Conservative: A Migrant-Deal Red Line
“Conservatives are rightly concerned that the reported immigration deal in Congress won’t adequately secure the border,” frets Henry Olsen at National Review. “One provision they should not accept under any circumstances: work permits for illegal immigrants awaiting asylum hearings.” Why? If migrants “know they can get them once they get inside the country, they will continue to come,” and cutting incentives for illegal migration is “the prerequisite to successfully stemming it.” “Migrant work permits also put downward pressure on wages, which hurts all American workers.” So “Republicans need to decide whose side they are on when it comes to illegal immigration. Any deal that includes work permits for the people Biden let into the country shows they aren’t on the side of conservatives — or American workers.”
Mideast watch: Iran’s Already at War with Us
Iran “is on the offensive on multiple fronts across the Middle East,” warn Jonathan Sweet & Mark Toth at The Hill. “Yet the Biden administration seemingly remains in denial.” “Hamas’s attack against Israel on Oct. 7 was the first blow,” followed by Hezbollah attacks; consider too the “tens of dozens of IRGC-sponsored militia strikes on U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria, and the Houthi attacks against commercial and military shipping in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.” The Biden response so far has been “predictable and self-defeating” — it “continues to avoid striking IRGC targets.” The White House “does not want a direct confrontation,” but too bad: “The U.S. is in an asymmetrical war with Iran.”
From the right: The Path to Colorblind Equality
“Americans concerned about the excesses of the DEI bureaucracy” shouldn’t seek” abolition of the Civil Rights Act, but “demand that our civil rights law conform to the standard of colorblind equality,” urges Christopher F. Rufo at City Journal. “Outlaw affirmative action and racial preferences of any kind” and “eliminate the ‘disparate impact’ provisions in the Civil Rights Act of 1991 and overturn Griggs v. Duke Power Co., both of which have entrenched the doctrine that disparate group outcomes are de facto evidence of racial discrimination.” “The answer to left-wing racialism is not right-wing racialism — it is the equal treatment of individuals under law, according to their talents and virtues, rather than their ancestry and anatomy.”
Campaign journal: Kerry’s Record of Failure
John Kerry plans to step down as climate czar soon to join President Biden’s campaign; The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board muses: If he doesn’t “fare better in that job,” then Biden “will be a one-termer.” For three years, Kerry’s “been preoccupied with getting China to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.” Yet “excluding emissions from land use and forestry, China’s emissions rose 13% between 2015 and 2023,” per Climate Action Tracker, while US emissions fell 9%. In 2022, China accounted for 53% of global coal generation, and permits for new coal power plants hit “their highest level since 2015.” President Xi Jinping openly states that China’s carbon goals “can’t be detached from reality.” Kerry’s problem? His “failure to recognize reality.”
Fiscal beat: Defusing the US Debt Bomb
“In the late 1780s, the finances of the United States were in disarray” amid mass defaults on Revolutionary War debts, until new Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton got “a reluctant Congress to establish the nation’s first central bank and consolidate all outstanding state and federal debt” to restore “the integrity of the public credit,” explain David M. Walker & Mark J. Higgins at USA Today. “Over the next 175 years, politicians across the political spectrum largely adhered to Hamiltonian principles,” above all that “debt should be issued primarily to address emergencies” such as wars and “debt burdens should be reduced during times of peace.” Yet now “the Hamiltonian principle has been decisively abandoned,” and soaring federal debt poses “the greatest threat to the U.S. economy, national security and social stability.” Congress and the American people must “take steps to defuse America’s fiscal time bomb.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board