biden’s recently unveiled $6 trillion budget. Not to mention all of his crushing tax hikes—on corporations, family farms and middle-class earners.
Which brings up the second shaky bet—that nearly every member of the Democratic Party can be compelled to support $4 trillion or $5 trillion or $6 trillion in additional spending in one reconciliation blowout. Centrist Democrats in March gritted their teeth and passed Mr. Biden’s $2 trillion Covid “relief” bill, but only after fretting over the cost and paring back some provisions.
Now Democrats are internally battling over tax changes and the extent to which to expand entitlements like Medicare. And because Mr. Biden has coddled the left, centrists aren’t the only votes at risk. Progressives are increasingly threatening to walk away if they don’t get more. Meanwhile, a sprawling reconciliation bill would again subject vulnerable Senate Democrats to painful votes as part of the “vote-a-rama” amendments that accompany the process.
All this might suggest the White House double down on infrastructure talks, an attempt to hive off $1 trillion or so of its ambitions in a bipartisan bill. Yet congressional sources report that, as recently as Wednesday, Mr. Biden doubled down on his tax-hike demands, making negotiations that much harder.
More telling might be Mr. Biden’s recent lashing of the “two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends.” This attack on Mr. Manchin and Ms. Sinema is dishonest; VoteView.com shows that both senators overwhelmingly vote with their party.
But it suggests the White House is still betting it can pull off the go-it-alone strategy. It’s a call for activists to pile on any would-be centrist defectors. And it comes as Mr. Schumer is readying a series of summer votes on controversial topics—a federal election takeover, a Jan. 6 commission, gun measures, a paycheck “fairness” bill—designed to stoke confrontation with Republicans and pressure Democrats to kill the filibuster.
Maybe Democrats will pull off the tall feat of eliminating the filibuster or compelling complete party unity on a reconciliation blowout. Democrats are effective at wielding brass knuckles. But if Mr. Biden ends this year with little of what he promised, it won’t be because of parliamentarian rulings or disloyal Democrats. It will be because he dramatically overreached.
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This from a friend and fellow memo reader:
Israel’s Democracy Works
By Sherwin Pomerantz
While it is not over yet, as there remains some internal machinations in Israel’s Knesset before the new government can assume its role, Israel’s democracy proved its resilience once again as disparate parties put aside their ideological differences to ensure the take down of the Netanyahu government.
It took four elections in the course of two years, massive demonstrations around the country every Saturday evening after the end of the Sabbath during that time, civil strife on the streets of our cities and two weeks of war with Hamas. Nevertheless, those of us who believe that no Prime Minister of Israel should ever serve indefinitely finally seem to have won the day.
To be sure, Prime Minister Netanyahu has an enviable record of accomplishments in foreign relations, security, and economics. Certainly, he deserves credit and thanks for all of that, notwithstanding his current legal challenges. However, having served for 15 years (Israel does not yet have term limits for its nationally elected officials) it was clear to a large portion of the populace that it was time for new leadership to take over in order to avoid the risk of Israel becoming a totalitarian state.
For this to have come about as it did, political parties with strong ideological differences had to compromise those positions for the good and welfare of the health of Israel’s democracy. Whether the coalition will be successful, whether it will serve out its term, whether it will split apart, nobody knows. Hopefully, while the good feeling persists, some initial positive legislative steps can be taken such as instituting term limits on the prime minister, among others, that will further strengthen what remains as the only real democracy in the Middle East.
No doubt over the next days we will hear many negative voices. They will posit a number of predictable scenarios.
We are already hearing that if, as expected, Naftali Bennett becomes Prime Minister, that we cannot have a Prime Minister whose party only gathered 6 of the 120 seats in the Knesset. Who says so? The whole concept of a parliamentary democracy is that whoever is able to put a coalition together gets to work with his or her coalition partners to determine who will lead the coalition and become Prime Minister. If the coalition partners agree that Bennett should be the next Prime Minister, so be it. That’s the way the system works and we should celebrate it.
There is a lot of noise that many of Bennett’s supporters would not have voted for him if they suspected he would agree to sign a coalition agreement with an Arab party (i.e. RAM). That may be true. Nevertheless, while some will describe it as an abandonment of his constituency and a pure power grab by Bennett, I look at it as a successful business person (Bennett and his brother are self-made millionaire alumni of the high tech industry here during its infancy) deciding what is strategically best for Israel. And I might add, that Israeli Arabs constitute 20.95% of the population so logic would dictate that they should be part of the governing coalition.
I already hear the complaints that nobody in the new government has the diplomatic experience that Netanyahu possesses. There is no argument with that statement but so what? That will always be the case when we consider new leadership unless we Israelis let someone else take the reins, guide the chariot and develop his/her experience. I believe that people rise to the occasion if they have the raw intelligence, commitment and personality to do so. The country will survive the transition and may even come out better than today’s status.
There will also be the (mostly right wing) naysayers who will say that our security is imperiled, we won’t be able to stand up to Iran, to the US, to Russia, to Hamas, to the Palestinians……and the list goes on. I believe that these scare tactics are just that, scare tactics to substantiate the canard that marks so many world leaders today who boast “I am the only one who can handle the problems we face.” When a nation believes that tripe, democracy and the nation are both doomed. We see that playing out even among some of our closest allies. We, as Jews, know where that can lead and we really don’t want to go there. It never ends well for us and others.
Will there be disagreements as we move forward? Absolutely!!! No doubt about it. But machloket min hashamayim, a dispute in the name of heaven is in the highest traditions of our people. Our challenge is to recognize that there is validity on both sides of every disagreement and that at the end of the day a decision must be made as to which side to follow while respecting the validity of “the other.” If the new government can rise to the occasion and craft a constructive dialogue among its members, Israel can continue to grow, to prosper and to be the light unto the nations that we are obligated to be and as our hallowed tradition dictates. We owe ourselves nothing less.
Sherwin Pomerantz has lived in Israel for 37 years, is CEO of Atid EDI Ltd., a Jerusalem-based business development consultancy, and former National President of the Association of Americans & Canadians in Israel.
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https://freebeacon.com/latest-
Mychal Massie is a respected writer and talk show host in Los Angeles.
The other evening on my twitter, a person asked me why I didn't like the Obama's? Specifically I was asked: "I have to ask, why do you hate the Obama's? It seems personal, not policy related. You even dissed (disrespect) their Christmas family picture."
The truth is I do not like the Obamas, what they represent, their ideology, and I certainly do not like his policies and legislation. I've made no secret of my contempt for the Obamas. As I responded to the person who asked me the aforementioned question, I don't like them because they are committed to the fundamental change of my/our country into what can only be regarded as a Communist state.
I don't hate them per definition, but I condemn them because they are the worst kind of racialists, they are elitist Leninists with contempt for traditional America. They display disrespect for the sanctity of the office he holds, and for those who are willing to admit same, Michelle Obama's raw contempt for white America is transpicuous. I don't like them because they comport themselves as emperor and empress.
I expect, no I demand respect, for the Office of President and a love of our country and her citizenry from the leader entrusted with the governance of same. President and Mrs. Reagan displayed an unparalleled love for the country and her people.
The Reagan's made Americans feel good about themselves and about what we could accomplish. Obama's arrogance by appointing 32 leftist czars and constantly bypassing congress is impeachable. Eric Holder is probably the MOST incompetent and arrogant DOJ head to ever hold the job. Could you envision President Reagan instructing his Justice Department to act like jack-booted thugs?
Presidents are politicians and all politicians are known and pretty much expected to manipulate the truth, if not outright lie, but even using that low standard, the Obama's have taken lies, dishonesty, deceit, mendacity, subterfuge and obfuscation to new depths. They are verbally abusive to the citizenry, and they display an animus for civility.
I do not like them, because they both display bigotry overtly, as in the case of Harvard Professor Louis Gates, when he accused the Cambridge Police of acting stupidly, and her code speak pursuant to not being able to be proud of America. I view that statement and that mindset as an insult to those who died to provide a country where a Kenyan, his illegal alien relatives, and his alleged progeny, could come and not only live freely, but rise to the highest, most powerful, position in the world.
Michelle Obama is free to hate and disparage whites because Americans of every description paid with their blood to ensure her right to do same. I have a saying, that "the only reason a person hides things, is because they have something to hide." No president in history has spent millions of dollars to keep his records and his past sealed.
And what the two of them have shared has been proved to be lies. He lied about when and how they met, he lied about his mother's death and problems with insurance, Michelle lied to a crowd pursuant to nearly $500,000 bank stocks they inherited from his family. He has lied about his father's military service, about the civil rights movement, ad nausea. He lied to the world about the Supreme Court in a State of the Union address. He berated and publicly insulted a sitting Congressman. He has surrounded himself with the most rabidly, radical, socialist academicians today.
He opposed rulings that protected women and children that even Planned Parenthood did not seek to support. He is openly hostile to business and aggressively hostile to Israel. His wife treats being the First Lady as her personal American Express Black Card (arguably the most prestigious credit card in the world). I condemn them because, as people are suffering, losing their homes, their jobs, their retirements, he and his family are arrogantly showing off their life of entitlement - as he goes about creating and fomenting class warfare.
I don't like them, and I neither apologize nor retreat from my public condemnation of them and of his policies. We should condemn them for the disrespect they show our people, for his willful and unconstitutional actions pursuant to obeying the Constitutional parameters he is bound by, and his willful disregard for Congressional authority.
Dislike for them has nothing to do with the color of their skin; it has everything to do with their behavior, attitudes, and policies. And I have open scorn for their constantly playing the race card.
I could go on, but let me conclude with this. I condemn in the strongest possible terms the media for refusing to investigate them, as they did President Bush and President Clinton, and for refusing to label them for what they truly are. There is no scenario known to man, whereby a white president and his wife could ignore laws, flaunt their position, and lord over the people, as these two are permitted out of fear for their color.
As I wrote in a syndicated column titled, "Nero In The White House" - "Never in my life, inside or outside of politics, have I witnessed such dishonesty in a political leader. He is the most mendacious political figure I have ever witnessed. Even by the low standards of his presidential predecessors, his narcissistic, contumacious arrogance is unequalled. Using Obama as the bar, Nero would have to be elevated to sainthood...
Many in America wanted to be proud when the first person of color was elected president, but instead, they have been witness to a congenital liar, a woman who has been ashamed of America her entire life, failed policies, intimidation, and a commonality hitherto not witnessed in political leaders. He and his wife view their life at our expense as an entitlement - while America's people go homeless, hungry and unemployed."
Let's not leave Obama's white wing man out:
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