Impeach watch: Dems Have No Legal Case
It shouldn’t be hard for the House of Representatives to determine whether President Trump’s actions are impeachable, argues Northwestern Law Prof. Stephen B. Presser at American Greatness. The Constitution declares impeachable offenses to be “treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors” — and there’s no evidence to suggest the president is guilty of any of these. For the Framers, impeachable offenses were “those which demonstrate a fundamental betrayal of public trust.” Trump’s Ukraine phone call doesn’t rise even close to that level, since he campaigned on fighting “Swamp” corruption, and Hunter Biden’s Kiev shenanigans count as just such graft. A president’s prudential acts by definition don’t betray public trust — which means “we are probably witnessing the beginning of the end of the Trump impeachment.”
Conservative: West’s Shameful China Complicity
“We can’t say we didn’t know” about China’s concentration camps for Muslims in Xinjiang Province, warns National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty. After all, reports have been “leaking out for years in drips and drabs.” This month’s leaked memos only show a more complete picture of the “state apparatus mobilized in the service of repression.” And this is a tyranny that we in the West “have helped to create”: It was China’s “ability to trade in such high volume with the United States” that paid for the regime’s ability to terrorize its own people. Fact is, the West “desperately needs to recover its ability to privilege political and moral aims over the immediate exigencies of the market” — because “enough is enough.”
Campus beat: The Left’s Campus Panic
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos announced her department would be “reviewing Obama-era guidelines” for campus sexual-assault allegations — and, Commentary’s Christine Rosen sighs, “liberal advocacy groups wildly overreacted.” One “hyperbolic piece in Vox” decried that schools could allow “in-person cross-examination” of students who had claimed to have been assaulted or harassed. Yet these new rules just allow “students to confront their accusers” — a constitutional right in criminal proceedings. And “the life-ruining results” of campus investigations is ample reason to treat them like criminal proceedings. Liberal groups are wrong in claiming that the new standards are “traumatizing and ‘absolutely terrifying’ for women on campus,” as Vox did. Then again, Americans have grown numb to such “overheated rhetoric on the left.”
Iconoclast: Obama’s Zombie Discourses
Former President Barack Obama’s post-White House proclamations — his calls for less toxicity on social media, his warnings to fellow Democrats not to veer too far left and so on — are “interesting,” muses The Week’s Matthew Walther. But “only in the sense that it would be interesting — and no doubt highly amusing — to hear what LBJ or Nixon had to say about contemporary American politics.” Fact is, Obama’s legacy is “dead,” and his era now bygone, and not just “because 20- and 30-something activists are demanding Medicare for All.” When he first took office, “the nasal drone of a dial-up Internet connection could still be heard in millions of homes. Same-sex marriage was a fringe cause.” And “new albums sold millions of copies on CD.” Set against the sweeping and often disruptive cultural and technological changes that took place over the course of his time in office, Obama’s actual achievements were rather paltry. Perhaps his real legacy, then, was this “curious paralysis in the face of a country — and a world — evolving too rapidly.”
Science desk: Let Them Eat Greenhouse Gases
At Big Think, Robby Berman jokes: “It’s not like you can make food out of thin air. Well. . . . it turns out you can.” Finnish firm Solar Foods “is planning to bring to market a new protein powder, Solein, made out of” carbon-dioxide, water and electricity that “looks and tastes like wheat flour.” If it works, greens should cheer: “Solein’s manufacturing process is carbon-neutral, and the potential for scalability seems unlimited.” Since “we’ve got too much” carbon-dioxide, “why not get rid of some greenhouse gas with a side of fries?
— Compiled by Karl Salzmann & Sohrab Ahmari