Trump administration

Labor Department’s disgraceful discrimination case against Oracle fails

Featured image In 2017, on its way out the door, the Obama Labor Department filed an action against Oracle for alleged pay discrimination against women and minority group members. The case was based on a flawed — indeed an indefensible — statistical analysis. I explained why in this post. The Trump administration should have dropped the case straight away. Instead, Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta pursued it. So did Gene Scalia after »

How dare you do your job, Gene Scalia!

Featured image We have written before about the Department of Labor’s action against Oracle for alleged pay discrimination. In my view, the case against Oracle is without merit. It was brought by the Obama administration, based on specious statistical analyses. The Trump administration should have promptly dismissed the action, but former Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta, not wanting to alienate the left or the mainstream media, allowed holdovers from the Obama administration »

Trump’s political masterstroke [UPDATED]

Featured image President Trump says he will sign an Executive Order to ease the suffering of those harmed by the pandemic-related shutdowns and to stimulate the economy. Congress has failed to agree on a new package to accomplish these things. Trump’s Executive Order would include these four components: (1) a payroll tax holiday until the end of the year, (2) an extension of enhanced unemployment benefits until the end of the year, »

Raising the Barr

Featured image We’ve been all over Attorney General Bill Barr’s adventures in congressional “oversight” this week, but as it happens I just received the summer issue of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, which is the academic journal of the Federalist Society. And the lead article in this issue is Barr’s Barbara Olson Memorial Lecture from last fall’s annual Federalist Society conference, which has the anodyne title, “The Role of the »

Noxious diversity training in federal government flourishes under Trump

Featured image Christopher Rufo reports that “critical race theory — the far-left academic discourse centered on the concepts of ‘whiteness,’ ‘white fragility’ and ‘white privilege’ — is coursing through the federal government’s veins. Under a GOP ­administration, no less.” Last month, a private diversity-consulting firm conducted a training titled “Difficult Conversations About Race in Troubling Times” for several federal agencies. The training called on white employees at the Treasury Department, the Federal »

George Will’s over-the-top attack on Donald Trump

Featured image George Will looks at America and sees a nation in decline. That’s not a very controversial view. In polls, most Americans say we’re on the wrong track. If asked, I would say we’re declining. But Will fails to make the case that we are. He also fails to make what I take to be his core case — that President Trump bears substantial responsibility for our “downward spiral.” Here is »

Trump: “We were going in and would have taken the CHOP”

Featured image In an interview broadcast last night on Sean Hannity’s program, President Trump said he was about to send in forces to take back the area in Seattle known as CHOP. Hannity asked: I had a source that told me, I was not able to confirm it, that one of the reasons that the Seattle mayor finally acted is that they were given notice that if they didn’t act that you »

I was wrong about Bolton

Featured image There are few men in public life I have admired more than John Bolton. To take just one example, I am grateful for his successful work in the administration of the first President Bush to overturn the UN’s vile “Zionism is a form of racism” resolution. See pages 40-43 of his memoir, Surrender Is Not an Option. Bolton suffered the Democrats’ remorseless campaign of defamation against him to prevent his »

No news is better than fake news

Featured image The Washington Post complains that the Trump administration has decided not to release updated economic projections this summer. The administration says it won’t release projections because of the “unprecedented state of play in the economy at the moment.” In other words, although the economy clearly will be in bad shape for a while, and everyone knows it, no one has a clear idea of what the numbers will look like. »

Warp it up

Featured image In his May 14 column “Losing our fears, in war and plague,” Victor Davis Hanson recalls the monumental industrial effort that backed our effort to win World War II. Arthur Herman wrote the book on the subject. I thought of Victor’s column and Herman’s book when President Trump announced the ambitious plan to develop a COVID-19 vaccine and manufacture hundreds of millions of doses by the end of 2020. The »

The Power Line Show, Ep 180: From the White House Press Room to the Hospital Emergency Room

Featured image This week’s show features two guests who just happen to be married, which certainly makes recording convenient! Our first guest is Debra J. Saunders, the White House correspondent for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and former opinion columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. President Trump called on Debra last Friday in his daily virus briefing, and beyond the immediate story I was most interested in talking with Debra about what it’s »

Trump extends federal social distancing guidelines until April 30

Featured image President Trump’s suggestion that the federal social distancing guidelines might be lifted on Easter, April 12, was aspirational. This was clear from the beginning. Trump never said the guidelines would be lifted then. The anti-Trump media made more of Trump’s optimistic suggestion than was warranted. Now, we know that the guidelines will stay in place until at least April 30. Trump declared that “nothing would be worse than declaring victory »

No, Trump did not dissolve the pandemic response office

Featured image Former Obama administration officials have been claiming that President Trump and his then-national security adviser John Bolton “dissolved” the office at the White House responsible for disaster preparedness. Trump’s legion of knee-jerk critics have run with this claim. But according to Tim Morrison, the former aide to whom direction of this office was assigned, the office was not “dissolved.” It remains in operation under Morrison’s successor. Writing in the Washington »

Trumplaw: Ninth Circuit update

Featured image Writing about developments in Trumplaw here this past Sunday, I confused two Ninth Circuit decisions that were decided on the same day. Both cases are worthy of note; they are a double whammy. In the East Bay Sanctuary Covenant case, the Ninth Circuit upheld a preliminary injunction against enforcement of a rule and presidential proclamation that, together, strip asylum eligibility from “migrants” who cross into the United States along the »

Trumplaw: Three decisions

Featured image After falling for the blatant Schumination hoax, I want to note without further comment three significant appellate court decisions ruling on Trump administration policies. I link to stories on the decisions followed by links to the slip opinions of the decisions themselves. 1. “Appeals court temporarily blocks Trump administration’s ‘Remain-in-Mexico’ policy.” A federal appeals court on Friday slapped a temporary halt on the Remain-in-Mexico policy — one of the most »

Trump In the Lions’ Den

Featured image As Scott wrote earlier today, President Trump is in Davos, Switzerland, for a meeting of…whom, exactly? The Western world’s elites, I guess. Scott quoted the section of Trump’s speech that rejected the environmental catastrophism that we have all put up with for decades. News accounts have focused mostly on Trump’s supposed duel with a Swedish teenager, but that was a small portion of his speech, which was rather brilliant and »

Why Trump Will Cruise to Victory Next Year

Featured image Britain’s Sun newspaper comments on a new report by the Centre for Economics and Business Research. The Sun’s focus is Britain, but the report is highly relevant to the U.S. as well: BRITAIN’s economy has defied forecasts predicting it would be overtaken by France as a new report reveals we have cemented sixth place in the world. And by 2034 the UK’s economy is now predicted to be a quarter »