But the children of white working-class families who pay a racial penalty when competing for college spots against the children of Nigerian college professors and Colombian oil executives are not the only ones with a legitimate complaint. The de facto discrimination against Asian and Asian-American students is spectacular, undeniable, and shameful. They are in effect subjected to the same quota system that the Ivy League once used to keep down its Jewish population — the “bamboo ceiling,” some call it.
.. Asian-American groups pursuing litigation against these policies have demonstrated that students of Asian background on average have to score 140 points above white students to have similar chances of college admission — and 270 points higher than Hispanic students, and 450 points higher than black students. The “Asian penalty” is especially heavy in places such as California’s prestigious state universities.
Defunding Planned Parenthood Isn’t Enough
oth Congress and our country are mired in an inexhaustible debate over whether to remove Planned Parenthood’s federal funding as a result of its provision of abortion. The question we ought to debate is whether the group’s executives deserve to be prosecuted as criminals.
.. The details of their wrongdoing began to emerge exactly two years ago, when the Center for Medical Progress released its grisly undercover videos showing Planned Parenthood directors haggling with prospective buyers over line-item prices for the fetal tissue of aborted babies.
.. Dozens of abortionists and technicians admitted on camera to altering abortion procedures to obtain more-profitable organs. Such alteration, along with accepting payments for fetal organs that are greater than reimbursement for their expenses, is strictly illegal under federal law.
.. Abortion defenders argue that the videos were deceptively edited to reflect Planned Parenthood in an unfavorable light. However, CMP released the full footage of its work in addition to the shorter highlight reels
.. biotech firms such as StemExpress frequently partner with Planned Parenthood affiliates and place employees within their clinics to perform all fetal-tissue-related work: organ harvesting, packaging, and shipping. In these cases, any money Planned Parenthood accepted from the firms must have been profit, not reimbursement for expenses, because the firm was incurring all the related costs itself. Firms explicitly advertise such partnerships as a way for clinics to boost profits.
.. violating the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which guarantees the right to privacy and informed consent. Clinic leaders disclosed details about specific patients and their pregnancies to biotech employees so they could persuade certain women to donate their fetuses if those fetuses could be sold for a higher profit.
.. The national organization has also instituted abortion quotas, offering rewards to clinics that meet or exceed their abortion targets.
.. A new CMP video this spring depicted Planned Parenthood employees describing having performed illegal intact partial-birth abortions and reporting their profitable partnerships to sell fetal organs. And this week, an undercover video showed a Planned Parenthood executive in Florida describing the protocol the group uses to cover up late-term dismemberment and partial-birth abortions, allowing for more-effective fetal-tissue harvesting.
.. It has been two years since the CMP first broke this story, causing an initial uproar as the public was disgusted by what it saw. But that outrage was swiftly swept under the rug by a combination of efficient Planned Parenthood PR and the complicit mainstream media.
.. Today, Congress has yet to even remove this diabolical group’s federal funding.
.. The public disagreement is due in large part to the group’s insistence that it provides essential health care and almost never performs abortions. This is a blatant lie. Not only does Planned Parenthood perform over 328,000 abortions annually
.. Defunding this group can no longer be our endgame. As if its decades of annihilating children weren’t ghastly enough, Planned Parenthood has graduated to a new level of horror. And now we have evidence enough to ensure that its executives are prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
The GOP health-care bill shows the need for regular order.
Kennedy was the showy performer in that ugly spectacle, but Senator Biden, as chairman of the Judiciary Committee, was the stage director. Prior to Bork’s nomination, Biden had in fact said that he would support it: Bork was, after all, a distinguished legal scholar with a long history in public service. Bork had many challenges in front of him: For one thing, he was very sharp-elbowed in intellectual disputes, which had not won him very many friends.
.. The Senate majority leader at the time was Democrat Robert Byrd, a man who had rejoiced in the title of Exalted Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan, and who held a grudge against Bork for his role in the Watergate scandal, during which Bork had fired special investigator Archibald Cox on the orders of President Richard Nixon.
.. The Senate majority leader at the time was Democrat Robert Byrd, a man who had rejoiced in the title of Exalted Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan, and who held a grudge against Bork for his role in the Watergate scandal, during which Bork had fired special investigator Archibald Cox on the orders of President Richard Nixon.
.. The Democratic primary field was very full: There was Biden
.. Biden could not afford to stand by his earlier assessment of Bork and announced his opposition to the nomination shortly after it was made formal.
.. The 14 hours Senator Byrd had spent filibustering the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not prevent him from becoming the Democratic leader in the Senate.
.. The Bork nomination, on the other hand, was an ordinary piece of government business elevated by Democrats to the status of national emergency in the service of narrow partisan interests. Biden was running for president, Kennedy was running for conscience of the Democratic party, and Byrd, frustrated by Republicans’ lack of cooperation on a number of his spending priorities, had promised: “They’re going to pay. I’m going to hit them where it hurts.”
.. The hysteria and vitriol directed at Bork were of a sort rarely seen since the early 19th century. But they quickly became commonplace.
.. But the rules of the game are not all there is to the game. What in another context might be called “sportsmanship” is in politics a question of prudence and even of patriotism, forgoing the pursuit of every petty partisan advantage made possible
.. The progress from Robert Bork to Merrick Garland is a fairly obvious story, but there is more to it than that:
- The increasing reliance upon legislative gimmicks such as omnibus spending bills and retrofitting legislation to fit with the budget reconciliation process,
- the substitution of executive orders and open-ended regulatory portfolios (“the secretary shall . . . ”),
- the prominence of emergency “special sessions” in the state legislatures,
- the absence of regular order in the legislative and appropriations process —
all are part of the same destructive tendency. Procedural maximalism in effect turns the legislative system against itself, substituting the exception for the rule and treating every ordinary item of business as a potential emergency item.
.. at the time, their numbers in the Senate were enough to secure their victory without a filibuster. But the course they set in those hearings — one of maximal confrontation, of reaching for whatever procedural cudgel is close at hand — led directly to our current state of governmental dysfunction.
.. at the time, their numbers in the Senate were enough to secure their victory without a filibuster. But the course they set in those hearings — one of maximal confrontation, of reaching for whatever procedural cudgel is close at hand — led directly to our current state of governmental dysfunction.
.. The recently proffered Republican health-care bill instantiates much of what is wrong with our politics:
The bill was constructed through an extraordinary process in which there were
- no hearings,
- no review from the Congressional Budget Office, and
- no final text of the legislation until shortly before the vote.
- The process is erratic and covert rather than regular and transparent.
- It was put together in a purposeful way to avoid substantive debate and meaningful public discourse,
making the most of the majority’s procedural advantages for purely political ends.
.. As Rod Dreher recently put it, Republicans will have to choose whether they love the rule of law more than they hate the Left.
.. Republican populists who argue that the GOP must play by the same rules in the name of “winning” have very little understanding of what already has been lost and of what we as a nation stand to lose.
The United States will not thrive, economically or otherwise, in a state of permanent emergency.
.. What’s truly remarkable about our current constant national state of emergency is that no one can say exactly what the emergency is. But we all seem to be very sure that something has to be done about it right now, that we must rouse ourselves to excitement about it, and that the ordinary rules of lawmaking and governance no longer apply.
There is not much political mileage to be had from arguing for regular order, transparency, and procedural predictability — but that’s part of what makes those things so valuable. Order in the little things is a necessary precondition of order in the big things. Orderly government cannot be built on a foundation of procedural chaos.
The Republican Health-Care Fiasco
Senator John McCain cast the deciding vote to jettison Republicans’ latest Obamacare reform effort, handing a victory to Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, moderates whose opposition to any substantive health-care reform has become nearly intractable. But the legislation for which Republican leaders asked their conference to vote was so unpalatable, and the process so objectionable, that it is almost difficult to fault him. The Congressional Budget Office suggested that the “skinny” health legislation on which the Senate voted would raise premiums by as much as 20 percent. It assumed that since the legislation ended the fines for going without insurance, many healthy people would drop coverage, and premiums would have to pay for a sicker population. The estimate may be too high, since the CBO has repeatedly overestimated the impact of the fines. But it almost certainly had the basic story right.
Senator McCain may have been taken aback as well by the CBO’s projection that the bill would result in 16 million fewer people having insurance coverage — something Democrats nearly unanimously portrayed as “taking away” insurance from all of those people. In fact, this projection is based almost entirely on the end of the fines. The CBO estimates that once they can make a decision free of the threat of fines, 15 million people will forgo coverage.
.. We are willing to bet that McCain didn’t know any of this. A lot of health-policy experts are unaware of it too. The legislation was unveiled, after all, only a few hours before the vote. There were no hearings on it. The CBO had only provided the relevant numbers the same day, with the inferences we have made above left unstated.
Republican leaders such as Mitch McConnell were asking senators to vote for a poorly understood bill that would likely raise premiums in the expectation that something better would emerge from a conference committee between the House and the Senate. But there was a chance that the House would end up just passing the skinny bill. And if the conference committee was capable of coming up with something better that could get 51 votes in the Senate, why couldn’t the Senate come up with that “something better” itself?
.. Here Senator McCain deserves criticism for naïveté. He believes that there should be bipartisan reforms to Obamacare (which is a far cry from what he had previously campaigned on).
But the Democrats have made it clear that the only “reforms” that interest them are increased taxpayer commitments to shoring up the program, including increased subsidies to the insurers. In practice, this option would amount to higher spending and, at best, a fig leaf of reform; it would become law through the votes of nearly all Democrats and a handful of Republicans.
.. Option three, the “let it burn” approach, is simply untenable.
.. Option three is likely, then, to be option two in slow motion.
.. Consideration of the alternatives should bring Republicans back to option one. Try, try again, but this time with more deliberation.