2020 watch: Don’t Idolize Your Candidate
Sure, it was only one sign, and maybe it was meant as a joke. Then again, as The Week’s Bonnie Kristian suggests, the “Beto Is Our Christ” sign that one man held aloft at a Beto O’Rourke rally may well have been “a sincere statement of political enthusiasm.” And that, she adds, “should give us serious pause.” Our culture tends to idolize public figures, “politicians very much included,” but it’s “misguided worship.” Politics has become a “substitute outlet for our religiosity” as church participation declines, which means Americans are investing an ever-more-powerful presidency with “salvific significance.” But “Beto is not your Christ,” and “neither is Trump nor anyone else who runs for president.” Political idolatry “is a sure route to disappointment: Your idol may look golden, but his feet are made of clay.”
Iconoclast: We’ve All Made Up Our Minds About Trump
The 2020 election is shaping up as a referendum on President Trump, declares Charles Lane at The Washington Post. But “nothing between now and Election Day — not actual events, and certainly not the spin his political opponents put on those events — is likely to change” the way we feel about him, pro or con. An average of polls by Real Clear Politics puts Trump’s favorability at 42.3 percent, while 52.8 percent disapproved; two years ago, the respective figures were 41.5 percent and 52.5 percent. In other words, “24 months of tumult produced essentially no change in Trump’s standing with the public.” The “bad news for Democrats” is that “beyond a certain point, Trump is impervious to negative campaigning.” So the election will be a “base-mobilization contest.”
Conservative take: Jerry Nadler’s Double Standard
New York Rep. Jerry Nadler has been the leading Democrat calling for release of the Mueller report “in its entirely” without any redactions. On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee, which he chairs, will vote to subpoena the document. But as Jerry Dunleavy reports at The Washington Examiner, Nadler sang a very different tune two decades ago, when the special counsel was Kenneth Starr and the president was Bill Clinton. Back then, Nadler opposed release of Starr’s full report “as a matter of decency and protecting people’s privacy,” because it contained “salacious material” and grand jury statements that “may or may not be true.” Moreover, he complained about the multi-year length of Starr’s probe, asking: “Is this a permanent inquisition against the president?”
Law prof: Security-Clearance Orders Not a Scandal — Yet
On the surface it seems outrageous: A federal whistle-blower disclosed that the Trump administration reversed 25 security-clearance denials, including for the president’s daughter and son-in-law. But Bloomberg’s Noah Feldman says no one should assume those denials were “some sort of unassailable judgment that cannot be reversed without bad motives.” The process is essentially “a secret trial by anonymous bureaucrats who make subjective judgments on the basis of secret reports.” The subjects “do not learn the reasoning for the decisions, nor do they have any opportunity to make objections.” And the decisions “are unreviewable, unless the president intervenes.” Fact is, “anytime government officials can effectively block individuals from service without giving public explanation and without the possibility of recourse, we should treat the process with appropriate skepticism.”
From the right: Yes, the Electoral College Is Undemocratic
The Democrats’ “most accurate argument” against the Electoral College is that it’s undemocratic. But as Jon Gabriel points out at USA Today, “that’s the entire point.” Indeed, that’s why the Electoral College works. There is “a very good reason why America doesn’t choose its chief executive by popular vote. That’s because democracy, at least in its pure form, doesn’t work.” Which is why America was set up as a republic, “filled with countless checks and balances to avoid one group gaining power and using it to punish or exclude everyone it didn’t like.” Abandoning the Electoral College means “the interests of rural and small-town Americans would be abandoned for those of urban elites.”
— Compiled by Eric Fettmann