January 17, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Nancy Pelosi undoubtedly is proud of the fact that Donald Trump is now the only U.S. president in history to have been impeached twice. However, it’s a distinction Trump is unlikely to hold for long. Impeachments are likely to become a cost of doing business for American presidents. Arguably, they already are. There have been three of them in the last four presidencies. Two of the last four presidents have
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January 16, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
When we started blogging in 2002, Wayne Rooney was a 16 year-old phenom for Everton FC. This week, Rooney retired as a player. He will be the manager of Derby County in England’s second tier of football. If I didn’t already feel old, this news would have done the trick. Rooney wasn’t your average teenage phenom. He was probably the most promising soccer prospect England had produced in decades and
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January 15, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Last night, I wrote about Lani Guinier, Bill Clinton’s nominee to head the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. Clinton withdrew her nomination because, in essence, she advocated voting and legislative practices that were not race-neutral. I compared Guinier with Kristen Clarke, Joe Biden’s nominee for the same position, and found Clarke to be more extreme than Guinier. I also pointed out that, unlike Clarke, Guinier was a good-faith advocate for the
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January 15, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Yesterday, I suggested an approach to fighting back against Big Tech’s censorship of conservative voices that I believe merits very serious consideration — state legislation banning viewpoint discrimination by Big Tech. The suggestion came from a reader and distinguished lawyer. In a follow-up message, the same lawyer considered possible legal difficulties with his approach: It appears the only issue (not surprisingly) is Section 230 [of the Communications Decency Act]. It
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January 14, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
In 1993, President Clinton nominated Lani Guinier to head the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Guinier was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania law school (she later moved on to Harvard), and a friend of the Clintons going back to their law school days. She had attended their wedding. However, Guinier’s nomination led to scrutiny of her scholarly work and that scrutiny led to charges that she was too
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January 14, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
It’s obvious that, as Scott has been documenting, Big Tech is engaged in a concerted effort to censor conservatives. It seeks to prevent us from presenting our ideas to the public on an equal basis with liberals, left-liberals, and even the most extreme leftists. How can we counter this? The First Amendment doesn’t forbid censorship by private corporations. The Democratic Congress isn’t going to go to bat for free speech
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January 14, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Yesterday, Scott recommended a column by William Voegeli called “About ‘Whataboutism.'” I read that column and join Scott in recommending it. In our current discourse, whataboutism is used by Democrats/leftists to counter conservatives who, when discussing questionable actions by Donald Trump or violent conduct by a pro-Trump mob (for example), point to similar behavior by others that Democrats/leftists did not condemn. Those of us who point to the double standard
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January 13, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Martin Luther King yearned for a society in which people are judged by their character, not their skin color. Kristen Clarke, Joe Biden’s nominee to run the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, begs to differ. In an interview with Tucker Carlson, Clarke insisted that when employers hire people, skin color is highly relevant and should carry a “premium.” She even applied this rule to heart surgeons and airline pilots, jobs
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January 13, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
The editors of the Washington Post intoned today that “if the GOP wants reconciliation, it must admit that Mr. Biden won, fair and square.” (Quotation from paper edition) But why in the world would Republicans want to reconcile with Democrats? The GOP and the Democrats are adversaries. They aren’t partners in a marriage or in a family. They aren’t friends. Nor have the Democrats vanquished the Republicans, as, for example,
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January 12, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
I wrote this morning about the ugly racist comments that Kristen Clarke, Joe Biden choice to head the Civil Rights Division of all things, made while she was a student at Harvard. I also pointed out that Clarke invited a notorious anti-Semite to speak at Harvard and then endorsed his attacks on Jews. Clarke’s defenders will no doubt emphasize that she did these things as a student. They will insist
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January 12, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
America’s institutions are using the invasion of the Capitol building by a relatively small number of extremists as a pretext for carrying out a purge of conservatives that they have long desired. The barons of the social media world are leading the charge, but others are following. The latest conservative victim of the purge is Rep. Elise Stefanik, a member of Congress. Harvard has removed her from the Kennedy School’s
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January 12, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Kristen Clarke is Joe Biden’s choice to head the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. But Biden probably doesn’t know Clarke, so in a sense she is the choice of the radical BLM crowd, which demanded a similarly radical pick in exchange for Biden having had the audacity to pick a White male to run the DOJ. It’s no coincidence that Al Sharpton was quick to praise the selection
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January 11, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
In the 1970s, my constitutional law professor, Gerald Gunther, was invited by the West German government to visit that country and to lecture on the American Constitution. Gunther and his family had fled Germany in the 1930s. When he returned home to California, Gunther commended the Germans as hosts and for what they were accomplishing as a society. However, he added that they still didn’t quite understand the importance of
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January 11, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Gerry Marsden died on January 3. He was the leader of “Gerry and the Pacemakers,” a prominent British band of the early to mid-1960s. I wrote at some length about Marsden in this post, called “Remembering Liverpool’s other British invasion band.” Marden’s obituaries have called Gerry and the Pacemakers the Beatles’ greatest early rivals. I don’t know whether Marsden’s band ever truly rivaled the Beatles, but the two groups were
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January 11, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
President-elect Biden intends to release nearly every available dose of Wuhan coronavirus vaccine to the states. This is a reversal of President Trump’s policy, which was to hold back doses of the vaccine to make sure there is enough for people who receive a first shot to get a second one within the recommended period (21 days or 28 days, depending on the vaccine in question). Is this a good
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January 10, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Friday was my friend Eric Dreiband’s last day as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. Eric will take the rest of the month off and then return to private practice. Eric accomplished a lot in his two years and two months in charge of the Civil Rights Division. Some of the Division’s accomplishments under Eric’s leadership are set forth in this DOJ announcement. Eric defended the Trump administration’s record on
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January 9, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
My conservative cousin from New York moved to California a few years ago — in other words, out of the frying pan and into the fire when it comes to state governance. He reports on the effort to recall California Governor Gavin Newsom: Today I received in the mail a request from the California Republican Party to sign an enclosed petition to recall Governor Gavin Newsom. Together with my wife,
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