From the right: GOP Needs To Act Fast on O’Care
Republicans now “control the levers of power in Washington” and must “deliver immediate relief” to ObamaCare’s victims, urge Heather Higgins and Phil Kerpen in USA Today. But they fear Congress will “follow the template” of the 2015 partial-repeal bill vetoed by President Obama, which left in place “heavy-handed insurance regulations.” Instead, they urge “a Trumpian solution” — starting with an executive order “to immediately undo the congressional exemption.” Because “Congress members and staffers paying their own way in the ObamaCare exchanges would be miraculously motivated to rapidly solve the problems crippling these markets.” That should be followed by “permitting people who want insurance to buy any state-legal insurance they want.” These are “smart, real, time-sensitive solutions that offer relief from a misguided law.”
Urban wonk: New York’s Homelessness Mayor
Bill de Blasio “isn’t the first mayor to be swamped by the city’s host of homeless, and he won’t be the last,” says Bob McManus in City Journal. Fact is, though, he’s “done a miserable job.” Almost 61,000 homeless individuals were in city shelters last month — and that doesn’t include several thousand “street people.” All this is “a sharp rebuke to de Blasio’s progressive agenda.” The mayor, after all, “pledged to bring homelessness under control during his first term, if not quite to end it altogether.” But he’s “essentially dropped all pretenses of work rules or other quid pro quos for benefits.” Getting rid of longtime advocate Steven Banks as homeless czar, suggests McManus, “might help contain the growing crisis.”
Security writer: The Return of Kissinger’s Washington
At age 93, Henry Kissinger is still “playing the influence game against insiders who hadn’t even been born when he was Richard Nixon’s secretary of state,” reports Eli Lake for Bloomberg View. He’s spent “several hours” advising President-elect Trump and is also “putting his network in place,” wrangling top jobs for several former aides. And “that’s just behind the scenes” — Kissinger “is also an important validator for Trump in the press” as well as the foreign-policy establishment. All of which is “strange,” since “he is the author of many of the policies Trump is hinting he will undo.” The ultimate irony: The candidate “who waged a campaign against global elites is turning to a man who knows most of them on a first-name basis.”
From the left: Can Democrats Start From Scratch?
If ever the times called for “hard self-evaluation of world views,” suggests T.A. Frank in Vanity Fair, this election should do so for Democrats. Instead, “we see blame being placed on misogyny, racism, fake news, real news, Bernie Sanders, the Electoral College, James Comey, Vladimir Putin, Vladimir Lenin and probably Vlad the Impaler.” Strikingly, “the most feverish reactions haven’t come” from the hard left, but from “the center-left.” Seeing “their worldview most disturbed,” they figure “only a conspiracy could be the cause.” What Dems need is not debate over how best to stymie Trump but “a fundamental re-examination of first principles” — i.e., “reviewing the catechism.” Because “the atrophy of center-left thought meant that the Democratic Party had less and less on which to draw when it came to expressing the big ideas — or any ideas” at all.
Foreign desk: Time for Realism in Syria
Donald Trump is “taking over from an administration whose Syria policy was not merely a resounding failure, but was so middling and contradictory that the most important takeaway isn’t self-evident.” Which is why, write Gregg Roman and Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi in The Hill, he must “jettison” Obama’s assumption that ISIS and its allies “constitute the paramount threat to American interests” there. Fact is, with the Turkey-Syria border now closed, ISIS’s ability to dispatch operatives and import recruits “has been seriously hampered.” Obama’s ISIS obsession resulted in “acquiescence in Russian military intervention on behalf of the Iranian-Syrian regime axis” — which meant de facto alliance with Iran. It may be too late to challenge Russia’s presence, but “neither should Washington accept it.”
— Compiled by Eric Fettmann